Advertisements have become more unique and creative since the 1940’s. They not only cater to the family life, but also the single life. Automobile advertisements in the 1940’s were directed towards the modern family. Although there are still automobile advertisements that show happy families in nice cars; there are also advertisements for certain vehicles that are more geared towards single people. Marketing is constantly changing to meet what the majority population wants or needs.
Jib Fowles “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals” discusses the need for prominence. In the ad Portfolio there is an advertisement for Cadillac’s that depicts a man in a car with multiple women and men. This advertisement can be interpreted by an individual that if a man buys a Cadillac that he will gain popularity from both men and women. In contrast to this, other car ads from this period show mostly women. They mostly can be interpreted as a need for attention. They seem to be tailored towards a changing America, from a male dominate environment to equality. A 1966 Corvette add shows a women standing...
It’s clear that those advertisements try to make an impact on our buying decisions. We can even say they manipulate viewers by targeting specific group of people or categorizing them so they could have a feeling this product is intended for them or what he or she represents. For instance, they use gender stereotypes. Advertises make use of men and woman appearance or behavior for the sake of making the message memorable. Therefore, most effective and common method is to represent a woman as a sexual object. They are linked with home environment where being a housewife or a mother is a perfect job for the. In other hand men are used more as work done representations. They are associated with power, leadership and efficiency. Those stereotypes make the consumer categorize themselves and reveals the mainstream idea of social status each gender needs to be to fit in and what products they are necessary to have to be part of that
Other commercials, according to Solomon, thrive on fitting in. The Chevrolet commercials have a slogan that makes one feel to be American, one must by American. Chevrolet's slogan is 'The Heartbeat of America.'; Car commercials also have targeted markets also. For a truck commercial, they will show a truck getting all dirty and going through an obstacle. This is targeted towards men because most men find these things appealing. For a luxury car commercial the mood or the commercial is nice and pleasant, the car is on a country road (representing one driving to there country home). These cars were once targeted towards upper class people, but now they are targeted towards everyone according to Solomon. A commercial strives on the ever so enduring drive for Americans to have better things and climb up the social status ladder. Marketers know this, so they place normal, average, everyday looking people in their commercials to let middle class people know that they can have the car, too.
Advertising is as old as civilization itself. They are forever interconnected. If one changes then so does the other. So as our society evolved dramatically by the influence of technology and social media, so did the way we advertised. With the power of technology, advertising gained the ability to be everywhere at once. These locations ranged from billboards, to projector screens that hang from skyscrapers, to even in your homes in the form of commercials. The evolution of advertising in the modern world is both somewhat disturbing and innovative at the same time.
Depictions of families in the 1950s were extreme in a myriad of ways. The notion of a “nuclear family,” in which a husband, wife and their children were considered the smallest unit of our society, became incredibly popular. Husbands and wives each seemed to have particular roles and duties from which they couldn’t stray. The husband, of course, was a working man responsible for bringing money to the household. His wife worked on something else: their household itself. She cleaned, cooked, and decorated. She bought groceries and clothing for everybody. She watched their children, fed them, and took care of them. In the 1950s, advertising advocated these roles and these roles alone: straying from them was rather unthinkable. The “nuclear family” had a facade of perfection, hiding any troubles within. To challenge it was to ostracize oneself. More than half a century later, notions of family have loosened considerably, but the influence of the 1950s lives on. In the attached advertisement from 2011, Coca-Cola supports its consumeristic goals by presenting a modern twist on classic 1950s family ideals via a brazen acceptance of the negative effects of its products.
Men and women both drive cars, it’s a simple necessity to be able go to work for most people, however, from the commercials on television, one would assume that men are the primary purchasers of cars. In Steve Craig’s essay, Men’s Men and Women’s Women, he analyzes four commercials to illustrate how advertisers strategically targets the viewers. Craig argues that advertisers will grasp the attention of the viewer by the gender ideals that both men and women have of each other. Not only do advertisers pick a target audience demographic, but they also will target the audience at specific time to air their commercials. By analyzing an Audi and Bud Light commercial, one can see that Craig arguments are true to an extent but it appears that commercials have gone from an idealized world to a more realistic and relatable stance. for are still [true, however it seems that commercials may have altered to appear more realistic.] [relevant to an extent. This is to say, it appears that advertisers may have altered their commercial tactics. ]
The author of this book Bruce Barton was a partner in a successful advertising firm during the 1920’s. This was a time when the industry of advertising was under going some major changes. These changes had a lot to do with a number of factors the first of which being the post war prosperity this meant people had more money than they ever had before. Another one of these factors had to do with the high number of teens who were now attending high school, this proved to be important because it created a whole other market which hadn’t existed before. One more factor was the advances made in transportation and communication, these advances allowed goods, people, and information to travel long distances relatively quickly intern allowing companies to grow large enough to spread their services nationally. Still another important factor was the invention of financing, this allowed people to pay for durable objects (large objects that would last a couple of years) with affordable installments or payments. But the biggest changes were the actual advertising practices themselves, many of which were pioneered by Barton and his associates, and didn’t become norms in advertising until after the release of Bartons book “The Man Nobody Knows” in 1924. This book served not only as a manual on how to advertise more affectively but also as an example of good advertising itself.
