For centuries, advertising has been a powerful way for companies to reach a wide audience of potential consumers and buyers. It has also been a good way to reflect the political, economic, and cultural environments of the community it is targeting. This is why many historians look at advertisements. Doing so allows them to gauge the attitudes and values of the time period and area in which the advertisements were produced and circulated. This idea of advertising and a society’s culture reflecting upon each other applies to a series of advertisements for Listerine antiseptic mouthwash that started circulation in the 1920s and were rebooted in the 1950s. The chosen advertisement was printed in an unknown magazine in approximately 1956, and was marketed towards women. The newer ad, which features similar language to the ads from the 1920s, reflect on insecurities women faced surrounding their appearances and roles in their societies while also showing how certain cultural attitudes have persisted since the ads were printed. On the left side of the advertisement, there is a picture of a young woman. She is wearing a formal dress, fancy jewelry, and her hair is in an updo. She is also …show more content…
But what makes this Listerine advertisement stand out is how blatant and obvious its sexism is, and how well it worked for Listerine’s sales. By printing advertisements like this and repeatedly using these marketing techniques, Listerine was able to make their product a staple of consumers’ medicine cabinets and influence the way they thought about oral health. However, the sexist phrases used in Listerine advertisements did not create negative attitudes towards women and their roles in society, but rather reflected them and perpetuated them in a way that allows them to persist and linger on in modern
Longaker and Walker identify how dehumanization effects emotion by discussing, “The Nazi pogrom, Jews were often made to do disgusting things—scrub toilets, relieve themselves publicly—to make them seem less than human and more deserving of cruel treatment and even mass extermination” (212). Similarly, advertisements can dehumanize individuals, like women, by portraying them in grotesque situations or environments. As a result, a society lessens respect for these individuals and creates a mentality that fosters abuse. Kilbourne tries to illuminate this issue by presenting various advertisements that are suggestive of women, and elaborates on the effects these advertisements have on society. For instance, alcohol companies tend to target women with advertisements like, “A chilling newspaper ad for a bar in Georgetown features a close-up of a cocktail and the headline, ‘If your date won’t listen to reason, try a Velvet Hammer’”
Modern Americans are still motivated to spend on various products, whether they are useful and necessary or not, as the result of powerful mass advertising campaigns, widely broadcast through many forms of media. Children and young adults are usually the main targets for such campaigns. It is estimated that the average American child watches between 25,000 to 40,000 television commercials per year so advertising undeniably has a great power over the young minds, who in turn would influence their parents and guardians (Shah, 2010). More than 30 billion dollars are spent by families every year as the result of this strategy, which is progressively adapted by many companies (Shah, 2010). Additionally, thanks to these advertisements, people pay more attention to keeping up with the current trend, with what is considered the most up to date rather than the overall necessity of the product.
In Advertisements R Us by Melissa Rubin, she analyzes how advertisements appeal to its audience and how it reflects our society. Rubin describes a specific Coca-Cola ad from the 1950’s that contains a “Sprite Boy”, a large -Cola Coca vending machine, a variety of men, ranging from the working class to members of the army, and the occasional female. She states that this advertisement was very stereotypical of society during that decade and targeted the same demographic: white, working-class males- the same demographic that the Coca-Cola factories employed.
Consequently, she would likely challenge Cox’s description of the role that women played as the subject of advertisements in the 1920s as nothing more than objects whose sole purpose is to be beautiful. She would be more prone to state that instead of this harsh and objectifying image set forth in Cox’s narrative, women as subjects in advertisements during this time period were “the visual representation of a modern cultural consciousness that defined the 1920s” (Rabinovitch-Fox, 374). This is a very drastic contrast to what has been the narrative thus far regarding women’s status in society through the lens of the advertising companies. These companies have either been demeaning them as nothing more than housewives by pandering to that notion in their radio programming or outright objectifying women completely when they make them the subject of an
The environment is pledging an elitist appeal but the warm colors found in the image attract the populist group. In Jack Solomon’s “Masters of Desire the Culture of American Advertising” he explains a paradox in the American psyche. He argues that Americans simultaneously desire superiority and equality, as a result, advertisers create images that exploit those opposing conditions. He emphasizes that America is a nation of fantasizers. He sums up that advertisers create consumer hunger by working with our subconscious dreams and desires in the marketplace.
