Score Hair Cream Advert

Media Factsheet - Score hair cream

Go to our Media Factsheet archive on the Media Shared drive and open Factsheet #188: Close Study Product - Advertising - Score. Our Media Factsheet archive is on the Media Shared drive: M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets. If you need to access this from home you can download it here if you use your Greenford login details to access Google Drive.

Read the fact sheet and answer the following questions:

1) How did advertising techniques change in the 1960s and how does the Score advert reflect this change?

The 1960s ushered in an age of new and pioneering advertising techniques. According to AdAge (adage.com), advertising agencies in the 1960s relied less on market research and leaned more toward creative instinct in planning their campaigns. “Eschewing portrayals of elitism, authoritarianism, reverence for institutions and other traditional beliefs, ads attempted to win over consumers with humour, candour and, above all, irony.” Copy was still used to offer an explanation of the product - and to pitch to the consumer - but the visuals took on a greater importance. The “new advertising” of the 1960s took its cue from the visual medium of TV and the popular posters of the day, which featured large visuals and minimal copy for a dazzling, dramatic effect. Print ads took on a realistic look, relying more on photography than illustration, and TV spots gained sophistication as new editing techniques were mastered.

                 

2) What representations of women were found in post-war British advertising campaigns?

In contemporary advertising campaigns it is still possible to identify examples of women as objectified or portrayed as domestic servants, but sexism in 1960s advertising was on a much greater scale – and continued this way for many years after. In the UK, advertising in the post-war period was characterised by campaigns that very effectively reinforced that idea that a woman’s place was in the home. Ironically, during the Second World War, propaganda posters had convinced women that their place was on farms and in factories while the men were away fighting. Post-war, and now surplus to requirement in the workplace, the advertising industry stepped in to provide a new ‘propaganda’ campaign – one designed to make women feel useful in the domestic arena.

3) Conduct your own semiotic analysis of the Score hair cream advert: What are the connotations of the mise-en-scene in the image? You may wish to link this to relevant contexts too.

The costumes are quite revealing showing that females are sexualised in every way. The females are also carrying him to show that they are their to serve the men and that using this hair cream will "get you what you want" meaning the women surrounding you as well as to look good. 

4) What does the factsheet suggest in terms of a narrative analysis of the Score hair cream advert?

The Score advert identifies the man as Propp’s ‘hero’ in this narrative. The image infers that he is ‘exulted’ as the hunter-protector of his ‘tribe’. The adoration – and availability – of the females are his reward for such masculine endeavours. This has a clear appeal to the target audience of (younger) males who would identify with the male and aspire to share the same status bestowed on him. The idea of women being sexually available and falling at the feet of a man is echoed in the long running series of Lynx deodorant commercials that ran for the greater part of the early twentieth century. Even though many decades separate the Score and Lynx commercials, their message – despite changes in social attitudes - is remarkable similar.

5) How might an audience have responded to the advert in 1967? What about in the 2020s?

The 1967 male audience might read the narrative as ironic and humorous (the dominant reading?) but it is unlikely that they would challenge the underlying ideology implicit within the advert. Females, though not the target audience, might read the gender representations in an oppositional way but at the same time accept its representation of a patriarchal society as normal or inevitable. Modern audiences, including students of the media, are likely to respond in a different way, aware that its sexist narrative is outdated and, for some, offensive.

6) How does the Score hair cream advert use persuasive techniques (e.g. anchorage text, slogan, product information) to sell the product to an audience?

The Liquid hair tonic is a product of the American Bristol-Meyers Company. Like many large companies of this era, they paid much more attention to building a distinctive character for the brand. The brand message is clear: to present the product as grooming product for a ‘real’ (masculine) man. The choice of the ‘Score’ brand name is deliberate and carries very obvious connotations.

7) How might you apply feminist theory to the Score hair cream advert - such as van Zoonen, bell hooks or Judith Butler?

The feminist writer Liesbet van Zoonen argues that ‘gender’ is constructed through discourse and that its meaning varies according to the cultural and historical context. The Score advert constructs a representation of women that is typical of the late 1960s - and accepted as ‘normal’. Indeed the women depicted in the advert are not dissimilarly dressed to Jane Fonda in the film Barbarella (released in the same year). Women in this era were largely represented as either domestic servants or sex objects – and in Score they might be considered both servant and sex object. Much like Laura Mulvey, van Zoonen argues that in mainstream media texts the visual and narrative codes are used to objectify the female body. Judith Butler asserts that gender is not biologically determined but rather socially determined; learned through society. She believes that gender is a performance. Both the male and the female in the Score advert are performing the roles of the (masculine) man and the (feminine) woman in accordance with their biological sex. The advert also serves to reinforce the binary opposite gender roles ascribed by society.

8) How could David Gauntlett's theory regarding gender identity be applied to the Score hair cream advert?

