Ethics in Advertising Essay

Every time you flip a magazine, change channels, or go online, you are struck with images of models who are super skinny with flashy outfits and have excessive make-up on. Ads not only try to sell their products, but also promote how females should look like. These models are airbrushed and photo shopped which is false advertisement. The media progressively encourages a thinner body image as the ideal for women. We see advertisements every day. Some of these ads use manipulative strategies that influence our choices and spending habits. For example, “One in every three articles in leading teen girl magazines included a focus on appearance, and most advertisements used appeal to beauty to sell their products.”(Teen Health) To grab the viewers’ attention, especially females, they include

Today, more than ever, teenage girls are influenced by magazines, billboards, television, movies, and most of all advertisements. While the advertisements of models that have been airbrushed to flawlessness may sell products, the effects on teen girls is undeniable. Over the past decade the numbers of depression, eating disorders, and hypersexuality in young girls has been steadily on the rise. False advertising in way of airbrushing, heavy editing, and photoshopping models has had negative effects on teen girls and according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) policy, false advertisement is illegal. It may be stretching it calling photoshopping false advertising, but nonetheless manipulating young, impressionable girls into believing

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).

For women, advertising exemplifies the ideal female body. According to Kilbourne, young girls are taught from a very early age that they need to spend lots of time and money to achieve this “physical perfection.” But realistically this cannot be achieved. The ideal woman’s body is Caucasian, very skinny, big breasts, no flaws, and pretty much no pores. This cannot be achieved because it is physically impossible to look like this; the illusion comes from the secret world of Photoshop. No woman is beautiful enough so they leave it to technology to create perfection. The supermodel Cindy Crawford said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford!” She knew the realities of Photoshop and body image, and more women and girls need to become aware of this as well.

Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that

Over the years the size of female models in advertising has decreased significantly. Today the average model ways up to 23% less than an average women. The use of Photoshop adds to this by creating perfect skin unattainable even with makeup, along with making the models appear even thinner. Given that these women often set the standard for beauty wouldn’t this lower women’s self-esteem. These “perfect” and unrealistic models in advertising negatively affect body image (the way we see our own body) and distort our idea of beauty. Negative body image can lead to depression, the development of eating disorders, or the abuse of weight loss drugs or anabolic steroids.

Lauren Greenfield is a photojournalist that created the expose, Girl Culture, in 2002. Elline Lipkin says in her article “Girls’ Body’s, Girls’ Selves”, “The girls in Greenfield’s photos often see themselves as too thin, too fat, not stylish enough, too trendy, attractive or ugly or desirable or hideous” (596). When advertisements use edited or photoshopped images to sell a product it causes effects like what is seen in Greenfield's images. Advertisements make consumers believe that their products will make them more desirable. When that product doesn’t have that effect it makes the customer believe that something is wrong with them. Queue the, “Honey does this dress make me look fat?” This is especially harmful to younger girls that are more likely to be insecure about their bodies and try harder to fit in. It can even go so far as to cause eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa. The media puts out images of extremely thin and fit women which can only be achieved by digital editing and photoshop. The young girl flipping through the magazine has no idea that the pictures she’s seeing aren’t real and aren’t achievable and it ruins her self image.

The average woman, along with models, do not have perfect bodies as the media portrays.

The media is one of the leading causes of self esteem and body image issues in not only women but men as well. This is due to the fact that thousands of advertisements contain messages about physical attractiveness and beauty. Examples include: commercials for clothes, cosmetics, weight loss, hair removal, laser surgery and physical fitness. The effects of advertising on body image have been studied by researchers, psychologists, marketing professionals and more. Researchers, Mary Martin and James Gentry found that teen directed advertising negatively impacts self-esteem. The advertising industry is setting unrealistic expectations for teens about their physical appearances by using models with "perfect bodies." The modeling industry today has put many pressures on models, causing them disorders of both mental and physical illness. These disorders then creating the look of the “perfect body” have now lead to unrealistic expectations of body image for society.

