HAIRY INDUSTRIES: THE POLITICS OF ADVERTISING HAIR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES TO SOUTH AFRICA ON FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM

Resumen

This paper investigates messaging by smaller businesses in the hair and beauty industries in South Africa who use targeted ads to promote products and services to Facebook and Instagram users in South Africa. These ads are currently not considered “political” ads, despite the fact that racialised notions of hair and beauty have played and continue to play a key role in white supremacist discourses in South Africa. Using the Facebook Ad Library, we obtained a purposive sample of ads posted to Meta platforms over a six month period (N=558) by 99 different advertisers whose ads matched the query “hair”. We review image-based adverts in this sample, asking how visual signifiers of gender and ethnicity address potential consumers and represent their hair. Multimodal content analysis was used with the aim of identifying current micro-targeting practices on the platforms. Our analysis of the messaging about hair in the ads found hegemonic racial ideologies and binary gendering in campaigns addressing ethnically differentiated audiences of women in SA. The relative absence of men from the messaging suggested that the burdens and pleasures of hair care and maintenance remain distinctly feminised while the hair industry is actively involved in production of gender. WoC were targeted with messaging which, at best, promoted a new aesthetic or promised to save money or time. At worst, it was promoting harmful products and perpetuating racialised discourses. Built on dataveillance, such micro-targeting may be fuelling feedback loops that further entrench the country’s extreme racialised inequality.