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Assignment 3 for The Media Landscape
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Course Name: The Media LandscapeTutorial Group Number: 4
Assignment 3
Date : 15/03/2020
Word count : 1015
The advertisement chosen is from the German car company Audi, which
circulated in China. The advertisement has clear sexist themes and
received great criticism in the Western world. In the advertisement, a
couple is about to get married when the groom’s mother suddenly
appears and “assesses” the bride, pulling on her face to see if anything is
not naturally hers, to see whether she fits the standards she has set for
her own son. As the mother “approves” the bride and the couple sighs in
relief, the mother then looks at the bride’s breasts which she forgot to
“assess”, and the bride holds them to protect herself. Next, a shot of an
Audi car on the road is accompanied with someone saying “an important
decision must be made carefully”, thus equating getting married to a
woman to choosing a new car. The advertisement also shows the sexist
nature of the mother trying to see if the woman hasn’t gone under any
cosmetic procedures, as if that would make her less worthy of being her
son’s wife. The advertisement then goes on to promote a new Audi and
their website for anyone who wanted to confirm the cars’ qualities and
qualifications.
This advertisement can be classified best under Leiss et al.’s iconography
frame. This frame indicates that there is a strong focus on the product
that’s being advertised, but there’s also some implicit connotations
around the status or associations that the product will give to whoever
buys it (Thibaut, 2019). Therefore, while the focus is still on use value, this
type of frame has characteristics of symbolic value. This frame connects
to the advertisement’s symbolic value, as it shows marriage to be as
important as buying a car. In its sexist reasoning, it is equally valuable to
have a “worthy” wife as it is to buy a good car like Audi, suggesting both
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, actions require as much careful thought. This importance given to a good
wife or car ties in with the symbolic value that the Audi car, just as a good
wife, will make you happier or safer. At the same time, the end of the
advertisement shows the car they’re promoting and the Audi website,
which allows for customers to compare cars, highlighting how great their
services are. Thus, it shows the use value of the product and of the
website they use.
This problematic advertisement can be linked to the essentialism in media
representation of minorities. Essentialism can be defined as the belief that
all members of a group, such as all women or all black people, act the
same way while different groups are fundamentally different (Thibaut,
2019). This advertisement shows one of the essentialist patterns in media:
stereotypical representation, in this case, of women. This means that the
way the advertisement shows women doesn’t entirely reflect the reality of
women’s different nuances, instead perpetrating a prejudiced view.
There are two aspects of the advertisement that portray women in a
stereotypical way. The first refers to the mother checking to see if the
bride had gotten any procedures done, before allowing her to marry her
son. This negative portrayal of women with procedures done is a typical
way media uses to criticise women in general; it creates a paradox.
Women are constantly told to fit into a certain beauty standard, and when
they work towards it by getting procedures done, they are criticised and
ridiculed for not being “natural”. In China, the situation is particularly dire
as the cosmetic surgery industry has boomed in the past few years,
largely thanks to beauty apps and social media that push women to look
prettier and the recent success of South Korean content which exclusively
shows perfect-looking people (He, 2016).
The second stereotypical aspect of the advertisement is the implicit
assumption that marrying a woman is as important as buying a car. The
representation of women as properties, particularly properties of their
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