Gendering Oil through the Lens of Advertising Gender roles in oil company advertisements as a mirror of culture and of social change
Pamela Vang
Gendering Oil through the Lens of Advertising
Gender roles in oil company advertisements as a mirror of culture and of social change
Pamela Vang
IEI, Language for Academic and Professional Purposes
Linköpings universitet, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden Linköping 2021 © Pamela Vang, 2021
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
This book is a scientific text published at the non-commercial publisher Linköping University Electronic Press. The author has tried to get permissions to publish the images included in this report. However, due to the complexity raised by their number, the age of many of these and their sources, in particular the fact that many of the advertisements appeared in a variety of different periodicals and publications including The Economist, New Statesman and Scientific American as well as general newspapers, the copyright owners have not been found. If you are the copyright owner of any of the images included in this report, please contact [email protected].
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the staff at BP Archives, Warwick University, for the assistance they gave me in 2010 in my search for advertisements connected to BP and Shell.
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press 2021 Editor: Edvin Erdtman
ISBN 978-91-7929-030-6 (PDF) https://doi.org/10.3384/9789179290306 Cover by: Nico Franz from Pixabay Abstract
This electronic book is a longitudinal investigation into the ways in which oil companies have adapted their advertising to both influence and appeal to their contemporary publics. Taking a dramaturgical approach, it examines the roles and attitudes attributed to the characters that populate the advertisements and with whom the intended audiences should identify. The analysis shows that despite the fact that society is striving towards increased gender equality, the general narrative of oil companies remains unchanged. The casting of the advertisements shows that oil and its derivatives are provided and developed by strong, heroic and competent men to ease and facilitate the lives of the weaker, dependent female population.
Keywords: oil companies, advertising, identities, dramatic narrative, social change, gender
Contents Introduction: Gendering Oil through the lens of advertising. 1
The female cast 2 a) The Independent Woman 2 b) The Sexualised Woman 6 c) Woman as a Homemaker 12 d) Working girls … 20 e) …and Representantes 24 f) Changing gender roles? 26 Portrait of an oil man 27 a) The Expert 29 i) Educators 31 ii) Innovators 37 iii) Entrepreneurs 41 b) The Adventurer 42 c) Manliness 47 “Casting”oil 50
References 54
Gendering Oil through the lens of advertising.
Advertising is ubiquitous and exists in a multitude of forms. Its sole aim is to influence us to act in a specific way which is to the advantage of the advertiser. Thus, advertising constitutes a communicative act which builds upon a partnership in which the advertiser and the person viewing the advertisement enter into some form of “dialogue”. Emile Benveniste, has shown how an enunciation, an utterance, is an act through which a speaker (in this case, an advertiser) mobilizes language for his own use (Benveniste 1974:80). Thus, a successful advertisement must have a strong audience orientation and a clear sense of “recipient design” (Sacks et al., 1974). As Kenneth Burke (1945) has pointed out, the persausive aspect of rhetoric is to identify your interests with those of your audience, to adapt [your] practice to [your] addressee (William Hanks 1996:244) and to “altercast”, that is to project an identity “which is congruent with one’s own goals” upon the addressee (Weinstein & Deutschberger 1963:454). However, for advertisers, dialogue is not simply communication between themselves and the addressee but is a “living tripartite unity” (M.M.Bakhtin 1986:122) in which the surrounding world also plays a part. In other words, “[t]he word is a drama in which three characters participate” (ibid).
Thus, for advertising to fulfil its purpose and persuade the addressee to respond in the desired manner, it must change and adapt in response to the world and to evolving contexts. As Umberto Eco has pointed out (1990:131), “ a message signifies only insofar as it is interpreted from the point of view of a given situation”. In other words, culture as well as context are central to dialogical relationships and therefore advertisements are a mirror of social change.
Today, gender and the attribution of roles based on gender have become a focal point of discussion. How then has this been reflected in advertisements? The advertising of the oil industry which can be traced back for over a century, provides some very interesting insights into these changes.
However, first it is necessary to name and explain the “roles” played by the figures that populate the “dramas” played out in the advertisements. My nomenclature is based on Kenneth Burke’s (1945) “dramatistic” perspective and his Pentad (ibid:xv) and has five elements, the Act, (what took place in thought or deed), Scene (background situation) Agent (who) Agency (how) and Purpose.
An advertisement is created by a Scripwriter, and is staged. To this end, it has a number of agents who all play different roles in the drama that unfolds and for whom I use the term actants. Actants can be “framed” and feature as participants in the advertisement as speaking actants or simply be a voice outside the frame. An actant can address the reader directly or address another participant staged within the frame who functions as the addressee or addressed agent in the dramaturgy. The intended audience or public for the advertising message, whether this be a reader or a viewer can also be referred to as the destinee and can be addressed by a character playing the role of informant. The role of a representant is to illustrate the benefits of the product or service being featured
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The female cast
Taking an American perspective, Suzanne Romaine (1999:253) has pointed out that in advertisements images of men tend to outnumber those of women by two to one. Moreover, despite the fact that women have 75% of the purchasing power, advertising, which is “one of the most important areas of public life in which gender is displayed in images as well as in language” (ibid: 251) tends to reflect a stereotypical and even mythological world in which men (usually white), are professionals1 while a woman’s place is in the home. Women shown outside the home are predominantly portrayed as secretaries or as young and beautiful fashion models, often with a Barbie doll figure (ibid: 253). Glen Mick (1987: 269) has also pointed out that advertising promotes role models that are sometimes anachronistic and caricatures normative and ideal lives that are statistically unrepresentative. Referring to Goffman’s (1979) findings, he states that in advertising, caricature is “evident in assorted hyper- ritualizations” of certain behaviours.
From my studies of the advertisements of the oil companies, (Vang 2014) it has emerged that in line with Romaine’s findings, the characters that populate the advertisements of the oil companies are predominantly male, although here, the ratio of men to women is much closer to ten to one.2 This is less surprising if we consider that the oil industry has historically been the preserve of men and particularly, that of white American and European men. What is particularly interesting, however, is not so much the roles into which the female figures portrayed in the advertisements are cast but how the stereotypical representations of women have changed over time. These representations can be generally classified into five types, each one specific to a particular historical period. I will introduce these role typologies and briefly discuss them below. I will then trace the way in which their male counterparts are depicted before discussing the matter of rhetorical identification that this implies.
a) The Independent Woman
In the very early years of the advertising of the oil industry, women (Figure 1) were shown independently using the products derived from oil. Jules Chéret produced a well-known series of posters to advertise Saxoléine, a safety petroleum for the lamps that had begun to appear in the early 1850s, and which were one of the driving forces of the modern-day petroleum industry. The Chéret series shows elegant women lighting their lamps with this brand of safety petroleum. The women are typically portrayed as young and extremely feminine, and tend to wear highly elaborate clothes and hair-styles. Typically, they are portrayed in a graceful, almost ballet dancer-like pose while lighting their lamp, and like the young woman
1 Romaine (1999:253) states that one researcher found that 90% of the doctors portrayed in advertisements were male. 2 In the four series of Shell advertisements that I have studied from 1958, for example, consisting of 12, 6, 4, and 5 separate advertisements, only one had women as the actant participants. For Chevron, one advertisement featured a woman. In the case of the nine advertisements that BP published, one mentioned the Duchess of Kent who had launched a new company tanker, one mentioned the wife and daughter of a BP customer who was interviewed in Canada and actually named the 7-year old child, who was shown in the photograph, one included girls in a photograph from a mixed sex school in Australia, and one showed an African female learning to work a BP petrol pump. 2
in the example from 1894 shown here, accomplish the lighting of the lamp with great ease and elegance. The combination of the women’s posture, clothing and apparent simplicity with which they perform the act of lighting the lamp all connate the cleanness of the product and the ease with which is can be used. While it can be argued that the lamps are for domestic use, and that the home is traditionally the territory of the woman, it is still necessary to point out that men do not feature in these posters. The women are alone and independent, lighting their lamps without any assistance.
Figure 1, A Jules Chéret advertisement for Saxolèine, 1894
Figure2 illustrates how women are associated with the home and with oil as an illuminant. This particular postcard informs customers that the company are changing address and provides the new contact information. Although both a man and a woman are portrayed on the card, the message is addressed to a male recipient, probably a distributor. It is interesting to note that while the French product is illustrated by a society lady, lighting the lamp herself, the British advertisement shows a housemaid holding a ready-lit lamp.
Figure 2 Figure 3
The second example, (figure 3) depicts the be-winged female creature, part goddess, part spirit, in Greco-Roman dress, which featured regularly in the early advertisements. In this example, she is sitting on a British Petroleum certificate holding a red Shell can and lighting the huge oil lamp above her head with ease using only one hand. Her elegantly pointed foot creates a vector which draws the reader’s eyes from the lamp down towards the scrolled text which reads “The Light and Power of the Age” while the red background colour echoes the can and lends cohesion to the whole.
While the postcard in figure 2 casts men and women in different roles which reflect a stereotypical division of labour and of social space,3 other cards from the early years of the twentieth century portray them as equals. In the example in figure 4, both figures are holding a can of Shell Motor Spirit and both are dressed for a journey. The figures stand one on either side of a huge Shell, upon which they are gently leaning. The Shell itself is floating above a
3 Gillian Rose (1993) for example describes and discusses the way in which gender roles are socio-spatially structured. 3
golden, tentacle-like stand and underneathis the slogan, “It’s Perfect Purity that’s the Point”. Above the shell, which is in the centre of the image and which is brought even more into focus by the slight cant of the two figures and the vectors created by their resting arms, is an aeroplane. However, this is no ordinary aeroplane, but its wings are shaped like those of the be-winged spirits who poulate the series.
Figure 4 The wheels of the ‘plane point down towards the shell and also function as a semiotic device to bring it to the reader’s attention. The connotation is that Shell can be used for both motoring and flying.
Three more examples, from 1907, 1908 and 1926 can illustrate the independence and emancipation of women during the first years of the century. The earliest of these, figure 5 portrays an emancipated lady motorist, alone holding a can of Shell Motor Spirit with her motor vehicle shown on the sands in the background. Her attire is very similar if not identical to that of a male motorist.
The other two portray independent ladies in their motor cars. The lady in the 1908 example4 (figure 6) is driving, but is wearing typically female clothes including a pretty bonnet rather than the leather helmet of her Figure 5 counterpart in figure 5. The shape of the bonnet resembles that of the Shell logotype. The 1926 (figure 6) card shows a lady visiting one of the new Shell safety cabinets to purchase the fuel that she needs to drive her car. Her dress is typical of a well-to- do young woman of the time and this example is particularly interesting as it not only exemplifies the independence of the woman, but also shows how fuel was sold.
Figure 6 Figure 7
This was the era when women were fighting for emancipation and the right to vote, and this is reflected in Shell’s advertising of the time which portrays women positively as independent
4 Just a few years before this postcard was produced, a secretary had shocked conventional society by participating in a public motor race. (Shell Art Collection, Beaulieu, on line http://www.arpostcards.co.uk/gallery/albums/userpics/10002/sq111a.jpg). 4
beings. The postcard shown in figure 8, which dates from 1910, shows a group of women calling for votes for women as well as votes for Shell Motor Spirit. There is no man in sight. Humour is added to the advertisement by the form of the veils over the hats of a number of the women which echo the shape of the Shell logo that is prominently placed in the middle left centre of the picture and by the fact that the women white-gloved right hands are lifted in a salute which might be associated with men.
In these early postcard advertisements, women are portrayed as independent creatures who enjoy motoring just as much as men do and who are just as capable of handling the different oil consuming machines as a man. Indeed, women are not merely portrayed driving motor cars, but also feature as pilots.
Figure 8
A number of other postcards were produced during the early years of the century which depict women as strong and independent. One of these is an example from 1910. In this advertisement for Shell “Motor Spirit,” which is an early example of product endorsement and is provided by a male aviator, it is a female character that dominates She is in the foreground, holding up the laurel-wreathed can, and despite her rather inappropriate, green Greek goddess clothing, seems also to be actively engaged in steering the aeroplane in which she is sitting while the man who made the successful flight from London to Manchester does not feature as a participant actant. He is instead “off stage”.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of the view of women as strong, independent, beings is to be found in the postcard advertisement from 1909 (figure 9) which shows a female figure astride a horse, bearing a golden shell as a shield and holding aloft a banner whose device is the Shell can in a laurel wreath. The copy tells the reader: “Safeguard your interests by using “Shell”. It’s perfect purity that’s the point.”
This advertisement utilises the `imagic´ iconicity5 associated with Joan of Arc who was beatified that same year.6 Thus the Figure 9
5 Jan Assman discusses the concept of “figures of memory” (129) which is associated with cultural memory that stores past cultural formations. Much of the theory is based on Aby Warburg’s notion that we recognise and reuse images from the past, even unconsciously. 6 Although Joan of Arc had been a symbol of the Catholic League from the 16th century, interest in her became more intense in the middle of the 19th century, both in France and in England. This culminated in her canonisation on May 16th 1920 by Pope Benedict XV. 5 impact of the advertisement is increased by its contemporary relevance. The strong, fearless young woman sitting on the beautiful white horse represents purity, and the rippling muscles of the horse suggest speed and strength. Together, they protect the castle in the background, and by extension, the nation. Symbolically, Joan represents the power and purity of “Shell” motor spirit.
b) The Sexualised Woman
However, the late 1920s and the 1930s show a change in the way in which women are depicted by the oil companies. Amy Johnson, the air pioneer, for example, is referred to in Shell advertisements of the time by her married name, Mrs. Mollison, although her flying career and the records that she broke pre-dated her short marriage and despite the fact that she broke a number of her husband’s records.
Generally, women then were portrayed either as unattractive, comic characters or as silly sex objects. A series created by Shell in 1929, entitled “Important little differences” seems to herald this change in the way in which women were portrayed. The “Important little differences” series, which was created “for insertion in general newspapers”, and was therefore generally available to the public, played with both concepts. Although the advertisements in the series explain the technical advantages of Shell petrol, such as its anti- knocking chemicals and easy starting, and describe these characteristics as the “important little differences” that make Shell superior, what is particularly interesting about these advertisements is the way in which they compare women with petrol.
