Advertisement Analysis: Steel Tribe Muscle Gear

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).

Have you ever been watching television and a commercial for Hydroxycut comes on featuring a male or female who went from 250 pounds to 150 pounds and looks like a fitness model just from using Hydroxycut? Although these results may seem extreme this is what many fitness advertisements promote; portraying unrealistic body images and displaying false results. Fitness advertising can be found in print and broadcast forms. While fitness advertising can be viewed as having both positives and negatives, I believe fitness advertising is negative. This paper will discuss the negatives of fitness advertising, to include creating negative body images and promoting false results. It will, also, address the counterarguments against fitness advertising being negative.

     We live in a fast paced society that is ruled by mass media. Every day we are bombarded by images of, perfect bodies, beautiful hair, flawless skin, and ageless faces that flash at us like a slide show. These ideas and images are embedded in our minds throughout our lives. Advertisements select audience openly and subliminally, and target them with their product. They allude to the fact that in order to be like the people in this advertisement you must use their product. This is not a new approach, nor is it unique to this generation, but never has it been as widely used as it is today. There is an old saying 'a picture is worth a thousand words,' and what better way to tell someone about a product

Media plays a major role in one’s life as it is everywhere you go. Nobody is able to run away from media because it is portrayed through many different techniques such as online, print and broadcast advertising. These advertisements try to show that in order to obtain happiness, you “need” to buy that certain product. In this essay, I will argue how this advertisement plays upon society’s perspective on beauty and the perfect body size, showing that through makeup products and the perfect body, women will feel more confident and welcomed in society. This will be represented through a Tom Ford advertisement, showing the expectations marketers have for women, with supporting evidence from the articles, “Image – Based Culture: Advertising and

Consumers do not just buy products, they buy images. These images are how they want their life to be, how they want other people to see them, and how they want to see themselves. How companies are able to sell all of this to consumers with just one product is through advertising. Advertisements play a crucial role in the business world. The advertisements people view provoke them into either buying the product being sold or not. In some cases however, advertisements can be taken too far. Throughout this essay, I will argue how the over sexualizing nature of Abercrombie and Fitch’s advertisements promote sexual activities to the younger generations and how these ads can lead to young girls obtaining a negative body

This sexual objectification around sports and personal health is also seen in majority of health magazines painted with bodybuilding advisements through advice on fat reductions, muscle building, and tanning formulas that even if women had a sense of control over their bodies, they are being expressed and distorted in a manner that threatens their own health. Victoria Secret is iconic for promoting underweight models on the verge of being diagnosed with anorexia. In 2014, Victoria Secret released their Perfect Body sports ad featuring multiple white women with edited unachievable toned bodies in feminine recognized sports. The desire to satisfy society’s sex-role expectation influences the decisions women make regarding their sport of choice.

Adolescents are bombarded with many media messages every day. These media messages may take the form of advertisements, newspapers, magazines, broadcast media such as television, and more. Such media can have a detrimental affect on how adolescents perceive their body image. Adolescents may feel pressured to diet, to spend copious amounts of money on the latest trends, and they may even feel inadequate compared to the models they see on television. Adolescence is a time of change that is difficult for many already. The messages conveyed to these adolescents often do more harm than good.

There were three questions that arose in a study by Spurr and Berry and they were ‘‘what are adolescent understandings of psychological wellness, are there positive or negative influences on an adolescent’s sense of psychological wellness, and does the psychological dimension influence adolescent wellness?’’ (Spurr & Berry, 2013, p. 18-19). The study targeted ages 16-19, this raised a reoccurring concern of the participants, the effect of media on their views of physical appearance. These adolescents are comparing themselves to the models and celebrities and it’s causing them to feel bad about themselves. Other adolescents expressed their views of how the media affected their thoughts. One stated ‘‘you think about it more. Like, once you see someone like that, you think about what you’re eating, and why you don’t look like that.’’ (Spurr & Berry, 2013, p. 26). Other participants made references that girls are hurting their bodies trying to lose weight to look like the women in the media. Male adolescents are also feeling the same way. When they see a toned male, they want to be like that so they start working out or popping drugs to make themselves bigger. Men and women struggle with the same ideology that the perfect body is skinny and muscular but this has negative repercussions, this body dissatisfaction leads to harmful weight control

Our eyes collect information and processes it without us even knowing. We use our eyes as the basic collector of everything, and we process it, sometimes done subconsciously. The Ideology of Norms in today's society is the key element that we live by, and we learn these norms through conversation, observation, and media. Media being especially important, especially now. We consume more and more media everyday. This grows as technology does, giving more platforms for advertisements. Therefore, companies have a responsibility of expressing or advertising their elements with sensitivity to general public. Some companies will persuade by using body image. They will set a standard of beauty and all those who don’t relate to it, are not beautiful. In Protein World’s recent advertising for their diet supplement products, you can see a clear Marginalization of women. They do this by using Color, Anchorage, and Problem & Benefit to marginalize and persuade women to purchase their product.