David Gauntlett argues that both media producers and audiences play a role in constructing identities. The role of the producer in shaping ideas about masculinity is clear in the Score advert, which is undoubtedly similar to countless other media texts of that era. Surrounded by such representations, 1960s men would inevitably use these to shape their own identities and their sense of what it means to be a man in the mid-twentieth century. Similarly, women would have a clear sense about their place in the world, despite many of the social changes that were leading to greater equality both socially and sexually (for instance, through access to the contraceptive pill).

9) What representation of sexuality can be found in the advert and why might this link to the 1967 decriminalisation of homosexuality (historical and cultural context)?

According to Paul Burston writing in The Guardian (27th July 2017), “It’s a commonly held misconception that the 1967 act legalised male homosexuality. It didn’t. It partially decriminalised it under certain conditions. In the years that followed, gay sexuality was policed more aggressively than before and the number of men arrested for breaching those conditions actually rose considerably.” Incredibly, several police constabularies actively took advantage of loop holes in the Sexual Offences act of 1967 to prosecute homosexual men engaging in consensual sex in their own homes. Research by Peter Tatchell confirms this: in 1966 some 420 men were convicted of the gay crime of gross indecency. By 1974, that number had soared by more than 300% to over 1,700 convictions.

10) How does the advert reflect Britain's colonial past - another important historical and cultural context?

The reference to colonialist values can also be linked to social and cultural contexts of the ending of the British Empire. Paul Gilroy argues that despite the passing of empire, the white western world still exerts its dominance through cultural products. In Hollywood film, for example, the white male (usually American) plays the role of the hero, who inevitably saves the (dependent) world from disaster. The Score advert follows a similar narrative. The jungle setting, the gun, the throne all infer that the white western male has been successful in fighting off primitives or dangerous animals to save his own tribe.

Wider reading

The Drum: This Boy Can article
Read this article from The Drum magazine on gender and the new masculinity. If the Drum website is blocked, you can find the text of the article here. Think about how the issues raised in this article link to our Score hair cream advert CSP and then answer the following questions:

1) Why does the writer suggest that we may face a "growing 'boy crisis'"?

A growing global ‘boy crisis’ suggests that we could be, in fact, empowering the wrong sex. Of course, women are woefully under-represented in boardrooms and certain walks of life, with casual sexism and unconscious bias still endemic, but the difference is that we are all now familiar with the narrative around tackling these issues, thanks in no small part to groundbreaking campaigns such as ‘Like A Girl’ by Always, Sport England’s ‘This Girl Can’ and Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’.

2) How has the Axe/Lynx brand changed its marketing to present a different representation of masculinity?

As Lynx/Axe found when it undertook a large-scale research project into modern male identity, men are craving a more diverse definition of what it means to be a ‘successful’ man in 2016, and to relieve the unrelenting pressure on them to conform to suffocating, old paradigms. This insight led to the step-change ‘Find Your Magic’ campaign from the former bad-boy brand. 

the boy brand is not always the right way 

3) How does campaigner David Brockway, quoted in the article, suggest advertisers "totally reinvent gender constructs"?

Campaigner David Brockway, who manages the Great Initiative’s Great Men project, urges the industry to be “more revolutionary”, particularly when it comes to male body image, which he says is at risk of following the negative path trodden by its female counterpart. “We’re seeing a huge rise in eating and body image disorders among young men. We can’t isolate the cause. Advertising plays its part. A 13-year-old boy of average build in one class recently told me seeing an ad made him feel fat. He didn’t mean a bit out of shape. He meant everything that goes with that feeling such as seeing himself as lazy, unaccomplished and incapable.” In order to prevent a full blown crisis of self-worth, Brockway advocates that advertisers “totally reinvent gender constructs” and dare to paint a world where boys like pink, don’t like going out and getting dirty, or aren’t career ambitious, for example.

4) How have changes in family and society altered how brands are targeting their products?

“In the US men are running household budgets now. If brands don’t recognise this, they are going to lose out because they’re increasingly ignoring their potential biggest audience. We hear a lot about women’s voices needing to be heard, but in FMCG men are a strangely silent group.” As Miller says, the definition of “family” in places like Britain is profoundly changing – but advertising is not helping to normalise different scenarios by largely failing to portray this new normal. Joey Whincup, insight director at Creative Race, agrees that success comes down to better research and she’s witnessing a slow but growing shift towards targeting consumers on more than the usual ‘ABC1 male’ demographics. Quite a few brands still segment like this, but others are seeking “a true understanding of their target consumer; who they really are, their beliefs, their attitudes, where they are now, where they want to be in future. “These brands are not just governed by the jobs men do or their age”.

5) Why does Fernando Desouches, Axe/Lynx global brand development director, say you've got to "set the platform" before you explode the myth of masculinity?

To be fair on Fernando Desouches, Axe global brand development director, he knows that. And, as he says, you’ve got to “set the platform” before you explode the myth. “This is just the beginning. The slap in the face to say ‘this is masculinity’. All these guys [in the ad] are attractive. Now we have our platform and our point of view, we can break the man-bullshit and show it doesn’t matter who you want to be, just express yourself and we will support that. “What being a man means, and what ‘success’ means, is changing and this change is for the good. The message hasn’t exploded yet but we will make it explode. We will democratise it.”