“We Know What Matters to You”

Jean Kilbourne

A recent ad for Thule car rack systems features a small child in the backseat of a car, protected only by a seatbelt.  Next to the child, assorted sporting gear is carefully strapped into a carseat.  The headline says,  “We Know What Matters to You.”  In case one misses the point, further copy adds,   “Your gear is a priority.”   

The ad is meant to be funny, of course.  Taken individually, I suppose it might seem amusing or, at worst, tasteless.  As someone who has studied ads for a long time, however, I see it as part of a pattern, one of many ads that state or imply that products are more important than people.   It is also one of many ads that objectify and trivialize children, such as an ad for Joop! jeans that features a baby on a leash with the headline, “A child is the ultimate pet.” 

Some ads hark back to the days when children were supposed to be “seen but not heard.”  “Quiet kids.  How’s that for a product benefit?” says an ad for an SUV that comes with a TV/video cassette player.  And a candy bar ad asks, “Kids talking too much?  Give ‘em a Chewy Grand Slam.  . . . Really, really chewy.”  Do we need this kind of message in a culture in which people say they spend about forty minutes each week in meaningful conversation with their children?  

Sometimes children are portrayed as getting in the way of our pleasure.  “We can get rid of the pain in your neck but not the cause of it,” declares an ad for physical therapy featuring a woman dragging a little boy out of a park.  Although the copy assures us that “Of course, you’d never want to get rid of the little guy...,” the initial impression is of shocking hostility.  Of course, the creators of this ad use shock to get our attention; they intend no larger consequence.  But an image of potential child abuse, in a culture in which millions of children are abused and neglected,  is used to attract our attention and perhaps to make us laugh. 

More often, sentimental images of children are used to evoke deep feelings of love and protectiveness which are then connected to the product.  “Can a shoe hug you like a tiny hand?” asks an ad featuring a woman cradling a child in her arms.  The answer, of course, is no -- but that’s not what the ad implies.  Whatever emotional response we might have to the image is immediately transferred to the product. 

Many ads that seem to be about the relationship between a parent and a child turn out to be glorifying the relationship between the parent and a product.  “There are some things you wouldn’t trade for the world,” says an ad featuring a beautiful woman wearing a fur coat and holding a child rather stiffly on her lap.  The copy continues, “If you don’t feel that way about your fur, why not trade it for a new one?”

A stunning example of this kind of confusion between products and people occurs in an ad featuring a girl running into the open arms of a woman, presumably her mother.  The copy says, “Open your eyes.  What’s important is right in front of you.”  One hopes, expects, that what is important to this woman is her child.  But no, it turns out the ad is referring to her Timberland shoes.  If we take time to reflect on this, the message is truly awful.  The ad explicitly states that the shoes are more important than the child to this woman.  But we don’t usually pay conscious attention to ads, so the message slides right by … into our subconscious.  One ad like this wouldn’t matter at all, but the constant repetition of the belief that products are more important than people has a devastating impact on our families, our communities, and our society as a whole.

Jean Kilbourne, EdD,  is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on alcohol and tobacco advertising and the image of women in advertising.  She is the author of Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel and the creator of several award-winning films, including the Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women series.  She is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women.