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How the Royal Air Force shot down tropes with a simple flip!

The 2019 RAF advertisement throws a wrench into tired clichés by showcasing the multifaceted lives of real women and their desire for action and resilience over superficial concerns. It shatters traditional gender stereotypes by emphasizing inclusivity, where every role is open to everyone regardless of gender. This powerful message encourages individuals to define themselves by their actions and contributions, not by conforming to societal expectations and outdated portrayals of women.

Tenets of this Video: 

The ‘Anti-cliche’

To get into this, we first need to dive deep into cliches, stereotypes, and archetypes - words often used interchangeably, incorrectly. 

Cliché: A cliché is an overused phrase, expression, or idea that has lost its originality and impact due to frequent repetition. Simply put, cliches are predictable as hell. 

Stereotype: A stereotype is a widely held, simplified, and often exaggerated belief or image about a particular group of people or thing, typically based on assumptions rather than individual characteristics.

Archetype: An archetype is a universally recognized symbol, character, motif, or theme that recurs in literature, mythology, folklore, and other forms of storytelling, representing a fundamental human experience or aspect of the human psyche. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is an example of this. 

This ad flips the usual cliches associated with advertisements associated with women. How? With the next principle.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is the act or placement of two elements (such as images, ideas, or concepts) side by side or close together, often for the purpose of highlighting their differences or creating a contrast between them. 

The ad nails the the auditory portrayal and treatment of cliches and juxtaposes it visual  archetypes that elevates women/gender equality 

Here’s what you should aim for if you want to emulate this formula: Portray meaningful representations to fight reducing them to stereotypes or clichés.

In conversations about visual media, saying “I hate tropes” has become a trope in itself. The cycle is something that anyone that has ever been in a pitch meeting with a client will know -

The client asks for something extraordinary and the phrase OUT OF THE BOX is yelled out a couple of times before papers are scrapped, documents are wiped out and the final pitch arrives.

The excitement is in the air until the client says “This is TOO out of the box, can we go with something like [done to death trope that rival brand used] instead?”

This holds true for so many campaigns, but this pattern is all the more prevalent in ads with women and womanhood in the centre. You know the campaigns that pop up right after Valentines Day, run all the way through the first week of March and disappear for a year until next February rolls around? Yeah, we’re talking about those. 

Every trope starts off as a unique idea that people then capitalize on, until it becomes the default, after which the once unique idea becomes the subject of rolling eyeballs in briefings. But here’s the catch - no matter how much we hate it, tropes are here to stay. It’s how we use it that makes all the difference - like what the Royal British Army has done here. 

What is the goal? To create awareness about the diversity in the Royal Air Force and encourage women to join 

How did they go about this? By using the age old tropes that advertisement’s for womens’ products always go with - with a brilliant twist. 

Most advertisers and creatives constantly look for that one novel idea - something that’s completely new and out of the box that blows everyone’s minds. They detest the ideas that are cliche(“That’s too hacky!”). But here’s what’s wrong with that approach - Novelty without familiarity scares people away. 

THE GOLDEN RULE: Remember, half-measures won’t do the trick. If you’re going for it, you have to go all the way.

Derek Thompson writes this in this book “Hitmakers: The Science of Popularity in the age of distraction”, I’m paraphrasing: Novelty is a myth. People trust what they’re familiar with. So if you want to sell something new, bake familiarity into it. To sell something surprising, make it familiar. To sell something familiar, make it surprising. 

You can hear more of this in his brilliant Ted Talk here.

This ad executes this to perfection - we’ve all heard lines about wrinkles and tans, about hair that’s strong enough to pull a station wagon out of a ditch, about wings that help you fly. Take these lines that we are familiar with, and put the point across by juxtaposing them with visuals that are completely new to us and hits us with the perfect line that communicates the idea - “Women should be defined by actions, not cliches”.