Commercial advertising may produce the sense of low-esteem, humiliation and even inferiority in those women and men who do not look or act like the people represented in the media as having the ideal body.This negatively affects how people view how they look compared to how other people look in the media. This causes many people to have low self-esteem about their own body images which can make people do extreme dieting or go into depression because they don't look like what the media showcases. Representations of women in the media tend to highlight beauty, size and relationships. These stereotypes carry on in commercials and negatively impact women’s outlook on what’s important. This can be seen in the Inspire Her Mind by Verizon Wireless.

The media is an ever-present part of our daily lives. Magazines line checkout lanes in grocery stores, televisions are in stores and gyms and every home, cell phones carried in pockets allow instant access to social media as well as digital versions of magazines and web-based platforms for watching television shows and movies. This unlimited exposure is not always a good thing. The benefits of having access at anytime to the latest news and entertainment is tempered by the damage of the body ideals demonstrated in commercials, in magazines, in television shows and movies. Everywhere women look they are told to be smaller, that smaller is beautiful and smaller is better, and men are told that they should be bigger, stronger and more muscular

Advertisements have an impact on individuals in society, regardless of what the ads are trying to sell or promote. Certain advertisements force the idea and image of what true beauty “actually” is. These advertisements portray the ideal body which makes a majority of women strive to attain that look, by any means necessary. However, The Dove Beauty Campaign, Real Beauty, revolutionized society’s idea on beauty and allows women to feel beautiful on their own. Dove’s campaign presents the idea that women do not need dozens of cosmetic products to feel beautiful; instead, they should “love the skin [they are] in” (Dove). Virginia Postrel, writer for Bloomberg View and author

Today 's society is constantly presented with misrepresentations of the ideal body image through the advertising of diet plans and supplements. Companies in the fitness industry scam people into buying useless products or services by advertising with individuals that have, what the mass media sees as, the 'perfect ' body composition. In addition to getting consumers to buy into a product or service, these companies also aid society with the spreading of this fake idea of what classifies as the perfect body. They portray a body image that is unattainable for most individuals in society, despite how many of those supplements being advertised they buy. The models used in these advertisements, are in most cases, starving themselves, enhanced via illegal substances, or are photo-shopped to the point where even they do not look like the model displayed in the ad. All this has led to many people wanting to strive for that perfect body, that in reality, is impossible to achieve. In order to show the affect these advertisements play in our society, I will be deconstructing multiple ads in the fitness industry, as well as multiple peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles centered around the impact media has on an individual 's self-image.

Fitness magazines typically feature articles concerning weight loss and often include a variety of topics ranging from celebrity workout routines to diets to supplements to sex tips to and even healthy recipes. Some, such as Men’s Fitness boast a front cover with an attractive celebrity’s that has got toned for an upcoming film and entail that celebrity’s routine and diet as well as interviews asking them what they did to prepare for their role. Often the celebrity says he did some intense cardio and weight lifting routines and stuck to a very strict diet while leading up the film’s premiere. There are almost always products being endorsed by the celebrity in the magazine including gyms, supplements, or clothes. The central component of these magazines however isn’t to offer the consumer advice, motivation, or fitness news. It is instead to show the attractive celebrity showing off their muscles and abs, which causes consumers to try and look the same. This is not only found in fitness magazines but in all aspects of the media. This is an effective technique that targets the consumer’s insecurities because as statistics show the average American male is overweight. And as a culture obsessed with weight and looking physically aesthetic it is a strong selling point that Gold’s Gym marketers are well aware of. To sell gym memberships, the Gold’s Gym advertisement in Men’s Fitness uses bold words spelling the words “F-A-T” and “F-I-T” using a overweight man as the center letters

In “Body- Image Pressure Increasingly Affect Boys,” Jamie Santa Cruz shows that the media harms boys and girls in similar ways. Cruz discusses that “boys who were highly concerned with their weight, about half were worried about gaining more muscles…major difference between boys and girls when it comes to weight concern: whereas girls typically want to be thinner, boys are as likely to feel pressure to gain weight as to lose it” (1). This displays that boys feel obligated to look a certain way like having a 6-pack or looking physically fit due to the influence of media. Similarly, women want to lose weight because being skinny is considered to be attractive. Cruz shows that most action figures have a significant proportion of muscles which displays the “improbable body image they set up for young boys” (3-4) because of this, boys are “falling prey to a distorted image of themselves and their physical inadequacies” (3-4). It is presenting men in a way that is unnatural, like how girls and their bodies are advertised. We assume that this is how men should appear and we judge them based on the illusions that the media has created. Cruz displays that “steroids is associated with depression, range attacks, suicidal tendencies, and cardiomyopathies” (4). He asserts that boys are pressured to look what is considered as healthy in society. This shows how the media is harmful to boys because they can use other alternatives, such as