Figure 10 Figure 11
Two examples, in particular, are significant for the way in which they depict women and their function in society.
In the first example, (figure 10) two men, Clodpate and Motorist are the scripted, unrepresented participant actants discussing petrols. To Clodpate’s assertion that petrols are all the same, Motorist answers that petrols “differ as widely as one girl from another” and
6 then goes on to explain that “[b]eauty is no more than little differences of face and figure, just as the supremacy of Shell results from little points of difference from all other petrols.” The representants portrayed in the advertisement are an elegant, slim, young society woman, a clutch bag clasped under her left arm and waving her handkerchief and a second woman, dressed and posing in exactly the same way, but who is twice as big. In the second example, (figure 11) “The Smile is the Same” the copy states that “[l]ike a squint to a débutante, the small defects of ordinary petrol mean a lot in the long run. Shell is like a beautiful woman – free from flaw or blemish. Worth wooing – worth waiting for if need be, worth being faithful to when won.” The implication is that the young woman with the squint is not worth pursuing and that the man who marries her cannot be expected to remain faithful because of her slight physical imperfection.
The individuals physically portrayed in these unkind advertisements, the representantes, belong to the upper class and although the intention of the production team might be humour, the outcome is extremely sexist and women are reduced to a set of physical attributes and the importance of physical beauty and appearance is emphasised. Imperfections are the source of ridicule and are the basis of the joke. Moreover, women are likened to and equated with petrol and Shell is likened to the ideal woman. The inscribed reader of these advertisements is a man who implicitly and to the detriment of women, makes the connotation between superior petrols and superior females and who is assumed to be able to pick the “right” one, Shell and the girl with the “right” physical attributes.
Other advertisements from Shell in the 1930s in which women are comic figures include some of the “Quick- starting pair” series where the lack of understanding displayed by the cariacature-like old lady “Emily” is a source of humour, as well as examples from the “Some phrases seldom ring true” series that was published in The Economist in 1938. In the example, the actant participants, two working class char ladies, one thin and the other extremely fat, are caught gossiping. The reader catches them in the middle of their conversation and the humour of the advertisement is Figure 12 brought about by the words that the fat char woman is saying: “You could have knocked me down with a feather.”
The improbability of the verisimilitude of this common expression of surprise is made even less believable by the physical size and weight of the speaker.
In other words, Shell again play on the negative physical attributes of a female character in order to make their advertising point with humour.
Other examples from this You can be Sure of Shell series include a girl in a very short kilt marching with a group of Scots Guards and the example in figure 13, “Mistakes will happen….” in which the elderly, upper class restaurant guests are shocked and horrified by the scantily clad cabaret dancers whose high kicking routine causes the waiter to drop the wine bottle.
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The text underneath the headline has been ripped from the society pages of a local newspaper and the words “Before her marriage, Lady Bultitude was Miss Highstepper, the well- known cabaret danger” are visible. Humour is found not only in the situation but in the names of the characters and in the exchange of the expected word “dancer” for the more situationally appropriate “danger”.
It is interesting that after women had achieved voting rights, the depiction of their independent status seems to have declined in the advertising of Shell, and they are women are represented stereotypically either as being old, comic and unattractive, or as young, stupid, frivolous sex objects.
The examples below give a further taste of the trend to portray Figure 13 women as silly sex symbols.
In the first example, (figure 14) the actants are on the beach and are dressed for the occasion. The scantily clad girl is being lifted into the air by her male companion. He is thus not only the expert on all matters concerning Shell, and presumably, motors, but is also symbolically presented as the strong and stable part of the male/ female relationship. The girl rather innocuously asks “Do you like this Shell advertising?” and he replies “Yes, but it’s not as good as their petrol which is really the best.” The text under the photograph with the additional words “Everybody knows” before the slogan “you can be Sure of Shell” subtly adds to the implication that she is rather silly and uninformed. Not only does this exchange cast the woman into the role of the one who asks, it also implies that the couple are already engaged in a discussion about Shell and its advertising, an activity which is ascribed complete normality independent of time or place. This is a strategy which the company uses again in the 1950s.
Figure 14 Figure 15
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A second advertisement which also implies that women are not particularly intelligent and are merely sex objects is shown in figure 15. The two female actant participants are dressed in matching and somewhat dramatic and revealing clothes with backs cut in the form of shells, while other characters in the tableau are much more warmly clad. Two young men are staring unabashedly at them as they approach. Again, the characters are caught discussing Shell advertising and the first bathing belle, the one on the left asks her companion if she has seen the Shell advertising. The answer, from the girl on the right is “No, I used to but it’s getting too “clever” for me. I always use their petrol and leave the highbrows to read their advertisements.” This answer contrasts with that of the man in the previous example. He knows what he is talking about, while the young woman not only admits her ignorance but also confesses her lack of cleverness.
These advertisements are created from unframed photographs. Although the actant participants do not look at us, the lack of a frame suggests that we are part of the scene and are not separated from what is going on in (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). In the first case, we are sitting on the sand close to the young couple and looking upwards, an angle which generally creates “an impression of superiority, exaltation and triumph” (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996:146) while in the second we are walking directly behind the girls overhearing their somewhat inane conversation. The fact that the actant participants in these advertisements are real people who have been photographed, increases our sense of reality and of presence.
An interesting aspect of these two advertisements is the matter of gaze, or what following Laura Mulvey (1975) has been termed the “male gaze”. This is particularly evident in figure 15 where the two fully dressed young men openly share the reader’s voyeuristic viewing of the two young women whose style of dress is quite at odds with that of the other characters who people the photograph. However, even in figure 14 the gaze of the man is upon the woman and his upright body and stretched arms create a vector which draws the reader’s gaze to the curved bodylines of the woman. Although Mulvey’s analysis concerns gaze in cinema, her comment that “[i]n their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” applies even here. The photographs used in these advertisements can in fact, be considered like stills from typical Hollywood films where the male actants can be seen as figures with whom the spectator, or reader can identify.
However, the Shell production team was not alone in portraying women as silly sex objects during this period. In the dramatic scene from 1934 produced for the “BP for snappy engines” series, (figure 16) an elegant young woman is at the wheel of a car, just like her predecessors from the 1920s. The cigarette between the fingers of her left hand connotes that she is modern and emancipated. However although she seems to be relaxed and in control of the situation, this advertisement differs from those of the previous decades. This woman has a problem, namely, that she does not seem to be getting the best out of her new sports car. In this advertisement, she does not seek advice from the experts but instead, turns to her male friend or acquaintance who advises her to use BP, as this is best for “snappy engines”. The structure of the spoken elements of the advertisement follow Kress & van Leeuwen’s (1996) insistence
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on the old and the new, namely the woman with a problem concerning the performance of her car and the man who has the solution to her problem. The staging of this advertisement, with the woman at a lower level, results in the physical as well as the informational subordination of the female actant to the more informed and knowing male. This is an example of what Goffman (1979: 32)7 describes as “functional ranking”.
In another advertisement from this series, (figure 17) the female character has been made the subject of a “saucy” play on words. In this example, the female participant is the passenger, sitting alone in the car, turned away from the two other actants, assumedly her husband or boyfriend and the car salesman, in what Goffman (1979:57) has termed “licenced withdrawal,” a state which he Figure 16 describes as a lack of orientation to the social situation.
The two male actant participants are standing next to the car, talking to each, ignoring the woman. One of the males, presumably the salesman, and who acts as the speaking agent, comments, “She’ll never say `No´ …on `B.P. Ethyl.” The deictically ambiguous “she” of the words uttered can refer either to the car, which like a ship is typically referred to as female, or, to the woman sitting in it. The sexual innuendo is reinforced by the use of the adjective “fast”, a term used at the time for girls who were less conservative than was traditional and who enjoyed a life that involved the same pleasures as those more traditionally assumed to be the prerogative of men.
While many advertisements portray female characters as frivolous sex symbols, others tend to show them as home- makers and helpless. For example, in the “Times change” series. Figure 17
Two of the advertisements in this series have female representantes. One shows two women cooking,8 and the other, two women calling for help, one from an upper storey window and the other calmly telephoning 999. The advertisements show how modern kitchen equipment and the advent of the telephone have changed life for women, and explain how Shell products are developing in the same way to change our lives and make them easier. However, the male
7 My references to Goffan’s work, which is from 1976, are taken from the 1979 version, with an introduction by Vivian Gornick. 8 The cook in the “Old days” is a professional household cook while the one from “nowadays” is a housewife. 10 characters portrayed in the series are involved in some form of profession, and include waiters, teachers and musicians and even two schoolboys9 writing to Santa Claus.10
A series that appeared in The Motor as late as in 1954, and which was for Snowflake anti-freeze, for example, demonstrates the helpless quality attributed to women as well as their intrinsic lack of a profession and consequently, of social status, quite clearly (figure 18). The majority of the fictive characters in this series about people who have problems with their motor cars are men. Each character has a name, such as Mr Trowbridge, the “active young director of a furniture concern” who “has a problem”. Similarly, Mr. Blackwell, who “operates a fleet of vehicles” is a man who “takes no chances”. The female character portrayed in the series, Miss Hilcot, however, “needs help”. Moreover, while the male characters are introduced first through their professions and then perhaps, their family-life, “Betty Hilcot, Figure 18 28, brown-haired and pretty as you can see” simply lives in a flat in Kensington and is merely attributed with good looks. The solution for everyone, is, of course, Snowflake anti-freeze, marketed by Shell-Mex and B.P. Ltd.
Another interesting aspect of this advertisement is what Goffman has referred to as “gender display”. Betty Hilcot is stereotypically portrayed with her head slightly tilted in a rather gamine fashion, not looking straight into the camera, but towards it, and touching herself; in other words, clearly demonstrating what Goffman refers to as “the feminine touch”.11 She seems to have little or no relationship with or interest in the motor vehicle depicted behind her.
In 1958, BP produced an advertisement for their newly opened subsidiaries in Canada. The advertisement was structured like the page of a tabloid newspaper and comprised interviews with customers at a new BP station. Each interview was accompanied by the name and address of the interviewee and a photograph. Only one woman features among the six people named by the reporter and then simply as an appendage to a man, as a passenger in the car driven by her husband, who is “Out for a weekend trip with his wife and 7-year-old daughter Marilyn”. The wife, who does not look at the camera, does not even merit a name although the daughter, whose presence and recognition defines the driver as a family man with the positive attributes of a father and provider.
9 A number of schoolboys are depicted over the years from the boys in the “Shell Lesson“ to “Colin” in BP’s “For all our tomorrows” series from the first years of the 1990s to recent Shell advertisements. To my knowledge, one advertisement portrays a schoolgirl and that is part of Shell’s campaign from the mid and late 2000s. 10 It is perhaps significant that although I have found seven Shell advertisements with male students of different ages, I have only one with a girl and that is from 2008, an advertisement which has two versions, one with a schoolboy and the other with a girl cast in the same role. 11 This posture is one which can be associated with photographs of the ultra-feminine Marilyn Monroe. 11
c) Woman as a Homemaker
Tim Russell (2007) has reported how oil companies in the United States provided rest rooms to encourage customers. Gulf was the first of the companies to do this in the early 1930s and Texaco and also Shell quickly followed the trend to use the provision of rest rooms as a weapon in their advertising armoury. All of these advertisements featured women and children as the assumption was clean rest rooms would be a female priority in the choice of petrol. 12
The Texaco advertisement from the early 1950s (figure 19)shows an elegant young mother driving an open-top car with three neat and well-dressed little girls in her car. The young woman’s hat and pearl earrings connote respectability and a comfortable economy. All four are smiling and despite the open top, they do not have a hair out-of-place. The bonnet of the car creates a vector which points towards the large Rest Room sign, whose position in the top right of the image indicates that it is not only a new concept but also source of comfort and satisfaction (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996). The connotation is that they are happy and tidy because they have just visited the Texaco rest room and are about to drive away.
Figure 19 Although the copy states that the rest room is “Another Texaco dealer service appreciated by motoring families”, in this example, as in all the others, only the female members of these exclusively white, middle- class motoring families are depicted. The statement “Something we ladies appreciate!” can be attributed to the mother, who is immaculately and conservatively dressed but whether these words are voiced or represent her thoughts is unclear.
The Shell advertisement from 1938 (figure 20) is particularly interesting because it emphasises the female role as housekeeper and defender of cleanliness. The advertisement hails us with the words of Mrs. Marjorie B. Illig, who states; “With their `White Cross of Cleanliness´, Shell dealers guide us to Rest Rooms such as Good Housekeeping recommends”. Mrs. Illig, who is established as an authority on matters concerning housekeeping through her position as Chairman 1935-38 of the Division of Public Health for the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, is portrayed at middle distance, seated at a desk, dressed in a business-like, dark blue tailored jacket and light coloured blouse with a self- coloured jabot and her hair is neatly pinned up. She is gazing up into the camera at an angle that suggests that she is addressing the reader who is perhaps just entering the room. The lack of explicit framing contributes to this idea of reader presence. The desk is positioned in front of a window curtained in dark red velvet and the chair in which she is sitting is rather
12 For more information about the “powder room” or rest room and their function in oil company marketing see Russell (2007: 26 and 60-61). 12
elaborate and not of the sort normally associated with an office. Moreover, there is not only a crystal writing set on the desk but also a floral arrangement, something that is not found in depictions of male office scenes.
The advertisement comprises a number of other elements. The most conspicuous is the sign “This rest room is kept HOME CLEAN” with the White Cross symbol and the Shell logo is below this. The other elements of the advertisement consist of an extract from a hand-written letter written by Mrs. Illig to Shell congratulating them for their “prompt response to the plea of Good Housekeeping Magazine for sanitary equipment and better housekeeping in gasoline station rest rooms.” This is followed by Shell’s official type-written response Figure 20 thanking her and Good Housekeeping for pointing out to them what the public wants and explaining how they are now making demands on their dealers to maintain the high standards required.
