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MEDIA STUDIES: The Influence of Advertising Dealing with advertising starts with understanding how it works, what it does, and how it intends to influence you. While you may be taking advertising for granted, it does seek to influence what you spend your money on. Many people don’t believe that they’re susceptible to being influenced, let alone manipulated, by advertising. However, it wouldn’t be so omnipresent if it didn’t work. Advertisers hide the manipulative parts of advertising, because people will not accept it if they notice being manipulated.
It needs to appear innocent in order to have an influence. So how does advertising influence people? Advertising as information An obvious reason for advertising is simply informing people of the existence of products they might be interested in buying. No one will buy something that they don’t know exists, no doubt about that. When more people know about a product, more of it will be sold. Remember an ad from an advertising agency that was about advertising itself. They said that it was good that there is advertising, as it is an important source of information about products.
If that were all, most people would embrace advertising as a welcome addition o their lives. However, advertising is obviously not a source of objective information. The bright side of a company’s products is highlighted exclusively. No ad will list both the pros and cons of a product. It is also not exactly a source of complete information, as the amount of actual information in ads is usually very minimal, if, in fact, there is any real information at all. So, ads are not particularly trustworthy as information. But advertising goes much further than being a limited form of information.
Influencing valuation Judging by the extensive use of praise for products in ads, advertisers do expect that people will be influenced by the positive valuation. So apparently a significant amount of people do believe the praise is somehow real, even though it comes from a copy writer of an advertising agency, paid for my the manufacturer of the product. While other people may believe that doesn’t affect them much, what does happen is that they get to know about positive valuations, while negative valuations are mostly absent.
The latter is not because the product isn’t experienced as negative by some people, but because one doesn’t hear of them. The net effect is that one is not unwilling to buy, or at least try, the product. So it’s good to get some more objective opinions about products, like from reviews, or from someone who will not just say she likes something just to hide shame about a bad choice. Familiarizing with products With advertising emphasizing only the positive aspects of products, one might forget that not only are there also negative aspects, but a product might not even be what we really want or need.
We are more willing to go with what’s familiar than with what’s not. Advertising familiarizes us with products and brands. It does so in a positive only context, attempting to keep us open to this familiarization process. When we only know about particular products, selecting a product to satisfy a particular need could come down to choosing from the list of advertised products only. But sometimes, psychological needs can be satisfied somewhat by products, but may be satisfied even better by other things.
When we feel without self-worth, buying a prestigious car may for some time make us feel valuable, but there are other ways as well to increase that sense of worth, like paying more attention to our feelings and life circumstances. Brand recognition It is not only specific products that advertisers want us to feel as familiar. They particularly want to familiarize us with brands. This is why brand logos are everywhere. Not only on the products themselves, but on trucks, pens, shirts, caps, and lots, lots of ads. The influence is ubiquitous, but unobtrusive.
So when you are considering a choice between products, it is good to beware not to choose just on the basis Of familiarity of a brand. If you know a brand simply because you ‘eve seen the logo everywhere, you are letting marketers decide for you. Life style identification Lots of advertising connects a product or brand with a particular life style. People who identify with that lifestyle, will feel attracted to these products. When you feel like “such and such” a person, and an ad or commercial values that, you’ll feel willing to buy the product or brand, even if it isn’t presented that prominently in the ad.
You’ll believe you like the product because it is “like you. ” Sex sells As the saying goes “sex sells. ” Advertisers will put sexy women next to cars, let handsome actors tell how great a product is, or have women in bikini show how great the beach is. For men, sexy and attractive women in ads will grab your attention. Instantly, and without a need to explain anything. And that is what advertisers want, instantly having our attention, as their message by itself is to most of us not really that interesting.
BODY IMAGE: It has become obvious now that the media advertises and promotes a very unhealthy trend of extreme dieting and other bad eating habits to women. Most of media sources put on their covers images of skinny emancipated females. Doing this they influence the subconscious mind of the masses. And women continue to spend their money trying to achieve this unattainable look they constantly see in media advertising. To try and solve this problem let’s answer the next questions. 1 . What is body image? 2. What kind of trends in the media industry are we noticing now? 3.
How do the media influence our perception of body image? 4. What could be the reasons behind this? 5. What are the consequences of this kind of trend? 6. What are some real suggestions on how to improve your body image? Your body image is how you perceive, think and feel about your body. This may have no bearing at all on your actual appearance. For instance, it is common in Western nations for women to believe they are larger and fatter than they really are. Only one in five women is satisfied with their body weight. Nearly half of all normal weight women overestimate their size and shape.
