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advertising and body image essay
how does the media influence beauty standards
advertising and body image essay
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Glamour, Life & Style, Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and People; what do you see when you open these magazines? Women who are beautiful, young, flawless, sexy, flirty, provocative, fashionable, seductive, innocent, and happy. What do you think as you look at the pages in the magazine? I would like to look like her. What do you say to your self when you see the product? Will this product help me look like her?
Magazines play a part in creating the image of sex sells. Advertisers use an image to create an advertisement to sell a product. The Purpose of advertising is not to sell sex, but to attract the consumer. Their talent is the ability to transform seemingly neutral object to create a desirable product. It’s no wonder that we are so obsessed with our bodies and how the world looks at us. Woman want to be desirable and some would do almost anything to achieve the look of what the world sees as being sexy.
Magazines target a certain audience, giving advertisers a way of targeting a specific audience. Magazines like Elle and Vogue target an audience who prefer fashion and cultural lifestyle 1. The advertising in this magazine will target audiences that are mainly interested in fashion and living a wealthy lifestyle. The advertisements that you would mostly see would be products of name brands, like Dolce and Gabbana, Rolex, Tiffany’s, and high end products. Cosmopolitan and Glamour Magazines target audiences who are more trend conscious and stylish. This audience is between the age group of 18-40 whose interests are fashion, beauty, hair styles, relationships, health etc 2. Advertisements in these magazine will be brand names, like Tommy Hillfigure, Coach, Maybelline, an enormous amount of beauty products. Life & Style and Peo...
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...in_klein_billboard_offen.php
Is the calvin Klien Billboard Offensive?.
By Jen Carlson in News on June 15, 2009
12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Klein
Calvin Klein
13 http://niki-guess.blogspot.com/2009/06/brief-history-of-company-and-marciano.html
Brief History of the company and the Marciano brothers
June 25, 2009
14 http://www.examiner.com/celebrity-in-national/top-20-sexiest-guess-jeans-models-of-all-time
Image- Anna Nicole #5
15 http://www.frankwbaker.com/celebrityads.htm
Celebrities in Advertising
16 http://www.styleite.com/beauty/natalie-portman-topless-dior-ad/
Natalie Portsman Goes Topless for Dior Perfume Ad
by Justin Fenner-1/12/2011
17 Elle Magazine
April Issue no.308
18 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/11/eva-mendes-new-calvin-kle_n_419006.html
Eva Mendes' New Calvin Klein Ads: Greased Up & Topless (NSFW PHOTOS)
Advertising is form of communicating and using methods into getting the buyers to purchase a product. Cosmopolitan has done a good job in determining what readers and listeners want and need. Cosmopolitan is a magazine directed toward young people who have low self- confidence and low self-esteem and also who care about health and appearance. As Fowles said, “By giving form to people’s deep-lying desires and picturing states of being that individuals privately yearn for.” (Fowles, 137). All advertisers know who and what readers wish or long for.
...ce their inceptions over 20 years ago, both InStyle and Allure magazines have secured themselves a place in the women’s magazine market. They have both demonstrated that they have an authority and influence in the fashion and beauty industries. In spite of these similarities the magazines went about their success in different manners. Through creating the world’s first beauty magazine, Allure gained its success by obtaining a niche market and offering an original product. On the other hand, InStyle took an existing model of a fashion magazine and expanded it to reach a greater demographic by including trends at all price points. Both these magazines took innovative measures to create a success in an over flooded market and they have continued to secure a readership by adapting to new media and positioning themselves as must-have guides to insider beauty and fashion.
I chose sex in advertising for my research topic because I do not know about it well, even though a lot of sexual images and texts in advertisements. When I was a little kid, I often surprised by ads with sexy woman. Even now, I sometimes have my eyes glued to such kinds of advertising. I wonder that there are some physiological reasons why people pay attention to sex images. Also, learning about sex in advertising is useful for my career because I want to work for an advertising company in the future. I infer that sex sells has both good and bad aspects and I can use it effectively by learning it accurately. If I use it effectively, we can make much money. However, we also take a risk by using sex in ads because some extreme images may give a bad reputation on products and company. Also, I care about the danger of sex in advertising, too. If I were a parent, I do not want my children to see some ads because they are too excessive for children. By researching this topic, I hope I can learn what is harmful for young people. I think sex sells have both good and bad effects on commercial and ethical aspects. Now, I have three questions about sex in advertising. First, I want to know when and how it has been used. I think there should be many famous advertisements with sexual images. Next, I would like to learn about how effective it is. I infer that there are both positive and negative effects in the advertising. Lastly, I want to know how boys and girls react to the advertisement. Some ads focus on to get male customers and others target on female. I also want to know how reaction relates to purchasing. Some people may not change their purchasing behavior even though they notice the ads and are ...
