Ads Playing Upon People's Insecurities are Unethical Essay

What does an ad say about a society? When viewing a product advertisement, many people never stop to think why the ad and product appeals to them. However, when a more critical look is taken, it’s easy to see precisely how ads are carefully tailored to appeal to trending values of a targeted demographic, and how that makes it easy to examine the society of those whom the ad is targeted at. In the analytic writing Advertisements R Us, Melissa Rubin provides an excellent example of this, as she crafts a logical and clear analysis of a 1950’s Coca-Cola magazine ad which thoroughly explains how advertisements can reveal quite a great deal about the society in which they were created.

The claim presented in the article is how ads often set unrealistic beauty standards, and how the author encourages them to “break free” from these standards by giving two examples on how ads should be compelled.

The new advertisements focused on creating unique slogan that consumers would remember and that cast products in an optimistic light (N.p. [Page 1]). By the 1880s, advertisement seems to take on a driving aspect of its own, and focused on the creation of “wants” and “needs” in the growing consumer population in order to create a market for certain items, clever businessmen would advertize products in careful language, designed to influence potential buyers into seeing the necessity of owing particular products. Economic effects on society, especially in Americans families, became apparent during the twentieth century. The place of women in the new economy was firmly cemented in the early decades of the twentieth century, with the rise of Progressivism and supply and demand economics (N.p. [Page #]). Progressive reformers and businessmen alike appealed to and propagated the idea of virtuous households, carrying a theme from the culture of sentimentalism in the 1850s that stressed the value of nuclear families with morally upright - if submissive - mothers. Many of the advertisements seen in this collection are clearly directed at women .The foundations of household economy were raised in the early twentieth century and during the World War I era. Home economy, in theory, allowed the housewife to make the most of finances, so that her family could purchase current

For the longest time now, advertising has played a huge role in how we identify ourselves in the United States with the American culture, and how others identify themselves with all the cultures of the rest of the world as well. It guides us in making everyday decisions, such as what items we definitely need to invest our money on, how to dress in-vogue, and what mindset we should have to prosper the most. Although advertising does help make life easier for most, at the same time it has negative affects on the people of society as well. Advertisement discreetly manipulates the beliefs, morals, and values of our culture, and it does so in a way that most of the time we don’t even realize it’s happened. In order to reach our main goal of

In our society today a business is not a business without an advertisement. These advertisements advertise what American’s want and desire in their lives. According to Jack Solomon in his essay, “Master’s of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising,” Jack Solomon claims: “Because ours is a highly diverse, pluralistic society, various advertisements may say different things depending on their intended audiences, but in every case they say something about America, about the status of our hopes, fears, desires, and beliefs”(Solomon). Advertisers continue to promote the American dream of what a women’s body should look like. They advertise their products in hopes for consumers to buy them, so they can look like the models pictures in the ads. Behind these ads, advertisers tend to picture flawless unrealistic woman with the help of Photoshop. In our society today to look like a model is an American dream and can be the reasons why we fantasizes and buy these products being advertised. “America’s consumer economy runs on desire, and advertising stokes the engines by transforming common objects;signs of all things that Americans covet most”(Solomon).

Jean Kilbourne’s film, Killing Us Softly 4, depicts the way the females are shown in advertisements. She discusses how advertisement sell concepts of normalcy and what it means to be a “male” and a “female.” One of her main arguments focuses on how women aspire to achieve the physical perfection that is portrayed in advertisements but this perfection is actually artificially created through Photoshop and other editing tools. Women in advertisements are often objectified as weak, skinny, and beautiful while men are often portrayed as bigger and stronger. Advertisements utilize the setting, the position of the people in the advertisements, and the products to appeal to the unconscious aspect

Do you ever watch the Super Bowl for its commercials? Have you ever bought a more expensive product because you had seen its advertisement? If the answer is yes, then you might have been a victim of today’s marketers. Jean Kilbourne, the author of “Killing us Softly” stated in one of her lectures, “The influence of advertising is quick, cumulative and for the most part, subconscious, ads sell more products.” “Advertising has become much more widespread, powerful, and sophisticated.” According to Jean Kilbourne, “babies at six months can recognize corporate logos, and that is the age at which marketers are now starting to target our children.” Jean Kilbourne is a woman who grew up in the 1950s and worked in the media field in the 1960s. This paper will explain the methods used by marketers in today’s advertising. An advertisement contains one or more elements of aesthetics, humor, and sexual nature.

In today’s mass media, it is quiet common for advertisers to assimilate class into their commercials. These advertisements portray a certain level of elegance because of the sophisticated choice to use classical background music and thick European accents. On the contrary, other advertisers take the common-folk approach by structure these commercials around the western concept. Both of these advertising tactics supports an American paradox. As argued in Jack Solomon’s “Master of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising”, the contradiction lies in the desire to strive above the crowd and the quest for social equality.

