Asda Advertisement 2012 - Sexist or Not

Asda has received over 600 complaints about their 2012 advertisement based on Christmas. The work all being done by a women has reached 600 complaints about how its offensive and sexists. The last line of the ad "Behind every great Christmas there is a mum, and behind every mum there is Asda" caused over 620 complaints to the ASA

The TV advertisement shows a harassed mother flooded with festive preparations: shopping, cooking, cleaning, writing cards and wrapping. At the same time, it showed the dad and the rest of the family being in the background doing nothing but having fun.

The stereotype throughout this advertisement is to show that women are hardworking and have greater independence to men. This is because the mom is doing all the responsibilities to make Christmas perfect with no help from her husband. At the start of the video we can see that the mother is making the decision of buying the Christmas tree. From this we can see that the mother is the boss of the relationship. Later on in the video there is a scene where the mother is directing the father where to put the Christmas tree making him look useless when doing preparations. Another key scene is when the mother sits down at the dinner table on the beanbag. To some people this is because she was the last person to arrive at the table but to others it shows that the mother is not respected enough. The fact that she is doing all the work but has the lowest seat at the dinner table shows that the people in the household do not respect her. Furthermore, we can see that the dad is sitting at the head of the table. This can be seen as a 'mockery' as we have not seen the dad do anything yet he has the important seat.  This links back to the reality of family life since the 1950 with mums being responsible for the household chores, cooking and looking after their children whilst the dad comes home from work and does not really do anything to help.

The reason why people may of thought that this advertisement was sexists was simply that women do the most work in the house and men do nothing. As much as this advertisement seems like an outdated stereotype, statistics show that 80% of women {of 1896 surveyed} believe that this advertisement reflects on common experience. Furthermore, the women believe that they carry the weight of the house especially at Christmas. Some people may argue that even though the father wasn't useful in the video, he played a positive role helping preparations, entertaining children and hosting the family.