Entry #3 The Male Gaze and Dominance over Subject in Coca-Cola’s Advertisement

"Coca Cola... YES.." Tribe. Utah Street Networks, Inc., 02 Jul 2010. Web. 19 Mar 2014.            <http://tribes.tribe.net/cocacolalovers/photos/4f0445aa-ad94-443e-8167-42f239d1e149>.

MDSB62 Media Portfolio Entry #3—Commercial advertising & Image from 20th century
By: Annie Duong

The Male Gaze and Dominance over Subject in Coca-Cola's Advertisement

            Advertisements in the twentieth century have increased dramatically as the industrialization expanded the supply of manufactured products. With the effects of higher rate productions, industries needed more consumers, which lead to something called mass marketing. Mass marketing refers to a large target audience. With mass marketing, industries are able to target specific groups of people through the use of certain images and concepts in the advertisement. A Coca-Cola advertisement, “Yes”, in 1946 is an example of mass marketing and target audience. Coca-Cola’s advertisements specifically targets middle-aged men by portraying young women through the male gaze and the sense male dominance over subject in the advertisement.

            Pretty women were frequently featured in Coca-Cola’s campaign advertisements in the twentieth century. Coca-Cola’s ‘pin-up gals’ are often represented in a seductive way through their body language and the clothes they are wearing. In a particular Coca-Cola ad called, “Yes”, the young woman appears to be lying on the beach in her bathing suit facing towards the audience and smiling up at the person offering her a bottle of Coke. It is clear that the hand of the person offering the woman the bottle of Coke is a male figure. The hand is much larger and appears to be more ‘masculine’ than the woman’s appear to be. The composition of this print advertisement allows the spectators (mostly males) to place themselves in the advertisement as if they were the one handing the woman a drink. By not being able to see the face and body behind the hand, we assert ourselves in its position. This relates to Freud’s psychoanalysis and the concepts of identification, scopophilia, and narcissism. Sean Nixon, the editor of “Exhibiting Masculinity” in Representations, described the psychoanalysis concepts as, “particularly suggestive for our purposes in that they foreground the organization of gender identities within representation and play up the acts of looking and spectatorship which shape this process” (312). The role role identification, scopophilia, and narcissism have within an individual affects the individual’s ego and desire of the acts of looking and spectatorship. The concept of identification has a distinction between two kinds of desire according to Freud. The two kinds of desire are the “desire to have the other person (which he calls object cathexis) and a desire to be the other person (identification)” (Nixon 312). The image of the Coca-Cola ad has a connection between Freud’s theory of identification in terms of the advertisement implying the desire to be the other person.

            The subject in Coca-Cola’s advertisement also has a representation of power and discourse. By having the woman posed in such a way (with her sitting on the ground, looking up), she is represented as fragile and powerless. The big, bold text that says ‘Yes’, suggests that the subject of this advertisement is allowing herself to be controlled by the person handing her a bottle of Coke. She is conforming to the needs of a male figure, becoming the ‘subject’ by subjecting herself to its meanings of being controlled (by saying ‘yes’). Stuart Hall, the editor of “The Work of Representation” from Representation, he explained:

For example, pornography produced for men will only ‘work’ for women, according to this theory, if in some sense women put themselves in the position of the ‘desiring male voyeur’ – which is the ideal subject-position which the discourse of male pornography constructs – and look at the models from this ‘masculine’ discursive position. (40)

The subject of Coca-Cola’s ad is positioned within the ‘desiring male voyeur’. She is positioned in the center in which her body language depicts her acceptance of being seduced, which is a method of luring in male consumers.

Target audience is a marketing technique that requires the marketing team to thoroughly analyze and apply the consumers’ desires and psyche in order to achieve successful advertising and commercial campaigns. The Coca-Cola advertisement took advantage of the male gaze and used the ‘desiring male voyeur’ to attract and target the male audience and the subject in the ad proposes that one can get the girl to conform to their needs with a bottle of a refreshing drink, Coke.

Works Cited

"Coca Cola... YES.." Tribe. Utah Street Networks, Inc., 02 Jul 2010. Web. 19 Mar 2014.  

          <http://tribes.tribe.net/cocacolalovers/photos/4f0445aa-ad94-443e-8167-
          42f239d1e149>.

Hall, Stuart, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon. Representation. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: SAGE
          Publications Ltd, 2013.