Commercials and Cavemen

In 2004, GEICO aired a series of commercials that featured a caveman-like Neanderthal. The storyline was a commercial within a commercial where GEICO promotes their product with the slogan “so easy, a caveman could do it.” The Neanderthal represented in the advertisements were ordinary people living in modern society, dressed in suits, going to work, eating out at restaurants, living in modern homes they owned, etc. Behind the scenes, the Neanderthal would react and be offended by this slogan as it undermines their intellectual and cultural likeness to the anatomically modern humans whom they live amongst in the story. The commercial highlights the need to correct the misconceptions people have of Neanderthals while creating a comical advertisement about GEICO’s accessibility to its users.

With the inspiration of the GEICO commercials, I wanted to find a more recent commercial to see whether social perceptions of early humans depicted in media has changed. I stumbled upon a commercial that aired in 2018 by the Rexona anti-perspiration deodorant company. The link to this commercial is found here: https://youtu.be/EkF-8Nqn9d8. It is interesting to note that in this commercial, despite being aired a decade after the GEICO commercial the producers resurface all the biases the society has on the early humans. They initially depict a group of cavemen who are impaired of speech, dressed in mud, covered in animal skin, and wandering like lost animals in a deserted desert. The plot then begins to unravel where the group finds fire and become hunters and gathers, scavenging the land. The word choice to which they then describe how during the progression of time people got “faster, stronger and maybe smaller” and lastly “evolved” reflects the habit we have on relating the forward movement to development or complexity in humans. The commercial creates a timeline of this misunderstood perception of evolution as a directional change from the primitively depicted caveman to the anatomically modern humans. The deodorant company attempts to exploit their understanding of a primitive, cognitively impaired early human being unable to efficiently move to the notion that humans today are better, fitter, and move more, thus their selling point of needing deodorant. This commercial is quite flawed in many aspects, but how they attempt to exploit “primitiveness” to then being less active is quite unsubstantial, to say the least.