In the advertising of Shell during 1958, (figure 21) two female actant participants make their appearance to describe how the company is making housekeeping easier. This is in an advertisement from their “I’ll tell you something else…” series published in The Economist and is the only one to feature females. Although they are portrayed in what appears to be a work situation, where a younger woman is visiting an older one, possibly to be interviewed for a secretarial position in a company that has connections with Shell, the talk of the speaking agent centres around the ways in which Shell Chemicals help women “everywhere in the home”. The status of women as homemaker is confirmed by this stereotypical utterance.
In this advertisement, the speaker directly contrasts the male view with the female. Wolfgang Iser (1974:115) has stated that when an author uses the pronoun “we” the implication is that he is “describing `natural´ reactions [and] is in fact seeking to trap the reader into agreeing with him”. If we accept this view, then the company is claiming through the speaker that for men, it is motor vehicles that are important, while for women, it is the home. However, women in general are probably unaware of how Shell is serving them there (line 2) and making their lives better (line 3) and easier (lines 4, 5). Moreover, Shell not only makes housework easier but also provides cosmetics and new fabrics (lines 5, 6).
1.Car-conscious men may think of Shell in terms of oil, but we live in a women’s world and Shell has a 2.lot to give us – chemicals in our service all day and every day, although we probably don’t recognise 3.them in their many attractive disguises. Such as? Plastics in all their gay variety. The gleaming 4.surfaces of refrigerators and other domestic equipment. Paints and lacquers that are easy to apply, 5.quick-drying and better protectors. Wash-day detergents, cleaning aids and polishes. Cosmetics. 6.And lovely fabrics, especially new man-made fibres such as Terylene, which begins life as a 7.chemical …. The fact is that, today, practically all household and personal goods depend 8.somewhere along the line on organic chemicals, more and more of which are coming from petroleum …. and Shell.
13
However, besides the insistence on things housewifely, it has a number of other features which are interesting from the point of view of gender. One particularly interesting feature concerns the language used by the speaker. Suzanne Romaine (1999:153-154) has asked the question whether or not talk is “gendered” and discusses the possible features of “women’s language”. “Womanspeak” or “le parler femme” is a notion that is posited by Luce Irigaray (in Toril Moi, 1985: 144) and is a term that I consider aptly describes the way in which the copywriter has characterised the speech of the speaking actant. Romaine (1999:154) lists the nine features that Robin Lakoff (1973) identified as being characteristic of this type of language. Typically, “womanspeak”, which Irigaray claims occurs only between women and in the absence of men, is considered to include emotionality and so-called “empty” Figure 21 adjectives to express the speaker’s feelings.
Moreover, women are said to talk a lot and to simply chatter. The rhythm of the speaker’s utterance in this advertisement results in a rather breathy delivery, which together with the way in which her ideas are presented in a series of verbless lists (3, 4, 5, 6) mimic the stereotypical chatter of woman’s talk. The scriptwriters have made use of a kind of Bakhtinian “ventriloquism” (1981) in this attempt to reconstruct and represent a social voice-type. The tactic of her opening sentence which includes a repetition of the pronoun “we” and the use of the pronoun “us” is to create a sense of solidarity between women, something also considered to be a feature of the speech of women. Moreover, the script of this advertisement is slightly longer than that of the equivalent “male” gendered advertisements in the series.13
The physical portrayal of the younger woman is also a clear Goffman-like example of gender display. The addressee sits with her head on one side, looking up at the speaker.14 Her body cant (Goffman 1976: 46) with knees and ankles close together and the legs turned to one side, display what Goffman refers to as “the bashful knees bend” (41) and her head tilt, together with the way in which she holds her handbag in her lap with both hands, provide a stereotypical display of female vulnerability and subordination. In this case, the subordination is not to a man, but towards the older woman who is standing and therefore has been placed in a position of dominance.
Although this is one of a series of advertisements which all use the same format the higher angle and the greater distance from which we view the scene further diminishes the seated woman and also puts the reader in a position of power over both the represented participants in the scene (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996:146). Moreover, all the vectors in the image guide the reader’s eye towards this seated actant, trapping her in the enclosed space that these create
13 A fourth advertisement is actually longer, but the talk moves from what immediately concerns the actants to provide an account of the importance of farming and the way in which grass grows. 14 This type of gaze is one which was often used when Princess Diana was photographed, especially in the first years of her life as a public figure. 14 in the centre of the image. This has two effects; one is to symbolise her confinement within the four walls of her house and the other is to strengthen the notion that she is the focus of a lecture dummies. 15
In their “Panorama of Progress” series that was published in The Economist, also in 1958, Caltex too, has one advertisement, “A Wider World for Fabrics” that features a woman (figure 22). She is standing with her foot and the hem of her Cinderella-like evening dress16 outside the frame of the picture in the bottom right corner, holding her skirts out and gazing at a huge, ornate mirror. The theme of a woman gazing at her reflection in a mirror is not original and has been the subject of a number of famous paintings.17
However, this image is particularly interesting for a number of reasons. Typically, the female gazing at her reflection is nude, while in this instance, she is dressed in a beautiful gown which she is ostensibly admiring. John Berger (1972:48) contends that to be naked is to be Figure 22 oneself while to be nude is to be seen naked by others and to become an object of another’s gaze. Usually, this gaze is theorized to be that of a man (e.g. Mulvey, 1975).
The connection between female vanity and the mirror is starkly evidenced in Snow White, another Disney film that was extremely popular at the time. Berger, however, contends that the real function of the mirror is to connive with the woman in treating herself as a sight (1972:45) and the woman here seems to be doing just this.18
However, as Edward Snow (1989) has shown, in a number of famous nude paintings,19 the woman is not always looking at herself and her reflected gaze is not aligned to the angle of her head. Berger has described the relationship between art and advertising shown how advertising depends on the techniques and symbols originally found in paintings. The Caltex
15 In none of the other advertisements in the series does the speaker have his back to the reader, and although he clearly addresses the other actant, the reader is only a slight turn of the head away from meeting his gaze. Further, with one exception, the men are portrayed out of doors. The exception in which the actants are two university students, shows them sitting and sprawling in a very relaxed manner discussing their future career prospects with Shell. 16 Disney’s popular film, Cinderella dates from 1950. 17 See for example Edward Snow (1989) for a discussion of the use of mirrors and gaze in art and Schroeder & Zwick (2204) for some interesting observations about the way in which men are now being portrayed gazing at their reflections in mirrors. 18 Schroeder & Zwick (2004:46) propose that the act of looking reconfigures the subject of consumption. In this case, the subject of consumption is both the Caltex brand and the fabrics that their work provides . 19 Two of the most interesting for my purpose of comparison are Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus and Ruben’s Venus Looking in a Mirror. 15 advertisement echoes the symbolism of some of the most famous nudes with mirrors in the history of western art as here too, the woman’s reflection does not truly mirror the direction in which she is looking. Unlike the Wicked Queen in Snow White or other narcissistic characters, she is not actually gazing at her own reflection in the mirror, but beyond herself, over the transport barge, to the panorama on the other side of the dark river and what seems to be a cathedral-like building on the opposite bank.20 She is looking over her shoulder, not at a vision of herself but into a vision of the past,21 at the huge, dark, dank cotton mills of cities like Manchester in north-west England. The river separating the place where she is standing, a place where fabrics can be made cleanly and in the sunshine emphasises the divide between the present and the past.
The relationship between past and future is also implied in the organisation of the different elements of the advertisement. Typical for this series is that the frame in which the scene is depicted is irregular in its form and that a part of the image steps outside the frame to suggest the merger of the new and the old. Here it is the woman’s feet that step outside the frame connoting her break with the past. The heavy, ornate mirror in which she is reflected adds to the impression of moving from a heavy and complicated past to a light and modern future. Again, the oil company advertises how it is helping the resurgence of the textile industry in Europe by combining tradition with new technology and design to create new materials and trends in fashion. Thanks to Caltex, every Cinderella can go to the ball.
This interest in textiles and their association with women can be seen some ten years later in two Amoco22 advertisements published in Scientific American. The first features an elegant young woman, dressed in a short-skirted orange suit, with matching hat and shoes, what might either be the steps of an aeroplane or a catwalk. She is photographed from slightly below in a typical catwalk pose, with one leg just in front of the other and one arm raised at right angles, elegantly reaching out in front. The image is framed in a cube, with the Amoco chemicals logo on the left side, and together with the text or slogan at the bottom of the page creates a verbal/visual pun; “Another chemical building block for you … from Amoco”. The headline of the advertisements reads: “Today’s uncrushable fabrics depend on DMT/TA from Amoco” 23and the body copy describes how they are “Perfect for travel, easy to care for” and require no ironing (figure 23). The advertisement then goes on to explain other uses of these products, which include “polyester films for packaging, electrical recording tape, wire enamels, surface
20 From my specifically English perspective, this picture is heavily symbolic. The background with the cathedral- like building on the other side of a river suggests Manchester, the centre of the textile industry and the “dark satanic mills” of William Blake’s popular and well-known poem, Jerusalem, in which he compares the England of the Industrial Revolution with the new Jerusalem. The poem was set to music in 1916 and has featured ever since then in the Anglican hymnal, was sung regularly in schools until the end of the 1970s and is also sung on the Last Night of the Proms. 21 Caltex placed this advertisement in the Economist twice, in March and in August 1958 and another one with an actant looking into the past, New Caravans in Old Settings appeared in February, June and December. 22 Amoco merged with BP in 1998. 23 This insistence upon easy-care fabrics reflects the “feminist” stance of Augusta Mole-Weiss, who as long ago as 1910 insisted that “being a better housewife” involved developing the skills and expertise that remove the drudgery of household chores and led to freeing women to become better feminists (in Karen Offen, 1988: 144). 16 coatings, and herbicides” and recommends the reader to “Call your Amoco Representative or write to us” to find out more about “why you can depend on DMT/TA from Amoco.”
Figure 23 Figure 24
Similarly, a second advertisement for Amoco’s “durable press polyester fabrics” (figure 24) is headed “Freedom From The Press” and portrays a group of four women sitting around an ironing board to play cards and drink coffee. The women are elegantly dressed and coiffed, and the text opens with the words.” Ironing day in the housewife’s week isn’t what it used to be” and explains how thanks to “Amoco’s contribution to durable press polyester fabrics … [t]roublesome shirts, suits, dresses, playclothes, and bed linen come with a free press. Stay wrinkle free, care free.” Instead of a basket full of ironing, there is a large bag full of grocery shopping next to one of the women, who also has a black and white dog tied up to the chair on which she is sitting to play her hand. The implication is that instead of being at home ironing, thanks to Amoco, she can go shopping and drop in to visit other housewives for leisure purposes. The connotation is that a woman’s place is very much in the home taking care of her husband’s as well as the household laundry but that Amoco is freeing them. Again, the advertisement uses a pun to make its point and also recycles the notion of the “freedom of the press”24. Other advertisements in the series involve men who are portrayed using or producing the products.
One of the most interesting aspects of these advertisements is perhaps is that they postdate both The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963) which marked the reawakening of American women to an awareness of the pervasive societal pressures to conform to the
24 This pun was particularly relevant at the time as in 1964, the Supreme Court had ruled that journalists could not be prosecuted for publishing material about public officials unless actual malice could be proved. The origins concerned an Alabama segregationalist who had published attacks on Martin Luther King Jr. http://civilliberty.about.com/od/freespeech/tp/Freedom-Press-History-United-States-Timeline.htm (May 6 2013). 17 traditional female role25 and to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir.26 By suggesting that Amoco is helping women in their daily lives, these advertisements are acknowledging the movement to free women from the burden of household chores.
The examples that have been discussed here are from the 1960s and 1970s but a glance at the advertisements of the twenty-first century shows the same trends.
Figure 25 Figure 26
Two women feature in Shell’s “Real People” series from 2005. One of these, Suzuki, (figure 25) is referred to as “this Japanese housewife [who] since the arrival of her new baby daughter, Miyuki, [has] thought more seriously about the world’s energy future,” and come to the same conclusion as Shell, namely that liquefied natural gas is a major step towards ensuring a cleaner energy future.
The other is referred to as “this Dutch windsurfer” whose name we later discover is Linde Logtenburg (figure 26). While the ways in which Shell helps the other, male Shell endorsers to improve their business is reported, for Linde, who functions as a type of passive endorser, it is the fact that “the same wind that powers [her] surfboard will soon be cooking her breakfast as well.”
25 Demarest & Garner (1992:363) point out that articles by both Betty Friedman and Simone de Beauvoir were the central focus of a number of specific issues of both Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping during the late 60s and early 70s., but their impact upon general advertising does not seem to have been very great. In fact, according to these authors, it is only” in times of national economic peril” such as the two world wars, that women have been portrayed as strong and independent (358). 26 Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe appeared in 1949and was translated into English, The Second Sex, in 1953. This translation has been subject to a great deal of criticism as among other things, it was selective about what content was in fact translated. 18
Although her life- style is one of the outdoors and of physical skill and strength, this female actante is portrayed by her relationship to the home and to simple household chores just like the Japanese housewife.
In the example shown here (figure 25), a little girl is the focal point of the picture and is the most energetic. However, it is the grown woman is her mother and her role in the home - cooking “tonight’s warming noodles” for her family with energy provided by Shell, which is the subject of the advertisement. This explains how although her children have a lot of energy, the country where they live does not. Shell is providing energy “not just for tonight’s bowl of warming noodles, but for years to come, when the children may have children of their own”. The little girl is closest to the camera and the mother’s gaze is fixed on her while the younger boy is gazing at the scene in the background. The skipping child is a metaphor for Shell’s boundless energy, and the focus on the family, and particularly on the female members, connotes the future-orientation of their work.
