Interest:
I am interested how advertising affects one’s self-image. I believe many if not most ads create a since of dissatisfaction with one’s self. The result of this I assume is consuming the advertised product to correct this suggested dissatisfaction. I began reading about self-image and knew I would find plenty on women and how advertising affects their body perception. This is one topic I have addressed in the past and I want to continue to. I want to expand on how advertising affects males and society as a whole. I was very struck by the David G. Myers Quote on how low self-esteem can cause prejudices in culture. I want to explore and exploit the dissatisfaction that ads use as a technique to sell products. An empty promise in most cases, or is it not? Do people gain the satisfaction from consuming and all is well or is their something deeper missing? I hope to continue to investigate these relations between advertising and the result of consuming. Also, it must be noted that people find dissatisfaction when interacting in social groups, I am curious as to how much of that is a result of human nature versus advertising.
Quotes:"Ads offer to sell a new self-image. Of course, the ads that injure our self-image and self-esteem don't stop there. They conveniently offer to sell a product that will solve our newly imagined "problem."
Consider this quote from Nancy Shalek, president of an advertising agency: "Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you're a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that. If you tell them to buy something, they are resistant. But if you tell them they'll be a dork if they don't, you've got their attention. You open up emotional vulnerabilities and it's very easy to do with kids because they're the most emotionally vulnerable." Another person involved in marketing, Charles Kettering, said that selling new products is about "the organized creation of dissatisfaction."
Many commonly accepted ideas about appearance - for example, that skin should be blemish free and teeth bright white - are not absolute truths. These expectations were artificially created over a period of years by those who wanted to sell certain kinds of products and promoted the idea that we needed those products if our physical appearance was to be acceptable."
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/handouts/body_image/tpoh_advertising_and_image.cfm
"Advertising is an over 100 billion dollar a year industry and affects all of us throughout our lives. We are each exposed to over 2000 ads a day, constituting perhaps the most powerful educational force in society. The average American will spend one and one-half years of his or her life watching television commercials. The ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images, and concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normalcy. They tell us who we are and who we should be. Sometimes they sell addictions."
http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article40.html
“News and information media also express biases against working-class interests: A survey conducted by City University of New York found that in two years of PBS prime-time programming, 27 hours addressed the concerns and lives of the working classes - compared with 253 hours that focused on the upper class.”
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/whiteness_and_privilege/whiteness_working_class.cfm
“Maybe self-esteem is a gauge that reads out the state of our relationships with others…. Experiments do reveal an effect of low self-esteem. Temporarily deflate people’s self-image (say by telling them they did poorly on an aptitude test or by disparaging their personality) and they will be more likely to disparage others or to express heightened racial prejudice. Those who are negative about themselves also tend to be thin-skinned and judgmental.”
Myers, David G. “The Benefis of Self-Esteem” Worth Publishing 9th Edition P. 591
Further Reading:
http://www.rtvf.unt.edu/html/craig/pdfs/beauty.PDF
Blurb from Paper:
“In a front page box, it editorially asked
the question “Are We ‘Dirty Old Admen’?” and requested its readers respond,
promising that the publication would “try to print all views that are not libelous or
obscene” (Are we ‘Dirty Old Admen’?, 1969). Over the next several issues, the
debate raged on Ad Age’s pages, and within three weeks, the magazine had
received over 100 letters from ad professionals which, it concluded, were about
evenly split for and against Sudomier’s criticisms (Sederberg, 1969).
One male respondent pointed out what was, for him, one of the issue’s
confusing ironies: many of the ads that use sexually alluring images of women
were, in fact, designed to promote beauty products to women; and women used
these products to make themselves more sexually alluring to men -- an apologia
that was to become a frequent response to such criticisms.”
Video Link:
Impossibly Beautiful
Posts
Post a Comment