![]() | Jonathan Jackson brings music to Milwaukee, but it's not from 'Nashville'.| WMSE, DJ Dewey Gill keep big band music swinging - and, soon, digital.| Bob Odenkirk, coming to Pabst Theater, talks about 'Better Call Saul'.| Election-night returns could have impact on shifting Milwaukee TV landscape."If you had to make a list of the biggest stars in Milwaukee," he said, "it would have to include David Gruber." To be part of our star system all you have to do is advertise a lot." "Other cities have celebrities or ex-presidents, but who are our stars? We don't have any. "Seriously, who are the stars in this town," Eichenbaum said. The tendency for advertisers to appear in their own commercials, however, is a uniquely local corollary. The use of spokespeople like Allstate's Mayhem, the Progressive Insurance folk singers or fast-food CEO Craig Culver are a way "to put a likable face on a company" with the hope that "by transference if they represent the company and I like them, then I'll like the company and do business with them." He said the trend really represents an "exponential growth" in the use of spokespeople in general for all products. ![]() You don't have to be the same age or background" to make an impression. It's just a feeling people have."Įichenbaum said "the idea that a woman is speaking to other women or a man is speaking to other men. The idea that female spokespeople are meant to appeal to women consumers, he said, "sounds like a really good argument, except there aren't any facts to support it. He called Josephine, Flo and their spoke-sisters Everywomen archetypes. He said advertising agencies create campaigns based on "stereotypes or anecdotal knowledge of what they are hearing from the public." Milwaukee advertising executive Steve Eichenbaum, a contrarian by nature, agrees to a point. Grow attributes their proliferation in part to the fact that "there are trends to advertising and if something works others start copying it." What they represent, and which makes me thrilled," said Grow, is that advertisers "are demanding more realistic images of women and walking "that fine line of not appealing to one consumer at the expense of another consumer." They are "clearly intelligent," "non-threatening," "non-sexualized" and "sort of pleasant looking in a generic way. Grow, who takes issue with the word "perky," describes them as "not sexy, just funky and fun" and said "they command some kind of authority in a whimsical, humorous way." They are similar enough "types" - usually young, sometimes red-haired and typically perky - to suggest their manufacture at a Taiwanese robotics factory. "They have maybe just added more intelligence to the quotient."īut Flo was just the beta version for an army of female spokes-clones that followed: the red-headed co-worker in the Wendy's commercials, the girl in the pink dress in the T-mobile ads, the woman behind the desk in the Toyotathon ads, the young woman pitching the AT&T family phone plan to basketball player Grant Hill, and various blue-shirted female clerks in Best Buy technology ads, to name a few. "I think Flo might be the postmodern-day Madge and Josephine," said Grow. You can't turn on a television without seeing Flo the Progressive insurance spokeswoman, played by improv comic Stephanie Courtney, a Groundlings comedy troupe alum whose other credits include what was a likely less lucrative recurring role in season one of "Mad Men." Global representation of women in advertising creative departments is just 20.3%, said Grow. ![]() Yet "men remain the majority of the creatives making the ads," she said. This reflects the fact that "women make 85% of all consumption decisions," including 50% of all auto purchases and a majority of technology purchases, said Jean Grow, associate professor of Strategic Communication at Marquette University. Today spokeswomen are ubiquitous and the products they are pitching run the gamut. Since then the revolution of women in society has been accompanied by an evolution in their portrayal in film, on television and in advertising. She was played by radio actress Jan Miner, who died in 2004 at the age of 86 and acted in the movies "Lenny" and "Mermaids." "You're soaking in it," was her tag line. ![]() "It softens hands while you do the dishes," she told them. Then there was Madge, the wisecracking manicurist in the 1980s ads for Palmolive dish detergent who plunged customer's hands into soapy water. She was played by Jane Withers, 88, who as a child actress appeared with Shirley Temple and later was in the TV series "Pete and Gladys" and the James Dean film "Giant." There was Josephine the Plumber, who appeared in commercials for Comet cleanser in the 1960s and '70s. If there was a glass ceiling in the early days of advertising, women were expected to clean it.
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