'Advertising, Popular Culture & Gender
- Let's Think'


Let's address those who will make
the culture-stoking, culture-probing,
culture-churning ads of tomorrow.

Ads are business, but not just business. 
They aren't just about retaining a job,
being a yes-men and yes-women to old ideas 
or bringing out a collateral or many a 
audio/video entity.

Rather they are a serious cultural enterprise 
because they impact popular culture, 
and by extension, our thoughts and behaviours 
just like films and documentaries. Or
social movements. Ads reach spaces
and homes where these don't. 

Ads are a part of our thoughts -- 
indelible, invisible, un-erasable thoughts
that inhabit the surfaces, medians and recesses
of our minds. And hence they make us act
and choose who we want to become
in accordance with the choices they
create for us. 

They shape our consumer culture
and excite or compel us to buy one thing
or another, one service or another,
and to then use them, experience them
to shape our lives, change our lifestyles
and most importantly, transform our 
behaviour for each individual and the socio-cultural groups they are a part of.

Therefore, if at the base of our advertising
endeavours lay inspiring contemporary
perspectives, history-turning ideas and
their understanding... and yes, a thorough
(not-wikipedia) research and grasp of them...
we may then move from simply doing advertising to creating advertising. 

Because that's the essential word - creating.

We need to ask ourselves if we're just
doling the bare minimum or 'creating'
something unique.

Something that is said in such a way
that it transcends and fuses that assumed gap
between a product, those who'd want it
and the culture that ensconces them both invisibly. 

For now, I leave you all with this succinct account
by Judith Butler on the gendered reality of our lives
and what it entails beyond the misunderstandings
we all hold on to as our simplistic, hear-say, aped understandings and beliefs of gender and life.