Advertisements Are Shaping Our Society

Under society’s customs for decades, young women have found themselves immersed in the pressure and anticipation to have exemplary bodies. Nearly every young woman prefers to be slim, have a perfectly shaped body, that is beautified by applying pounds of makeup to their face but does not appear ridiculously overdone. Who’s responsible for these measures imposed on young women? When a young girl picks up the model on the cover of Vogue being called flawless, naturally it’s easy for her to then aspire to be a real-life imitation of the that model. These companies produce magazine covers shown with girls’ images daily. As if keeping the perfect body wasn’t hard enough, our culture also forces girls into the forever expanding world of composition, however, body image is a surging subject for young girls. Advertisements and pictures of lean female models are all over. Young women are measured and perplexed by their physical appearances with attire intended to raise their physical structures; social media, magazines, the society, marketing campaigns, advertisements, and the fashion gurus add to a strand of excellence.

Every day, companies present the people with advertisements everywhere they go. Advertisements have become very prevalent in today’s society nowadays focusing in on a negative connotation. Advertisement has become an effective way for producers to display their new products. In present day, they come in forms of billboards, flyers, e-mails, and even text messages. It is widely known that companies create advertisements to persuade people to buy specific products or goods; however, it is not widely known that advertisements can make a negative impact on today’s society. The companies manipulate people’s mind and emotions, swaying people by new promotions and therefore generating a strong desire to fit into the society, that causes them to make inessential expenditures. Advertisements pose a critical impact on the American culture.

The text “A wife can blame herself if she loses love by getting “middle-aged” skin!” implies that men are only attracted to the beauty of a woman, and not on a woman’s intellectual personality (Ruppert, PowerPoint). This ad plays off the stereotypical idea that women’s role within society consisted of tending to the household and to the every need of her man. The ad exemplifies the issue that the only characteristic of a woman that holds importance is the level of her beauty. The sexiest assumptions hidden within this ad abolishes the intellectual assets that women had to contribute society with in that time

Advertisements are considered as an art to try to persuade people that certain products can make their lives better. Advertisements have been around in the United States since 1841. Advertisements influence society on what to buy. Advertisements lures society into buy their products. The basic role of advertisements is to provide people with basic information about a product. Companies hire celebrities to be in the advertisement in order to get more consumers to appeal to the advertisement. In Jean Kilbourne’s article, “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt: Advertising and Violence,” she discusses ways how advertisements sexualize women and make them act a certain way to appeal audience to buy a certain item. Advertisements

Advertising has recently become a hundred billion dollar industry that affects society and our lives . On the other hand, the question still remains whether or not advertisers should be allowed to use children, and women to promote their products? In my opinion, I think that advertisers should not be able to use children to promote their products because they’re being used as sex objects, exploited, and being created artificially.

To some viewers, however, the Old Spice commercial is sexist and targets the female’s boyfriends or husbands. A potential problem for the advertisement is that many women nowadays are independent, savvy, and strong that does not need a man to take care of them. In fact, many women may tell their men to purchase their own personal-care products instead. Furthermore, the humor in the commercial is heavily geared towards men. Using logical fallacy of ad hominem, however, the Old Spice commercial shifts the audience attention from the argument to the Old Spice man. The Old Spice man indirectly attacks the female audience’s boyfriend or husband’s appearance such as

Old Spice is a key example of how advertisement and marketing companies can excel and make a lot of money by understanding how societal norms and beliefs influence what people buy. Old Spice’s “Smell like a Man” campaign appealed primarily to young men, but also to men of all ages because they have created the understanding that this product will work regardless of who one is. Nearly all of the ads in the campaign addressed a female audience and each ad essentially compared the male actor in the commercial to their man, an association which emphasized luxury, fitness, and the perfect man. This is what is known as branding and it is exactly how companies such as Old

media by way of advertising. The price a consumer may have to pay to receive

Americans today tend to believe that advertisement ads are more honest that the mass-media news. For this reason, advertisers have developed new strategies to grasp the attention of consumption obsessed people. Evidently, the main goal is to stick their products into Americans memory and focus on reaching a certain type of consumer. Every ad is carefully designed and analyzed in the hopes that consumers will buy their product over other similar products. Ads are now using ordinary everyday products and linking them with charity. Advertisers use this tactic so that consumers can justify their shopping and make them feel as if they have met enough goodwill. Many well-known brands like “M.A.C” cosmetics are creating such ads to sell their products, specifically their “Viva Glam” products. Advertisers take advantage of their audience’s vulnerability and trust by exposing sexuality to grasp the attention of consumers.