Similarly, in a later series from 2010, “Let’s Go”, Shell typically depicts women in the home or in situations of relative passivity. Like the “Real People” advertisements, the real people portrayed here as representants of Shell, have their origins in a variety of different countries. However, none of the characters presented in this series comes from Europe or North America but instead all are young members of emerging markets and economies
One of the women portrayed in this series is young, muffled up against the cold, struggling with her bags through a snow storm in the middle of a New York street crowded with yellow cabs and other vehicles and another is standing in the dusk looking out a town that is brightly lit up against the evening sky, presumably by Shell’s new Floating Liquified Natural Gas (FLNG) facility with her boyfriend.
The females in the advertisements are portrayed either involved in typically female activities like shopping and in need of a helping hand against the elements or in a romantic setting.
In the same series a young boy is shown outdoors, actively flying a kite on a Brazilian beach while his bespectacled female counterpart is portrayed lying reading in bed (figure 27). The spectacles increase her vulnerability and help underline the importance of Shell helping to “keep the lights on” for her and for little girls like her.
Another advertisement in the series shows young men going to a football match while one that appeared quite often shows a young Chinese boy, Feng, (figure 28) sitting in a large public launderette waiting while his clothes are washed with Shell’s “clean energy”. Two particularly interesting observations can be made about this advertisement. The first is that although Feng is waiting for his washing to be ready, he is not unoccupied, but is busily reading what seems to be a technical magazine. The second point of interest is that Feng although Feng is indoors and doing something that has previously been strongly connected with women, he is portrayed as the modern young man who is learning to venture out into the world and take care of himself.
19
Figure 27 Figure 28
d) Working girls …
Shell, of course, are not the only oil company to advertise and Chevron, for example, makes an interesting contribution to the matter of gender in advertising.
In fact, since the turn of the twenty- first century, the advertising of the oil industry has shown some movement towards portraying women not merely in the role of homemaker, or possibly as a secretary, but also in a professional context which is perhaps slightly less stereotypically female.
In 2007, Chevron began their “will you join us” campaign. One of the advertisements that featured quite regularly during 2007 and 2008 could be interpreted as an invitation to apply for a position with the company (figure 29). 27
Under the question “Who is going to meet a global energy demand that is expected to grow about 50% by 2030?” the reader or potential destinee, is told to “[f]ind out where your skills and talents can take you” by visiting the company on-line. The advertisement is made up of a montage of different photographs fastened together with a paper clip. And with a biro lying at
27 While Koller (2008:158) has referred to the fact that job advertisements are increasingly adopting the up- beat tone of advertisements in general, Chevron here incorporate a job ad in the company advertisement. This is in fact not unique or new to Chevron but can be traced back to earlier oil company advertisements such as the one that Shell used in 1958 and which features two university students and is an interesting example of genre mixing. 20 an angle across the top page which is a letter on company paper.28 The focal point of the image is an attractive young woman, gazing into the camera lens and thereby demanding audience response. Can the invitation to apply to the company be attributed to this girl or is her role to illustrate the possibilities of a successful application? Significantly, she is wearing a pale pink shirt-blouse. As I have already remarked, colour is a semiotic marker, and pink is a colour that is typically associated with femininity. It is not a deep or bright pink and is thus rather subtle in attributing femininity to the young woman, and the actual garment too is a hybrid which connotes both masculine, business-like qualities with the more feminine, which the colour enhances. She is smiling and her arms are folded. This is a somewhat ambivalent stance as it seems here to suggest confidence whereas it can also be protective and defensive.
The girl’s smile implies that she is displaying self- satisfaction but the slight almost imperceptible cant of her body towards the right together with the slight forward bend of her head, almost imperceptibly suggests that she might be feeling insecure. The tilt of Figure 29 her head and body draw the eye to the meeting that is taking place behind her where she is portrayed alone at one side of the paper-strewn table with three other figures; two men and another woman. The two men are older than the two young women who are both long-haired and attractive. The ages of the male and the female characters corresponds with the findings of Mary Gilly (1988) and of Artz & Venkatesh (1991) and of William O’Barr, for example. One of the men is leaning over the table, bending slightly towards the second girl and looking at the first girl, and is thus in a stance which physically positions them in a position of subordination. The man who is seated seems to be rather older and it is towards him that the attention of the two women is directed. Both are smiling at him and one is even taking notes about what he is saying. Although a man can be glimpsed behind the focal female, he does not seem to part of the dramatic action of the advertisement and his role is to add a sense of movement and activity to the whole.
I suggest that even in this advertisement, which at first sight seems to depict gender equality in the work place as the numbers of male and female participants are equal and the characters are shown to be working together, traditional “gender behavioural styles” (Goffman 1979:24) are unconsciously reproduced and on display.
Certainly, this advertisement provides an example of what Goffman termed “functional ranking” or one person, the male, being portrayed in a managerial role relation to another, usually female character. Another aspect of this advertisement that echoes Goffman’s
28 This is typical of the Chevron advertisements of this period. What is particularly interesting is that the angle from which we view the montage is incorrect. Logically, the papers should be lying flat on a table and not upright as they are shown. 21 observations is that the principal character or company representative is touching herself, in the large picture and lightly touching the papers on the table in the other, while the man to whom she is appealing is firmly grasping his pen with both hands. The other woman is lightly holding a pen, also typical of Goffman’s “female touch”. Romaine (1999:2) has proposed that we “do” gender in our language with displays and indexes and that it is inherently communicative. Judith Butler (2004:1) contends instead, that “gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing” and that it occurs always “with or for another”. Moreover, despite the fact that as Elliot & Elliot (2005:5) point out there is no one “correct” reading of an advertisement just as there is no one correct reading of a literary text, in the role of the audience to such unconscious displays, we also unconsciously interpret and understand what is going on in the light of the lifeworld and cultural knowledge and expectations that we bring to our interpretation. I would also like to suggest that the company are trying to imply a break not only with male stereotyping but also introduce the notion that people involved in the business have a variety of racial backgrounds.
However, Chevron also produced another advertisement asking prospective employees to visit them online during the autumn of 2007. Whereas the advertisement described above appeared many times in a variety of periodicals, I have only found one example of the second advertisement and which depicts a female engineer (figure 30) The female engineer in the advertisement is dressed in a helmet and overalls that match the intense blue of the sky in the background and is wearing sunglasses. Typically of women in advertisements, she is smiling and looking to the left and is thereby making no attempt to address the reader directly. It is difficult to make out what exactly her role in the operation is, but of the figures shown on the screen, one, definitely a man, seems to be in charge. Another interesting aspect of this advertisement is the text of the actual copy. “At Chevron, you can be part of a team of engineers that thrives on solving the toughest problems. With a work environment as big as the world and with challenges to match, you’ll have the resources and support you need to succeed. Find out how your expertise can help move the world. Visit us online today”.
What is interesting is that this advertisement, which Figure 30 features a female, although not a particularly young female, insists on team work and on support to do the job. This is despite the fact that she is dressed in the same way as men who are portrayed as working in the field rather than in an office. Mary Gilly (1988:83) discovered that the men portrayed in her corpus were likely to be portrayed as independent whereas the women were depicted in roles relative to others. This observation is in line with O’Barr (2006) who states that feminine images typically show cooperation.
22
Total too have an advertisement from this period which centres on a female actante (figure 31). This advertisement is part of their inverted “Imagine if” series which is populated with only a few characters. However, the one particular advertisement which includes female participants is set in a futuristic laboratory filled with plants and beautiful test tubes of interesting shapes, containing beautifully coloured liquids, and a young, slim elegant female laboratory worker, her dark hair casually piled up in an elegant knot on the top of her head, is the focal point. However, she is not alone in the laboratory but is part of a team. She is depicted in the middle distance gazing into her instruments and makes no attempt to communicate in any way with the reader. In her sparkling white laboratory coat, she resembles a film-star super secretary or scientist. Like the Chevron advertisement with the female engineer, this advertisement too stresses the importance of team work, stating that the company has more than 4 000 researchers working in 22 research centres worldwide.
Figure 31 Figure 32
Although they survey specifically concerns women’s magazines, Demarest & Garner (1992) discerned that while there was evidence of some sensitivity to change, there was a time lag between social reality and the media portrayal of change. This finding confirms the supposition raised by Steven Lysonski (1985). For example, the advertisement described above can be contrasted with those portraying male characters. In one of these (figure 32), the upper picture of the inverted pair depicts a solitary man on a beach, playing with a happy male child that he is flying above his head, a freedom which is echoed by the aeroplane flying into the distance, presumably powered by Total fuels. The inversion in the lower part of the page features an upside-down khaki-clad engineer talking into a walkie-talkie, a measuring instrument of sorts on a stand in front of him, pointing towards a drilling rig in the distance. At first sight, his legs seem to merge with the arms holding the child aloft and the grey-blue of the lower part of the page seems to reflect the clouds above. However, if the page is turned upside-down, the engineer is in a desert and the sandy beach with its hollows is a landscape of sparsely vegetated sand dunes.
23
This advertisement is typical of the paternalistic or “adult playmate” role that O’Barr has commented is typical of the way in which men are portrayed in advertisements. Not only do these advertisements demonstrate the typical spatial limitations placed on women by means of the physical settings, but in addition, while the woman is positioned behind a large laboratory table, restricted by this and removed and protected from the reader, the men are photographed from closer and in a way which imposes no restrictions either on their physical movement or on their potential to engage with the reader. The young boy is in fact gazing towards the reader and thus making direct communicative contact. This advertisement echoes those that preceded it .
In fact, the only oil company that seems to portray men and women as equals, both numerically and professionally, is ExxonMobil who ran a small series comprising two advertisements in and around 2008 which usually appeared as double-spreads. Both featured the new company symbol, a kind of metallic blue atomic structure on the left-hand page, and two black and white, middle-distance photographs of company workers in the middle and right of the spread. All are named and are of different ethnic origin. One advertisement showed two male professionals, their Chief Polymer Scientist and an Engineer, while the other shows two female professionals, an Economist and a Natural Gas Specialist. All four professionals are standing looking into the camera lens and smiling. Both the women display confidence, their arms relaxed by their sides, slightly behind their backs. Both are dressed in a smart casual style with open-necked shirts and in Figure 33 the case of the former, a darker V-necked sweater, and for the latter a cardigan. However, once again, the women seem to be younger than their male colleagues. The example shown here is a single-page advertisement from 2009, and although the ratio of men to women is not equal here, the woman does not seem to be particularly younger than her nearest male colleagues which is extremely unusual for the advertisements in my corpus.29 Although one knee is bent and her head is slightly tilted, the total impression that she displays is one of confidence.
e) … and representantes
However, the companies also make use of women as representantes. One of these is an advertisement from BP that ran as part of their London Olympics Fuelling the Future campaign (figure 34) where they describe how they are “[d]edicated to fuelling the success of London 2012” by providing the “advanced fuels” that are necessary for the 5,00 vehicles that will be used.
29 It is common that the women portrayed in advertisements are younger than the men. These findings are confirmed for example by Water & Ellis (1996). 24
However, they not only worked with the logistics of the event, as they express it in this advertisement, “Helping to move the Games smoothly”, but they also sponsored a number of athletes and particularly those involved in the Paralympics. What is particularly interesting is that although a couple of men were sponsored, the only examples I have found in the advertisements are female, or involved in the Paralympics. Typically, each athlete is portrayed moving towards the right through the BP Helios.30 In this example, the word play in the title of the advertisement is underlined by the metaphor of the cyclist, Lizzie Armistead, moving smoothly and rapidly around the track in the velodrome.
This can be considered a return to the earlier strategies whereby the oil companies sponsored athletes and Figure 34 pioneers, then specifically with their products, and then used their names or faces in the company advertisements. Here, BP is sponsoring the athletes with funding to enable them to train to represent the UK in the 2012 Games in London but their underlying message could be seen to convey their engagement with those who are “weakest” and most in need of help.
Chevron too, has used women to represent their company ideology and to enact the vision of their corporate responsibility. In their “We Agree” campaign which began in 2010, the company has run a television advertising campaign which takes up those issues that they believe are important in Figure 35 places where they are active, and propose ways in which oil companies should work to improve the social and environmental situation of those living in these areas (figure 35). The main content of each television commercial is then summarised in a print advertisement which is published in leading periodicals.
The individuals portrayed to represent the work with corporate responsibility in which Chevron is engaged, are almost exclusively female and are from so-called Third World countries. The example here is one of the earlier advertisements, and is also one of the very few in which the women portrayed are smiling. In this case, their happiness is because
30The company describe the logo in the following way on their home page. “Our visual identity reflects the revolutionary quality of our business. Our logo was launched in 2000, and was designed as a dramatic break with tradition. Even after a decade, it is still unlike any other energy identity, and symbolises a number of things – not least the greatest source of energy … the sun itself. The colours of the 'Helios' - named after the Greek god of the sun – suggest heat, light and nature. It is also a pattern of interlocking shapes: like BP, a single entity created by many different parts working as one. “ 25
Chevron has facilitated a micro-loan which can help them to become more independent and make a livelihood.
f) Changing gender roles?
These observations about the development of gender roles in the advertising of the oil companies seem to correspond to the general findings among advertising researchers in general. 31 Discussing the portrayal of women in magazine advertising from 1958 to 1983, Sullivan & O’Connor found that in an American context, recognition was being given to the increasing economic and social status of women but that there was “still ample room for improvement” (188) , while Mee-Eun Kang (1997), who based her study on Goffman’s gender analysis, for example, found that there was no significant changes in the images of women found in advertisements from 1991 to those from 1979. One particularly interesting finding, however, was that the distribution of the stereotyping changed, and that in the magazines from 1991, more women were shown in the categories of licenced withdrawal and body display, an observation that I find no evidence for in considered that my corpus. However, in a study carried out in 1991, Ford et al interviewed American women to elicit their responses to sex role portrayal. A majority of the respondents considered that women were seen as sex objects, 58.5% that women do not do important things and 55.3 % thought that advertisements showed that a woman’s place is in the home.32 In addition, almost half the women interviewed believed that women were depicted as dependent on others. These findings are certainly in line with the way in which the few women who appear in the advertisements in my corpus are categorised and portrayed.
