Media and Fathers: Taking Action by Joe Kelly
 

(From his book Dads and Daughters (Broadway, 2003) © Joe Kelly, all rights reserved.)

We are all intertwined: media, culture and us. We can’t make media into a big bad Other that is disconnected from us – at least not if we want to stay in touch with reality.

First, we must learn how to decipher the overt and subtle vernacular of media. It helps to think of media as a language, like Spanish, English or Japanese, that has both vocabulary and grammar. In media, the vocabulary is the words and images we see, while the grammar is how those words and images are put together to communicate a meaning and/or motivate us to buy or do something.

Our kids tend to absorb more media words and images than we do, and thus can recite more vocabulary. But very few adults or kids understand its grammar—how and why all those words and images get put together in ways aimed to influence us. This is a serious knowledge gap at a time when reams of research reveal connections between media consumption and child behavior.


It’s hard to identify the biggest media offenders when it comes to undermining our daughters–because there are so many. Beyond fighting back at home with media literacy, we can get at the root of the problem by becoming media activists.

About once a month, the Dads and Daughters organization encourages our members to email, write or call companies that advertise and market in ways that affect girls. It only takes a few Dads speaking out to have a big impact because fathers have more clout than most of us realize. Why?

Because men (many of them fathers) head nearly all media, marketing and advertising companies in the United States. As of this writing, only four of the Fortune 500 largest U.S. corporations are led by women. The other 496 CEOs are men – most of them fathers and/or grandfathers. Fathers like us are the ones who run these organizations and so we can talk to CEOs father-to-father about the messages they send our kids.

If I (as a father) ask a CEO (as a father) to put his daughter’s or granddaughter’s face into the picture of what he’s selling and how he’s selling it, my question might carry special legitimacy and weight with him.

For example, Sun-In, a long-established hair-bleaching product, once ran a troubling ad in Teen People magazine. (I’d never heard of Sun-In, but women often say, Oh sure, I used it when I was a girl). The ad’s copy reads: “Four of five girls you hate ask for it by name. Stop hating them. Start being them with Sun-In, the original.”

In response, DADs’ members wrote to Zan Guerry, CEO of Chattem, Inc., the multinational manufacturer of Sun-In, Ban deodorant, pHisoderm skin cleaner, Dexatrim diet pills and dozens of other products. We asked, Do you want your children to hate others? If they did have that corrosive feeling, would you encourage them to start being the people they hate? We assume that your answers to these two questions, like the answers of any responsible parent, is a strong ‘No!’ Then we asked him to have Chattem stop running the ad.

A couple of weeks later, Guerry himself wrote to say he’d been on vacation with his family when our letters arrived, but upon his return, the ad was the first topic he took up with his marketing managers.

In my twenty plus years at Chattem, I am aware of no similar problem with any of our ads. We certainly always intend to market our products with good taste and sensitivity. Unfortunately it is apparent that this ad has been misunderstood, for which we take full responsibility.
The purpose of communication is not to communicate so you can be understood, but so you can’t be misunderstood. Clearly, we failed in this measure.

Guerry went on to say that Chattem was pulling this Sun-In ad; it never ran again. Speaking father-to-father, a few dozen DADs’ members got our message got through.

When Campbell’s soup created a 30-second TV commercial pitching soup to prepubescent girls as a diet aid, it aired during after-school programs like The Rosie O’Donnell Show. Puberty is the time when nature adds body fat to females so they can bear children and lactate. You can’t fool Mother Nature; marketing diet aids to a prepubescent is insane.

Once again, Dads and Daughters wrote a father-to-father letter to the CEO. Two days later, Campbell’s Vice-President John Faulkner called DADs to say, we’ve pulled this ad Faulkner explained that when creating the commercial, Campbell hadn’t recognized the danger of the message, but it was clear after reading our letter.

Thirty-second national TV commercials are not cheap to make or air. Campbell’s’ was willing to kiss that money good-bye in response to letters from one small organization because competition for consumer attention and loyalty is greater than it’s ever been. To succeed, companies must be agile and respond quickly to what consumers say. For example, NBC used to have only two competitors for TV advertising revenue: CBS and ABC. Now it has more than 500. Each one of those 500 has a big stake in listening closely to what viewers – us – tell them.

We can use that leverage to point out examples of good advertising, too, just like we try to catch our children being good and reward positive behavior.
 

Joe Kelly is President of the national nonprofit Dads & Daughters (www.DadsandDaughters.org), publisher of Daughters: For Parents of Girls (www.Daughters.com), leader of the See Jane program (www.SeeJane.org) which addresses gender imbalance in children's media, co-founder of the girl-edited magazine New Moon, and author of six books. The father of two, he serves on CCFC's steering committee.