Why 90% of television advertising target women?

I love Top-Gear, but I don´t like cars particularly. Iike their jokes, Specially when Jeremy Clarkson exposes what is now known as prejudices. Some people don´t accept them even in the context of a comic show. This is a sign of this time when idiots and cowards rule the World.

To watch  this program I have to pay in the form of advertising. For me even have been astonishing how even men directed channels such are National Geographic or specially, Discovery Channel or the Energy channel in Spain have a great majority of femenine advertising.  May be because many men watch these channels together with his couple. But, the reason why advertisers spend more money in these women rather than  in their men, who are more motivated to watch these channels is something puzzling for me.

I know that femenine directed advertising has dominated TV from the beginning. Even when women where not "liberated" payed professionals, and women used to care for their famillies, there were a disproportionate amount of advertising about product for women in the home. There were a ridiculous amount of happy mothers advertising cleaning products. After the women´s liberation, this same 90% of femenine targetted advertising now promotes  magic beauty products, magic fat reduction products, magic healt products, dietary products for women and so on.

Why? Do women spend more time watching TV than men? I don´t thing so. Specially now, when women work out of home. The fact that in the nigh when working and non workin men and women are at home, the advertising is still mainly about products for women. Are women more monetary affuent than men? Neither were before nor they are now. Do women buy more spensive productos?  No . In fact it is the opposite: Men usually buy more expensive products. They buy the most spensive car they can afford, for example. Do women spend more money globally than men? I think it is not the case; In the old times, when  the marketeers counted the buyers in numbers of familly units, women had a considerable buying power, despite the fact that they did´n made money for themselves. Now women do, so the manufacturers create products for two different and completely separated universes of men and women. but I doubt that women have more money to spend than  men. Women buy things more often, but they buy cheaper things. Men buy less but they spend more in each buy.

If an advertiser would be what now is called "rational" -a form of simple minded stupidity economically sanctioned- and if the car business is three orders of magnitude greater than the dietary yoghurts industry then there would be 1000 spots of sport cars for each spot of magic yoghurt for weight loss. But the fact is almost the opposite.

The reason is that advertisers know that the money spend in femenine targetted products has far more returns and are more inmediate. Men are not so heavily influenced by advertising. Men are much more conservative. Introducing a new product for men is much much more difficult. That is what advertisers and market researchers know.

The reason behind lies in the different psichology of men and women, based in the different life that in the past, they had to cope with.

Frist of all, the Christian tradition of strong attachment of the young couple to the girl's family is a conquest of civilization. And it is the exception. In other societies, and specially in the more primitive ones,  the women abandon the clan of his parents and enters the clan of his husband. In tribal societies, the kidnapping os women it is the main motive of -and the cause of- wars. The alleged cause of the War of Troy is a symbol of the deep cause of most, if not all the ancient wars.  In any case, since the beginning of times, by agreement or by force, women abandoned their society and entered other that they did not know, sometimes they did not know at all.

So women had a problem. They had to adapt as fast as possible to an alien environment. The fastest way to adapt to a new society is trough fashion sensibility. Forced by circumnstances to live from the first moment in an alien society, without having time to know the rationale behind each cultural fact, the best way to be successful is to imitate the best practices around. "where you go, do what you see".  The best to do is to imitate the most sucessful women around.

As result of this adaptive pressure for millions of years, since prehuman times, the femenine psichology developped a much more stronger fashion sensibility and a shallow thinking.  Fashion sensibility is an unconscious, hardwired instinct, immune to education that produces aestetic sensations. Men are not absent of this instinct. The atractiveness of an sport car is a result of fashion sensibility in men. The same impulse makes this same sport car to look ugly and ordinary 10 years later.  Yet it makes the same car to look classy and exclusive after 50 years more. But in women, fashion sensibility  is the dominant way of thinking.

Men, who stayed for life in their home societies, where their descendants live for generations and very often died for, spend more in rational thinking because for men things were less uncertain. Prediction of future from what we observe in a predictable environment is the purpose for which rational thinking was made for. Participation  in social organization  and solving collectively problems with a mix of technical skills and innovative social organization had a high return of investment for men. Men invested much more in their societies for the same reason women invested much more on their children, just because these investments payed more for each one. Destroy the male role and you will destroy the society. Destroy the female role and the society will depopulate. both things happens today simultaneously, by the way.

So this is the reason for fashion sensibility in women and this is the reason of the higher payment of women-targetted advertising: An spot with a successful women who uses a new product will excite a powerful impulse in the watching women to buy the same.

Finally, to deactivate aggressive feminists, i would say that I'm sure that Intelligent women will agree with me. A sucessful woman said me so ;)

By te way:

http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2011/06/men-more-difficult-to-persuade-with-advertising-than-women/