The sexualisation of women is evidenced in the advertisements below from Amoco in the late sixties. Although the advertisement (figure 36) is for IPA, a tough polyester that will “resist cracking, crazing [and] fracture” and is used in everything from bowling balls to automotive parts and the linings in chemical resistant tanks, the company chose to advertise a product for surfers, with a bikini-clad young woman at the centre33. Two other advertisements for the product that showed its use for sports featured a male pole vaulter dressed in shorts and tee-shirt, and a male snowmobile driver, Figure 36 warmly dressed for the snow.
31 In her overview of gender stereotyping, Wolin (2003) for example, shows that although there is no total consensus, the images of women reflected in magazine advertisements was narrow and that although there has been some decrease in women shown in home roles and some increase in women shown at work. Moreover, and in line with my findings from the 1950s and 60s in particular, men are more likely to be displayed as product authorities and women as product users. 32 The complete list has 17 statements is shown on page 21 of their article. 33 Phillips 66, another major oil company uses the image of a bikini-clad girl with long, blonde hair for an advertisement for their polyethylene plastic in 1972. 26
What I find particularly interesting is that it has emerged that at least in the advertising of the oil industry, women at the beginning of the twentieth century were portrayed as independent and emancipated, doing the same things as men and in public spaces. Such attributes seem to gradually disappear in their depiction from the period after they had achieved the right to vote to be completely lacking a century later.34. This is a question which it would be very interesting to investigate further, and particularly to compare with advertisements that are not related to the oil industry.
Portrait of an oil man
As it can be seen that the roles assigned to women in oil company advertisements have undergone some shifts over time, it will be interesting to investigate whether there is evidence of similar shifts in their depiction of men.
John F. Sherry Jr. (1987:445) has pointed out that advertising is “ a system of symbols synthesized from among the range of culturally determined ways of knowing that seeks to establish powerful, persuasive, and long lasting moods and motivations in people by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” What are the “ways of knowing” that the oil companies formulate in the dramas played out in their advertising?
Based on the work of Vladimit Propp, (1968 and 1971)35 Northorp Frye (1957) formulated a “theory of myths” each named after a season. The central element of his “mythos of summer”, the genre of Romance is adventure. The adventure of Romance typically centres on a Quest, the search for a magic substance that will help, save and empower the good. We have already seen how the world has become a better place, especially for women, all thanks to the oil industry, but what roles are played by the male characters?
I have observed that male actants, just like their female counterparts, have been assigned a number of roles in the advertisements. HØngmark Knudsen (2012) points out that meanings of “the moving target of masculinity” (9) are rooted in discourses from the past and which are generally current today. These include the notion that masculinity involves sports and athleticism and an element of “roughness”. Her findings are in line with those of O’Barr (2006), who identified power, strength, virility, athleticism and competitiveness among the attributes of masculinity. As I have mentioned, the oil industry is traditionally a man’s world, and although there is some indication that the male hold on the industry is beginning to loosen slightly, the extent to which the image of the “oil man” has undergone any change is a matter of interest.
Figure 37 shows an advertisement published by Texaco in the 1970s. The text explains how “Texaco drilling crews understand the language of oil. They speak it in 125 territories”.
34 An exception can be seen in some of the ExxonMobil advertisements from 2007 onwards. 35 Propp found that Russian folktales had seven characters, the villain, the hero, the dispatcher who illustrates the need for the hero’s quest, the princess or prize, the helper, the false hero and the donor. 27
The company then explains how they employ men in the countries where they work. The men pictured are very different and come from different ethnic and racial backgrounds, but the oil world is portrayed as exclusively male. Moreover, the masculinity of the oil business is underscored by the perspective from which the photograph has been taken which foregrounds the blatantly sexual stance of the figure at the centre right. The gaze of the men is focused on the camera and they exude confidence. While the man whose pose is blatantly sexual looks at the reader in a way that is almost confrontational, some of the others appear nonchalant and secure in their skills and camaraderie. The man portrayed at the far right is standing somewhat in front of the others and seems to be looking down at the reader.
Figure 37 Figure 38 The picture to the right (figure 38) is part of an advertisement published by ChevronTexaco in the 1990s. It is the second page of a double spread which shows an oil rig, viewed through the screen of an aeroplane or helicopter, in the middle of an empty blue ocean with the words “What’s coming into view is a better partner for you”
The photograph shows four men, dressed in the typical clothes of a building worker or engineer and who all look relaxed in each other’s company and comfortable on their small platform high above the water, miles from civilisation. However, while the men from the 1970s are depicted as a strong, sexualised male gang, these men are intellectualised. The view from above brings into focus their pristine white helmets contrasting with the more mixed headgear and physical display of the Texaco men and their stance is relaxed. These men are in deep discussion with each other and have no need to display themselves to the public. The modern oil man is an intellectual, a scientist rather than a man of physical action. As Chevron is a company that prides itself on its international impact36, the men featured are also of
36 Chevron has developed from Caltex, whose “International Panorama of Progress” series from the 1950s ended with the words “partner in progress” in “over 70 countries in Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.” Notice too that their advertisements from the first decade of the 21st century feature individuals of different races and from different continents.
28 different nationalities. that myth plays an important role in the advertising of the oil companies and it is in the depiction of masculinity that this is most clearly evidenced. I contend that the roles assigned to men can be classified as either that of an expert, including educator and innovators, or an adventurer and hero.
a) The expert
Power is characteristic of all relationships and these relations exist at all levels. Power is often founded on the presumption that one partner in the relationship “knows” and that the other will take the knower’s advice (Foss et al. 2002:352). In the advertisements of the oil industry, male actants are regularly portrayed as experts, or as informants.
Their expertise can be communicated directly to the reader, man to man as illustrated in figure 39. “This, gentlemen, is the famous Motor Spirit known as “Shell,” which attained premier position immediately on its introduction six years ago and has since been unfailingly successful; it has now extended its supremacy to the realms of flight” or demonstrated through the intermediary of a less knowing woman (figure 40).
Figure 39 Figure 40
The advertisement for sealed cabinets (figure 40) illustrates how the male pump attendant is demonstrating his superior knowledge to the woman driver by showing her the new cabinet, just as figure 16 illustrates male expertise with the man explaining to the female driver how to get the best out of her car.
In figure 41, taken from the same series as figure 16, although ostensibly talking to the couple, the expert salesman is directing his address to the man and recommending that he use “BP” Ethyl, as “snappy engines require it”. The expert is leaning authoritatively against the car while the prospective male customer looks at the vehicle. The clothing of the customers denotes wealth and style, and while the salesman’s foot leads the eye towards the BP logo, the prospective customer’s walking Figure 41 stick points towards the slogan “snappy engines”. The expert is
29 turned towards both the prospective buyers but is angled towards the reader to include him in the message. The woman,however, (figure 41) is looking at neither the car nor the expert, and although she is present, does not seem to be taking an active part in this discussion, but instead seems to be gazing at her husband as if awaiting his expert decision.
The Mobil advertisement (figure 42) from 1958 (taken from Russell: 2007:32) is another good example of the expertise demonstrated by men connected with the oil companies.
Figure 42
Not only does the headline take up the skilled hands37 of the specialist mechanic, but opening words of the first two of the three paragraphs below the headline emphasise expertise, which is then illustrated in the photographs below. “Expert training is important” is illustrated by such a training session, while “Your Mobil dealer has special skills” is illustrated by the dealer demonstrating one of these skills. These words are written in bold font to make them stand out. The third photograph and paragraph refers to their products which are “tops,” and the male dealer here shows a female customer a product that the company’s research experts have developed. The men are portrayed as skilled experts, while the female customer is a vehicle for demonstrating both the quality of the products and their knowledge and expertise. She listens while the expert explains the advantages of the product.
37 An advertisement from BP in 1958 uses the concept of skilled hands. A photograph of a pair of male hands working with a pipette and a glass jar of some sort, is accompanied by the text “How will these hands shape tomorrow’s motoring?” Similarly, a series of Shell advertisements in the “Real Energy” series from the first decade of the 21st century is illustrated by a pair of male hands engaged with a tic-tac game and trying to 2Start from another place”. 30
An interesting example of expertise being demonstrated through the medium of female ignorance is the Enjay38 advertisement “To line a ditch or hold a hitch, call on Enjay skills” published in Scientific American in 1963. The advertisement shows two photographs; one of a group of men working in the desert with heavy machinery and cranes, and who, from the headline can be understood to be lining a ditch, and the other showing a boat being moored with a strong rope. The informant opens with the words “When a new secretary asked her Enjay boss what technical service meant, he didn’t know where to start”.
Woman is not depicted as a “maker of meaning” (Mulvey:1975) but as a vessel through which man can impose his view of the world, and in this case, describe the work of the company’s “2900 highly trained technical experts, many of whom are nationally recognised authorities.”
The earliest forms of expertise demonstrated simply concerned the superiority of a brand of petroleum products, but by the 1950s, this expertise incorporated not only the chemical components that are included in the specific brand and which make it start better in the summer or that prevent knocking, for example but also the development of nuclear energy and agricultural solutions.
Later, this expertise grew to include improving issues concerning social welfare and economic development as well as answers to environmental problems. Male expertise can be categorised in a number of different ways.
i) Educators
Education in is a recurrent theme of the advertising of the oil companies and this interest finds expression in a variety of forms. It includes the materials that Shell, for example, provided for schools and which evolved from the Guide to Britain books and included posters about flowers and wild life. BP too has always shown showed an interest in education. One example is the “Khan” from 1925, an exhibition which they built up at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley to show every phase of their work to bring oil products to motorists in Britain, while another is their beautifully illustrated series of twelve advertisements showing and explaining traditional life in Persia39 and describing how the company is improving life for both Persians and the British. Each of the advertisements has a drawing taken from “an original drawing by Christopher Clark, R.I.”40, and begins with a picturesque description of what is illustrated. This relates to times and traditions long gone by in the history of Persia. These traditions are all based on or involve the many uses of petroleum. The narratives are all very informative, and open in a style reminiscent either of a tourist guide book or of a school text book. The narrator then makes a connection between Persia’s glorious past and the present day with BP and the reader is assumed to understand the historical references that are made. Their 15-step detailed cartoon overview of the “The story of oil” from that period is yet another example of the way in which the company wanted to teach people about their
38 Enjay Chemical Company was a division of Humble Oil & Refining and became incorporated into what is today ExxonMobil. 39 These will be discussed in more detail later. 40 Clark was a well-known artist of the time whose work was exhibited at the Royal Academy, for example, and who generally favoured military themes. 31 business as is their strip cartoon “Tony Strikes Oil” from 1953. More recent effforts are discussed in a series from 2005.
Today, oil companies are involved in a number of educational projects of different kinds. One of these is the Folger Shakespeare Research Library on Capitol Hill, Washington, established by Standard Oil of New York President Henry Clay Folger in the early 1930s, while more recently, Shell have supported and sponsored a number of educational projects such as the Launchpad project at the London Science Museum or the Questacon Science Circus to help schoolchildren in remote parts of Australia.
The advertisement from 1912, The Shell lesson, (figure 43) where the teacher askes his pupils to “draw the finest shell” is set in a boys’ school and the other example shown here (figure 44) from ther “Times change” series also features a male cast. Both the “old” and the “new” teachers and pupils are male and in another examples in the series, the children contacting Santa Claus are also both boys, one writing at an old-fashioned school desk and the other using the telephone.
Figure 43 Figure 44
An examination of the advertisements that centre on the concept of education reveals that educators are exclusively male and that those being educated are predominantly boys and young men. The “Tony Strikes Oil” cartoon booklet, for example, features not one single female
Advertisements from the 1950s also show schoolboys and “male university students. This trend that concerns the male part of the world’s population does not seem to have greatly abated.41 I also interpret Feng (figure 28) to be a young male student.
A small number of advertisements do seem to accept that girls too attend school and receive an education, but in these cases, the girls are portrayed as part of the general mass of pupils.
41 The Shell Cradle to Career (C2C) Scholarship Scheme described on their Innovation in Education website (August 2013) shows a photograph of a group of young Nigerian boys all dressed in yellow uniforms which include yellow caps with the Shell logo as a badge on the front. 32
BP, for example, portrayed girls in the learning role in their “BP Maps the Future” series from 1958. However, in one of these cases, “A new township springs up in Australia” the girls were shown in a school group photograph from Medina, the new township near Kwinana Refinery, outside the splendid modern school that had come into being thanks to BP. It is significant that it is the actual school, and thus their general contribution to education that the company emphasises in this way. A second example from the same series, “West Africa on Wheels”, depicts a young woman manning a petrol pump, She is an illustration of the “local talent” being trained to operate the company’s new petrol pumps.
The advertisement, “Education on the move”(figure 45) from Standard Oil of New Jersey (later to become ExxonMobil) is from Scientific American, November 1969 and some girls as well as boys are shown running after the truck. The rather lengthy text, which is typical of the advertisements in this series, opens in a casual, chatty manner. “That truck in our picture causes quite a stir as it rolls from town to town. Some kids think it is a traveling circus. Ah well.” In combination with the opening words and the pronoun “our”, the choice of the familiar “kids” and the colloquialism “to cause a stir” positions the reader as a partner in an on-going dialogue with somebody from the company. The reader is then informed that despite its appearances, the truck is a classroom with all the latest “gadgets [which] have a single purpose. To bury the old lecture-and-listen teaching methods under the ivy. And substitute involvement.” The concept of involvement is ambiguous as it refers on the one hand, to the students becoming more actively involved in their own education. This is metaphorically anchored by the image which shows them actively pursuing this new and innovative source of education, instead of passively listening. On the other hand, it obliquely refers to the company’s involvement in education and society, a position which the speaker developes at some length, explaining how “[s]ome of these experiments are already silver linings in a thundery sky. Harlem Prep School42 is one. Nearly all of its students are dropouts from the public school system. Thirty entered college last year. Seventy-five have been admitted this year. Another program has come up with some answers to the psychological problems of bright students who mysteriously flunk out of college.”
