Giant Idiots!
A firm called Cargiant has been running an extremely irritating series of ads on the Tube. Reader Claire wrote in to tell us about them, and encourage everyone to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority.
The ads feature gurning men, smugly explaining how they took advantage of Cargiant’s cheap prices to a) save enough money to send his stereotypically irritating mother-in-law on a long holiday and b) save enough money on buying “the wife” a car to take “the girlfriend” on a “wicked” trip to Paris for the weekend. There may be more of these, of course, but from the ones I’ve spotted we can gather:
- Only men buy cars
- Only sexist, slimy men buy cars
- This makes it acceptable to say things like “tweet, tweet” about “the girlfriend”
Gross. What really bemuses me is who is this meant to appeal to? What’s the marketing line? “Slimy men - our target demographic!”
Posted by Jess McCabe on 11 February 2008, at 11:16 PM | Comments (2)
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grace said:
thank you for posting this! Saw these ads recently and thought exactly the same.
Posted on 16 February 2008 at 1:38 AM
Shotpurple said:
The Cargiant ads are hideous. How come LU considered banning posters depicting Cranach's Venus (from the Royal Academy exhibition), yet has allowed these to pass unmentioned?
I thought that overtly sexist advertising was not permitted, yet this campaign is normalising the belittling of women as irritations that have to be put up with.
And another thing...this doesn't really break down the sterotype that men of Asian origin treat women as second-class citizens, does it?
Posted on 28 March 2008 at 8:31 AM