Objectification In Burger King Advertising

Advertisements often employ many different methods of persuading a potential consumer. The vast majority of persuasive methods can be classified into three modes. These modes are ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos makes an appeal of character or personality. Pathos makes an appeal to the emotions. And logos appeals to reason or logic. This fascinating system of classification, first invented by Aristotle, remains valid even today. Let's explore how this system can be applied to a modern magazine advertisement.

In Jean Kilbourne’s essay, “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence, she paints a picture of repression, abuse, and objectification of women. Kilbourne gives an eye-opening view to the way American advertisers portray women and girls. Throughout the essay she has images that depict women in compromising poses. These images are examples of how often we see women in dehumanizing positions in advertisements and how desensitized we have become. Kilbourne implores us to take the media more seriously. She is putting a microscope on society and showing that the objectification of women is acceptable.

What captures the attention of people when they view an advertisement, commercial or poster? Is it the colors, a captivating phrase or the people pictured? While these are some of the elements often employed in advertising, we can look deeper and analyze the types of appeals that are utilized to draw attention to certain advertisements. The persuasive methods used can be classified into three modes. These modes are pathos, logos, and ethos. Pathos makes an appeal to emotions, logos appeals to logic or reason and ethos makes an appeal of character or credibility. Each appeal can give support to the message that is being promoted.

This advertisement demonstrates equal amounts of each rhetorical appeals, ethos, logos, and pathos, at the start of the commercial the first rhetorical appeal that was presented is ethos.

Many Americans are immune to the exploitation of woman in the media due to the fact that it happens quite frequently. Showing a half-naked woman eating a juicy sandwich should not be the attention getter to encourage viewers to buy their food or product. While examining these ads, it is realized that advertisements today are selling

In her essay “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” Susan Bordo manages to recognize an underlying fundamental change in society’s attitude towards advertisements and specifically sees that unfold in the growing shift towards male sexually oriented advertisements with a focus on feministic qualities. Furthermore, since Bordo wrote this essay in the 1990s, the advancements in technology have caused growing ideological differences between generations as their responses to things like social media and advertisements elicit contrasting reactions. The Millennials, also known as Generation Y, have been born into the various outlets of social media and have become accustomed to a greater sense of comfort with the Internet as they share all of their life stories and photos with other human beings. On the other hand, Generation X and the Baby Boomers were born into an era that didn’t depend on technology to perform everyday tasks. As a result, their mindsets make them reluctant to the changes in technology, which inadvertently makes them more uncomfortable to any massive changes in social media. By using sexually oriented advertisements, Kraft Foods and Axe, effectively display differing ideological differences between Generation X and Generation Y. In conjunction, Bordo’s elements of the gaze, objectification, and the rocks and leaners pose allow us to better understand the construction of the advertisements and the role they play on influencing each targeted generation.

An important controversial issue that America faces today is the debate of sex in advertising. Edward A. McCabe and John Carroll are two authors that present opposing arguments about this issue. McCabe persuades the reader into thinking that sex in advertising is no big deal, while Carroll explains why this is a major problem in America. Sex ads are defined as any type of advertising that shows pictures of partial nudity with wording that relates to the body in a sexual way, usually portraying women. Sex in advertising has been around for a long time but has the industry become too sexually explicit?

The average American is exposed to more than one hour of television advertisements every day, even though commercials can be vital to promote sales and business, some are explicitly disturbing. The advertisements highlighting Hardee’s hamburgers may be popular among the male population, but I am offended by them, and they actually cause me to turn away from the product. Watching sexy, half dressed women marketing hamburgers makes me uncomfortable, especially when guys are around. These commercials cause me to scramble for the remote, and I feel self-conscious about my body the entire 30 seconds.

