A guest blogger explains how the use of animals and anthropomorphism in advertisements negatively affects the public's image of animals and encourages speciesist attitudes in society.

As an ex BBC natural history TV producer I have first hand industry experience with animal representation in the media and the influence of advertising over non-commercial programming and print content. My PhD research is looking at how attitudes to animals are shaped, what effect perceiving animals as either “in-group” or “out-group” members has for preferences towards them, and whether we bias in favour of animals that we consider similar to us. This advertising research looks at the historic representation of animals within popular culture, focusing on a single category – car advertising.

By Cluny South, guest blogger

As an ex BBC natural history TV producer I have first hand industry experience with animal representation in the media and the influence of advertising over non-commercial programming and print content. My PhD research is looking at how attitudes to animals are shaped, what effect perceiving animals as either “in-group” or “out-group” members has for preferences towards them, and whether we bias in favour of animals that we consider similar to us. This advertising research looks at the historic representation of animals within popular culture, focusing on a single category – car advertising.

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While the human-animal relationship may be complex and full of inconsistencies there is no denying that, love them or hate them, animals have been a part of human culture for thousands of years. Proof of this relationship exists all around – from early Palaeolithic cave paintings, through evolving human language, fables and stories, and not surprisingly on into our modern lives and media.

Previous research, looking at how animals have been portrayed in popular culture – specifically the tabloid press, greeting cards, visual arts, T.V. and print adverts, has generated a number of themes, or roles, in to which animals have been cast. These include roles such as symbol, allegory, loved one, savoir, threat, victim, tool, imaginary person, object of wonder, and nature. Additional factors affecting animal representation have also been identified. These include the degree of anthropomorphism of the animal, whether social or moral valuations were made regarding the animal, if any transformative effects could be seen between product and animal, and whether our understanding of the meaning of a product or animal might be fundamentally altered by association with the other. The potential power of adverts to shape the human-animal relationship was specifically considered by Spears et al. (1996), who constructed a symbolic communications model (SCM) that related interaction between a culturally constructed world (CCW) and the representation of animals in marketing contexts.

Relating the above to my own academic interests as well as my experiences in factual animal programming, I became curious on a number of issues. I wondered if animals suffered in the popular media, a little like typecast actors constrained by culturally constructed roles – roles that were generated by human stereotypes and biases of what it was like to be a given species? For example did hyenas ever get cast as anything but the bad guys in adverts, were dogs always ‘mans best friend’ in T.V. shows, and were butterflies ever anything but beautiful? Were there any signs of changing uses of animals in advertising, and did different products use animals in different ways? Finally I wasn’t just interested in how the media was portraying the outside world, I also wondered, like Spears et al., if stereotyping in the media could have an impact on an animal’s real life world? To answer some of these questions I set about a review and content analysis of animals in car adverts, to see if the use of animals in a single product category displayed any of the themes previously noted, or revealed any new trends or issues.

Over several months I documented and analysed over 500 advertisements that had aired globally between the period 2000 to 2012. My limitations were as follows: The adverts must have been in print advertising (as opposed to video or web), that any contextual copy (text) must be translatable using Google translate (if it was not originally in English), that the advertisements were available using web based search engines (Google, Bing) or through advertising agency archive sites, that the category was auto related, and finally, that at least one animal was featured as an integral part of the advertising message.

Jaws Rules….but Cheetahs are Go!

What I found confirmed past research, but also provided some notable variations perhaps unique to car advertising. The symbolic themes previously identified; of threat, victim, tool, nuisance, nature and object of wonder, could all be seen fairly consistently in the depictions of animals in car advertising over the last ten years. For example sharks and crocodiles were nearly always coded as attacking or threatening, and likewise brown and black bears were frequently cast in a threatening role. Interestingly however polar bears were often seen as victims, perhaps due to their more recent association with melting polar ice caps and climate change. Another bear exception was the teddy bear – which was frequently used to represent a cute and cuddly child-friendly animal. And yes, dogs were invariably ‘man’s best friend’, with only the rare exception! Elephants and hippos on the other hand were consistently used to symbolize either wild nature or great size, capacity and power; rhinos to denote toughness; and bulls to represent unbridled power.