Every woman grows up knowing that they one day want to be beautiful, in Margie piercy’s “Barbie Doll” she gives an in-depth look at what negative effects the concept of beauty can have on the individual. From infancy to a full-grown adult women, beauty has been a way of thinking and lifestyle. As a little girl you are given petite shaped, blonde, blue-eye dolls, while boys are given brawny soldiers

When speaking regarding the women of today’s society, in order to be considered beautiful you must have a certain appearance. The following characteristics society sees as perfect is: Long smooth hair, soft feminine facial features, thigh gap, straight white teeth, larger breasts, larger butt, small thin waist, shorter than 6 feet tall, flawless complexion, and even sometimes have Caucasian colored skin, or a light olive tone,

What is advertising? It is the billion-dollar industry that is slowly taking over our lives as they try to sell us everything. Advertising is an ever expanding force that has impacted every part of our society, including what clothes you wear, what electronics you buy, and what candidate you should vote for. Advertising is everywhere and in everything. It doesn’t only sell us products anymore, but ideas and morals. Look at any political ad to see what morals society wants humans to have. Ads have become powerful enough that they influence who becomes the most powerful person in the free world. They play off our emotions to create a desired reaction to manipulate us into buying their product and ideas. The sad part is we know we are being manipulated, yet we buy the product or idea anyway. They are still an inescapable part of our society.

Advertising has found ways to be subtle about how they go about demeaning and dehumanizing different genders, races, ages, ethnicities, cultures, and sexual orientations. Society would like to believe that advertising has improved from the days of showing women’s place in the kitchen and only having light skinned models but now advertising companies have just become sneakier and wittier about the way they portray people and the worst part is that society encourages it. Society, as a whole, seems to subconsciously take cues from media and advertising to base social norms around. “The average American is exposed to over 3000 ads every single day,” that much repetition of ads must have some effect on people. In fact, more than 90% of ads are received by the unconscious mind (Rance Crain). Advertisements use different criteria to portray different scenarios. This image specifically uses stance, foreground, character, and items to show the depth of brainwashing illustrating society’s influence on gender roles.

As Americans we are exposed to advertisements everyday. People are pressured from every direction by advertisements which exploit their deepest fears, attractions, needs, and desires, shaping their behaviors, goals, and thoughts. They are led into believing false information and promises that are mostly never kept, all for the simple reason of selling the product and making profit. We see advertisements everywhere--in magazines and newspapers, on the radio, on TV, online, in the mail, even over the phone. These advertisements use the basic ideas of either providing an elite status with the possession of the product, or giving a sense of belonging to a group or community. Since the recent military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, another

According to Lipsyte (1977:59), “sport is the single most influential currency of mass communication in the world ... sport cuts right through the differences of age, education, language, gender, and social and economic status, all those differences that tend to divide us“. Yet when it comes to advertising these differences are not put aside, especially in terms of gender and race. According to Schroeder & Borgerson (1998), advertising is quite significant when influencing, building and illustrating consumers vision of the good life, which includes sexual attraction. Domzal & Kernan (1993), added that, advertising images represent an essential part of the experienced visual world. Reality and advertising are not separated and affecting one another, but instead advertising and the mass media contribute to the visual scene that shapes reality. Advertising shapes identity, especially gender identity. In other words, the way women are portrayed in advertisements should represent their images and identities in the real world. A study by Knoll, Eisland, & Steinhagan (2011: 878-879) established that compared to men, women were seven times more likely to be stereotyped. This is due to the fact that men’s roles haven’t changed as much in society and at work place, thus they are not as regularly stereotyped. Moreover they added that in adverts, usually, women are younger than men and likely to be under 35