#Metoovertising: the institutional work of creative women who are looking to change the rules of the advertising game

ABSTRACT

In the wake of #MeToo, the ad industry is coming to terms with its own issues of sexual harassment. We therefore explore the institutional work of actors who are constrained by these gendered institutional arrangements and consider how they might be involved in changing the sexist attitudes and behaviours prevalent in ad agencies. We consider the work of Les Lionnes, a collective of women working in French advertising agencies, who form a boundary organisation to address sexual harassment in the French advertising industry. By conducting critical discourse of their 2019 poster campaign, together with a netnographic study of their social media sites and an interview with its founder, we identify how advertising is used to expose the sexist attitudes and behaviours embedded in discourse and challenge the continued legitimacy of institutional logics. The success of this work may be further enhanced when it is aligned with a wider social discourse, such as #MeToo. We therefore conceptualise the advertising undertaken by Les Lionnes as institutional work which seeks to expose sexual harassment and abuse within the ad industry. We call this novel form of advertising #Metoovertising.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• advertising
• critical discourse analysis
• social networks
• #MeToo
• #Metoovertising

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://www.instagram.com/leslionnesfrance/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helen Thompson-Whiteside

Helen Thompson-Whiteside is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth.

Sarah Turnbull

Sarah Turnbull is a Reader in Advertising at the University of Portsmouth. She is co-author of Marketing Communications: touchpoints, sharing and disruption (2019) and Associate Editor for the Journal of Marketing Management. Sarah is on the Editorial Review Board of the International Journal of Advertising and has published over 70 papers, books, articles and cases. She is a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Marketing and a Freeman of The Worshipful Company of Marketors.