Get me some holy water and a priest, there's an Advertising Executive about!

[sparkindarkness]

As has previously been apparent, I am not the biggest fan of the advertising industry - especially in relation to "health" (using the term loosely) foods.

So it should come as no surprise that the latest special K advert caused the usual frothing fury


A resume of the advert (since I can't you tube it): you look at a series of photographs. In each is a woman in a red bathing suit. When she sees you are looking at her, the woman in the photograph instantly hides, especially trying to hide her stomach. The implication is that she's fat and ashamed to be seen in a swimsuit.

She is not fat. Not by any stretch of the imagination is she fat. She doesn't need to lose weight - and trying to get women to buy cereals to lose weight because THIS is the standard for what fat is? GRRRR

Then we wonder at anorexia. Well, we don't. But the advertising execs profess to have nothing to do with it.




Of course what's vaguely tangentally amusing is if you pull up their website and click on the little nutritional info: http://www.specialk.com/ you find out that one bowl of special k WITHOUT milk contains 9% Of your daily salt intake (and can I have another slap to whichever cunning person thought it was a good idea to hide salt content by only labelling sodium content?) and they've craftily not decided to tell you how much of your daily intake of sugar that 4g per 31g bowl makes up.


Which returns me again to my age old rant - how dumb are people. It's low FAT CEREAL. Since when does Cereal actually HAVE fat in it? We're talking toasted grains, fat content nil ANYWAY. Sugar is the culprit in cereals - and you'll find none of these wholegrain, high fibre (A cereal with wholegrains and high fibre! Well damn, who'd have thought it! Next they'll be selling us orange juice - now with vitamin C!) is screaming about sugar contents. Hmmm, funny that.

Comments

[seryan.livejournal.com]

This is because in the 'before' pictures, they frowse your hair, shoot the photo without makeup, put you in clothes that are the wrong size, don't touch it with Photoshop, and have you slouch. In the 'after' pictures, the stylist and the makeup artist have been after you, you're wearing tailored clothes that fit, standing up straight, and have been airbrushed. The pics are probably even taken on the same day. It's awful.

[ephemera.livejournal.com]

no, I mean, in this add they haven't even done the 'you too could loose weight with Photoshop' thing - it's the same model in the same swimming costume, and what they've sold you is the right to point to a packet of cereal and say 'see, I have fulfilled my morning's quota of feminine guilt about needing to eat'.