CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

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1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background of study There are many types of advertisement, one of them is television advertisement. Television and advertising cannot be separated from one another. Television needs advertisement to run their television station, and advertising needs television as media to introduce their products to consumers. Based on Goddard (1998) Advertisement is the Latin verb of Advertere, means to turn towards. Adverts are text, image and sound that to do their best to make us towards them and get our attention to it. An advertisement is considered successful if it looks attractive and can make the prospective customers interested and understand about the purpose or message in an advertisement. To make it more attractive, advertisement needs the audio-visual contents which only can exist in television. In this analysis, it uses three Pond s advertisement. Pond's is one of Unilever product. Unilever is one of the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) in the world that leading headquartered in Rotterdam, Netherlands and operates in approximately 75 countries. The series of the Company's products include products of Home & Personal Care and Foods & Beverages marked with the brand that trusted and renowned in the world, such as Vaseline, Wall's, Lifebuoy, Pepsodent, Lux, Pond's, Sunlight, Rinso, Blueband, Rocyo, Dove, Rexona, Clear, and others. Unilever was established on January 1, 1930 and is a blend of "Margarine Union" from the Netherlands and "Lever Brothers" from the UK. Unilever Indonesia was established on December 5, 1933 as Lever's Zeep Fabriken NV (LZF). Unilever marketing office is based in Jakarta, Indonesia, while for the eastern region, branched in Surabaya. Pond s first attended to beautify women in 1984, starting from a home-based laboratories belonging Lutheran T. Pond to launch Ponds skin cream's classic. 1

2 Pond s become one of the world's first skin care products. Since then, Pond s has evolved and created a range of revolutionary innovations and expanded to various countries throughout the world. If the first Pond's has the slogan "Women's Upper Class Choices", Pond's now have a philosophy; On Pond s, we believe that the world would be a better place if we stopped making the ideal of beauty, and began to appreciate it. This analysis uses three Pond s television commercials, that have the same plot. The first commercials is, Pond s White Beauty Facial Foam Chess version. The commercial set showed the story of a teenage woman playing chess with her college friend. When she was playing chess with the man, the man won the game. The woman felt annoyed because she cannot defeat the man. She even tried to flirting him by biting her lip in order to destroy the concentration of the man. The woman then used Pond s White Beauty to look whiter, cleaner and more beautiful. After using Pond s, the woman's face looked whiter than usual. After that, the woman asked the man to repeat the chess match that they have played before. The man was then amazed by the beauty and whiter skin of the woman, and lost his concentration so that he cannot play chess well. Therefore the match was won by the woman. Second, Pond's Clear Solution Foam Just My Luck version tells the story of a female student who felt insecure, un-confident and alone. Then, she found a five pesos coin in the floor. When she was going to pick it up, there was a man who tried to pick up the coin too. They realized that they want to pick the same coins, and smiled at each other. The woman felt shy after she saw the man smiled at her and she fixed her hair to hide her shyness. But when she was fixing her hair, the man saw a pimple on her forehead. The man was shocked and run away from the woman. However, after using Pond's Clear Solutions, a pimple on her face was gone and the woman became more confident than ever. When she walked in the hallway, all of the men around her looked at her. Then, she dropped her coin to the floor and all the men trying to approach her and get her attention. Third, Pond s Facial Foam "Yoga" version. This television commercial tells the story of a woman who has a busy and chaotic environment that has a lot of air pollution. Then, the woman did yoga to keep her mind at peace and make her calm. When she did Yoga she saw that there was a man that she likes also practicing yoga 2

3 at the same place with her. After she saw him, the woman moved beside the man. As she did yoga, she looked at the mirror and she realized that she had a dark and oily skin because of pollution. After using Pond's Whitening Foam, this woman did yoga again and suddenly the man that she likes appears in front of her. Advertising as a mass communication system are likely to show a gender discourse that makes gender biases unjust. Women are always shown as a second or subordinate. Strinati (1995, p. 171) give comments about women in advertising that from its very beginnings the Women s movement has responded critically, often angrily, to what it has rather loosely called sexism in the media. Strinati comments show that the gender injustice has been done even before the television advertisements tried to enter our mind with their code and symbol Researchers saw that the meaning of the women's beauty is constantly changing from year to year depending on the social environment and cultural backgrounds. At first, the concept of being beautiful was made by men because of their power. Women strive to be beautiful in the eyes of men, because women want to be chosen by men. Time changes, the concept of being beauty has changed, according to the environment and culture. However, because of the power of mass media, beauty concept that was different, becoming the same. Women can be called as a beauty if they have an ideal body with beautiful curves, with not only white skin, but also clean, soft and shiny skin. The women who is not beautiful like a model who appear in the advertising will do everything to be like them, (use the cream, every day and night) in order to look beautiful, and they hope they will get the rich handsome man that appear in the advertising (Cortese, 2004, p. 53). 1.2 Problem Formulation 1. What are the images of women and men that are shown in three Pond s advertisements? 2. How the process of signification is developed in three Pond s advertisements? 1.3 Scope and Limitation Scope of this thesis is Pond's television commercials, and for the limitation on this thesis, the writer took Ponds White Beauty Facial Foam Chess version, 3

4 Pond's Clear Solution Just My Luck version and Pond's Pure White Facial Foam Yoga version. 1.4 Goals and Function The goals of this thesis are; 1. To find out the image of women and men in three Pond s commercials. 2. To find out the process of signification developed in the three Pond s commercials. The functions of this thesis are: 1. To increase the awareness of Indonesian women so they are not manipulated by media. 2. To increase awareness about gender equality to the society. 1.5 Previous Research To support the writer's research, the writer has collected some previous research. First, Kurniawan (2011) titled Representasi Kecantikan Wanita Dalam Iklan Nature-E (Analisis Semiotika terhadap Iklan Majalah Nature-E. This thesis discusses the definition of the meaning of beauty that exist in the current that created by the massive media. The author used semiology from Saussure to identify the signs that exist in Natur-E advertisement to represent of woman's beauty massively. The construction that made by Natur-E's ad about women's beauty still using the stereotype of beautiful women in general, which have white and glow skin, has a slim body and is also coupled with the inner beauty in a woman that is obtained from the personality and achievements that they owned since young. Another research that is related for this research is the research from Rahmawati, Tripambudi, and Lestari, P. (2010) titled Bias Gender dalam Iklan Attack Easy di Televisi. This journal communications is about the domination of men over women in the division of household chores using Roland Barthes's semiology. According to this paper it is clear that bias gender very clearly appear in this television commercial. The woman was shown to do heavy household chores that usually only men can do 4

5 it, but even if a woman can do the heavy work, she will continue to be placed in the position of housewives. Stereotypes that appeared in Attack Easy television commercial are; women only work in house and also the kitchen. Whatever the education and income of woman, a woman should always look beautiful and attractive. Although just being at home and doing the household chores, women should always be beautiful in order to satisfy the man. 5

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