​CULTURE AND ADVERTISING

Advertising is the mirror of society in which we live, therefore it is always important to

contextualize the period in which advertising has been produced. That means nowadays
discriminatory and racist advertising should not be produced anymore. The reason is because
we live in an inclusive society in which racial laws have been abolished for a long time. Yet
it would seem that the cultural tendency to judge the different as wrong is very present. For
this reason I have decided to compare three different advertising posters dating back to the
early ‘50s, to the early 2000s and the most recent one of 2017 respectively. These three
posters have in common the fact to be explicitly racist.

Lets start with the first one: it is a ‘50s poster advertising the new soap Fairbank Company.
As you can see there are two children put in the foreground one white and one black, the
white child is asking the other one “why doesn’t
your mamma wash you with Fairy soap?”,
alluding to the fact that her black skin is of that
colour because it is dirty. To underline this
concept they have drawn the white child with a
clean and tidy blue tailored dress in contrast to
the other child who instead is wearing a poor,
old, dirty and ruined rag. It is a manifesto that
seems outrageous to see it today but in America
in the 1950s it was perfectly in line with the
culture, ideas, values of the society in that time.

Despite today a comparison of this kind would

make us shive in 2006 the famous electronic
company Sony produced an advertising in which
it substantially does the same thing to promote
the launch on the market of the white PSP which would be better than the black PSP .
In this advertising a blond and white woman is represented, she violently holds the face of a
black girl. Even the position of the two women aims to the concept of white over black
people, because the blond girl is clearly higher than the black girl then it is clear that she is
submitting her. On the side the phrase “playstation portable white is coming” stands out. This
slogan combined with the image seems to allude to the fact that “white people” are coming to
conquer and subdue black people who are weaker and lower. Unlike the ‘50s this advertising
has been heavily criticized by public opinion because it is too racist. The japanese company
had also to defend itself against these accusations by claiming that the central aspect of this
campaign is the visual contrast between colours and therefore there is not any connection
with racial distinctions and ethnicity.

In my opinion it is clear that it is present in culture a background of racist which is going on

to allow the production of posters like these.

The third and last final case which I want to analize is the most recent one that dates back to
2017, it is an image of the dove home of skin care products. This image has been posted on
facebook by the company itself, in addition to being
transmitted on tv.

We can see that at the top of the picture there is a black

girl wearing a brown shirt that is taking off and next to
her is the dove soap bottle. Below instead there is a girl
who is taking off the brown shirt because she is wearing
a white shirt. This image then seems to represent a
timeline in which first here is black girl who turned
white after using the dove soap, as seen in the lower part
of the picture.

In conclusion after 67 years of the Fairbank scandalous advertising it seems that nothing has
changed, the message which passes is always the same black is synonymous with inferior,
dirty and therefore it must be changed, “bleached”. The only difference between today and
the past is that the explicit racism is no longer tolerated. In fact even in this case the company
has been forced to withdraw the campaign and apologized publicity.

However the fact that such posters are no longer tolerated does not prevent the minds who
create them to think of them, this happens because in culture is still present the double
concept according to which different equals wrong, although it is a muted concept, even if
times and laws have changed in the common ideology.