I saw this billboard going up on the Borrowdale Road the other day. Aside from my persistent question about the disconnect between the growing number of billboards littering Harare’s streets (city revenue, presumably) and the consistent poor quality of things like pothole repair and road maintenance (absence of city spending), this one caught my eye for another reason.

Okay, so I can read – So I can tell it’s an ad for Raylite Batteries. But what is that woman in the red dress doing in the advert? Like, what does she have to do with the battery? The answer, of course, is nothing. But hey – sex sells, so sexy women sell, so if I put a sexily dressed (faceless, irrelevant, dehumanised) woman up there on the billboard in the general proximity of my battery, my battery, presumably, will also sell.

I note the slogan is “Never add water! Just fit and forget.” Presumably that’s the battery they’re talking about, not the woman.

This entry was posted on May 30th, 2013 at 11:57 am by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Media, Reflections, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.