Michael F. Cramphorn: Gender Effects in Advertising

Michael F. Cramphorn: Gender Effects In Advertising

In 2010, Michael Cramphorn, the chairman of Add+Impact International Market Research Industry, do research about the distribution of advertisement target market based on different gender, the result showed that "Less than 15% of ads are directed specifically to women and less than 5% are intended just for men. The remaining 80% are apparently targeted to everyone" (Cramphorn 147). This result drew Michael's attention, and made him wrote this article: "Gender effects in Advertising." In this paper, he aimed at providing clear understanding about how do such difference affect overall gender responses to advertising and how advertising messages can provide more creativity and variety in the way to communicated between different genders. This article demonstrates how gender and value relevance can influence advertising processing under different viewing situations.

In order to build background knowledge to audiences, Michael Cramphorn first introduce how the gender different in psychological aspect. Michael highly supported Simon Baron-Cohen's idea, which is about "Gender Different in brain" (Cramphron 148). He is a psychopathologist of University of Cambridge, and he indicated that different structure of brain between male and female result in primarily different personality and reaction of life. Even though Michael is not professional in this field, his objective and informative tone is persuasive for our readers to understand and believe the gender difference has existed when we at birth. For example, Michael indicated that "Gender difference caused by chromosome. The combination between the different chromosomes led to different gender personalities." (Cramphron 150).

On the second part of his article, Michael tried to connect gender difference with different response to advertisement. "There has been a lot of attention given to the portrayal of gender in advertising by both practitioners as well as academics and much of this has been done regarding the portrayal of women in advertising" (Cramphorn 158). As Cramphorn's opinion, this has led many to believe that most of the advertisements and their contents are sexist in nature. This point has been noted by viewing various advertisements that women are shown as being more concerned about their beauty and figure rather than being shown as authority figures in the advertisements, they are usually shown as the product users. Also, there is a tendency in many countries, including the United States, to portray women as being subordinate to men, as alluring sex objects, or as decorative objects. This is not right as it portrays women as the weaker sex, being only good as objects.

For continual draws readers' attention, Michael started to make bar charts to show the attraction of top 35 different brands' advertisements