A distorted body image can lead to self-destructive behavior, like dieting or eating disorders. Approximately nine out of 10 young Australian women have dieted at least once in their lives. So, the basic trend in the media industry at the moment is to promote slim, even skinny unnatural looking women’s bodies as being beautiful. Women of all ages but especially young women look at magazines, TV, movies and other media products full of images that show skinny women’s bodies. And these are perceived by the subconscious mind of young women as being a role model to follow and aspire to be like.
Achieving this skinny look does not come naturally; it inevitably leads to practicing some kind of dieting, excessive exercising or abnormal eating behaviors. Twenty years ago, the average model weighed 8 per cent less than the average woman??but today’s models weigh 23 per cent less. Advertisers believe that thin models sell products. When the Australian magazine New Woman recently included a picture of a heavy-set model on its cover, it received a truckload of letters from grateful readers praising the eve. But its advertisers complained and the magazine returned to featuring bone-thin models. What could be the reason behind all this?
Why has this fashion trend occurred now? Dewy are standards of beauty being imposed on women, the majority of whom are naturally larger than any of the models? The reasons for this according to some analysts, is an economic one. By presenting an ideal look which is difficult to achieve and maintain the cosmetic and diet product industries are assured of growth and profits. It is estimated that the diet industry alone is worth $100 billion (US. ) a year. This s a lot of money and certainly worth their while to continue to foster emancipated women as being the norm. And the consequences of this trend are huge.
On the one hand, women who are insecure about their bodies are more likely to buy beauty products, new clothes, and diet pills or other diet supplies. On the other hand, research indicates that exposure to images of thin, young, air-brushed female bodies is linked to depression, loss of self- esteem and the development of unhealthy eating habits in women and girls. The level Of eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia are increasing rapidly very year. It is estimated that around 5 per cent of women and 1 percent of men have an eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia or binge eating some time in their life.
And about 15 per cent of all young women have significantly distorted eating attitudes and behavior that can lead to developing anorexia or bulimia in the near future. So, what would be some real suggestions on how to improve your body image without resorting to unhealthy eating habits? The First one is to change your goal from weight loss to just improving your health. Second, is to focus more the internal beauty like improving your elf-esteem, self-confidence and internal strengths of your character.
Get informed by reading up on body image issues and self-improvement books. And give yourself a break from women’s magazines and the mass media advertising for a while if you feel you maybe prone to this kind of false perceptions. To sum up, the media does impact on women’s body image significantly and it can affect women’s physical and mental health in a negative way. And the only way to stop these negative effects coming from the media is to teach women not to judge themselves by the beauty industry’s standards and learn not to compare themselves to the cover girls.
And also it is important to promote a healthy life style with emphasis on internal beauty like improving self-esteem and self-confidence. Not on being a stick like model. Article Source: http://Centralizes. Com/720646 How does Today’s Advertising Impact on Your Body Image? Advertisers often emphasize sexuality and the importance of physical attractiveness in an attempt to sell products, 1 but researchers are concerned that this places undue pressure on women and men to focus on their appearance.
In recent survey by Teen People magazine, 27% of the girls felt that the media pressures them to have a perfect body,2 and a poll conducted n 1 996 by the international ad agency Chitchats and Chitchats found that ads made women fear being unattractive or old. 3 Researchers suggest advertising media may adversely impact women’s body image, which can lead to unhealthy behavior as women and girls strive for the ultra-thin body idealized by the media. Advertising images have also been recently accused of setting unrealistic ideals for males, and men and boys are beginning to risk their health to achieve the well-built media standard.
The Beautiful Message The average woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day,4 and by the mime she is 17 years old, she has received over 250,000 commercial messages through the medias Only 9% of commercials have a direct statement about beauty,6 but many more implicitly emphasize the importance of beauty– particularly those that target women and girls. One study of Saturday morning toy commercials found that 50% of commercials aimed at girls spoke about physical attractiveness, while none Of the commercials aimed at boys referred to appearance. Other studies found 50% of advertisements in teen girl magazines and 56% of television commercials aimed at female viewers seed beauty as a product appeal-8 This constant exposure to female-oriented advertisements may influence girls to become self-conscious about their bodies and to obsess over their physical appearance as a measure of their worth. 9 A Thin Ideal Advertisements emphasize thinness as a standard for female beauty, and the bodies idealized in the media are frequently atypical of normal, healthy women.