Advertising, whether criticized or celebrated, is undeniably a strong force in American society. Portrayals and Images of women have long been used to sell in published advertisements. However, how they have been used has changed enormously throughout the decades. Women have fought to find a lasting and prominent position in their society. Only in the span of twenty years, between 1900’s and 1920’s, the roles of women changed dramatically here in United States.
In Jib Fowles analysis of advertising he states, “An advertisement communicates by making use of a specifically selected image (of a supine female, say, or a curly-haired child, or a celebrity) which is designed to stimulate “subrational impulses and desires ” (75). Fowles quote applies to Tom Ford’s 2012 advertisement. Ford’s advertisements, portray women as sex icons. In his advertisement, there’s a woman who has dramatic makeup and is looking directly at the camera to show attraction. She’s posing while there’s a man behind her to represent protection and dominance. Meanwhile, men always have to have a masculine identity while women have to simply be beautiful. This is a mainstream issue that devalues women, encourages sexual harassment, and advertises violence against women.
In this particular advertisement, they are selling a very sleek attractive car. The advertisement was in the open road, with an attractive blonde woman wearing a bikini. There are no beaches around, she is not going for a swim, she is just there to look good. All of this quotes say, “The Pursuit of Perfection”. This ad is obviously selling both sex. The beautiful woman in the bikini is suggesting that with this car, you automatically get girls of this caliber. Almost as if it is all inclusive, including her. Most people consider the public display of sex or suggestive things taboo. People by nature are attracted to things that are “off limits”. This is an advertising tactic of taking things that are normally considered bad or taboo and making them acceptable and desirable. This is a truly effective tactic, based on the fact that rebellion sells, people want what they can not have. In the “Selling of Rebellion”, Leo states, “The central message here is very serious and strongly antisocial: We should all rebel against authority, social order, propriety, and rules of any kind. “Obey” and “Rules” are bad (Leo,198). This is saying that people will want to do something that is taboo just because it is “off limits” and it feels good to do something people tell say you cannot. This is also selling elitism by selling a certain status. Lexus is already considered a more expensive or high quality brand of car, and they use their
Craig’s article analyzed four different types of commercials, a car commercial about a group of men being independent and carefree around their cars, a beer commercial about a female bartender being attracted to the man that walks in the bar, a commercial for a weight loss program showing the success a women had and featuring her husband and family as background actors in the commercial, and a commercial for deodorant and a man being attracted by the smell of his female companion. The car and beer commercials were clearly aimed towards men where men are depicted as being carefree and non-committing individuals. The weight loss commercial and deodorant commercial are depicting a woman's sense of empowerment, the women in these commercials are not shown caring for the family which is all but opposite of the men’s commercials. The Audi commercial does not fit into either of these categories, it is a gender neutral commercial that captures the viewer’s attention from the beginning and holds it until the end. The commercial shows both genders breaking stereotypes several times throughout it’s course and can not be truly labeled as for men nor
Common sense seems to dictate that commercials just advertise products. But in reality, advertising is a multi-headed beast that targets specific genders, races, ages, etc. In “Men’s Men & Women’s Women”, author Steve Craig focuses on one head of the beast: gender. Craig suggests that, “Advertisers . . . portray different images to men and women in order to exploit the different deep seated motivations and anxieties connected to gender identity.” In other words, advertisers manipulate consumers’ fantasies to sell their product. In this essay, I will be analyzing four different commercials that focuses on appealing to specific genders.
The Web essay on Male Gaze by the authors Thomas Streeter, Nicole Hintlian, Samantha Chipetz, and Susanna Callender on the University of Vermont website discusses the exploitation of the male gaze in advertising and provides several convincing examples to explain its impact on women. Male Gaze has been a long tradition in western art, where women are represented as objects to be viewed by male viewers. This tradition continues in modern advertising and the omnipresence of this tradition has made it so that "Women watch themselves being looked at" (Berger, 1973, p.47). Through the ages and even in modern times, advertisements assume man as the ideal spectator therefore women are acclimatized to look at themselves through the eyes of a man. I completely agree with the authors that the advertisers understand the power and tradition of the male gaze and exploit it even in modern times, and the primary spectator is the male.
During the 19th and 20th century, America –mostly white collar, middle class Americans- saw a great increase in salaries and a huge rise in mass production which paved the way for the modern American consumerism which we know today. The advertising scene saw a dramatic boost during that period and tried to latch on to this growing pool of emerging consumers. Although only limited to print, advertising during this pivotal period showed panache and reflected American society
Advertising in the 50s was primarily focused on the return of traditional family values, and portraying the consumer’s role in society’s prestige. But, during the recession of 1959 to 1961, the time was ripe for some innovation in the advertising industry. Surly enough, a single ad appeared that changed the course of advertising history. The Volkswagen Beetle, a seemingly ugly car with all odds against it in the American market of huge, tail-finned vehicles of the 1950s, surprisingly prospered. The advertisement campaign broke all previous rules of using wide-angle photography, and beautiful women. These advertisements stole the American hearts with their wit and honesty.
Advertising techniques have changed and along with it, the impact they have on each individual’s mind. While there are some similarities between the different kinds of advertisements we see today, there are also many differences. Advertising has also become more unethical than it was in, let’s say, the 50s. Not all advertisements are brainless; there are a few that are even creative and fun and just pull the target audience in by entertaining them while selling them a product.