The rise in advertisement played a key role in the rise of consumption. Thanks to well-developed advertisement campaigns, America redefined what a necessity is. Advertisers encouraged Americans to actively work towards maintaining a high social standing. “Advertisers made no secret of their intention to promote novelty for its own sake, in the hope that consumers would exchange perfectly serviceable goods for goods that conformed to the latest fashions” (Lasch, 2000). Consumers devoured this advertisement scheme and began to rapidly increase their spending. Many advertisements for common, household products made claim that they could make the normal appear comparable to the high end. For example, Lux, a soap company, ran an ad in 1920 that depicted two women talking - one of the women complemented on the other on the quantity of sweaters she owned, only to find out that it is not a new sweater, but rather her old sweater that Lux soap made it look brand new (Lux)! Men and women alike began to believe

Commercials airing on the television or radio, the billboards on the side of the freeways trying to grab your attention to buy their product, even while scrolling through various social media platforms, we go through our day to day lives with advertisements all around us. In Jack Solomon’s essay, Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising, he states that the main purpose of all these advertisements is to show us our unhappiness within the American dream. He goes on to describe the differences in these advertisements which are known as the populist ads and the elite ads. Solomon's description of the contradiction between populism and elitism very much affects the way advertising and media is portrayed in American society.

Kilbourne demonstrates three major main criticisms of advertising. First, advertising objectifies people and objects for the purpose of sales. This critique promotes products as more important than people and exploits human deeds and desires. Kilbourne offers ample evidence to support her first criticism of advertising. For example, Kilbourne examines advertisement such as the Thule car-rack - which humorously places more value on sports equipment been a child's life - is evidence of the trend that advertising is “objectif[ing] people…trivializ[ing and exploiting] our most heartfelt moments and relationships. Every emotion [,person, animal, and natural phenomenon] is used to sell us something” (Kilbourne, 2006, 369). Second - according to Kilbourne - advertising promotes and perpetuates the unnatural passion for products rather than personal relationship. “Advertising corrupts relationships and then offers us products, both as solace and as substitutes for the intimate human connection we all long for and need” (Kilbourne, 2006, 370). Within this concept, advertising also commits ‘cultural rape’ by manipulating sacred symbols for their utilization as emotional leverage in advertising. Third, advertisements damage the personality and structure of culture. For example the Giwch’in tribe’s traditional culture was almost erased by the introduction of advertising through television. “As multinational chains replace local character, we end up in a world in which everyone is Gapped and Starbucked…[Thus] rampant commercialism undermines our physical and psychological health, our environments and our civic life, and creates a toxic society” (Kilbourne, 2006, 371), which robs individuals of cultural and personal diversity. Based on the evidence presented by Kilbourne, I strongly agree with all three of these

Coming from commercials, newspapers, movies, and magazines, advertisements are one of the most prominent things that we get bombarded with on a daily basis. The problem with a lot of people including myself is that we fall victim to the manipulation of the advertising sharks and their devious tricks. In the article ‘Advertising’s 15 Basic Appeals’ by Jib Fowles, the author describes how advertisers will use 15 basic emotional appeals in order to get you to say ‘I want and need that!’ In National Geographic, a historical, anthropological, discovery-based magazine, advertisers focus their energy on the middle-aged, middle-class, educated audience, who want to improve not only their intellectual integrity, but also improve their families lives if the readers can help it. National Geographic advertisers can do this by appealing to the readers’ basic needs for achievement, nurture, and guidance.

When I was a kid in school, I was told that there were the basic things that you needed like clothes and food and there were the things that you maybe want but don’t really need. Advertisements do not have any effects on what we need. We don’t watch and add about how we need to eat food to stay alive; we have hunger for that. However, Advertisements greatly affect what we want.

Each day we are bombarded with advertisements from a plethora of corporations in every waking moment of our lives. Advertising agencies have become so advanced at what they do, that often times we may not even realize we are being advertised a product. This raises an interesting ethical dilemma over a certain type of advertising: persuasive advertising. Philosophers, economists, and business professionals have debated over whether or not persuasive advertising is an immoral violation of the autonomy of consumers. While not all forms of advertising are in and of themselves certainly immoral, persuasive advertising is particularly reprehensible due to the fact that not only does it manipulate our unconscious desires of which we are completely unaware in order to sell a product, but it also routinely leads us to act against our own best interest, thus overriding our autonomy.

     However, with every positive side comes a negative, and advertising is no different. Advertising has been blamed for a great variety of negative social impacts. One of the major criticisms received by advertising is that it forces people to buy things they don’t really need, often projecting negative emotions such as fear, anxiety of guilt upon the consumer (Engel). It is claimed that advertising plays with our basic human emotions and takes advantage of them, using them as merely another technique to sell goods or services.