Advertising in the Media

Advertising is an important social phenomenon. It both stimulates consumption, economic activity models, life-styles and a certain value orientation. Consumers are confronted with extensive daily doses of advertising in multiple media. With the continual attack of marketing media, it is presumable that it will affect our individualism and society as a whole. What are the effects of advertising today? Does television reinforce the mainstream ideology of contemporary culture? How do they shape the society? Can the media help break the barriers of gender roles? Consumer minds' can be changed, opinions molded. I believe advertising in the media today is slightly changing, however will not drastically change. The commercials and advertisements still implant the usual gender roles to our society today. Will the media ever change?

The methodology used was researching, analyzing, and observing magazine ads, plus watching commercials for a full three hours to help in exposing the advertising in the media and how it seems to characterize our society today.

Commercials are a way that gender roles are displayed in society. When you see a car commercial for a mechanic most of the time the mechanic is a man. But when you see a commercial about cleaning products for the house, normally a woman is the face you see. In other words, the media can help break the barriers on how gender roles are portrayed in society. The more those women represent strength on television; it will then encourage them to build their own self-confidence.

In review of the television viewing of women and men, it is easy to forget that the hours they spend watching television are a substantial part of each week. Excluding hours spent sleeping, women spend approximately 1 hour out of every 4 hours of each day watching television. Men, not far behind, spend about 1 hour out of every 5 hours of each day watching television (Butler 1980).

In general, these concentrated views of manhood suggest the many ways in which advertising negatively affects men by narrowing the definition of what it means to be a man in American society. Upon re-viewing the advertisements and commercials, I realized how much the role of the strong, silent, authoritarian, militaristic and threatening male pervades societal ideals. Although it's neither realistic nor a positive role to emulate, it also shapes men's views of themselves and how they measure up to masculine role models.

Images of men influence the gender role attitudes that men express soon after exposure to the images. Ads and commercials, with their images of cowboys, successful businessmen, construction workers, sophisticates in tuxedos, muscle men and others, advertisements may seem to be flashing by casually. But they actually represent countless- if often unconscious- decisions by writers, advertisers, producers, programmers and others about what men look like, say and even think. Men view magazine advertisements containing images of men that varied in terms of how traditionally masculine versus neutral they were and whether the models were the same ate or much older than the viewers. This suggests that nontraditional men's gender role attitudes may be rather unstable and susceptible to momentary influences such as those found in advertising. Several parts of relationships are viewed differently by the sexes. "Men view women as lower on the socioeconomic scale, while women see the two genders as at equal level on the socioeconomic scale" (Melville and Cornish, 1993).

When studying the many different commercials these two commercials definitely supported the main type of male role in advertising. Coca-Cola ran an ad in which at a certain time all of the women in an office rushed to the window to watch a construction worker take his shirt off and drink a Diet Coke. Although he is undressing, the situation allows us to assume that he will not reach full nudity. Another good example opens with two women sitting in a park eating lunch. They are guessing whether the passing men are wearing briefs or boxers. Michael Jordan walks buy in a tight fitting shirt and a nice suit and says "They're Haines. Let's leave it at that."

Once again the media displays males as the "breadwinners", and efficiently renders women as inferior. These images largely reflect traditional patriarchal notions of gender. And although times have changed, our country's society was built on these (patriarchal) concepts. Social constructionist beliefs not only mold the media, but also forge advertisements into common stereotypes.

A person's environment has a big influence on the roles deemed accurately for men and women. Media also plays an important role in the socialization process for your and old people. Gender roles are as apparent in movies and television sitcoms, as they are in commercials. While observing the commercials throughout the three hours, the sitcoms in between those commercials showed the typical gender roles. However, there were others that flipped the stage. I observed commercials that showed on the mother goes to work and the father stays home with the child, yet the catch was when she arrived back home she found the house a mess. This portrayed that the father wasn't able to handle the housework or child at the same time as the mother can. Furthermore, the media seems to attempt to establish commercials to switch the gender roles; however they're creating mixed images.

Advertisements also have the possibility to encourage both positive and negative effects on people, especially on women. In fact, most advertisements use women to promote the product. Often, food is related to women in advertisements. In many of these commercials, the woman is not only rewarding herself, she is also coping with her disappointment at being unappreciated. The ideal women, according to these magazines, are passive and dependent. Her fate and her happiness rest with a man, not with the participation in the labor force. Advertisers often offer food as a way to repress irritation, resentment, and hurt feelings.

Although it has been seen that women are generally portrayed in roles that show them to be subservient to men in television drama (and even children's television and cartoons), it is in advertising that television is most backward in comparison with society's attitudes, and also where the most clichйd stereotypes exist. A unflattering comment from Jean Kilbourne (1999) probably sums up a lot of adverts; "Scientific studies and the most casual viewing yield the same conclusion: Women are shown almost exclusively as housewives or sex objects" We are, according to Kilbourne (1999), subjected to "over 1500 ads a day, constituting perhaps the most powerful educational force in society".