A husband and wife are in their front yard, watching cars go by. He gets more excited with each passing vehicle, practically sniffing the air as they go by until he can stand it no longer he sprints after one, only to be tripped up when his “leash” (a hose wrapped around his foot) snaps tight. She shakes her head in bemused superiority.
A woman sees her ex-boyfriend hitchhiking by the side of the road as she drives along. She remembers everything he said about not being ready for a commitment. Then she slams down the accelerator and leaves him in her exhaust.
A boy and a girl snowboard off a cliff. They meet in mid-air, potential soul mates, but they have only one soft drink. He pulls out two straws, offering to share. “Let’s just be friends,” she whispers in his ear, pulling the rip cord on his parachute and snatching the soda for herself.
You don’t have to spend much time in commercial land to realize that there seems to be a trend happening here. Or rather, two trends: one, advertisers are making a more conscious effort to target women, even for traditionally “male” products like cars, athletic apparel, tools and even men’s clothing.
Two, they’re doing it by making men look like hapless buffoons ruled by their brain stems and inane boy-men who would undoubtedly get themselves into serious trouble if not for the influence of a patient and wiser female figure.
“People are afraid to offend women, so instead they make the man the foil,” said Renee Fraser, president of Santa Monica ad agency Fraser/Young. “Unfortunately, I think we’ve really gone to the other extreme, as far as trying to accommodate some of the politically correct influences in advertising.”
For decades, the majority of advertising has been targeted at women because women did most of the shopping. But changing times have radically segmented the female audience. Instead of just worrying about how to appeal to stay-at-home mothers, advertisers now have to be able to reach the legions of working women, divorcees, and adult women who are making a lot of money and putting off marriage far longer than ever before.
Big advertisers don’t launch so much as a spitwad without performing market research first, and research in recent years has turned up some interesting facts about the economic power of women. This gender influences or controls 80 percent of new vehicle purchase decisions, 46 percent of all men’s clothing purchases, and 53 percent of investment decisions, according to figures from N.W. Ayer & Partners. In 75 percent of U.S. families, women handle the finances.
So when you’re a manufacturer whose top executives are nearly all men, and you have an ad agency whose top creatives are nearly all men, how do you come up with advertising that appeals to women?
One solution is a new generation of “women’s” advertising agencies, like Wiley & Associates in Westlake Village.
It seems odd to call an ad agency a “niche” marketer when its intended target makes up more than half the world’s population, but there’s no better description for Wiley & Associates. Of its 19 employees, 18 are women.
For most of its 13-year history, Wiley was a tiny boutique specializing in shopping malls. But three or four years ago, the firm’s president, Caryn Wiley, changed her new-business strategy, emphasizing that her company was a “women’s” agency that understood the female customer.
Wiley & Associates began approaching big advertisers and letting them know they were ignoring half their customers. Advertisers bit; L.A. Gear Inc. hired Wiley to pitch its women’s shoes, and while that account disappeared after L.A. Gear got into financial trouble, Wiley has picked up new clients like Sizzler International Inc. and Orange County-based baby products maker NoJo.
Along the way, it’s been growing at a blistering pace. From about $5 million in billings two years ago, the agency grew to around $12 million last year and is running at $20 million-plus today.
Wiley believes too much advertising has been created by male ad agency executives, at the behest of male-dominated client companies. The result is that advertising that does not speak to women.
“Trying to get a woman to buy her husband a shirt by presenting an ad with sexy, large-breasted women is not going to work,” Wiley said.
Renee Miller, of the Miller Group in West L.A., agrees that some advertisers still seem clueless about women customers but she blames the clients, not the agencies.
Her beef is with the kind of commercials you see on daytime television, in which bird-brained housewives seem obsessed with spotty dishes and ring around the collar. The makers of these detergents and other household products have, in many cases, been with the same agency for years, and seem incapable of changing formulas that were successful 20 or 30 years ago.
“I think the problem is just that we’re very slow to change stereotypes,” Miller said. “The reality is, working women could care less about whether their husbands have ring around the collar.”
So what kind of advertising does appeal to women? According to Wiley, it’s not the current batch of male-bashing spots flooding the airwaves.
“Show me as an equal in an experience, and show me something that I as a woman can relate to,” she said. “Generally, we have found that when you speak to a woman about what’s relevant to a woman, it doesn’t offend men.”
So although we’ll undoubtedly be seeing more and more advertising in traditionally “male” segments that will be targeted at women, it won’t necessarily come at the expense of male egos.
“I think there’s a very long history of depicting males as buffoons, and it continues to work,” said David Stewart, chairman of the marketing department at USC’s School of Business Administration. “These are cyclical sorts of things, and I think we’re in an up cycle for them.”
News Editor Dan Turner writes a weekly column on marketing for the Los Angeles Business Journal.
