Friday, February 5, 2010

Ads

For my blog this week I wanted to talk about the lecture on ads we saw and the ads we brought to class. I really enjoyed the lecture we saw in class and I think she had a lot of really good points about the advertising industry. When she said that the average American will see 3,000 ads a day that just blew my mind cause I never would have dreamed it would be that high. The advertising industry spends billions of dollars a year on ads, just for us to glance at them in a magazine or on the internet or watch them on TV. It's seems pointless to spend so much money on something that people really don't pay attention to, but the problem is we do pay attention. Whether we realize it or not, we pay attention to every ad that we see or hear even if it's just for a second. Another thing that I thought was really interesting was how the advertising industry portrays women and men. In the lecture she really goes into detail and explains how women are viewed was these perfect beings or objects, and according to a lot of the ads we see that's what women are, objects. The lecture made this point very clear by showing a bunch of ads that showed women's bodies as inanimate objects. This to me is just wrong to me. Another thing that is shocking and that I have noticed before is the way beauty is portrayed for women. The advertising industry always portrays women as very thin, tall, and well perfect. My whole issue with this is that even the women in the ads aren't perfect, let alone real women. The advertising industry pays big money to have the women in their ads look exactly the way they feel they should look and that means retouching. No matter what anyone says just about every ad you see is retouched in some way. The advertising industry is creating this perception of beauty that can never be obtained unless we alter ourselves in some way, either through diets, creams, pills, or even plastic surgery.

5 comments:

  1. I totally agree with you. I think it is outrageous the money that advertisers spend on advertising. It's amazing to see how much it costs just for a 30 second commercial on TV. Tommorrow is the Superbowl and I can only imagine the amount of money they bring in for just a 30 second ad!! Even though we don't 'look' at ads. We really do. Pretty much everything is an ad. Someone walking by with an American Eagle t-shirt is a walking advertisement, they don't know that. But when you see it and like it, it makes you more likely to go to the nearest AE store and pick one up for yourself.

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  2. Did you know that "Coca Cola" is the second most reconized term in the world? next to "OK"...that means that even if you do not speak the language, you will know what a Coke is. They used to use subliminal advertising...which works. Thankfully now that is illegal. When I get asked "what do you want to drink?" at a restaurant, if I do not have a drink in mind, I just say "Coke." As if it where second nature. Advertising is so expensive because it works.

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  3. Even more disturbing...the author of the book Fast Food Nation shows via research that more people recognize the "golden arches" than the symbol of the Christian cross....something to think about.

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  4. "Coke" is a general term where I grew up. Restaurants would ask the same question and if you said coke they would look at you like you had 6 heads. However I have to agree with Megan and Brit about how much money companies put into ads. Tonight for example Bud Light had to have put in thousands of dollars. Most of which had a woman or two in skimpy outfits and men drooling over them.

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  5. I'm with you when it comes to how the media portrays people. Be it man, woman, or child, the media always shows the sexiest woman, the studliest man, or the cutest damn baby anyone's ever laid eyes on. Why do they feel the need to do this. There was a real good commercial on the Super Bowl that showed a bunch of average joe/jane office workers running around in their under garments, and it was an ad for Monster.com. I just thought that it was good cause it didn't portray a bunch of damn super models for once. At the other extreme, look at how cigarette, smokeless tobacco, and alcohol ads all show beautiful people using their products. What a crock of shit huh?

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