Sexualizaton and objectification in the advertisements we see and the media we watch has become a very strong issue in our society. With the idea that “sex sells”, consumers don’t even realize that they’re not viewing the advertisements for what they are, but for the women (or men) that are being portrayed in a very erotic way, posed with whatever product they were hired to sell. Many articles have been written so far to challenge and assess this problem, but one written by Jean Kilbourne (1999), “”Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence” holds an extensive amount of authority. Using her personal experience with the subject, as well as studies she has conducted herself on the topic of sexualization, she talks about how the amount of sexualization in advertising affects how society views the culture and products consumers buy. She also notes that because of the quantity and prevalence of these ads, the rate of all forms of sexual assault, specifically rape (mostly towards women of all age), increase, as well as other forms of assault. It is important to examine Kilbourne’s use of rhetorical devices, such as ethos, pathos, and logos, and how effective these devices make her article. This way, it can be examined for its validity and her understanding of her own research. Kilbourne’s article is very effective through her uses of pathos and ethos, but at the same time, it loses its effectiveness through her absence of a counter-argument, as well as a lack

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.

Scantily dressed women are like an opened box of cupcakes on the cafeteria table; difficult to cease thinking about. Are women, in today's society, mere sex objects and tools in the hands of advertisers, or is this a gross misrepresentation in the pursuit of profit? In the article, “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”, by Jean Kilbourne, an award-winning author and educator, the idea about women being utilized to attract profits are brought to light. Advertising agencies' motives are, in essence, to successfully market and sell a product by whatever means necessary. However, of a greater concern, is the sexual violence in our culture towards women and children as highlighted by Kilbourne. In addition, she states that sexual violence is encouraged through advertisements, by making it appear as though it is an acceptable circumstance. That this phenomenon is tolerated in our culture is, indeed, a troubling thought. Nonetheless, Kilbourne leaves a distinct impression that this toleration may, sadly, be true. These advertisements, the ideas, and images portrayed have an undeniably negative impact on our culture as they serve to highlight stereotypes, dehumanize women as a sexual object or tool and, with a constant bombardment of these types of adverts, results in an indifference leading to victimization and possible violence that becomes almost commonplace.

Although this ad is crude and misleading, the creator of it uses pathos, ethos and logos very well in order to reach a future consumer. The pathos, or emotion, that the advertiser sets through his ad is that of sex and pride. Both of these are not actually stated in the ad, but these are the emotions that take place when the ad is comprehended. The creator of this ad has a certain target, and that target is any man over the age of thirteen. He uses their greatest weakness, their sex drive, to lure them I to wanting one of those burgers. This use of sexual reference is a very good example of logos because the creator uses the tactic of testing men’s pride. A great amount of a man’s pride comes from his sexual endowments. Here in this article those endowments are being tested from the standpoint of almost saying, “Are you man enough to eat this burger?” The ethos of this ad though is low. Usually it is not right to take advantage of someone’s greatest

Everyday we expose ourselves to thousands of advertisements in a wide variety of environments where ever we go; yet, we fail to realize the influence of the implications being sold to us on these advertisements, particularly about women. Advertisements don’t just sell products; they sell this notion that women are less of humans and more of objects, particularly in the sexual sense. It is important to understand that the advertising worlds’ constant sexual objectification of women has led to a change in sexual pathology in our society, by creating a culture that strives to be the unobtainable image of beauty we see on the cover of magazines. Even more specifically it is important to study the multiple influences that advertisements have

The Tiger Beer advertisement shown in the appendix is a clear example of the objectification of women in advertising. The Tiger Beer advert was made to appeal to men from the age of 20 to 60. The advert seeks to get a cheap laugh from the target audience with the image of the woman in a sexual pose and the picture of the beer. The ad promotes the idea that beer is the most

Sex is everywhere you turn. Victoria’s Secret is notorious for their ads that plaster billboards and the sides of buildings, featuring scantily-clad women suggesting an obvious sexual air. The bags you receive at Abercrombie feature half-dressed models, often two of which may be kissing or touching one another. These sexual images are far too present in the every day lives of young children, much younger than what used to be acceptable. Aside from this moral questionability, ads such as these often contain images of unrealistic body types, which exploit insecurity to make consumers use their product, the result of which can be dangerous to mental and physical health. Finally, when I see ads like the one to the right, and rack my brain