This Girl Can VS Victoria's Secret

Starting with the “This Girl Can” advert, we’ll go through 3 basic things. What we see, who it’s for and why we see it. We open to a woman in a swimsuit walking from some locker rooms towards a swimming pool. This opening shot establishes that she just got changed to go swimming. This shot may not be for anybody in particular but it lets us know immediately she’s about to do some physical activity. We see this to establish the rest of the video which will include females doing similar physical activity.

The next shot I want to analyse is about 8 seconds in when a girl is putting a gum shield in, presumably in a boxing ring but she also has pink, feminine nails on and fake eye lashes and earrings. This is for girls who are worried that being sporty and physical might make them come across as less sexy, which is mainly 14-30 year old woman. We see this because when we think of boxing, we don’t usually associate it with make-up and cosmetics. The shot shows that just because a woman does boxing, doesn’t mean she can’t still be girly or feminine and doesn’t have to be manly. It’s encouraging to the target audience.

The final shot I want to analyse is the shot that says “sweating like a pig” at about 34 seconds in. We see loads of women dancing and doing exercise but as it says, they’re sweating profusely. However there’s a shot following this a couple of seconds later saying “feeling like a fox”. This is for women 14-30 who are again quite scared to seem like a “pig” because of how sweaty and unattractive they’ll be while exercising. The following shot reassures them that they’ll still be sexy and foxy despite sweating so much. We see this again, just to encourage us to exercise and do sport.

Onto the “Victoria’s Secret” advertisement. Rather than analysing a particular shot, I want to just wrap it up in one, because many of the shots are just the same. They’re pretty girls, all following the same body type, hair styles, features and expressions. They’re all being very passive, posing for photos, not really doing much. This is also for women 14-30 but not to encourage them to get active, just to buy their products. We see all these shots to tell us, you aren’t beautiful unless you look like these girls. They’re all beautiful and you don’t look like them so you can’t be. But if you buy our products, you will look like them. That’s pretty much the entire point of the advert so as you can see, despite being for the same audience, there’s nearly no correlations between their messages, being nearly completely opposite.

In conclusion, the This Girl Can video shows all women as powerful, sexy and independent, going out and being active. Meanwhile the Victoria’s Secret advert shows all beautiful women as sexy, dependent and passive and implies any other kind of women is not a woman at all and not beautiful.