Southwest Airlines Ad-Venture

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I’ve just heard from the control tower, and we’re third in line for take off . . . WHAT THE?” 

Amid sounds of crunching metal mingled with the sounds of gasps and screams, passengers onboard the aircraft suddenly lurch forward in their seats. A voice returns to the intercom: 

“Ladies and gentlemen, Totally Distracted Airlines would like to apologize for the unexpected crash and resulting delay to your flight. The image of supermodel Bar Rafaeli on the Southwest Airlines plane taking off ahead of us distracted your pilots and the pilots in front of him, and we’re now part of a four-plane-pile-up. Please remain seated, with your safety belts fastened, and await further instructions from the cabin crew.”

It’s both sad and ironic that the page of history being written this Women’s History Month is yet another chapter on youth and beauty. Twenty-two years after the United States expanded Women’s History Week to a full month, the message about the importance of youth and beauty to the feminine identity in our culture worsened rather than improved over time. Women’s bodies are still a mere commodity, a marketing trump-card; if it doesn’t sell, put a pretty girl on it, better yet, a pretty girl in a bikini. 

Before reaching for the corner of the page and writing this off as a feminist rant, consider this: the Swedish Bikini Team had as much to do with an American beer as an Israeli supermodel has to do with cheap air travel. This isn’t anything new, but aren’t you just a little bit peeved at the idea that we haven’t really progressed beyond the odd pairing of scantily clad women with products that they have nothing to do with? If not, by all means, turn the page. 

Having worked in both fields of marketing and women’s studies, I fully appreciate that everyone in business (not just sales and marketing) is always concerned with the bottom line of sales and the return on investment from ever-dwindling advertising budgets. Rafaeli’s image plastered (or affixed in some other fashion) is there because it was a new idea, a re-invention of an advertising wheel that undoubtedly brought on what both Sports Illustrated and Southwest Airlines hoped for: reactions just like this one. Free column inches are, as Mastercard would say, quite literally, priceless.

To argue that it is horrendous that women’s bodies are still commodified, objectified and used as marketing tools would play right into the hands of critics like Rush Limbaugh, who proudly coined the term “Femi-nazi,” a term for any woman who dared to step out of the kitchen and have an opinion on how we are treated, raised and understood by mere virtue of having two X chromosomes. 

One of the cornerstones of feminism is that we are concerned with equality for all people and specifically women’s ability to make choices for themselves on an equal basis as everyone else, regardless of genetics, ethnicity, culture, ability, class, religion, etc. In plain English, Rafaeli should be able to commodify her image in a bikini, a parka or even—gasp—in the buff if she wants. Hopefully, she makes a mint off of selling those images; it’s her right to do so.

What is concerning is that Southwest Airlines chose Sports Illustrated for this advertising venture without seeing past the initial dollar signs to how it could affect their bottom line in the future. In short simple terms, Southwest may have shot themselves in the rudder. 

According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, women make up 52 percent of the world’s population and around 51 percent of the United States population. The “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty” website claims 81 percent of women in the US “strongly agree that the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can never achieve.” Southwest Airlines, by virtue of their new ad-placement and sponsor, made a jumbo-sized statement about how they view women’s opinions on advertising and media content. 

Maybe the larger and more positive response to this ad-venture is that we’ve finally started to successfully tune out these unwanted messages in other areas. We no longer have to sit through ads where groups of women are lectured by a man on how to remove stains (which does make one wonder: if he’s such an expert, why is he not doing the laundry in the first place). Or watch ads for cereals and support groups with food that outnumber messages of the same nature directed toward men by a ratio of 100:1 (Jared from Subway being the one).

We have DVDs, online episodes and recording devices enabling us to skip those marketing messages altogether. How many more magazines are they really going to sell by making their cover jumbo-sized? Who’s going to see it at 30,000 feet? It’s a bird on a plane. I’m still flying with the other guys, and I still don’t read Sports Illustrated.