Femvertising as advertising strategy and Subtitling: critical analysis of female empowerment on YouTube

Abstract

This article focuses on advertising strategies of female empowerment in the marketing communication of global cosmetic brands. The starting point is that commercials do not acclaim any more eternal youth or propagate a female body with a perfect but unreachable size. On the contrary, the advertising strategy is based on promoting the empowerment of female beauty with advertising messages in favour of the diversity of the female body. This new type of advertising, referred to in the specialized advertising terminology as femvertising, is not intended to convey a stereotyped and idealized image of female beauty, instead, empowerment of women is pursued. Feminist and gender translation applied to audiovisual translation in general and, in particular, to the subtitling of audiovisual advertisements constitutes the frame of reference for this study. Specifically, applying the method of a case study, the commercial of a global cosmetic brand will be analysed and compared to its translation from English into Spanish. Firstly, the ideological load of the commercial will be determined to showcase how the discourse of female empowerment is constructed; secondly, it will be compared to its articulation in the automatic subtitling process offered on YouTube. This virtual platform offers two modes of automatically generated subtitling that determine intra and interlinguistic subtitling. The analysis will reveal a) the discursive construction around female empowerment and will shed light on whether the concept of beauty redefined by femvertising is one of feminine empowerment as opposed to the established canons of beauty, b) to which degree the automatic subtitling on YouTube conveys pro-female messages, and, finally, from a broader standpoint, c) if the subtitling on this platform, because of its global reach, is a suitable means for transnational feminist activism and works as a bridge in intercultural advertising communication.