In fact, today’s fashion models weigh 23% less than the average female,l O and a young woman between the ages of 18-34 has a 7% chance of being as slim as a catwalk model and a 1% chance of being as thin as a uppermost-11 However, 69% of girls in one study said that magazine models influence their idea of the perfect body shape, 1 2 and the pervasive acceptance of this unrealistic body type creates an impractical standard for the majority of women. Some researchers believe that advertisers purposely normalize unrealistically thin bodies, in order to create an unattainable desire that can drive product consumption. 3 “The media markets desire. And by reproducing ideals that are absurdly out Of line with what real bodies really do look like… The media perpetuates a market for frustration and exasperations. Its customers will never disappear,” writes Paul Hamburg, an assistant professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. 14 Considering that the diet industry alone generates $33 billion in revenue,1 5 advertisers have been successful with their marketing strategy.
Advertising’s Impact Women frequently compare their bodies to those they see around them, and researchers have found that exposure to idealized body images lowers women’s satisfaction with their own attractiveness. 1 6 One study found that people who were shown slides of thin models had lower self-evaluations than people who had seen average and oversized models, 17 and girls reported in a Body Image Survey that ‘Very thin” models made them feel insecure about themselves. 1 8 In a sample of Stanford undergraduate and graduate students, 68% felt worse about their own appearance after looking through women’s magazines. 9 Many health professionals are also concerned by the prevalence of distorted body image among women, which may be fostered by their constant self-comparison to extremely thin figures promoted in the media. Seventy-five percent (75%) of “normal” weight women think they are overweight and 90% of women overestimate their body size. 1 Dissatisfaction with their bodies causes many women and girls to strive for the thin ideal. The number one wish for girls ages 11 to 17 is to be thinner,22 and girls as young as five have expressed fears of getting fat. 3 Eighty percent (80%) of 1 0-year-old girls have dieted,24 and at any one time, 50% of American women are currently dieting. 25 Some researchers suggest depicting thin models may lead girls into unhealthy weight-control habits,26 because the ideal they seek to emulate is unattainable for many and unhealthy for most. One study found that 47% of the girls were influenced by gazing pictures to want to lose weight, but only 29% were actually overweight. 27 Research has also found that stringent dieting to achieve an ideal figure can play a key role in triggering eating disorders. 8 Other researchers believe depicting thin models appears not to have long-term negative effects on most adolescent women, but they do agree it affects girls who already have body-image problems. 29 Girls who were already dissatisfied with their bodies showed more dieting, anxiety, and bulimic symptoms after prolonged exposure to fashion and advertising images in a teen girl magazine. 0 Studies also show that a third of American women in their teens and twenties begin smoking cigarettes in order to help control their appetite. 1 Boys and Body Image Although distorted body image has widely been known to affect women and girls, there is growing awareness regarding the pressure men and boys are under to appear muscular. Many males are becoming insecure about their physical appearance as advertising and other media images raise the standard and idealize well-built men. Researchers are concerned about how this impacts men and boys, and have seen an alarming increase in Obsessive eight training and the use of anabolic steroids and dietary supplements that promise bigger muscles or more stamina for lifting. 2 One study suggests that an alarming trend in toy action figures’ increasing muscularity is setting unrealistic ideals for boys much in the same way Barbie dolls have been accused of giving an unrealistic ideal of thinness for girls. 33 “Our society’s worship of muscularity may cause increasing numbers of men to develop pathological shame about their bodies… Our observations of these little plastic toys have stimulated us to explore further links between cultural assuages, body image disorders and use of steroids and other drugs,” says researcher Dry. Harrison Pope. 4 The majority of teenagers with eating disorders are girls but experts believe the number of boys affected is increasing and that many cases may not be reported, since males are reluctant to acknowledge any illness primarily associated with females. 36 Studies have also found that boys, like girls, may turn to smoking to help them lose weight. Boys ages 9 to 14 who thought they were overweight were 65% more likely to think about or try smoking than their peers, and boys who irked out every day in order to lose weight were twice as likely to experiment with tobacco. 37 Ads by Google Advertising College, ON Electioneering. Mom Research camp; Plan Online & Offline Marketing Strategies – Train Today! Dementia Signs www. Memory. Ca See if a Doctor should be Consulted about Alchemist’s. Take this Test… Power of Advertising ADVERTISING IN COMMUNICATION A. Background of Print Advertising The Commercial messages and campaign displays have been found in the ruins of ancient Arabia. Lost and found advertising on papyrus was common in ancient Greece and Rome. The tradition of wall and rock painting for commercial advertising is still present in many parts of Asia, Africa and South America.
