January 12, 2009

Because You Already Feel Great This January

Posted in Society at 12:53 pm by Paul Sagar

If you take the London Underground any time this week, you’re more than likely to round a corner and come face-to-face with a giant six pack. And i’m not talking about beer.

A poster campaign is currently under-way for Maximuscle Protein Powder, and it’s getting on my nerves. The concept is a simple one, a tried and tested method in advertising: make your target audience feel so awful about themselves they are compelled to spend money on your product.

Let me elaborate. The posters in question depict a topless man possessed of the body of Adonis. His chiseled pectorals and washboard-abdominals speak of a physique most men can only dream of. And that, of course, is precisely the point. For in his hand this living Greek statue holds a photo ostensibly of himself at a previous time, complete with ”moobs” and a gut which will be far more recognisable to the average morning commuter.

Alongisde the brazen colossus of Holborn there runs an extended caption – and it’s caption that really bugs me. Presented as a short narrative of ‘how a fat man got fit’,  the caption explicitly states that the pictured specimen of masculine perfection achieved his Kafka-esque metamorphosis simply by “doing some decorating, going to the gym a couple of times a week, and using Maximuscle”.

Which is, frankly, outrageous. Nobody achieves those sorts of results by “going to the gym a couple of times a week” and drinking a protein shake. The sorts of results depicted would require months of intense workouts, involving much highly- exacting cardio-vascular exercise, extensive weight-lifting and a strictly controlled diet. But even if all that were undertaken, in order to affect the transformation depicted the fact is a man would only achieve such spectacular results if he were fortunate enough to be endowed with a near Olympian physique. The fact is, no matter how many sit-ups they do and how carefully they eat, some men will just never have a six pack.

The hard truth is that most men will never look that great - especially those without four hours spare for the gym every day, and who can’t afford personal trainers.  And I know this to be the case, because I lift weights 3-4 times a week and will run an average of 15km over the same period. And believe me, I fall significantly short of looking like the Hellenic warrior of London Underground.

But misleading advertising is hardly something new, so why am I so bothered?

Well partly the lying itself just aggravates me. The dishonesty in this case is so egregious that I’ve taken special exception to it. For that reason alone I encourage everyone to make a short complain to the Advertising Standards Authority, by clicking here.

But there’s more to it than just dishonesty. The first time I came across one of these posters I snorted in contempt at the obvious dishonesty, smug in my own self-confidence. But then I turned to my left and saw the guy on the platform next to me. He was in his early 40s, balding and with a slight paunch, but overall a fairly ordinary physique. He too was looking at the poster, and the look in his eyes said it all; the self dissatisfaction, the staring forlornly at the poster and thinking “why don’t I look like that? Why am I so unattractive?”

Normally I don’t talk to strangers on the tube (it’s a good way of avoiding weirdos) but this time something compelled me to make a jokey commnt about how ridiculous the advert was, about how it’s impossible to look like that just from “going to the gym a couple of times”. The guy laughed, and it seemed to cheer him up – but I noticed that after I moved down the platform he continued to stare at the poster.

I suspect that man is typical of many, and increasingly of men generally. Women have been putting up with this (or in the cases of anorexics and bulimics, conspicuously failing to put up with this) for decades now: the constant barrage of images telling people that there is a certain way to look, a certain tightly-defined concept of physical perfection which denotes attractiveness. Alongside that image is the dual message that it is an abhorrent failure not to attain that perfection, but that such perfection can be bought, at a price.

There are many reasons to lament this culture of obsession with physical stereotypes, unattainable (for genetic or socio-economic reasons) by the vast majority of people. The shallowness of a culture which glorifies oneconcept of physical beauty, the attitudes to sex and sexuality which go along with that shallowness, and the base-capitalism which drives the advertiser to calculate that profit is maximised if consumer indvidual insecurity is heightened, all spring to mind.

But without getting bogged-down in all of that, there is a simple reason to lament this obsession with physical perfection. Namely, that January is a horrible time of year, when people are likely to be feeling near their lowest due to the cold, the damp and the darkness. How many people, recovering from the Christmas excesses  will have walked onto a tube platform, seen the near-naked Adonis, and thought to themselves: ”I am  disgusting person – and furthermore, I have no excuse. I could look like that if I just went to the gym a couple of times a week” ?

How many of those people have walked away feeling miserable? How many have given in and bought a tub of Maximuscle? How many have joined the gym, and wondered what is so wrong with them that after going “a couple of times a week” the image in the mirror still looks nothing like the one on the tube? How many then give up and sink into a physical self-loathing, quite possibly contributing to wider dissatisfaction and depression?

As I mentioned above, this is a problem which has dogged women already for decades, often in more pernicious formats with more pernicious outcomes. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon that man too are starting to be affected, as surely they must be whenever they see an advert for Calvin Klein or Abercrombe and Fitch, let alone the downright dishonesty of Maximuscle. 

Either way, it shouldn’t be tolerated. We should not stand by and be told that there is a certain we way have to look, be coaxed and bullied into parting with our money out of a desire to fulfil that image, and condone the state of affairs where failure to attain the virtually unattainable renders untold millions miserable.

It’s just happens that in the case of Maximuscle - the case of the wilful misleading of consumers to exploit insecurities a product’s own poster campaign helps to create - there is a direct opportunity to take a stand and protest that this is unacceptable. Here’s the link, one more time.

If enough people complain, the ASA does listen. If the ASA listens, then Maximuscle will know about it, and it should hit them where it hurts. Filling in a complain form will take five minutes of your time, and it could be the most worthwhile thing you do today.

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