Hidden Messages - Women's butts in TV commercials

roxics

roxics

Veteran
Maybe it's just me but I don't think so. I've seen a lot of TV commercials over the last several years for everything from pharmaceutical drugs to furniture stores, banks, etc. About 8 times out of 10 there are women with their backs turned to the camera usually wearing form fitting jeans and a waist length shirt. They are background extras to whatever is going on in the foreground. Either they're walking away from the camera, standing someplace talking to someone, using an ATM, whatever. But the message seems to be a subtle sex sells kind of thing.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who has noticed this. I'm starting to think I missed a memo where everyone who shoots these kind of commercials decided this was going to be a thing. I'm not against it, I'm just wondering if this is totally random or consciously planned. I see it so much I have to think it's planned (set up has a hidden message) when shots are figured out and blocking is done.
 
It's not just you.

It's everywhere.

Even in very serious television shows like THE FALL starring Gillain Anderson in a VERY serious role...and what is the first sequence of the first episode? You guessed it - a closeup of her butt in her underwear...even before she has any lines.
I thought that was really egregious.

Same goes for the Marvel show Jessica Jones - another serious, cranky, violent character - but the first few sequences are her in bed, in her underwear, getting undressed, etc,...
Lame. It's just lame.
 
Yeah, agreed. It's everywhere. TV/Film in general are still antiquated when it comes to the portrayal of women, and those are great examples of why.

Here's a fun one! http://bechdeltest.com/

The Bechdel Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. The test was popularized by Alison Bechdel's comic Dykes to Watch Out For, in a 1985 strip called The Rule. For a nice video introduction to the subject please check out The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies on feministfrequency.com.
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Yeah I'm not trying to make a statement for or against, just curious if people noticed this in TV commercials with background extras specifically and if it was a planned thing. Obviously in film and TV shows it's definitely a planned thing.
 
roxics said:
Yeah I'm not trying to make a statement for or against, just curious if people noticed this in TV commercials with background extras specifically and if it was a planned thing. Obviously in film and TV shows it's definitely a planned thing.
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I have been on enough commercial shoots over the ....ahem...decades....to know that it's ABSOLUTELY planned - although usually never talked about on SHOOT DAY. Just behind the scenes - between the lines - and when no women are in the room.
Although I have on a couple occasion witnessed FEMALE production designers really be open and forceful about putting only sexually attractive females in the scenes - especially the extras. I have no explanation for that.
 
Yep. In movie posters too--

http://gizmodo.com/5904157/movie-posters-love-showing-off-an-actress-from-behind

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Fascination with the female behind has been around since the Venus of Willendorf (24,000 BCE), and is much a part of art history as trees, shrubs, and rocky outcroppings. Nothing new to see here. How it is presented for contemporary media consumption (commercials, music lyrics and videos, film), is up for review, though with little hope for a global consensus on responsibility. Thums up, thumbs down, thumbs in.

advert.jpg
 
DPStewart said:
Although I have on a couple occasion witnessed FEMALE production designers really be open and forceful about putting only sexually attractive females in the scenes - especially the extras.
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Why would a production designer be discussing casting...?
 
It is so insanely not just you. This is more than just a casual thing, it is fully planned out and designed. Aligning the elements in frame so that eyes drawn to cleavage or to a behind must pass over the product is a common thing. I've been on commercial shoots where we had to go back and redo shots because the T&A were not perfectly aligned to what the agency wanted. I've been on sets where they had an engineer running test edits and comps from the Video Assist to make sure that the shot of the butt perfectly lined up with the bottle of beer or whatever. The female talent will just roll their eyes and collect the check, and the agency females don't dare say anything lest their frat boy coworkers stare them down.

The rampant sexism, the pure meat market of it all, is why I got out of the fashion world decades ago even though I was making great money format. That and the astoundingly vapidness of it all, where everyone talked like Us Magazine and Entertainment Tonight.

As silly as it is, this particular example is probably pretty accurate.
 

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CharlesPapert said:
Why would a production designer be discussing casting...?
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Not the formal role of casting so much as moving the bodies around on the set. I found it noteworthy because males typically seem reluctant to be verbally blatant about it, whereas these couple of women talked about the size and shapes of the butts and chests as if they were moving set blocks or furniture around. Which I suppose in a way they were...

But perhaps the hypocrisy lies in NOT being verbally open about it when the actions being taken are fundamentally the same.

Again - this is a topic on which I have a lot of questions, but no answers.
 
Mitch Gross said:
It is so insanely not just you. This is more than just a casual thing, it is fully planned out and designed. Aligning the elements in frame so that eyes drawn to cleavage or to a behind must pass over the product is a common thing. I've been on commercial shoots where we had to go back and redo shots because the T&A were not perfectly aligned to what the agency wanted. I've been on sets where they had an engineer running test edits and comps from the Video Assist to make sure that the shot of the butt perfectly lined up with the bottle of beer or whatever. The female talent will just roll their eyes and collect the check, and the agency females don't dare say anything lest their frat boy coworkers stare them down.