Indian rock art painting date back to 4000 BCC. (1 -Bait, TEX K. 2000). Advertising in Rural India: Language Marketing, Communication, and Consumerism). As printing developed in the 1 5th and 16th century, advertising expanded to include handbills. In the 17th century advertisements started to appear in weekly newspapers in England. In 1841, the first advertising agency was established by Volley Palmer in Boston. It was also the firs agency to charge a commission on ads at 25% commission paid by swapper publishers to sell space to the advertisers.
At the turn of the century, there were few career choices for women in business: however advertising Was one Of them. Since women Were responsible for most household purchases advertisers and agencies recognized the value of the insight. The first American advertising to use a sexual sell was created by a woman to sell soap. The ad portrayed a couple and boasted, “the skin you love to touch. ” The sass’s saw advertising transform into a modern scientific approach. This period of American advertising is referred to a the “Creative
Revolution” and its poster boy was Bill Branch, who helped create the revolutionary Volkswagen ads among others. (1 . Learn, Jackson, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, Basic Books, 1995). B. Current Advertising Techniques Current print advertising can include: magazines, newspapers, the Internet and billboards. Mobile Billboards are flat panel campaign units with the sole purpose of carrying advertisements. Advertisements can also be seen on the seats of grocery carts, on the walls of an airport walkway, and on the sides of buses.
Advertisements are usually place anywhere and audience can easily ND frequently access visuals, especially on clothing. The advertising industry is large and growing. In the United States alone in 2005, spending on advertising reached $144. 32 billion, reported in T NSA Media Intelligence. The same year PricewaterhouseCoopers generated a report titled Media Outlook 2006-2010 stating worldwide advertising spending was $385 billion and projected worldwide advertisement spending would exceed half a trillion dollars by 2010.
Advertising has gone through five major stages of development: domestic, export, international, multinational, and global. For lobar advertisers, there are four potentially competing business objectives that must be balanced when developing worldwide advertising: building a brand while speaking with one voice, developing economies of scale in the creative process, maximizing local effectiveness of ads, and increasing the company’s speed of implementation. C.
Advertising in Print with regard to Children With children either spending or influencing 500 billion dollars of purchases, marketing techniques have been turned upside down. In the past the most effective way to sell children’s products was through mom and dad. Now the opposite is true, children are the focal point for intense advertising pressure seeking to influence billions of dollars of family spending. 1 . Example l. Pre-K (children 0-5 years old) Children as young as three recognize brand logos (Fischer, 1991 with brand loyalty influence starting at age two (McNealy, 1992).
II. Teen (children ages 8-12) No longer little children, and not yet teens, teens are staring to develop their sense of identity and are anxious to cultivate o sophisticated self-image. And marketers are discovering there is a lot of money to be made by treating teens like teenagers. Ill. Teenagers (children 13-18 years old) Corporations capitalize on the age-old insecurities and self-doubts Of teens by making them believe that to truly be cool, you need their products.
According to NO LOGO author Naomi Klein, in the sass corporations discovered that the youth market was able and willing to pay top dollar in order to be cool. Some companies hire “cool hunters” or “cultural spies” to infiltrate the world of teens and bring back the latest trends. Fashion marketers such as Calvin Klein, Firebombed & Fitch and Guess use provocative marketing campaigns featuring young models. A 2000 report from the Federal Trade Commission in the US. Revealed how Hollywood routinely recruits teens (some as young as nine) to evaluate its story concepts.
By treating pre- adolescents as independent, mature consumers, marketers have been very successful in removing parents from the picture- leaving teens vulnerable to potentially unhealthy messages about body image, sexuality, relationships and violence. D. Advertising in Print with regard to Culture Numerous advertising studies have examined audiences’ attitudes towards ads of various racial compositions. Strength of ethnic identification may also eve a significant effect on audience evaluations of advertisements (Gene, 1997).