The Concept of Gender and Representation of Women in Advertisements

Abstract

The concept of marketing is explained as the activity of creating, pricing, distributing and promoting products, services and ideas to enable businesses to achieve their goals. One of the most important tools of promotion within these activities is advertising. Female figures, defined as an indispensable element of advertising, appear as both the initiators and the influencers of the change activity. Feminist advertising, also known as femvertising, which has been frequently encountered in recent years, is one of the advertising activities that place the female figure in the subject position. Feminist advertising is accepted as an example of advertising that emphasizes the power of women in advertising in modern societies and the departure from the traditional male-female role distribution. The concept of gender, which is determined based on the general acceptance of society, determines the place of women in commercial films and shapes women. In the study, the commercial films that won awards in the Mixx Award competition in 2022 under the title of gender equality were examined with semiotic analysis. The first of the commercials is the commercial of the Mor Çatı association, which includes Psychological and Economic Violence Against Women. It has been determined that there are many embedded messages in the commercials of the relevant association. In the other commercial analyzed, titled A Daughter Changes, the World Changes, the message that girls' education is at the request of their father, that is, a man, draws attention.