The media group that retouches images skews the “normal” body image of people through many of its outlets, including models in advertising and magazines, and actors in TV and movie productions. “The average model portrayed in the media is approximately 5’11” and 120 pounds. By contrast, the average American woman is 5’4” and 140 pounds” (Holmstrom, 2004). This statistic shows how the media manipulates consumers into believing that because they are not what the average model looks like, they are not living up to a certain standard which implies that they need to look like that to be beautiful. Another research fact that shows a similar concept is that, “In the United States, 94% of female characters in television programs are thinner than the average American woman, with whom the media frequently associate happiness, desirability, and success in life” (Yamamiya et al., 2005). This association of female thinness and happiness, desirability and success makes consumers believe they must achieve this unrealistic thinness to achieve more ultimate goals and fulfillment in life. “The media also explicitly instruct how to attain thin bodies by dieting, exercising, and body-contouring surgery, encouraging female consumers to believe that they can and should be thin” (Yamamiya et al., 2005). This idealization of thinness in the media is seen so much, and is extremely harmful to women’s self confidence and is often associated with body image dissatisfaction, which can be a precursor to social anxiety, depression, eating disturbances, and poor self-esteem (Yamamiya et al.,

In 2016, the United States spent 190 billion U.S. dollars on advertisements, almost double the amount of money on advertising than the next largest ad market (Statista). These ads advertise a multitude of different products. The ads are exposed to society in many different ways, from the breaks in between songs on the radio, to the ads shown online. Ads are targeted to a specific group of people, usually, the target demographic the brand wants to buy their product. Brands will often use women’s bodies in a sexual way to get people to stop and look at their ads. Over the last few decades, speakers and activists have seen advertisements becoming more sexual and more demeaning towards women. Activist Jean Kilbourne has been analyzing ads and has been bringing awareness to this issue for years through her four documentaries. In her documentary, “Killing Us Softly 4,” Jean Kilbourne asserts women’s bodies are often dismembered, portrayed with an unattainable, “ideal” body type, and despite advances in the women’s movement, the objectification of women in ads have gotten worse. The two images below illustrate these ideas.

Advertisements surround us on a daily basis. Constantly bombarding our conscious and subconscious minds with consumer items and suggestive material. But how much of that impacts the mind of young adults? More specifically, how does the constant incursion of beauty advertisements impact young women? Media, any form of mass communication- is one of the biggest factors in this widespread problem. Through the use of the media, ideas, images, expectations of perfection broadcasts throughout the country and on most occasions throughout the world. The portrayal of beauty in the media has contributed to a variety of psychological problems such as: misinterpretation of beauty, early exploration of sexuality and lowered sense of self worth which later leads to eating disorders.

In fact, “from 1997 to 2007, these procedures, overall, rose 457% to almost 12 million per year and an increase of 114% in actual surgeries, such as breast implants and liposuction”(Hodgson), all as a result of the influence of the advertising environment. Yet despite these statistics, many people feel exempt from the influence of advertising, this is because “only 8% of an ad’s message is received by the conscious mind, the rest is worked and reworked deep within the recesses of the brain”(Kilbourne). This working and reworking of the ad’s subliminal message of the brain is exponentially increased by the amount of ad’s the average American is exposed to every day. On average, Americans are exposed to over three thousand advertisements per day and will have been spent two years of their lives watching advertisements on the Internet and television by the time they die. This two hundred and fifty billion dollar per year industry that we call advertising profits from the appeasement of its consumers but at the cost of the consumers mental state. The cost of this environment, however, goes much further than just the environment itself, and extends rather into the direct objectification and dehumanization of women.

Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfect female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to “doctor” images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman’s body when we are actually looking at sections of three or four women’s bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women’s body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much time, energy, and money on achieving these standards.

One will see a white female with pouting red lips and the very petite body that resembles a thirteen-year-old girl. The extremely artificial women and the heavily photo-shopped pictures in these ad’s create a norm and make those women who look differently, feel insecure of who they are and make them feel as if they are less of a woman, for example they tend to over represent the Caucasian, blonde with bright eyes, white complexion and a petite body. This is an unattainable beauty for most women, which has caused many to develop issues such as eating disorders, depression and the very much talked about these days, anorexia.