Print Ad Analysis: Orbitz.com
Annashay Sutherland

Online travel booking is a relatively new market, emerging within the last half-decade. The ad campaigns for travel sites don't seem to have followed rigid genre conventions - campaigns have varied from William Shatner doing beat poetry for Priceline to Hotwire's "Hotwire Travel Challenge" in 2002. Yet these campaigns are highly competitive and each is intended as a specific, strategic response against other leading campaigns. Orbitz launched its first advertising campaign in June 2001, in which it attempted to establish recognition. Since that time it has become a major competitor. This ad is part of a larger campaign called the "Destination: Orbitz Team," which debuted on television in April 2003. Contemporaneously, the entire travel industry is suffering losses because of worries about terrorism, war, and SARS.

I pulled this ad from The New Yorker, October 20, 2003, but it also ran in Time and Newsweek, as early as late August 2003. At the campaign's April inception, Orbitz spent 30 to 40 million for airtime on major cable networks before branching out into print ads. The ads' creator is a well-known advertiser who also created the Budweiser Frogs (Parker 2003). The concept was a team of marionettes handling Orbitz customer service calls from their blimp headquarters. Different marionette characters were created to represent the different features of the Orbitz service (for an overview of the characters and campaign, visit the microsite www.destinationorbitz.com).

"The marionettes are a fun and creative way to illustrate how Orbitz listens to customers and responds to their needs," says Mike Sands, Orbitz' chief marketing officer. "Travel advertising is typically characterized by clichéd beach scenes and testimonials. With the marionettes, Orbitz is going a different way to break through the sameness of travel ads" (Parker 2003).

Yet it is clear that Orbitz advertisers are relying on raced and gendered stereotypes to market their services. Advertisers split the "Orbitz Experience" into components and personified each one, creating a representation of their company with a division of labor split along lines of age, gender and ethnicity. "Commander O" is the middle-aged white CEO. "Code" is a younger white male cybergeek with glasses and unruly red hair. "Hunt" (a young, shaggy, blond, white male) and "Starr" (a young, female, long-haired, bikini-wearing Hawaiian) go on adventurous trips together to check out travel sites, and "Deal" is a balding (white, male) businessman committed to saving you money. "Care" is a matronly black woman who cares about you and your flight. This particular print ad presupposes the marionette campaign has penetrated the mass media so that its elements will be recognized: as a non-frequent media consumer I was mystified by the ad's semiotics until I looked up contextual information on the web.

Personifying "Care" as an older African-American woman aiding her white male boss invokes a dense intersection of gender and race relations in subordination to white male executive power. The man's body is framed out of the ad, but unmistakable visual cues (relative size, inside/outside) and well-known stereotypes (race and gender) establish a clear power relationship, which would not "read" the same if cues showed the passenger to be a woman. This ad also invokes the (white) nuclear family, with the husband the jet-setting breadwinner.

The image reaches back to the white power privilege of having black servants and mines media stereotypes of black women as "mammies." The mammy caricature was used to prove that black women were happy as slaves. "She 'belonged' to the white family, though it was rarely stated. Unlike Sambo, she was a faithful worker. She had no black friends; the white family was her entire world" (Pilgrim 2000). Mammies were extremely maternal but completely desexualized, like "Care." This stereotype coexists with the "Jezebel stereotype" of hyper sexualized young black women. Both are depictions of the gendering of race within larger systems of power. Many ads today invoke the Jezebel stereotype by pairing white men with wild ethnic sexualized women ("Starr," the young bikini-clad Hawaiian being a close-to-home example). If "Care" were sexualized, it would invoke those kinds of familiar tropes. It is thus necessary that she be old and dowdy. And as bell hooks reminds us, both stereotypes of black women have been used politically to make accusations about "matriarchal" black families that cause "pathological" black masculinities (hooks 1992).

"Care" trivializes women's work. Although part of a high-tech team, her job is the subordinately valued "women's work" of nurturing and the secretarial work of relaying messages. Orbitz draws on both race and gender stereotypes to construct the person they assume epitomizes "care." Women are essentially more nurturing than men, but a black granny or mammy is the ultimate non-threatening, nurturing figure.

The technological side of online travel is downplayed in favor of an approach that hybridizes technology with nostalgia: "don't worry, Mr. Cook; little marionettes with real personalities are taking care of your every need." Given the insecurity about travel in the years after September 11, Orbitz' approach seems calculated to draw on nostalgia by replacing machines with (automated) humans, while reassuringly reinscribing gendered and raced relations of power.

Works Cited

hooks, bell. "Reconstructing Black Masculinity" in Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Parker, Pamela. "Orbitz Debuts Characters in TV Spots" Apr. 7 2003, Accessed Oct 20,  2003. URL: http://ecommerce.internet.com/news/news/article/0,,10375_2177061,00.html

Pilgrim, David. "Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia: The Mammy Caricature." October, 2000. Accessed October 20, 2003. URL: http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/mammies/

Saunders, Christopher. "Hotwire Ads Take Aim at Priceline" April 8, 2002. Accessed October 20, 2003. URL: http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/12_1005801