The Good, the Bad, and the Reality of Advertising
The following is a research paper I wrote for my English 112 course in college in the spring of 2006.
Simply put, advertising is the promotion of products, services and ideas. These promotions are sponsored by companies and groups that want to provide information to their target audience. This information could be about certain characteristics, features, and usefulness of a product or service. Idea-based advertisements usually found in political ads are also generally seen and heard when an election is coming around. Today, advertising can be found in many forms: newspapers, printed flyers, billboards, skywriting, television and radio commercials, product placement in television shows and movies, web site pop-ups, and unsolicited e-mail messages known as “spam.”
With the abundance of advertising in everyday life, a person can be overwhelmed with conflicting views about the products, services, and ideas being perpetuated. It may be hard to discern what the best product really is or who is really right about an ideology. The advertisements themselves can possibly change our way of thinking about the outside world and ourselves. While advertisements provide people with information, there is the possibility that companies are not doing so in ethical and truthful ways; that they are only trying to sell a product with no regard to the actions of the consumer or the consequences of those actions. Modern advertising may actually be harmful to individuals and society as a whole.
While a person may think modern advertising is as simple as selling a product, those same people may not realize the deeper influences that advertisements make on a subconscious level. For example, there is a typical class of advertisements that help create societal expectations of beauty such as promotions for diet products. These ads create the illusion that if a person uses this product, he or she will be irresistible to the opposite gender. In some cases, this can be true; however, the average consumer probably does not look like a supermodel; the chance that one product will forever change their life is slim to none. More often than not, we as a society believe what we see. We see things happening on television commercials so we believe they will happen for us as well. There is nothing wrong with looking beautiful, but the way commercials portray the average person can be questionable. The “average person” on an advertisement has a gorgeous, trim, hourglass figure or a rippling set of six pack abs. We probably have doubts that the average person is so fashioned, but we want to be like them regardless. Our society’s expectations of what a person should be and how they should behave have been molded by popular culture, including modern advertising. Since society expects perfection from us, we have been ingrained with these convictions. Advertising gives us assurance that there is a road toward perfection; there are products and services available to make us flawless. “Advertisers create and exploit these insecurities” (Schroth). By bringing these concerns to the surface while providing a solution, advertisers create a need and tell us how to cure our ills all at once.
