A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words July 9, 2011

We have witnessed several critical shifts in the world of advertising when it comes to how the ads or the people in the ads are presented. For example, the representation of women went from a very conservative motherly figure to an attractive happy-go-lucky kind of girl. Similarly, in printed ads, we see a shift from text to audience. It used to be that people would read the large paragraph of text typed under a small picture or photo of the product and believe it to be telling the truth. As years went by, the amount of text became less and less while the size and demeanour of the photos became more eccentric and provocative. Throughout this shift, the communication between corporations and the consumer has become distorted. When you see pictures of a Big Mac, you fall into this commercial illusion that associates McDonald’s with a healthy lifestyle. The more you become drawn into that, the more disappointed you are after you finish two of them and feel like your insides are trying to punch each other.

In the 1920s, people had the ability to produce but there was no market to sell to; the middle class simply did not exist. So what would any good businessman do? Create that market. Wages were raised so that people could afford to buy things they didn’t really need. As the middle class separated itself from the other, so called, classes, further divisions were created within it based on what they could and could not afford to buy. The function of the product didn’t even matter by this point! Today we see a similar trend in car advertisements. More so than not, we hear about the OnStar safety guide that is featured in every GM vehicle or the Acura with the already built-in XM satellite radio. But what about how the car drives? Is it safe? Is it built to last more than a year? My car may not have the latest World-Class In-Car Speech Recognition System, or automatic windows for that matter, but it’s been getting me from A to B for the last 8 years without a hitch. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’ll outdrive cars that are younger and better-looking than it based on the quality of its motor and its fuel efficiency alone. But today, that doesn’t matter. I get made fun of each and every time I have to reach over and roll down my window at the McDonald’s drive thru.

In modern day society, the corporate voice is the loudest. We are always promised to be using the only product that is suitable for our unique skin tone or ‘because we’re worth it’, as L’Oréal likes to put it. Ads always reassure us that we can be individuals and that we’re special and amazing. What about the other 6 billion people out there? That’s a whole lot of promises that will be broken. But we still buy it, despite being fully aware of that! And that is how strong the corporate voice is. Likewise, corporations even encourage us to spend. Look at the bank ads that tell us to ‘borrow with confidence’ or the department stores that make sure we know that ‘shopping is good’. Corporations know that people are willing to get into debt and to endanger their financial freedom by giving into consumption, but they don’t hold back. And neither do we. Advertising has been so successful because it has a way of getting into our faces whether it is through words, pictures, printed ads, or TV commercials. We may hate it when it sneaks its way in right before Derek is about to get shot in the middle of Seattle Grace Hospital (I’m a big Grey’s Anatomy fan, can you tell?), but we also live by advertising. We reiterate its message by wearing clothing with the little eagle symbol embroidered on the side of every American Eagle sweater, by buying the same eye shadow that Drew Barrymore wears in the Covergirl commercials, and by classifying people as preppy, nerdy, rich, or poor based on all of those symbols. We may not like it, but advertising sets up the cultural rules we live by each and every day.

I’ve Got the Power! July 5, 2011

In the last century, the uprising of television and the media has turned leisure time from reading the newspaper into watching the season premiere of yet another new hospital show. Not that reading the newspaper has become obsolete, but its prevalence has  significantly diminished since the time of TV. Even more so than television, the Internet has opened up millions of opportunities for entertainment. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, you name it, all of these forms of social networking allow us to be fully aware of where our friends on the other side of the world are going to grab lunch. As a result, with the turn of the 20^th century, we turned from being passive viewers of pop culture into active participants in its creation.

Helen Irving, author of the article “Little Elves and Mind Control: Advertising and its Critics”, gives a conservative point of view to the concept of advertising and its purposes. She strongly believes that advertising has created unnecessary needs and wants in order to sell products to its viewers. She says that unless we need the product, we must not wish to have it. For example, Coca Cola ads over the years have been shown in almost every context. There are ads showing housewives taking a break from a days’ hard work by sipping on a refreshing bottle of Coke, ads showing Santa with a Coke bottle in his hand with a witty remark underneath saying ‘my gift for thirst’, and ads that just plain and simply state ‘good for every occasion’. What do we know about Coke? It’s mostly sugar and water, with a little bit of food colouring and carbon dioxide in it. There is absolutely no biological need for it to enter our systems, yet Coca Cola is the second most popular international word in the world after ‘ok’. It doesn’t even get underlined in red in Word! My name does, but Coca Cola is apparently perfectly acceptable.

