Markets

Yoplait Ad Is Merely the Tip of Madison Ave's "Normalization" of Anorexia

By Jim Edwards

Updated on: June 16, 2011 / 2:18 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

When you see the ad that Yoplait yanked after protests that it encouraged anorexia, you'll probably think to yourself, What's the fuss about? Hasn't everyone, at some time, stood in front of a fridge having an internal debate about whether a slice of cheesecake will be worth it?

The ad's payoff is that a pot of Yoplait's strawberry cheesecake yogurt is only 100 calories. Big deal. Yet when the National Eating Disorders Association complained about the ad, General Mills (GIS) vp/corporate communications Tom Forsythe backed off immediately:

We had no idea ... The thought had never occurred to anyone, and no one raised the point. We aren't sure that everyone saw the ad that way, but if anyone did, that was not our intent and is cause for concern. We thought it best to take it down.

The ad is completely innocent until you line it up with advertising's history of pro-anorexic grotesques, and a disturbing trend among anorexics to celebrate their medical condition.

Blogs like Thinspiration and IWillBeaSize0 encourage girls to starve themselves. Anorexia used to be universally regarded as a mental illness, but there's a depressing "pro-ana" movement on the web to normalize it. Some have promoted "managed anorexia" as a weight loss tool.

The movement's biggest victory was when model Kate Moss -- no stranger to Madison Avenue -- said in 2009 that she lived by the motto "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels."

Advertisers have gone along with the pro-ana movement, intentionally or not, to a surprising degree. Consider:

Pretzel Crisps advertised its snacks with the "tastes as good as skinny feels" line in 2010.
Web fashion retailer Revolve had to promise that it would stop using model Allie Crandell (pictured) until she gained weight, after consumers complained that either images of her had been Photoshopped or she must be anorexic.
Italy banned a billboard campaign against anorexia in 2007.
Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) has long discriminated against non-perfect body sizes in its hiring and its product sizing. CEO Mike Jeffries even applied his rules to his own face -- with bizarre consequences.
Even when advertisers seek out "real" people for their ads, as in Unilever (UL)'s "real beauty" campaign for Dove, they want those ordinary folks to be "flawless."
And, of course, Ralph Lauren became famous last year for retouching photos of models so that they appeared thinner than human biology permits.

Yes, Yoplait's move was an overreaction. The actress in the ad is of ordinary size -- a brave choice for a food company, frankly. But it's nice to see a major marketer deciding that it does not want to go along with the body-fascism that is such a large part of marketing aimed at women. Hopefully the brand will generate more PR points than it lost in ad exposure.

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