Estee Lauder, Hegemony, Ideology, and Interpellation

EDIT: The pictures are too big, but if you click them, you can see the whole picture.

Sometimes on Hulu, the viewer is given the choice between regular commercials or watching a long ad at the beginning of her video and then watching the rest commercial free. Cosmetics brand Estee Lauder took this idea further by creating an interactive anti-aging skin care quiz in which the viewer moves a dial between two extremes. Since I am a 20-year-old nonsmoker who wears sunblock every time I am in the sun and try to avoid the sun as much as possible, my answers always fell under the "no signs of aging" category. Every time I selected that option, the feature would ask me if I was sure, followed by some cautionary blurb about how eventually I will have visible signs of aging.

Here is an example:


LOVE the "hint" to move the slider to the right. The ad is actually telling me what my skin looks like.

When I finally finished the quiz, here is the result I got:


This video relates to interpellation because it is speaking to me personally, but I did not interpret it the way that Estee Lauder wanted me to because I did not acknowledge the nonexistant signs of aging my face has and because I did not find the quiz useful or want to know more about the product. Instead, I had an oppositional reading because I found the quiz to be totally offensive and thought that the text's warning about "external assaults" was kind of hilarious.

I think that this ad very clearly promotes the ideology that women should not show signs of aging and that I should be concerned with my appearance. The quiz tells me that I have flaws that need to be fixed. I think that the language used- calling sun exposure an "environmental assault" for example- is interesting as well because it is clearly trying to frighten its viewers. It may be a stretch but I think that the video also very subtley promotes the idea that a woman's place is in the home where environmental assaults such as pollution and sun exposure cannot harm her.

I am still slightly confused about the difference between ideology and and hegemony, but I think that Estee Lauder's ad is an example of hegemony because the idea that women are and should be concerned with their looks is a dominant one that we see from other media as well. The idea is promoted by dominant forces in society such as magazines, ads, television shows, movies, the cosmetics industry, and the fashion industry. These are all institutions that hold a great deal of power in society.

The quality of this video is really crappy, but it shows how the ad works:


Annoying, right?

*Images are from the blog Jess and Josh Talk About Stuff. If anyone is looking for something interesting to read, it's a good one.