Brand owners must ditch the patronising “pity porn” in their advertising and do more to properly represent disabled people, because even “pro-diversity” campaigns feature disability in a tokenistic manner.
That is the stark conclusion of a new research paper by Dr Ella Houston, Lecturer in Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, who is calling for advertisers, including charities, to paint disabled people into “realistic and multifaceted depictions of everyday life”.
Dr Houston’s study – published in the Journal of Advertising – is based on interviews with a group of women with visual impairments after asking them to respond to three advertisements.
One ad was part of a ‘Sponsor a Puppy’ campaign put together by the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, in which a mum, Emma, is seen playing with her two young sons in a playground before doing some grocery shopping.
Another, by a pharmaceutical company called Vanda Pharmaceuticals, was for ‘Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder’ medication. This disorder is one that is said to affect 70% of people who are totally blind. The ad depicts a woman, who is visually impaired, doing laundry and talking about her experiences of blindness.
Meanwhile, a print ad by the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust – a UK charity that promotes well-being, employability, education, and leadership to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds – features a young woman, Haleemah, who has visual impairment and is putting on a fashion show.
The study found that the responses the interviewees had to the ads were very different. With the Guide Dogs ad, for example, one woman described it as ‘cringeworthy’, ‘awful’ and depicting people with visual impairments as dependent on their guide dogs. She said it would leave her worried about getting a guide dog in the future because she feared people would pay more attention to the dog than to her.
However, another woman said the ad was great – because it shows that support can help women with visual impairments to do whatever they want – be parents, for example, and get on with their everyday lives.
Even so, Dr Houston discovered that despite the advertisers’ attempts to portray the everyday lives and successes of women with visual impairments, the ads continue to reinforce “ocularcentrism”, the harmful and misleading notion that having sight is essential in order to live a worthwhile life.
Dr Houston explained: “You might have an ad that represents a person who has visual impairment enjoying life and being successful, yet hints that their life and experiences would be improved if they were able to see, or there might be the assumption that their visual impairment poses a hindrance in their life.
“It leads to metaphors like ‘seeing is believing’ or ‘going in blind’, which equates blindness with ignorance. As the women with visual impairments who participated in my research pointed out, people who have visual impairments do not live in a ‘world of darkness’, not knowing what’s going on around them. That notion is completely false.”
Dr Houston argued: “There’s the idea that dramatised images of disability are more likely to capture audiences’ attention and lead to better fundraising in the case of charities. But the social implication of being viewed as objects of charity is really damaging.”
However, Dr Houston believes that charity advertisers are starting to realise that the ‘sadvertising’ approach is not working.
She continued: “Audiences are now more likely to perceive ‘sadvertisements’ – which present heart-wrenching and sympathy inducing depictions of the recipients of charity – as a manipulative marketing strategy – pity porn, essentially. So charities have started to move to more realistic images of the recipients of charity.
“But there’s still a long way to go before charity advertising loses its bad reputation. Disabled people – who demand equal rights not pity – resent the patronising attitudes charity encourages.”
Dr Houston added: “Charities carry out important work and I don’t want to detract from that point. But disabled people – like everyone else – want advertisers to represent them as cool, trendy and part of the social landscape. Disabled people don’t want to be included as a way of evoking audiences’ sadness and pity – it’s dehumanising.”
As to how advertisers can continue to improve disability representation, Dr Houston suggests that the popularity of pro-diversity advertising campaigns continues to increase – Dove’s Real Beauty campaign being a well-known example.
Even so, she warns about tokenism, pointing out that in order to bring kudos to a brand, advertisers might include a ‘token’ disabled model, or an advertiser might include a disabled model, with only a slight indication they have an impairment, but otherwise all the typical exclusionary beauty standards are enforced.
Dr Houston concluded: “Advertisers must bear in mind the diversity of disabled audiences and avoid suggesting that one disabled person’s story represents the lives of many people with impairments.
“Including disabled people in advertisements only because their impairment is perceived as ‘risky’ or a sign of ‘difference’ in and of itself is problematic and runs the risk of focusing on impairments alone, rather than on the person as a whole.
“Advertisers should consider various aspects of disabled people’s characters, and think about why they might be a good fit for a brand and advertising campaign.”
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