Cliff Freeman + Partners

Cliff Freeman for DSW.

This is the first commercial created for DSW, and it definitely whoops any of the ads I've seen for Payless lately. The concept is much more creative than any Payless commercials, though Martin Williams isn't exactly setting the bar high with work for Payless, but this DSW campaign at the very least shows some thought. There have been several other variations of this ad that play off of the notion of women as hunters, who come out of hibernation and prowl for shoes. On one hand, I can watch this ad and think of it as just a light-hearted way to say women love shoes and shoe-shopping is a serious business. On the other hand, I can't help but feel like this ad, and the whole concept of the campaign, does its share of promoting a consumer culture and over-consumption. When you examine the concept with more detail, it takes a simple event, shopping for shoes, and transforms it into an instinctual behavior that supposedly all women are born with the instinct to carry out. This plays a part in perpetuating conventional gender roles and establishing what acts and behaviors girls are supposed to engage in. It implies that girls have some innate quality in them that gives them some natural impulse, need, or desire to shop. The fact that this ad is focused on the change of the seasons, and the need for women to go out and buy multiple pairs of new shoes (as indicated in the woman trying on multiple pairs of shoes) for the new season only further promotes a culture of consumption. Granted, these critiques expect that consumers are looking deeply into the subtext of the ad, which most people don't do. However, over time, being exposed to enough of these sorts of images, with people shopping and buying new things, becomes a learned behavior. This is part of the, though not the whole, problem we have as a society that consumes more than we can discard and sustain at one time on earth.