One animal group stood out, perhaps above all others in terms of symbolic usage in a single category – the big cats. Big cats, especially the cheetah, were linked to fast acceleration and speed time and again in car advertising, to the extent that even the smallest hint of a big cat, some stripes or spots or the blur of a feline shape, was often enough to suggest a sports car model. Interestingly, jaguar images only came up in two adverts for Jaguar sports cars, and on both occasions the images were not of real jaguars but were of a sculpture, and an ultrasound image.

Anthropomorphization on the other hand was an area in which car advertising appeared to differ from other advertising. On a few occasions animals were portrayed as human-like but most often it appeared that car advertisers were actively seeking to make their products seem more animal-like, trading on the transformative potential of animal characterisations. The hope was clearly that mere association with a given animal would effect perceptions of a car’s features. For example, an elephant would make a family car appear more spacious, a cheetah a compact car more racy, even if in reality these aspects of the car were relatively minor.

Looking at how transformation might happen in reverse drew me into the area of social moral valuations. A number of animals have become historically so tightly associated with certain human values that this association may be considered to have had a transformative effect on cultural perceptions of the animal. Butterflies and doves have historically been the beneficiaries of an association with the human values of freedom and hope, and even in adverts these animals were rarely seen in a negative light. Likewise ants and bees have frequently been associated with industriousness, and are favourably considered as a result, whilst conversely bats and wolves have lost out for centuries due to our cultural tendency to link them with human notions of darkness and evil.

For better or worse we use animals as a shorthand, to evoke meaning and mood, with minimal explanation. The badges of honour, or dishonour, we dish out, unfortunately tend to persistently ‘dog’ the recipients, colouring how we understand them as animal species. The lot of animals in car advertising is similar to many advert characters in this respect, with the good guys and bad guys typecast in roles that are rarely, if ever, questioned. The degree to which movement may be possible, in terms of altering these associations in popular culture, is an interesting debate. Recent research into the improving North American public perceptions of ceteans (whales and dolphins) following the release of the film “Free Willy”, as well as the shifting North Korean categorization of dogs, from food item to pet animal, suggests that attitudes towards animal groups can alter surprisingly quickly under certain circumstances, bringing a ray of hope that one day the hyena may indeed star as a film’s happy hero!

More Camel, Less Bull

As for changes, over a decade of animal use in car advertising there were some clear shifts to be seen in terms of animal popularity in the ads. One animal whose appearance seemed to be on the rise was the camel, associated almost always with fuel efficiency. It’s newfound popularity was perhaps not surprising in a world of changing car priorities. Bulls in car adverts seemed to be on the decrease however, perhaps because they were often used to depict untempered power, less popular in an age where raw power might be considered an extravagance. Increasing environmental priorities not surprisingly also affected other animals’ popularity with a rise in adverts containing polar bears, penguins, frogs, fish, butterflies and pandas; all frequently associated with environmental vulnerability and concerns. Another more general change was a result of shifting consumer expectations and increasing audience sophistication. Animal combinations, assisted by improvements in computer graphics, have become more popular in recent years, allowing several aspects of a car, such as fuel economy and speed, to all be promoted in a single advert. This, by its nature, has resulted in more complex characterisations in terms of animal usage, and it will be interesting to follow where it leads.

This brings me on to my last question – does the representation of animals in advertising matter in terms of human attitudes to animals in the wider context of the real world? I consider the answer to be yes, for the reason that the casting of animals in stereotypical simplistic roles across the popular media reinforces and perpetuates the already prejudiced constructs we have built around non-human species. While this categorization of animals into “good and bad” and “them and us” may be a natural product of the human-animal relationship and our very human centred world-view, it fails to appreciate and understand animals as they really are. It serves no one to repeatedly portray certain animals as harmless emblems of peace and innocence whilst always casting others as dark villains of nature, since animals are far more complex and, like any marginalised out-group, merit much deeper understanding. And ultimately such prejudiced constructs, be they positive or negative, undermine the worthy attempts of people like Singer, Regan and Midgely to break down one of the last major barriers of human prejudice – that of speciesism.

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Cluny South is working on an Interdisciplinary PhD at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver in the area of Conservation Psychology and Marketing. Previously she worked as a Natural History producer in the UK, primarily creating factual programming for the BBC NHU. She has past experience in journalism and freelance writing, and currently works as a consultant in the area of public attitudes and conservation.