Smiling Through the System: Glo’s Holiday Ad Under bell hooks’ Gaze

    In advertising, seasonal promotions blur the distinction between genuine cultural celebration and sales tactic. Glo's Christmas commercial, "Feliz Navidad Nigeria!", is just such a force. With the use of colorful imagery, upbeat lighting, and important cultural iconography, the commercial endeavours to create good spirits and sell the Glo Unlimited package. But subject to the piercing analysis of bell hooks a leading Black feminist theorist and cultural critic what seems to be a celebratory development is seen to be an intricate nexus of race, gender, class, representation, and consumerism. This critique expatiate how, despite being as celebratory as the ad itself, the ad remains ensnared by capitalism and patriarchy structures that hooks dedicated her life to criticizing.

      The Glo ad opens with dynamic shots: streets lined with Christmas lights, families reuniting, and young people calling loved ones in Glo networks. Mentioning the words "Feliz Navidad Nigeria!" is a sign of multicultural mixing, where a widely used Spanish celebratory phrase gets combined with Nigerian celebrations. Music and imagery are used in the ad to convey warmth, celebration, and belongingness. But as bell hooks reminds us too, not everything that represents ’s radical or liberators. Representation that only reaffirms dominant consumer narrative without questioning structures underneath has a tendency to reinforce rather than challenge system injustices.

One of the strongest points about hooks' model is internationalize Thinking that gender, class, and race can't be addressed in isolation. Glo is illustrating a cosmopolitan, middle-class Nigeria, full of smiling, trendy citizens enjoying blissful holiday traditions, in the advertisement. While this might be seen as empowering, it subtly mutes less privileged voices. The absence of working-class environments, rural homes, or poor communities suggests that chosen Nigerians are being invited to participate in this utopia celebration. Such selective visibility, hooks would argue, operates to construct class privilege and obscures the mundane brutal realities of most Nigerians who access Glo's services but never get heard. Hence, the advert establishes a potential Nigeria, not an inclusive one.

Also absent from the visual regime of the ad is the "oppositional gaze" which hook describes as the way in which the oppressed spectator, or specifically the Black woman, resignifies and subverts the dominant look through questioning what one observes. There is no room for opposition here. The spectator is to smile, sing along, and indulge in the nirvana. But hooks would respond that genuine cultural validation is open to critique. Where are the stories of exclusion, or the households who just don't have access to data? Where is acknowledgement that even in season's greetings, inequality pervades? The commercial's high-gloss sheen and overall good cheer quash any possibility for critical analysis, substituting it with a very manufactured feel-good message.

Gender also figures centrally in bell hooks' critique of media. She challenged the manner in which most dominant media represents women, and Black women especially, in limited and limiting ways. In the Glo advert, though women are seen, they are largely confined to spaces traditionally reserved for them smiling mothers, stylish dancers, and keepers of joy. They have passive or supportive roles, never the foreground of the technological or economic activity of the advert. No female innovators, no females using Glo services for activism or learning. As hooks would say, this performs a patriarchal text that includes women but does not empower them. The tone of the brand, as the beneficent bestow of contentedness, is paternalistic "Glo brings you joy," "Glo connects you to love" cementing corporate power cloaked as beneficence.

hooks also commented on the potential of education as a route to freedom. She believed that every medium, especially those broadcasting to mass audiences, had the potential to and should make audiences think and consider the world more critically. The Glo advertisement does not. It entertains but does not educate. It invites feeling but not thinking. In a year when the causes of family separation, displacement, or economic hardship are poised so well for engagement, the ad is still deliberately apolitical. It forgoes a chance to emphasize how social connectedness in the virtual world can be leveraged for empowerment i.e., through distant learning, community organizing, or enhanced access to healthcare. It keeps it simple, though: happiness is connection, and connection is Glo.

One of the most relevant sections of hooks' more recent work is her emphasis on love and community as radical practice. She has written extensively on how love can be a source of resistance through identification, solidarity, and healing. Love is presented in the Glo advert in a superficial, sun-kissed way: individuals calling each other, embracing each other, smiling at each other. Yet this love is brokered through a product. It is com-modified love, not redemptive care. The consumer is warmly invited to "stay connected," but through the buying and consuming of a telecom product in and of itself. hooks would likely see this as another example of the ways that capitalist systems drain deeper emotional truths, com-modifying love as a service and not actually encouraging communal caring.

Overall, while "Feliz Navidad Nigeria!" can manage the feat of making humans smile and bringing them festive spirits, it falls short of bell hooks' liberatory vision for the media. It presents a sanitized, consumerist Nigerian reality which glosses over diversity of experience, suppresses oppositional voices, and reduces rich social feelings like love and communalism to a question of data plans and catchy tunes. It is not radical, not very inclusive, and not critical of the systems that it's defending from the view of bell hooks. To be rightfully significant in a sincere way in the view of hooks, the ad would be a feature that features stories that subvert dominant power relations. It would show women not only as smiling faces but also as decision-makers and producers. It would render the digital divide visible and make technology access a matter of justice. It would not simply sell connection but query: connection to what, for whom, and why? Only then can such an advertisement aspire to be not only celebratory, but liberatory.