What We Are Advertisers By James Twitchell

In the reading Advertisements R Us, Melissa Rubin expands upon her analysis of Coca-Colas’ 1950 magazine advertisement, and brings many points to light about how the company uses cleverly crafted advertising tactics to appeal to a specific group of Americans. By clearly communicating her evidence to back up the analysis of the advertisement, Ruben composes a thoughtful and persuasive paper. For example, Rubin explains how simple details, such as the use of their slogan on the vending machine pictured which reads “Drink Coca-Cola - Work Refreshed”, and the placement of “Sprite Boy” in the ad, all work together to send a message that makes consumers want to buy their product. Consequently, because of the evidence presented in her writing, Rubin has crafted a paper that I find logical and persuasive.

For the longest time now, advertising has played a huge role in how we identify ourselves in the United States with the American culture, and how others identify themselves with all the cultures of the rest of the world as well. It guides us in making everyday decisions, such as what items we definitely need to invest our money on, how to dress in-vogue, and what mindset we should have to prosper the most. Although advertising does help make life easier for most, at the same time it has negative affects on the people of society as well. Advertisement discreetly manipulates the beliefs, morals, and values of our culture, and it does so in a way that most of the time we don’t even realize it’s happened. In order to reach our main goal of

From TV commercials and product placement to billboards and posters, thousands of advertisements bombard the average American every day. To be effective, an ad must attract the consumer’s attention, maintain the public’s interest, create or stimulate desire, and create a call for action. These advertisements can be small enough to fit on a three-inch screen or large enough to cover the side of a building. But no matter what the size, in this world of ever-shrinking attention spans and patience levels, ads have to be efficient in portraying their ideas. In order to successfully depict certain ideas, advertisements rely on shortcuts. These shortcuts usually involve stereotypes. In the media, stereotypes are inevitable because the audience

This video is entitled “The Next Time Someone Says Sexism Isn't Real, Show Them These Shocking Role-Reversal Images” by Darcie Conway. I chose this article because it talks about sexism and I know for sure that sexism is happening everywhere. It is due to media and technology, like television, magazines, advertisement and etc. Furthermore, this video tells us about how men and women view the body of a woman. According to Conway, one study found that more than 50% of ads portrayed women in women’s magazines as an object”.

In her article, Kilbourne emphasizes advertisements and images that reinforce her examination of stereotypes in popular

Advertising veteran Andrew Essex, who wrote the controversial book The End of Advertising, clarified his stance when he talked to Inc. magazine. While Essex did predict advertising's downfall, he meant that pushy, presumptuous advertising is doomed, not advertising in general. Essex co-founded the creative agency Droga5, although, now he is an industry defector, having left Droga5 in 2015.

Also, the commercials were coded as montage if no one in the class could tell what stereotype the central character was classified in, or if there were too many central characters to count. Our study categorizes a widespread list of female and male stereotypes which have been extensively used in prior research to examine gender (or racial) stereotypes in print advertisements as seen below (Hatzithomas et al., 2016). See Table 1 and Table

In the twenty-first century, both men and women have become targeted groups in advertising. Both target markets are flooded with images and content that promotes stereotypical sexual identities that are based on sexual images as well as cultural notions of gender roles. When flipping through a magazine a woman or girl would see ads for cosmetic surgery, makeup, wedding dresses, perfume, diets, jewelry and the list goes on. Women are affected on many levels by the flawless, airbrushed and idealized models when viewing such advertisements. Although women have been the subject of such advertising methods for centuries, men are also now bombarded with similar messages regarding perceived norms of idealized gender roles. Men are sent the message that they are to be physically fit, successful, and to judge women on their physical characteristics as well as their fashion ability.

Furthermore, Gender as a representative kind of culture stereotypes, it strongly influences people’s perspective of others, especially when lots information has been limited, for example, in the advertisement, the audience only have a few minutes to engage with it and it normally has no time to explain the issue of gender itself. In other words, when people meet new friends at the first time, they always make a precision of that person based on their characteristics, especially visual features. For instance, if a man seems full of muscle and powerful, then he will be defined as masculinity. Therefore, advertising often is critiqued as controversial of gender because it mainly expresses ideas and values visually, and gender is the most popular

Question 1: This article reflects on the issue whether advertising should reflect attitudes in society or does advertising lead cultural change? The article examines the growing demand for diversity in how families are portrayed in advertising.

Maleness and femaleness are represented with many stereotypes in advertising34. These stereotypes exist in our societies today, but to the majority of people, they are considered as normal. The film Codes of Gender shines the light on a lot of these stereotypes in advertising which is often overlooked.

Redbook magazine are devoted to selling products ranging from shoes to shampoo. The entire magazine only has only 210 pages. Approximately 6-8 min of every half hour television show is produced by ad agencies. Americans are bombarded with advertisements. We see them everyday in many different forms and through different mediums. Advertisers study America’s population through a systematic breakdown and analysis of our likes and dislikes in relation to our differences. These differences include gender, sexual orientation, economic status, location, race, ethnicity, and more. Advertisers have substantial knowledge of what appeals to each of these demographics and how these demographics will respond to

Market segmentation is a process that is used to make the selling of goods or services more efficient and profitable. By dividing a large and diverse population into smaller groups, marketers can craft persuasive messages designed to target a specific audience. Examples of these categorizations are age, race, socio-economic status, geographic location, occupation, and gender. These demographic distinctions inform every part of the marketing process, from product conception and design all the way to advertising message content. In addition, this process also aids the consumer in making purchasing decisions. Because living in a society driven by consumerism requires seemingly constant deliberation between various goods and services, the categorization of products in this manner can decrease cognitive load and speed up the decision making process (Sandhu, 2016).

Goffman researched the ways in which gender is portrayed in advertisements, noting advertisements serve a specific social purpose of convincing the public how men and women should behave. His model for decoding behaviour concentrates on hands, eyes, knees, facial expressions, head postures, relative sizes, positioning and placing, head-eye aversion and finger biting and sucking. He felt the simplest gesture, familiar rituals or taken-for-granted forms of address were sources for understanding relations between the sexes and the social forces at work behind those relations.

The way advertisers from the 1960s onwards responded to the causes of “demassification” of consumers began when the media industry was restructuring itself into smaller independent operating entities. The shift during this time formed large operating industry’s into smaller lines of production meant that advertisers would have to change their focus from a mass audience into smaller groups of well targeted consumers. Leiss, Kline, Jhally, and Botterill refer to this process of identifying smaller target markets as one of ‘demassification’ (309). Fletcher suggests, “over the past four decades, this has led to a more diverse representation within advertising as different groups have been identified as disposable income” (129). Therefore, the process of demassification has uniquely caused social relationships within the consumer culture during the 1960s onwards.