If you line up the Coca Cola advertisements in chronological order, they probably tell the story of time better than any historian in a museum could. Advertising had such an impact on the evolution of this necessity for Coke that the big Coca Cola sign in King’s Cross in Sydney, Australia, brings in over $150 000 a year to its owner just by hanging there. So, I’m afraid it’s advertising 1, Ms. Irving 0.

 

Another point brought up in the article is that we create the meaning of the message by interpreting it and giving it truth. We are in control! Once again, using the exact same example of Coca Cola, we know that we don’t need it, but we continue to buy it. The fact that our generation has grown up surrounded by TV and magazine ads of people drinking Coke and loving life limits our ability to decide otherwise. If we are constantly bombarded by the same message, we eventually start to agree with it, whether it’s true or not. Advertising 2, Ms. Irving 0. In an ideal world, if everybody had the same opinion about everything, then yes, I believe that we  could be in control of what the message of an ad truly states. But at a time when there are hundreds of products on the market trying to make our smiles whiter and our hair smoother, there is very little left to interpretation. We live in a capitalist society and culture, in effect, makes the decision between no name and brand name for us.

Reality Sucks July 2, 2011

Everyone’s heard the line ‘every girl wants to be her and every man wants to be with her’. It seems to be a central theme to pretty much any modern billboard ad or magazine cover. Gender advertising is hugely popular because we identify with it so well and it’s so easy for us to perceive the differences between male and female roles. These ‘roles’ have been created by culture, conventionalized by advertisers, and now provide us with a hyper-ritualistic sense of what we should try to be.

The views on gender imaging in advertising have not always been agreed upon by all critics; the feminist view frequently reverts to objectification while Goffman called gender ads ‘commercial realism’. He said that advertisers use models of gender relations from everyday life to connect to the consumer, which defines the basic essentials of what it means for him or her to be an individual. In doing so, they are able to produce ads that live up to these prototypes that culture and society have created and thus give us something to relate to in their world.

It may, at times, be objectifying and portraying something that isn’t necessarily real, but what if advertising didn’t exist at all? Well, we would not be subjected to this huge market of decisions that constantly tries to woo us into buying one of hundreds of products that we probably won’t ever use. There definitely would be no competition between brands, which means that there would be much more truth in ads, doesn’t it? People could show their individuality to a greater extent by not having the influence of the market forcing them to dress a certain way, right? And we certainly wouldn’t have to put up with commercials in the most suspenseful scenes of Grey’s Anatomy. Now wouldn’t that be just phenomenal?

Then why do we have all this advertising? Better yet, how has it been able to be so successful? Answer: sponsorship of the TV shows we watch, funding of all of our favourite hockey and basketball teams, the whole entertainment industry…need I say more? Every show is ‘brought to you in part by’ or ‘is sponsored by’ advertising. By forcing their way into the shows that we watch on a weekly basis, ads have a huge power in controlling the media. No advertising means no entertainment, no newscasts, no sporting events, and no fun.

In a world of 6 billion people (and growing), chances of being the only person with the same thoughts or views on the whole planet are pretty slim. So even though we know that there is nothing real about how comfortable and easy to walk in the new Steve Madden stilettoes are, about how good and healthy that McDonald’s hamburger looks in the picture, or about how you have to have a Blackberry to be part of the in crowd, we still go for it and buy all of those things. Why? Because reality sucks. Ads create this magical world of illusion that makes reality seem fun and carefree and exciting, when we all know that it’s mostly just work, worries, and taxes. As Ellen Willis, journalist and political theorist, once said, fantasy is more flexible than reality. As a result, it lets us imagine, it lets us dream, and it lets us live in a world where reality is the flawless size 0 Covergirl and the incredibly buff Abercrombie & Fitch model. So go ahead, step into that world every once in a while and enjoy it for what it appears to be.