Again, the photograph with the grey, cloudy sky conspires with the speaker’s language and use of the saying “every cloud has a silver lining” to suggest that the situation for these young people, and by extension, for the country, is serious. The sky is not merely cloudy but is thundery due to the flunking rate in the public school system.43 However, Standard’s commitment to education does not stop with this, but they are also backing “a lively new
42 In April 1970, Standard Oil of New Jersey published a second advertisement featuring Harlem Prep. The advertisement explains that the school “is less than three years old. It has its home in an old supermarket. There is no other independent school in America quite like it”. The advertisement talks about the success that the school has had and is illustrated by a row of thirteen people standing with their arms round each other. Of the thirteen, three are female and one, probably the headmaster, Ed Carpenter, is white. Jersey Standard express their pride in having provided some of the support that has been necessary for this project to succeed. 43 The concept of public school in the U.S.A. must not be confused with the public school in the U.K. In the U.S.A. the public system is the state system while in Britain, public schools are elitist, extremely expensive and especially at the time when this advertisement appeared, typically the reserve of the aristocracy and upper classes. 33 magazine called “Change” [which] is dedicated to exploring new directions in higher education and hopes to find sensible solutions to the problems that underlie student unrest.”
Figure 45
An interesting aspect of this advertisement involves the references that it makes to the specific American context in which it is set. These include the comment that the truck does not use the traditional methods found “under the ivy”, a reference to the privileged world of the academic elite of the “Ivy League” and an implication that while these methods are based on distance, Standards methods are based on the involvement of all concerned.
The advertisement closes with the speaker suddenly introducing another voice; that of an expert in the field, the editor of the new magazine, with the words: “Listen to the editor” The editor’s words are then reproduced within speech marks. “We intend to be an irreverent foe of all that is arcane and irrelevant in higher education. We intend to help return to higher education that long lost art – the plain English sentence.” The advertisement ends with a return of the speaker’s voice. “Knowledge keeps no better than fish. The plain English sentence should speed its delivery enormously.”
A number of interesting points arise here. Firstly, this is an interesting example of what Viveca Adelswärd (2000) has called a “virtual” participant voice.44 Secondly, the “we” of the editor must incorporate both the writers of the magazine and the Esso Educational Foundation which is supporting it. In other words, Standard is positioning itself as a champion of what they see as the basics of education, one element of which is the ability to communicate
44 Anward (2002:140) discusses the complexity of the relationship between a “real” speaker and a “virtual” speaker. In the case of an advertisement such as this one, where the “real” speaker is already the fictional voice of a collective of animators (Goffman), the situation becomes even more complex. 34 successfully in simple English. Thirdly, on a lexical level, the language of the actual quoted sentence is not an example of everyday, modern English, but is an instance of the language of the well-educated. In fact, the editor expresses his plea for a move away from the arcane towards the plain English sentence with a rhetorical style and a vocabulary that is more adapted to that of a British public school teacher of the previous century.
The speaker then returns to the more mundane with the fish metaphor, but the underlying message is that knowledge must constantly be developed and up-dated, if it is to be of any value, something which is in line with the work of the oil companies. Finally, he ends with a play on words. Knowledge will be delivered more speedily if it can be delivered in plain English.
The oil company is making a strong plea for education and is projecting itself as a supporter and benefactor of new ways of encouraging and teaching students. It casts itself in the roles of benefactor, educator and innovator, and makes no mention at all of its business. In other words, this is a clear example of corporate social responsibility and PR.45
In an advertisement from BP’s “For all our tomorrows” campaign series from the early 1990s, (figure 46) it is again a boy that is shown being able to study thanks to BP’s solar energy The campaign46 ran on TV in Britain and internationally as well as in international business publications, and was in part their answer to critics of the oil industry for its greed and lack of concern for the future.
Colin lives in a remote African village. He has no light to study by at home so after a full day of classes he remains at school to finish his homework.
You may wonder where he gets the energy from. Actually it comes in the form of electricity generated by solar modules.
Since 1981 we’ve supplied solar-powered vaccine refrigerators and water pumps to clinics, and lighting systems to schools throughout the African continent.
Solar technology may never eclipse conventional power sources. But it already promises the children of Africa a brighter future.
Supplying solar power to remote parts of the world is one of the things BP is doing today, for all our tomorrows.
Thanks to BP’s solar lighting, Colin’s future looks considerably brighter.
Figure 46
What is interesting here is that BP choose to focus on one schoolboy, Colin, to represent their entire solar technology programme. The addressee is introduced to Colin and provided with some very meagre details about his life, a technique which produces a sense of familiarity and
45 Notice the similarity of the ambitions that Standard Oil declare here with the Shell “Lincoln” advertisement. 46 The campaign won the Worldaware Award for Effective Communication in 1992. 35 engages the addressee’s sympathy. The opening sentence, comprising one main clause, firmly positions Colin as the focus of the text. Moreover, its simplicity has connotations of child’s first reader and subtly reflects the educational theme of the advertisement and the pedagogical approach which it takes to inform us about the content of the advertisement and the work of BP. From simple statements, it builds up to include puns (eclipse) and to the play on words in the last two sentences. BP is bringing enlightenment, metaphorically represented by Colin, who is portrayed bathing in a golden light surrounded by darkness in a manner which is reminiscent of some of the paintings of the Dutch classical period. In this way, the contrast between the dark and the light that is provided by BP is made starkly visible. BP portrays themselves as the bringer of light, both intellectual, through facilitating education to provide children like Colin with “a brighter future” and also physical, by taming the power of the sun. Some ten years later, BP expanded and established the metaphor presented in this advertisement when they changed their logo from the yellow letters on a green background to their Helios symbol, inspired by Helios, the god of the sun47. In this way, the company equated themselves with the mythological figure of Helios and with his powers.
Although it is the education of boys that dominates the world of oil company advertisements, there is an exception. This is a Shell Advertisement from the second part of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Two similar advertisements were created48 for Shell’s “Real enegry solutions for the real world” series, one depicting the young girl (figure 47) and one a young boy. The theme of the writing is that “it is high time someone got negative about negativity” and that nothing is impossible. The advertisement using the schoolgirl appeared quite regularly and more often than that with her male counterpart. In both cases, the schoolchild is dressed in a school uniform of a white shirt and dark red pullover and is drawing an atomic formation on a blackboard that is covered with different types of figures and diagrams ranging from three-dimensional figures to cogs, a bird, an envelope and a musical quaver note. The board is also covered with a list of sentences, starting with the question “Isn’t it high time someone got negative about negativity?” which go on to state things that the “nay sayers” have said were impossible and contrast these with “yes” answers, such as “continents have been found and men have played golf on the moon.”
Figure 47 The key is “Curiosity.An open mind. A willingness to take risks. And, when the problem seems most insolvable, when the challenge is hardest, when everyone else is shaking their heads, to say: let’s go. Real energy solutions for the real world.”
47 For further discussion of the idea of oil and myth, see Vang (2014) pp. 223-240). 48 The advertisements were published in two different formats. One was a standard single page version while the other was a banner-spread across the bottom of two pages. 36
The list of sentences ends with the campaign website address. The implication is that everyone must work together and the need to think is new ways is represented by the youth of the schoolchidren, the genertion that will contribute to finding solutions.
ii) Innovators
The “Colin” advertisement does not merely depict BP, just like Standard Oil, as a company that is involved in supporting educational programmes, but also shows them as a company of innovators in the field of solar technology. Innovation is another hallmark of the advertising of the oil industry and is dominated by men. An advertisement from Amoco49 which appeared in Scientific American in 1968 is entitled “The 1975 cars are on the Amoco drawing boards”. This advertisement also reflects an Einstein iconicity, and shows three men in front of a blackboard on which they have written various formulae. The text explains how “Amoco petroleum additive specialists will be working on ways to keep the automobiles of the future running smoothly” and help to create “smog-free gasoline-powered automobiles” and explains how the company is “putting its experience in dispersants, inhibitants, detergent- inhibitor blends, viscosity-index improvers, and pour point depressants to work” to develop approaches which will bring about this inovation.
However, the concept of innovation goes back much further than this. One example can be found in the Shell “Quick-starting pair” advertisements from the late 1920s and 1930s and others can be seen in BP’s anti-knocking series.
The 1950s saw advertisements describing the innovations of the different companies. Mobil for example, boasted about the “17 different improvements in gasoline quality” that they had made since the war. Among those that were published in The Economist are BP’s advertisement for “BP Energol Visco-static, the all weather motor oil which reduces engine wear by 80%” and Shell their Super Shell “the one high-octane petrol that contains Ignition Control Additive – I.C.A.” Using the voice of an expert talking to a man who understands the needs of an engine, Shell present this as an amazing innovation.
The notion of oil company engineers as innovators is also the subject of a number of advertisements that take up the relationship with the new and exciting world of nuclear power. One example is from the Shell “I’ll tell you something else about Shell…” series from 1958 that I have already mentioned and portrays concerns two young male students talking about future employment prospects. In this advertisement, the speaking actant explains how the petroleum chemist is creating both “well-known chemicals, but also …completely new substances. It is his 50work which provides the new materials to complement the age of nuclear power.” Another example goes under the heading “Shell meets the challenge; Within the Lethal Zone”. In this advertisement the reader is informed how Shell is an innovator: “Here is Shell “Leadership in Lubrication” in action – anticipating a need, undertaking
49 Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana) merged with BP to form BP Amoco in 1998 but its name disappeared in 2002. 50 The bold font is mine and emphasises how oil and innovation are depicted as masculine. 37 fundamental research, and finally developing the products to solve a problem of world-wider importance.”
An advertisement from Mobil that was published in Scientific American in 1958 both illustrates the oil industry as a world populated with men for men, and provides an illustration of how innovators and experts working together create a better world for everyone (figure 48).
After rousing the reader’s interest by stating how much money the Endicott Johnson company has saved, “…with the help of Socony Mobil51 the text describes how the “Leading shoe manufacturer cuts downtime and maintenance … increases production…all though Mobil’s lubrication program!” and explains how “Mobil engineers, in close cooperation with plant persiónnel, analyzed lubricant application methods” and together, created a way to save time and costs. The all-male innovators and experts are portrayed working with the lubrication of the different machines and the innovations are explained below the photographs.52
Figure 48
There are numerous other examples of male experts and innovators in collaboration such as a 1967 advertisement from the Standard Oil (New Jersey) series exemplified in for example in figures 9: 38 and 9:44, entitled “This little tanker has a big mission: safer, cleaner seas. The advertisement is illustrated with a photograph of two men in a small boat on what seems to be a boating lake. The men handling it are experts, “veteran tanker captains” and they are working on an eight-acre training “sea” complete with “waves, channels, moorings and piers”. The company are the innovators of a new training centre for shipmasters and pilots who will learn “more of what to expect from the new, giant tankers” that are being built and because of
51 Socony (Standard Oil Company of New York) came into being after Rockefeller was forced to divide his company in 1911 because of the monopoly ruling. Mobil became a trademark for Socony on 1920 and was incorporated into the company name in 1955. Eleven years later, Socony was removed from the company name. Mobil merged with Exxon in 1999. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) allowed the merger of these two oil companies after a record eleven months of deliberation. 52 Of the 6 advertisements in this series that I have found for that year, only one shows women. Two women appear in the bottom right corner of the set of four. They are working with cost control and keeping “alert watch” over the control card of the machines, seated a desk-like work stations. 38
New Jersey’s innovation and their expertise, “the world’s seaways will be just that much safer”.
From about 2005, Shell introduced the campaign concept that drawing on Wittgenstein I call “Aspect Dawning.” The theme of this campaign was that in order to solve the world’s energy problems, it would be necessary to think differently.
Figure 49 Figure 50
The advertisement shown in figure 49 asks the question: “What does it take to discover something new every day?”. This question is formed in a brain positioned at the top of the page, a position used to visualize the possible or the ideal and to make an emotive appeal, while a list of specific questions followed by the answer can be found at the bottom right of the page, the position of the “new” and “informative” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 193). The typography follows the shape of the brain and moreover, the letters used are an unorthodox mix of upper and lower case metaphorically connating the unorthodox thinking that is required to do just this.
Three specific questions are asked: “How do you drill for oil in ever deeper oceans?” How do you transport gas through thousands of miles without building a pipeline? And “How do you turn waste crops into fuels?” These questions and their answers are recurrent throughout the series and the given answer that is “[t]o tackle the world’s energy challenges, from oil and gas power to biofuel power, just takes brain power.”
Besides showing Shell as innovators, this advertisement is interesting particularly interesting from a participant roles perspective and can be interpreted in two ways. Does the speaking, or thinking actant represent Shell and is the “you” therefore generalized and impersonal, or is it the “virtual” voice of the reader who has been thrust into an actant role and who asks Shell specifically for answers to the questions that are troubling him? In the latter case, the “you” is a direct address to Shell.
39
The advertisement in figure 50 has two features that are particularly interesting. The first is that it opens with the words “There is no easy oil”, a statement that connects with the “ever deeper oceans” and difficult terrains that feature in other advertisements, and that it goes on to explain to the reader how difficult and expensive the work of extracting oil really is and implicitly comments upon the company’s interest in protecting the environment. The second is that it names a specific Shell innovator, Jaap van Ballegooijen, and explains how he 53was inspired to create the snake well drill from watching “his son drink a milkshake, sucking the bits of froth from the corners of the glass with his bendy straw”. Then “Hej presto, the snake well drill was born. A drill that can bend round corners and snake from side to side to reach (…) scattered pockets of oil” This is a clear instance of a Shell innovator thinking differently and putting his brain to good use.