The rampant sexism, the pure meat market of it all, is why I got out of the fashion world decades ago even though I was making great money format. That and the astoundingly vapidness of it all, where everyone talked like Us Magazine and Entertainment Tonight.

As silly as it is, this particular example is probably pretty accurate.
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That Ad....unreal. Maybe it's because I come from a family of all strong, advanced-degreed, independent women...but I'm still just a bit flabbergasted by the DEGREE to which it is done.
 
i dont know marketing/advertising, but my guess would be that its all about dudes being generally horny, sex sells, and the ad folks have research that says that butts and boobs translate to dollars. it works, so they keep doing it.

as for tv shows sexualizing their females, especially early on in a series, i was watching the extras from season 1 of Bones and whoever was doing the pilot commentary (there's a couple of cheesy cleavagey shots in the pilot) mentioned its called "securing the male demographic"---i.e. "take a look at this boys, see what we got here? maybe if you keep watching our show youll see more of it!" Bones never really got that trashy again, and many shows follow suit where they start off sex/nudity/skimp clothing-heavy, presumably in hopes of hooking dudes on the show, and then taper it off. Then you have Game of Thrones, where you have to fight your way through a gauntlet of boobs and pubes just to get to the craft service table on set.
 
Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.............
Not to be Mr Obvious but have you noticed how EVERY commercial have smiling faces as if the advertisers are trying to simplify human existence to one emotion, happiness?
This kind of gross oversimplification is going on all the time.
Humans = one simple emotion. Check.
Woman = cute face and shapely behind. Check.
Great image = lens flare. Check.
...
If you want depth, advertising and mass culture is NOT the place to see it.

Don't hate the player - hate the game. If people didn't respond to such obviously banal stimuli, advertisers would dig deeper.
 
patrick nailed it. look, man, humans, sometimes we're pretty cool, but sometimes we're also pretty lame. anything to do with ads/marketing/hooking viewers tends to display the latter quality.
 
Patryk_Rebisz said:
Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.............
Not to be Mr Obvious but have you noticed how EVERY commercial have smiling faces as if the advertisers are trying to simplify human existence to one emotion, happiness?
This kind of gross oversimplification is going on all the time.
Humans = one simple emotion. Check.
Woman = cute face and shapely behind. Check.
Great image = lens flare. Check.
...
If you want depth, advertising and mass culture is NOT the place to see it.

Don't hate the player - hate the game. If people didn't respond to such obviously banal stimuli, advertisers would dig deeper.
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I don't hate anybody. :)

I'm not necessarily against it. I am a butt guy so it works for me. I just wondered if it was planned and if so how it plays out on the shoot. Are the female extras even aware that they are being blocked in such a way in order to get that in the background?

DPStewart gave me the answer to that.
DPStewart said:
I have been on enough commercial shoots over the ....ahem...decades....to know that it's ABSOLUTELY planned - although usually never talked about on SHOOT DAY. Just behind the scenes - between the lines - and when no women are in the room.
Click to expand...

Here's an interesting video I found which says the sex doesn't seem to sell as well as we might think
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W93AiQkgZa4&nohtml5=False
Not sure how true, but the points stated make sense.

Scott F said:
Roxics, you're on a roll....resuscitating the Cafe (and this site) from outright doldrums in recent years.
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I do what I can. ;)
If I can't make an attractive post, how do I expect myself to write an entertaining movie?
 
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i had a professor a long time ago who said something like "sex doesnt sell; sex distracts". i dunno. its been this way forever (maybe a little worse now), so they must at least PERCEIVE that its working
 
No need to over complicate it. The basic concept is:

—put your customer in state of happiness or excitement. Once there, expose them to your product.

The way you get someone excited or happy can be totally unrelated to your product. If you're selling yoghurt, you don't have to make a cow joke. Not if you can have a sexy lady spill some on her chin and breasts instead (sexy+humor=double win).

The reason sex DOES sell, it's because it's such an easy way to tap into a very large customer basis. If you do it with taste, a large number of women will respond in equal manner: guys will want to conquer the girl and women will want to be the desired one.

Of course, if you're looking to target a very specific, smaller group—then do the opposite: present a strong woman. A distinct demographic will feel happy about that. When they're happy: show your actual product (not the strong woman).

OF COURSE these are all generalizations. But that's the point—it generally works.

Enter 2016 and this thread. Political correctness is mainstream now and the window of opportunity is probably getting smaller all the time. Going forward they will easy up on the sex and up the humor. Or so you think. The sex will be the same, only masked with humor. If you're laughing, it can't be bad…right? Am I right…? Right.
 
They've done studies of magazine ads where they give men and women a magazine to thumb through. They use hardware and software to track both eye movement and duration to see exactly how long the subjects looked at the ads and exactly where they were looking. Both men and women looked at ads with attractive women in them longer than ads with attractive men, and the women looked at the ads with attractive women in them even longer than the men did.
Make if it what you will but putting attractive women in advertisements works even more on women than on men.
 
If you have spent time in Europe or you are European I think you will have a different perspective. I remember watching ads in Germany for butter with a naked Adam and Eve . I don't recall exactly how they tied in the garden of Eden to delicious butter but they did. American TV is rather prudish by comparison.
 
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