A print ad analysis
Adonia Elena Lugo

Advertising sells ideals. The creation of a posed image, what Erving Goffman, in his 1979 book Gender Advertisements, describes as, "the magical ability of the advertiser to use a few models and props to evoke a life-like scene of his own choosing", derives its power from its convincing resemblance to our everyday realities (Goffman 1979: 23). The job of the advertiser consists of identifying a target audience, or market, for the client's product, then ingratiating the client company with the consumer through the presentation of constructed realities that portray the fulfillment that consumption brings. This has meant that advertising is increasingly based on the sale of appearance rather than quality. Thus more and more advertising focuses on selling an ideal lifestyle to the consumer, presented in the form of what the consumer's life could (ostensibly) be like, and, further, what the consumer's life should be like.

This image comes from the September 2003 issue of Vibe Magazine, a publication targeted at young black Americans and anybody else who identifies with an "urban" subculture. According to Vibe's website (www.vibe.com), which I visited on November 6, 2003, "with an authoritative voice, Vibe creates trends as much as it records them." The website also quotes Quincy Jones, a prominent songwriter and producer, as saying that the magazine "is the voice and soul of urban music and culture." Urban hip-hop culture is currently the favorite subculture of mainstream youth culture, thus Vibe is on the cutting edge of what is "cool" to American teens.

Within this context we will now examine the implications of a car insurance advertisement targeting teens. In this ad, Progressive Car Insurance attempts to ingratiate itself with the consumer by invoking typical teenage fears of having her or his social façade made ridiculous and laughable. In this image there are no direct references to car insurance; instead, the advertiser has used the idea of insurance to access adolescent insecurity. "Manhood Insurance" is just one advertisement in a series of similar ads with the insurance theme (see teens.progressive.com, also accessed November 6, 2003). I interpret this to be a move on the advertiser's part to make the company seem cool to teenagers; even if the company cannot provide identity insurance, it understands the desire for such. Douglas Rushkov talked about this sort of corporate compassion in his 2001 documentary "The Merchants of Cool". According to Rushkov, advertising has increasingly attempted to present a world in which nobody understands kids except the corporate sponsor. Clearly Progressive is here relying on the establishment of this sort of relationship, because their ad does not attempt to display the virtues of their product.

The young man portrayed here wears a melancholy expression while his classmate points and laughs. Why the long face? By wearing the same sweater as a girl, this boy has unwittingly undermined his own masculinity, the implication of which is evoked in the large heading reading "Manhood Insurance". In American high schools students police one another's appearances by bestowing popularity on those who display a confident social personality and by ostracizing those teens with less highly developed social personalities. The term "social personality" here refers to the performance of cultural perceptions of what is "normal", such as males dressing like men and females dressing like women. In this sort of performative environment, to lose one's gender identification is to place oneself in a dangerous position of liminality. Progressive's website displays a fine-tuned understanding of the undesirable nature of transgressing social boundaries in some ideal adolescent mind. Progressive validates the gender binary by representing variation from it as humiliating.

Here we have a powerful example of the socially constructed nature of the gender binary. If advertising draws its salience from its resemblance to our daily lives, it also projects images of an ideal reality that we as consumers have been programmed to seek out; recall the L'Oreal Cosmetics tagline, "because you're worth it". Advertising gives us something to call objective reality, something to measure our own realities against, something we should be able to achieve if we only had sufficient currency. Thus this ad perpetuates the gender binary by presenting it as an intrinsic aspect of the proper reality within which "cool" teenagers live, and by asserting that in reality all teens should want to be cool. By placing their advertisement in a "trend-setting" magazine, Progressive Auto Insurance's advertisers make it obvious that their target audience is young, cool people who would fall into Vibe's projected demographic. Then, by displaying the gender binary as something that proves socially damaging to transgress, Progressive draws on the assumption that cool teens have a vested interest in knowing how to properly display their genders.