It is interesting to note that in the first decade of the 21st century, the companies began to name the real individuals who appear as actants in their advertisements. Although Shell’s Jaap van Ballegooijen is an exception, ExxonMobil, for example, discuss the innovative work of their engineers and name both them and other experts. Jurgen Schwenger, portrayed in figure 51, for example, is involved with “an ingenious new technology that has transformed the scale on which natural gas be be safely and efficiently be liquefied and transported with a new class of ships that can hold 80% more liquefied natural gas and are a remarkable 40% more energy efficient”. This will diversify Europe’s energy resources and help to provide the whole continent with energy security. Schwenger is portrayed as an individual innovator, who by connotation, is representative of the innovative character of the entire corporation. He looks directly at the reader, open and friendly, confident in his standing and demanding Figure 51 contact and response. In this advertisement, the written text and firstly the heading which hails the reader, “Designing ships that transport 80% more natural liquified gas is no easy feat, but that didn’t stop our engineers” exemplifies the visual metphor of the ant carrying the leaf which is much bigger than itself. Typical of the series, the colour-scheme of the advertisement comprises shades of blue-grey and the halo of light that surrounds the enlarged image of the ant and leaf in the upper centre of the page acts to bring these more into focus. The ExxonMobil atom logo, which developed during the early and mid-2000s and is considered to represent power, knowledge and energy (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996:88), is also depicted in steely blue-grey, a colour scheme associated with metal and technology, and the only splash of colour is the bright red of the company logo and name.
iii) Entrepreneurs Men are also portayed as entrepreneurs.
53 Again, the bold font is mine. 40
The oil companies are portrayed as entrepreneurial organisations in their own right, and at the same time, as sponsors or benefactors that help other, individual entrepreneurs or small groups and communities. A glance at Shell’s “Real People” series shows men involved with their businesses and expanding and developing these with the help of Shell. Rick Scott’s hydrogen filling station in Washington DC is one example and the Endicott Johnson Company (figure 48) can be understood to be another.
The advertisement below for Standard Oil New Jersey and Esso (figure 52) is an interesting example from 1970. The headline hails the reader with the information: “Five years ago the Tyonek Indians needed food. Now they need an industry” and we are told that one of their affiliates, Humble Oil & Refining Company, “paid the Tyoneks several million dollars for the right to explore for oil on their land”. No oil was found, but the Tyoneks “used their money wisely. They invested in a modern office building, in nearby Anchorage, for future income. They bought a share in a utility company, a sawmill and a small airline. And they formed their own construction company, and rebuilt their village with modern homes, electricity, roads and a new school. While they were rebuilding their village, they learned to be welders and electricians and surveyors and technicians”. The implication is that the Tyonek Indians became entrepreneurs and were able to build a better future thanks to Standard Oil.
Figure 52
This advertisement demonstrates a number of aspects that are particlularly interesting. The first is that no women are portrayed and the village and every aspect of the entrepreneurship in which this community has engaged is presented as entirely male. The villagers are moving en masse towards the camera and the addressee who is positioned sligtly above them, carrying the tools of their new trades. Although the frontal angle of the photograph suggests the involvement of the viewer or reader (Kress & von Leeuwen 143), the perspective of looking down implies an element of dominance or of superiority. While most of the men are looking into the camera, and therefore at the addressee, the man nearest to camera is looking over the photographer’s shoulder, beyond the addressee and into the distance. It is this man who is gazing into the distance somewhere over the reader’s right shoulder that is the focus of the
41 picture. The right represents the future and thus, it can be interpreeted that this man, who is also one of the youngest, is looking towards opportunities that might lie ahead. Another aspect is that the photograph shows the difficult conditions under which these people live, and by implication, the hardships that the men who work to bring us oil endure, their heroic qualities.
Another point of interest is that after telling the addressee that their affiliate paid several million dollars for the prospecting rights, the company goes on to say “We didn’t discover any oil. But we’re used to that. (After all, only one out of every fifty exporatory wells drilled in the U.S. actually results in the discovery of oil in commercial quantities.)”
This paragraph is intended to fulfill two different purposes. Firstly, it is realtional and introduces a personal, comradely note to the otherwise informative text. The second purpose is to illustrate how precarious and costly their work is and how little return they can get on investment. The aim is to arouse feelings of sympathy among the readers, and to show the how the company is selflessly supporting the wellbeing and development of isolated communities.
A more recent example (figure 53) comes from BP who describe in an advertisement how they “helped Ian Hazlewood network in Tower Hamlets”. Under a head and shoulders photograph of the entrepreneur who is standing gazing to the right away from the camera towards a private vision which he does not wish to share with the reader and with a blurry shot of Tower Hamlets in the background, the company explains how they “recognise that one of the very best ways to help improve the quality of life in the communities in which we work is by creating sustainable jobs in new local businesses” and go on to describe how they have helped Ian Hazlewood to set up and develop his computer business through their association with the East London Small Business Centre. In other words, BP encourages entrepreneurship by sponsoring this work.
Figure 53
However, the examples that they provide in this short series are all male.
b) The Adventurer
The Tyonek Indians have already provided examples of the heroism, the quest to find the elixir that will provide us with a better life that the drama of oil relates. However, it is the Quest,54 itself, the search for the magic substance that is central to many of the advertisements. First, the hero must travel to distant lands where both the terrain and the climate are often hostile, just as in the example from Standard Oil New Jersey discussed above (Figure 51).
54 See for example the writing of Vladimir Propp (1968 and 1971) and Christopher Booker, (2004) for further discussions on this topic. 42
More recently, the example from Chevron (figure 54) from the first decade of the century, is one element of a much larger advertisement and shows two men sitting in a hot and barren landscape miles from civilisation, seemingly discussing how they can help to supply the global demand for oil.
Figure 54
Figure 55
The hostility of the landscape is clear from in the advertisements shown in figures 55 and 56. In figure 55 three oil men, pioneers and adventurers, fight their way along a shallow waterway through a rocky section of the South American jungle. Petroleum the magazine from which it was taken, tells how the search for oil in Columbia was often made even more difficult by the thick jungle and that the only way was through small streams and other waterways. 55Moss clad rocks like the ones depicted made progress even more Figure 56 difficult. These were of course, not the only dangers. The solid boots and tropical helmets of two of the men, as well as the equipment that they are carrying denotes some of the problems facing these adventurers. Further, Kress & van Leeuwen point (1996:144) that although the back view is complex and ambivalent, one of the things that the exposure of the back can connote is vulnerabilty. To be in the jungle, miles from anywhere,especially in the days before easy comminications, was certainly to be in a position of extreme vulnerability.
A differently hostile landscape is depicted in the BP advertisement from 1959 (figure 56) The text simply states: “Dynamite for shot-firing being carried across the country by camel train” and explains how the company is exploring six areas in their search for oil. Not only is the terrain hostile, but the transportation of dynamite under such primitive and unpredictable circumstances is another challenge for the oil heros in their quest to bring us the magic liquid that we need for our wellfare and survival today. Here, the terrain is dry and exposure to the
55 Taken from Esso’s Petroleum magazine cited in Olle Wilson (2012:148) 43 extreme temperatures of the hot and sunny day and chill of the night is a hardship. Moreover, not only is the transportation of the dynamite that is needed to blast the rock dangerous, but the magic substance itself is unpredictable. The extraction of the oil itself can result in disaster and the production of petroleum requires great care as it is a product that is highly explosive. While historically, oil was known for its healing properties, inhaling petroleum or coming into physical contact with it is known to be injurious to health. Many have given up their lives to the extraction and exploitation of this magic substance, which if treated with the slightest disrespect has a tendency to retaliate and turn against perosn who has come to fetch it . Thus, the men who search to bring us this magic liquid are romantic heros in Frye’s sense. They are strong and fearless and readily face dangers and discomfort for our sakes.
The beautifully illustrated series of twelve advertisements that I mentioned earlier and that BP produced in 1925 (figure 57) explain how through innovations brought about by the company, life in both Britain and Persia has improved. The advertisements in this series are all full-page and were produced on glossy paper. In each case, the top half of the page is filled by a square-shaped illustration which is “From an original drawing by Christopher Clark, R.I.” Clark was a well-known artist of the time whose work was exhibited at the Royal Academy, for example, and who generally favoured military themes. The words “BP” and underneath in smaller lettering “The British Petrol” catch the eye at the bottom of the page and the address of the Distributing Organisation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. Ltd. is provided the bottom, underlined by what seems to be a garlanded pipe.
Figure 57
Each of the advertisements begins with a picturesque description of what is illustrated by the drawing and relates to times and traditions long gone by in the history of Persia. These traditions are all based on or involve the many uses of petroleum. The narratives are all very informative, and open in a style reminiscent either of a tourist guide book or of a school text book. The author of the text describes the hostile countryside which the men had to cross with only mules to help them. The mythical qualities of the difficulties that the country offered are subtly underlined by them being three. He stresses problems that these men faced and refers to them as pioneers ascribing them with the qualities of endurance and indefatigability. This is a true tale of Romance.
I will provide the full text of this advertisement here as it describes the difficulties facing these brave adventurers very clearly. The opening sets the scene in the manner of a fairy tale. The inversion, “difficulties innumerable were encountered” at the end of the opening sentence lends weight to these difficulties and also resonates with the style of a traditional fairy tale.
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In the days before the War,56 when the first pipe line of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was laid, difficulties innumerable were encountered.
One hundred and fifty miles of barren country lay between the then recently discovered oil fields and the coast. Desert plains, deep gorges and mountain passes had to be traversed. The small body of British pioneers who carruied out the work were faced with privation and hardship, and often serious danger.
In the second section of the text, the frontal positioning of the distance increases the sense of its length. The groups of three elements of the terrain that had to be traversed at the beginning of the second sentence, with the three problems encountered listed in an order of increasing difficulty and positioned at the end of the achievement add to the fairy tale quality of the narrative. The slow, heavy work, and the determinaton of the men involved is expressed by the repetions, “mule by mule” and “step by step” and by the otherwise superfluous “at last”.
But the work went on. Mule after mule laden with pipe found its sure-footed way step by step further inland, until at last the vein of steel was complete, and the first of the rich crude oil of Persia flowed to the coast en route to England.
The original pipeline has since been duplicated to meet the ever-growing demand for the Company’s products, notable among which is “BP” the British petrol.
Refined at Llandarcy, South Wales, the crude oil of Persia, “BP” can be relied on to give maximum power, speed and mileage per gallon. And the demand for it grows daily greater as motorists in increasing numbers come to realise that it is both best and British.
Despite the fact that the heroes had succeeded in bringing the precious life-giving liquid to Britain, more was needed and the brave adventurers had to repeat their arduous task and bring yet more of the magic liquid home to Britain. My final comments here relate firstly to the metaphoric reference to the pipe line as a vein of steel and to the oil that is pumped through this pipe line being ascribed the quality of life blood, circulating from Persian to England and bringing benefit to both. Secondly, the insistence on Britishness is a central topic for both BP and Shell and is something to which I will return.
The tradition of portraying men enguaged in the discovery of oil as adventurers is still found in the advertisements of the oil companies today. The Standard Oil New Jersey advertisement from 1970 (figure 58) shows two men standing at the prow of an icebreaker. In the far distance, there is a dog team. These pioneers are miles from civilisation in a cold and dangerous environment where they have been looking for trouble. Their mission was to “reduce the Arctic from a forbidding mystery to a set of identifible problems” and “to test the feasibility of a year-round sea-route between the oil discovery in Alaska and the Atlantic coast”.
In fact Esso, as the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, positioned an eight-page article- type advertisement in Scientific American (1968) entitled “The New Adventurers” where they discussed the questions of why these men search for gas and oil offshore in dangerous environments, the risks that they take and finally, if they pollute the coastal waters.
56 The War referred to is of course WW1. 45
Figure 58
Similarly, the advertisement fromTotal in 2006 (figure 59) depicts a lone diver “reviewing the oil issue in depth” to bring “new solutions to the surface”. One solitary hero is depicted in his quest to find new energy resources at ever greater depths, while a second solitary man gazes at the moon,.a source of energy that according to the text, Total has been exploiting and working with innovations in since the 1980s.
The advertisement involves a double metaphor, both in words and in image. The first is the statement “Reviewing the oil issue in depth” which is illustrated by the solitary diver with his bright lamp, and the second is the second man, gazing out over the quiet surface of the ocean “bringing new solutions to the surface”. The light Figure 59 of the diver is repeated as the moon that is lighting up the sky and the surface of the water. The word “issue” implies that Total are aware that there is an unspecified problem which involves oil in some way.
The adventure afforded by petroleum whether in aeroplanes, cars or boats, was illustrated by the many advertisements that used endorsers, predominantly men, trying to break speed records or pioneers that the companies had sponsored.57 One well-known example from Shell
57 One exception was Amy Johnson, the air pioneer although as I mentioned earlier, after her marriage, she was referred to as Mrs. Mollison. 46 was Captain Scott’s exploration of the Antartctic, while BP advertised with Fuchs,58 almost 50 years later (figure 60).
Figure 60
Other adventurers that have advertised the oil companies through receiving sponsorship and providing endorsement include the early pioneers of aviation and motor racing and racing drivers like Sterling Moss. Donald Campbell59 who lost his life trying to break his own speed record on Coniston Water is another example.
c) Manliness
Tuncay Zayer (2010) contends that there eight representative themes of ideal masculinity: the Adventurer, the Athlete, the Attractive Man, the Daredevil, the Family Man, the Goal-Driven Man, the Individual and the Strong Man. Typically, the men engaged in prospecting and drilling for oil are portrayed as Adventurers, Daredevils, Athletic and Goal-Driven as well as physically strong, while the scientists and research engineers are Goal-Driven and mentally strong in their convictions that they can find a solution to any problem that may arise. They also demonstrate Individuality and Originality of thought.
However, a number of the advertisements show the Family Man, or the paternal man. 60 In such cases, the man is usually portrayed as a sensible purchaser of the right fuel. One example of this is from the introduction of BP in Canada in 1958. The advertisement comprises a newspaper collage which includes a group of four motorists who represent a cross-section of the male Canadian population. Two of the informants are described with their occupation and in two cases the car model that they drive is also named. The informants are of different ages. One is the 74-year-old driver of a British Ford Anglia for example while another is a “family man” out on a weekend trip with his wife and seven-year-old daughter, Marilyn. The
58 Vivian Ernest Fuchs (1908-1999) is best known for leading the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the first overland crossing of Antarctica. He received a knighthood in 1958 after the team returned. 59 Campbell was the son of Malcolm Campbell who held speed records during the 1920s and 30s. Donald held a total of 13 records, including both the land and water records which he set in 1964. He is the only person to have done this. He died on Coniston in 1967 in an attempt to break his own record. 60 The only category classified by Tuncay Zayer that is not a salient theme is that of the Attractive Man. 47 advertisement features a little girl with her father buying fuel at a newly opened service station. The girl and her mother are the only females mentioned in the advertisement, and the mother is neither named nor depicted. Only Marilyn is portrayed and thereby provides her father, Donald Morrison, with the attribute, “father”. In the collage of photographs and reports that make up this advertisement, only male characters speak or are active in any other way to endorse BP.