Advertisements: Exposed When viewing advertisements, commercials, and marketing techniques in the sense of a rhetorical perspective, rhetorical strategies such as logos, pathos, and ethos heavily influence the way society decides what products they want to purchase. By using these strategies, the advertisement portrayal based on statistics, factual evidence, and emotional involvement give a sense of need and want for that product. Advertisements also make use of social norms to display various expectations among gender roles along with providing differentiation among tasks that are deemed with femininity or masculinity. Therefore, it is of the advertisers and marketing team of that product that initially have the ideas that influence
Notions such as “sex sells” are not necessary true, for the observers recognize the damaging images in which women are portrayed. Advertisements that depict possessive and violent men toward women are should not be selling. For example, “no”does not mean “convince me”, when taken otherwise may lead to sexual abuse. Despite that both genders can be objectified, it is women who are more at risk due to the already established idea that women are more vulnerable.
In this society, the equality which stands between men and women is almost non- existent. It is widely believed that we live in a man’s world. Even something as common to our culture as the English language stands guilty to the possession of a rape content. With the “language of rape” surrounding our everyday lives and yet still being ignored as an issue seeking attention, it is common for many people to overlook the equally degrading images in which advertising agencies surround us with day in and day out.
Advertising is a form of propaganda that plays a huge role in society and is readily apparent to anyone who watches television, listens to the radio, reads newspapers, uses the internet, or looks at a billboard on the streets and buses. The effects of advertising begin the moment a child asks for a new toy seen on TV or a middle aged man decides he needs that new car. It is negatively impacting our society. To begin, the companies which make advertisements know who to aim their ads at and how to emotionally connect their product with a viewer. For example, “Studies conducted for Seventeen magazine have shown that 29 percent of adult women still buy the brand of coffee they preferred as a teenager, and 41 percent buy the same brand of mascara”
Advertisements paint a picture of how individuals are supposed to act and how they can show that they are either masculine or feminine. The advertisements that were shown in The Codes of Gender: Identity
In 1953, Alcoa Aluminium published their advertisement for Del Monte ketchups with flip up, easy to open ketchup lids called HyTop. It read “You mean a woman can open it?” and depicted a stereotypical image of a woman wearing red lipstick and nail polish preparing to open a brand new ketchup bottle. Advertisements portraying gender roles the way that “You mean a woman can open it?” did were less frowned upon and more popular at the time, although today they would be considered overly “sexist” or offensive. This critical response will examine the origins of this particular type of advertising from the 1950s, as well as the way Alcoa’s advertisement represented women at the time. Although gender equality wasn’t exactly a complete achievement
In this essay I will be discussing how femininity is represented in contemporary advertisements. Evolution of Female Roles in Advertising
GENDER & ITS ROLE IN ADVERTISING Nowadays, in society, the role of male and female have changed dramatically, as opposed to the prominent roles in history. Today women are changing to break out of the mold that which our society has placed her in. This is cannot be when it comes to role representation in the different advertisements. Nowadays different organization from medium to large are spending millions of dollars on developing their marketing strategies. They spent countless hours to study their target audience to study them so that they can attract them a better way to their competitors.
Stereotypical Ads: Clorox Bleach Television ads have been around in the U.S since 1941 and have aired all around the world ever since. Most of these ads seem harmless and try to convince the viewer to buy the company 's products, but some companies take their ads a little too far. In 2007, Clorox Bleach aired a commercial called, “The Laundry Timeline.” This commercial was extremely stereotypical towards women, mentioning how women are the ones who do the laundry in the household and made the assumption that the woman 's’ parents and grandparents did the laundry in the family. In “The Laundry Timeline”, women are portrayed as house cleaners and useless in the working world, through the use of symbolic items, using the word “your” as an idea that the watcher is in the ad, and the idea of pathos to catch to the viewers attention, in order to get people to agree with their statement and to buy their product.
Unilever’s personal care brand Dove was chosen since it was the first to show women in advertisements as they were. Their posters and TV commercials challenge stereotypes and draw attention to the distorted idea of how a woman has to look like. A small selection of former and recent advertisements were chosen to show the development in the brand’s marketing strategies. Since the focus of this paper will be on the representation of women, only advertisements including women are to be analyzed but still they are assumed to be characteristic of the brand’s advertising during that