Mass Meda Awareness

Advertising messages are essentially everywhere, from the minute we open the morning newspaper, turn on the TV, to the ads on busses and trains, even when we walk from street to street, we are culturally bombarded with mainstream advertising, whose sole purpose is to manipulate the consumer by any means possible. Advertising agencies spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year worldwide to encourage, provoke, influence and manipulate people into a consumer lifestyle that has overwhelming consequences for the social and physical environment, through its wasteful overindulgence. We learn throughout the readings that marketing campaigns target a consumer’s insecurity and hold it as a vessel to ferry ideas of fraudulent desires and phony solutions. Therefore it cultivates unhappiness towards oneself that in turn, leads to consumption. At the end of the day when you had spent over $700 on the latest Louis Vuitton belt buckle, one should ask why did I really want this? This is a problem that plagues our consumerist society, yet this is a problem that can be addressed more appropriately though basic knowledge and guidance so our minds are keen to properly decipher and interpret an ads message, thus making us think a little bit more critical then one would do so normally.

Mass media advertising is absolutely ingenious yet wreck less in their approach to exploit a targeted consumer. Many use the very raw yet simple ideas that we as humans innately value. Due to the constant bombardment of what is deemed “socially acceptable”, advertisers exploit these values through sexism, classism, racism, beauty, and so much more. Cortese writes in her article “media advertising sells more then just products it sells values and cultural representations”. These companies have developed many techniques over the years to incite and provoke shoppers into buying their product. These techniques involve but are not limited to institutional advertising, gender display representations, advocacy advertising, and subvertising methods to attract people.

The first method is Institutional advertising, according to Cortese it is similar to bureaucratic propaganda, just as national governments use psychological warfare to bring an audience around a particular viewpoint, [companies] use this method to remind consumers that they have been and integral part of the community for a long period of time, and that they intent to continue the tradition, and thus establishes them as reputable and trusted company.

Gender display is another approach this one a little more controversial then institutional advertising. It uses visual images of men and women to grab the attention and persuade. Cortese states that the ad puts the viewer in a mindset that depicts the ways in which we “think” men and women behave and look and not the ways they actually behave and look. I thought the pictures in the Cortese article, showing societies views one the things that men do and things that women do (Fig 3.19), were very entertaining but ever so true. The media exploits these concepts in many of their ads thus further incorporating men as active heads of the household and women as passive homemakers that rely on men. Falling under these gender roles we see that media also plays on the perfect provocateur exploitation, this promotes a young beautiful and seductive female as a hollow shell and her beauty is the only attribute is her beauty. Yet women are not the only ones subjected to this type of exploitation, men now-a-days, are also exploited for there physique, as Cortese writes “muscularity for masculinity” a concept that portrays the perfect man as physically better specimens then women. However it was the idea of the “New Woman” that played an integral role in the exploitation of men. The “New Woman” is an interpretation of a female as more then just homemakers and puts them in at new frontiers of business, education, and empowerment. Thus forcing men to rely on physical attractiveness as a counter weight to balance the “New Woman.”

Cortese then touches base on Alcohol use, Advertising and violence against women not only in ads but in television and movies, that show an intimidated and fearful women as victims of violence, potential violence, or threat of violence thus representing a clear extension of gender inequality. The real tragedy kilbourne states is that “women internalize these stereotypes, learn their “limitations” thus establishing a [reoccurring] and self full-filling prophecy.

Few solutions have been brought up most notably considering taxation of advertising (Kellner 131), although it is a very bold and new approach that can potentially be effective I believe the solution is more basic then that. It is evident that there are problems facing our society and it’s filtering of mass media messages along a broad spectrum. Yet many do not even realize that this is even a problem. Therefore my approach would be more grassroots oriented, I believe that media filtering and deciphering should begin at the home front. Children are particularly vulnerable to mainstream advertising manipulation. Young children are increasingly the target of advertising and marketing because of the amount of money they spend themselves, the influence they have on their parents spending and because of the money they will spend when they grow up. Though this child targeted marketing previously only concentrated on candy and toys, it now includes clothes, shoes, even fast foods, even adult products such as cars and credit cards. Parents should educate their children at an early age so they can understand these concepts, as they get older. I believe that it should be taught in schools, and that advertising corporations should pay funding for these programs and classes, as they are the reasons to why these classes or programs exist in the first place. Media Awareness should be brought up with the same intensity as bullying, drugs, and sexually transmitted diseases.