Figure 61
While stereotypical masculine images in advertisements convey power, strength, virility, athleticism, competitiveness, expertise and a life in the open air, feminine images typically show beauty, submissiveness, nurturance, and cooperation. The representation and portrayal of children and young people throughout the advertisements in my corpus seems to follow these traditional gender stereotypes. Typically, the few girls who are portrayed are confined within the four walls of a room, or as in the early American advertisements, on their way to or from the restroom provided by the company service station, while like the heroic oil men, even very young boys are portrayed outside, often in wild and natural surroundings. In the advertisement above from 1970, (61) Standard Oil New Jersey explains how they are working towards caring for the “tiny, fragile, vulnerable planet” upon which we are living and which we must pass on to future generations. “We” representing the world as we know it are shown in the distance moving towards the future, represented by the company and the two young children on the almost deserted beach. However, both of the children seem to be boys.
Boys are depicted out in the open, “doing” while girls are simply indoors, “being”.
In the Total advertisement (figure 62) a boy flies his toy aeroplane, copying the movement of the real one in the sky. Above him is the man from Total, “looking after (the) scarce resource”
48 that will ensure the energy future for both the plane and the boy. More recently, these stereotypes can be seen in the company’s advertisements where a little boy “flies” free above an empty beach (figure 32)
In the Shell advertisements in the “Let’s Go” series, the boys are shown in the open air engaged in activities that connote freedom and adventure or like Feng (figure 28) actively engaged in a practical pursuit such as doing the laundry and studying. Although he is portrayed indoors, he is obviously on his way to independence. He is not within the confines of his home, but in a public laundrette, and is obviously there because he is no longer living in his parent’s house where his mother would do his laundry. In other words, the connotation is that Feng is on his way out into the world. The girls, on the other hand, are inside the four walls of their homes, and even if the little Japanese girl is skipping (figure 24) she is doing this indoors under the watchful eye of her mother.
Figure 62 Moreover, while the male characters are named and individualised, the females remain anonymous and thus, representatives of a group.
The dominance of the masculine be can further exemplified by two advertisements from 1958. I have already shown that education is shown to be a masculine domain, and in the Shell advertisement from that year (figure 63), a young, fair-haired boy in school uniform is the central figure. Only the boy’s head and upper shoulders are visible, but his rather untidy shirt collar, huge eyes, large front teeth and the round National Health spectacles on his freckled, snub nose give him an air of studiousness and vulnerability. However, his innocent, simple answer, “Additives, Sir, are things that are added to things ….” to the unvoiced question ostensibly asked by his schoolteacher is interpreted as a sign that “the boy’s a genius”. The implication is that we have another expert in the making. The slogan “You can be sure of Shell” runs across the bottom of the page.
Very few of the individuals depicted in the advertisements in my corpus wear spectacles, and none of these are oil men or directly connected to the production or exploitation of oil. For example, Ian Hazlewood (figure 52 ) an entrepreneur helped by BP has glasses, and one of Shell’s “Real People,” Livio Accattatis, “the Principal Consultant on Energise, a Shell initiative designed to drive energy efficiency and reduce emissions across [their] business globally” also does. However, this boy, BP’s Colin (figure 46) and the Shell girl Figure 63 who likes to read, (figure 27) are all given this stereotypical attribute of intelligence and bookishness.
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Despite the Chevron advertisement that appeared during 2007 and 2008 approximately, and which were foregrounded by a young woman (figure 29) masculinity is the standard for the oil industry and is also observable in the job advertisements produced by the companies even during the first decades of the century. Moreover, the Chevron advertisement suggests that jobs for women are confined to the office.
In 2011, BP produced what was ostensibly a job advertisement (figure 64) that was completely different in character to this. In it the company state that they are “hiring Explorers, Geologists, Geoscientists, Geophysicists, Petroleum Engineers, Petrophysicists, Reservoir Engineers and Technologists” to “drill and Figure 64 develop access to some of the world’s most interesting hydrocarbon basins and our exploration heritage.”
The company state that they are looking for professionals with “outstanding technical skills and a passion to learn from and collaborate across our multi-disciplinary teams” and ask the reader “Are you up for the challenge?”
However, the people that populate the image that accompanies this text are exclusively male. Unlike the Chevron advertisement, it is set outdoors and filled with movement and excitement as the figures move around in the darkness with the help of flash lights and with a derrick framing the photograph on one side and a helicopter on the other. This is a world of action and adventure, and so it would seem, a world “for the boys”.
“Casting” oil
In the light of the advertisements that I have found from multiple sources and from all the major companies over time, it would seem that the Shell advertisement taken from The Advertising Archives (figure 65) still provides a fairly accurate summary of the way in which the oil companies have elected to gender their advertisements.
For the woman, what is important is “Glamour from an oil well” and the female actant is depicted applying lip stick. It is also likely that the less obvious contributions of the industry, such as shampoo to give her hair sheen61 and her eye shadow are also Figure 65 based on oil and its derivatives. The man, on the other hand, is
61 The only advertisements for Shell (or any other oil company) that I found in The Economist or elsewhere during and immediately after the war years were for shampoo to give hair sheen or how it gave fabrics a wonderful feel. 50 portrayed as an expert with a fuelling “Service Tip,” and the company itself is characterized as innovative; “They “cracked” the secrets of petroleum” to get the new Shell fuel.
While education, innovation and enterprise are major themes in the advertising of the oil companies, and that they are in many cases inextricably interwoven, the major theme in the portrayal of men in the advertising of the oil company is that the adventurer and hero. The
The Romance of the Quest for Oil infuses a multitude of advertisements, and in every case, the adventurer accomplishing heroic deeds is male. A more recent example is a BP commercial from June 2015 which was set and marketed in New Zealand (figure 66).
In this, a young man, busy tinkering with his motorbike suddenly finds a floppy-eared rabbit outside his garage. When he realises that it must belong to the little girl next door whose family has just moved, the kind but rugged young man sets off on his quest across the country to return this rabbit to its owner. Cradling the rabbit tenderly against Figure 66 the handlebars of his powerful machine,the hero travels miles across wild landscape on his motobike, stopping off for drinks, fuel and information at BP stations along his route to eventually present the “maiden in distress” with her lost treasure. This is the Myth of Romance, the story of oil in its essence. (Youtube.com/watch?v=3pcffPzDL7Y)
Figure 67 In a follow-up commercial from the same campaign the next year, a young boy, struggling to attract the attention of the girl of his dreams is helped by his inventive, innovative grandfather (figure 67) who builds a glider to help the boy win his princess. The grandfather is portrayed as strong, rugged and determined to help the child to fulfil his dreams. Again, the male protagonists do not give up until they have succeeded and again, the effort is made to impress a girl and make her happy.
Just like their forebears, (e.g. figures 37 and 54 and 55) the men portrayed in these advertising dramas are strong, practical, outdoor, innovative men and determined to succeed in their quest to save those weaker than themselves.
Despite the fact that in recent years ExxonMobil has moved from a ratio of one in four female participants (figure 33) to one which is closer to fifty percent in the few advertisements that feature people, and although the female actantes are professional, the roles they have been allocated do not seem to have changed greatly.The female scientist in their 2018 campaign Energy lives here, (figure 68) is pictured working with algae in a laboratory, for example. Men are adventurers, while even professional women are usually found indoors, (figure 31) or as exemplified by the BP London 2012 Games sponsorship, (figure 34) to provide the
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companies with a “soft” and caring image and as examples of corporate responsibility (figure 35). Those who are weaker, often women, are helped and their lives made easier by the benefits that oil and its derivities, all provided by men, can bring. The blatant sexualisation of female characters has disappeared but not the commonly portrayed characteristics. After the pioneering women of the 1920s, women are shown needing help and support, whether this is to drive their cars or to make their housework and beauty routines easier. The male experts and adventurers work together to seek for ways in which to ease a woman’s lot.
The “keep advancing” series that BP produced in 2019 Figure 68 exemplifies this. The advertisements are over two pages and consist of four scenes, ending with the photograph of a female on the right. In the example shown here, (figure 69) a woman is sitting dreaming and care-free, apparently in a motor vehicle which she is not driving.Two of the three other photographs show male hands fueling motor vehicles and the third shows a car on a long, deserted road. In another advertisement the first three photographs show the need for energy and ways to produce this more cleanly and the photograph on the right is of a young girl, her long blonde hair blowing in the wind in a field in an open country landscape. The female characters are representantes whose passivity and lack of action illustrate the benefits that the work of men or of the heroes of the oil companies offers.
Figure 69
Perhaps surprisingly, one exception to this rule seems to be a Shell commercial produced in Saudi Arabia in 2018 to promote female drivers. This commercial appeared just weeks before the ban on women drivers was lifted. The well-known men who participate in this commercial and who come from a variety of professions ranging from doctor to hip hop artist, all praise the women in their lives, whether they be sisters, mothers or wives, and discuss how strong they are and how much help and support they have given their menfolk. As one of the men points out, his sister is a pilot and it seems ridiculous that she cannot be trusted behind the wheel of a car. Although the women portrayed here need the help and support of men, it is
52 because of the political system and not because of their qualities as women. These women are the new pioneers of driving.
The world of Bakhtin’s “living tripartite unity” might have undergone technical and political change, but the roles in which those involved in his “dialogues” are cast seem to have evolved to a much lesser extent. To counter this, in 2018, advertising regulators in the UK gave agencies six months to eliminate stereotypes “likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence” Stereotyping has been banned, and men or women should not be shown “failing to achieve a task specifically because of their gender”. A telling example that is given is a woman failing to park a car.
However, using a multi-dimensional framework to assess stereotyping, Hentschel et al (2019) discovered that gender stereotyping still exists, particularly in how women seem to characterise themselves. More specifically, the female raters in their investigation characterised themselves as being in general less “agentic” and more “communal” than their male counterparts. This is in line with how the oil companies have tended to “gender”their work and products. However, it also implies that rules and regulations in themselves are not enough to change the “living tripartite unity” that is central to how the drama of oil, and more recently, its greener alternatives, is communicated and understood.
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References
Figure References
Figure 1 https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/Lots/auction-lot/JULES-CHERET-(1836-1932)-SAXOLEINE-1893- 48x34-inches-Chaix-P?saleno=2062&lotNo=8&refNo=564736 Figure 2 AR Postcards (2010) Shell Postcard Catalogue http://arpostcards.co.uk/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=139 Figure 3 AR Postcards (2010) Shell Postcard Catalogue http://arpostcards.co.uk/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=135 Figure 4 AR Postcards (2010) Shell Postcard Catalogue http://www.arpostcards.co.uk/gallery/albums/userpics/10001/SQ1_282229.jpg Figure 5 AR Postcards (2010) Shell Postcard Catalogue http://www.arpostcards.co.uk/gallery/albums/userpics/10002/sq114b.jpg Figure 6 AR Postcards (2010) Shell Postcard Catalogue http://www.arpostcards.co.uk/gallery/displayimage.php?album=1&pid=25 Figure 9 AR Postcards (2010) Shell Postcard Catalogue http://arpostcards.coAn Exhibition of Shell Advertising Art catalogueuk/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=71 and “That’s Shell -that is!”An Exhibition of Shell Advertising catalogue %th July -¤th September 1983, Barbican Art Gallery Figure 39 AR Postcards (2010) Shell Postcard Catalogue http://arpostcards.co.uk/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=68
Figure 10 Humour from Shell Advertising Art 1928-1963 (p.56, Cat.99) An exhibition of cartoons and illustrations from Shell U.K. Limited Advertising Archive and joint Shell-Mex and B.P. Limited Advertising Archive Oriel 31.
Figure 11 Humour from Shell Shell Advertising Art 1928-1963 (p.41, Cat.67) An exhibition of cartoons and illustrations from Shell U.K. Limited Advertising Archive and joint Shell-Mex and B.P. Limited Advertising Archive Oriel 31.
Figure 15 “Beach Pyjamas” That’s Shell -that is!”An Exhibition of Shell Advertising catalogue 5th July - 4th September 1983, Barbican Art Gallery (p.43)
Figures 19 and 20, Russell, Tim (2007) Fill ‘er Up! The Great American Gas Station (p.61) Voyageur Press St.Paul
Figure 42 Russell, Tim (2007) Fill ‘er Up! The Great American Gas Station (p.32) Voyageur Press St.Paul
Figure 43 “Shell Lesson” That’s Shell -that is!”An Exhibition of Shell Advertising catalogue 5th July -4th September 1983, Barbican Art Gallery (p.16)
On-line video commercials, figures 66 an67 My BP Story
Figure 66 Peter and the Rabbit youtube.com/watch?v=3pcffPzDL7Y (last viewed 2021.08.23)
Figure 67 Young Love (figure 66) last viewed in June 2021 but no longer available.
Shell
Saudi men’s attitudes to women drivers youtube.com/watch?v=jUzJKkneFw8 (last viewed 2021.08.23)
Other figures have appeared on various dates in a number of different newspapers, magazines and periodicals and many can also be found in the BP Archives.
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References
Adelswärd, Viveka (2000) `”Who is talking?” Some thoughts on speakers, voices and virtual participants`in Creative Crossroads _Electronic Honorary Publication Dedicated to Yvonne Waern on Her Retirement
Anward, Jan (2002) “Other voices, other sources” in Per Linell & Karin Aronsson (eds.)Jagen och rösterna: Goffma, Viveka och samtalet/ Selves and Voices: Goffman, Viveka, and Dialogue Linköping 127-148
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