The unrealistically perfect women featured on the cover, along with the controversial headlines, all serve to draw readers in. Even if someone doesn’t purchase Cosmopolitan, they might at least flip through the pages while standing in line at the grocery store. That being said, Cosmopolitan markets their magazine to impressionable, curious and perhaps already insecure young women. The women most likely to buy Cosmopolitan are probably those that are curious about the sexual nature of the magazine. Or, the magazine appeals to insecure women who believe that this magazine can “teach” them how to be desirable to men, as the headlines on the cover often suggest. Because Cosmopolitan magazine has been a mainstay in the media world for so long, I have to believe that the rhetorical appeals used by the magazine are effective enough to keep current readers reading and to consistently draw in new readers. While those working for Cosmopolitan enjoy the benefits of their magazine’s success, there are millions of young girls negatively affected by Cosmopolitan’s
Many advertisement have found the key part into selling a product is through "sex" because they know sex will sell. Susan Bordo, a philosopher, write an essay piece on how the male bodies are presented as objects of pleasure and exchange of commerce. Usually, it would be women who are presented as objects of pleasure, but in this particular essay the script is flipped. Susan Bordo focus on how women react to men in the media, how men was seen in sexy advertisements and how homosexuality had an influence on it. These advertisement images are brought to life by brand names like Calvin Klein, Gucci, and Versace. In Susan Bordo's "Beauty (re)discovers the male body" she uses rhetorical strategies persuasively to argue that the male bodies are being exposed and objectified in a similar way to the female body. Susan Bordo, a philosopher, the Otis A. Singletary Chair of Humanities at the University of Kentucky. Bordo has background training in the study of culture, including popular culture and its representation of the body. Bordo intended audience was a broad group of people. Her audience would consist of people of any gender who are aware of advertisement selling products through sex. No, Bordo does not show proper audience awareness. The readers are prone to use context clues and the information to paint a clear picture of who is Bordo audience. As recently mention, Bordo's purpose for writing is present her argument about the exposure and objectification of the male body as opposed to the female body in the media. In Bordo essay, she introduces her ethos through personal stories, her own opinion, and data polls. Bordo credibility is well equipped throughout her essay, and writing on subject she shows passion towards. Bordo acknowled...
Some people may not agree with this theory, and they think that women are merely over exaggerating being viewed as sexual objects in advertisements, because men’s body’s are also being sexualized in advertisements. But men’s body’s are not constantly looked at like an object or rated, or not good enough. Women’s...
Most controversy over magazines is about the images they portray. According to the writers, Amy Malkin, Kimberlie Wornian, and Joan Chrisler, "Women and Weight: Gendered Messages on Magazines Covers," women's magazines insist on dieting, exercise, and cosmetic surgery to achieve the ideal body. This is in no way true. Yes, magazines show pictures of beautiful women and have articles that relate to dieting, exercise and surgery. However, magazines have no other purpose than to inform. Also, magazines do not cause women to feel inadequate; they are useful tools in which women can find informative articles on the issues at hand.
We live in a society full of commercialism. With marketing companies competing with one another to sell their products, they must produce the most appealing advertisements to attract the consumer. Adults and children are exposed to many advertisements on a daily basis, from television to magazines to billboards. These all use many rhetorical strategies and ideologies to gain the audience’s attention. In advertisements there are hidden tactics to promote their products and appeal to the consumer. One very popular technique used by these companies is sex. Sexual appeal is a huge marketing tactic in our society and many advertisements definitely promote “sex sells” in their advertisements. For instance, Carl’s Jr. commercials and advertisements
I was flipping through some channels on the television set one day and came across a woman's talk show, "The View." It caught my attention when one of the hostesses asked the audience of mostly women to raise their hand if they thought they were truly beautiful. Much to my surprise the audience did not respond with very many show of hands. The hostess then introduced a study done by Dove, the makers of the body soap. Dove polled over 6,000 women from all over the country and only two percent of the women polled said they feel beautiful. Women are surrounded by images screaming physical beauty is more important than their talents and accomplishments. Women are deriving their self worth from an ideal of how they think they should look and how they think everyone else wants them to look instead of focusing on their sense of who they are, what they know, and where they are going in life. In "Help or Hindrance?: Women's Magazines Offer Readers Little But Fear, Failure," Mary Kay Blakely states, "Instead of encouraging women to grow beyond childish myths and adapt to the changes of life, women's magazines have readers running in place, exhausted." She goes on to say, "This is a world we have 'made up' for women, and it is a perilous place to exist." One of the biggest culprits feeding women's insecurities are the popular women's magazine that line the book shelves of grocery stores, gas stations, and waiting rooms. They supply readers and the occasional innocent passerby with unrealistic images of what women should be instead of showing diverse age groups and women with natural beauty. Reading through a couple of magazines, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Shape, I found nothing but hidden agendas and...
There are many companies that use sex appeal in their ads today. For instance Victoria Secrets is one of the top sellers in lingerie. They show skin in every one of their ads. All of their models put on the sex appeal for all commercials and magazines. That is what helps them sell. Women look at those ads and see those girls floating on clouds like angels and feel they could feel the same if they wore that purple bra or red underwear. By showing these girls constantly looking sexy in their ads make women feel sexy just wearing them. That is the whole point of using sex in your ads. It?s amazing what a little skin can do. "In advertising, sex sells. But only if you're selling sex (Richards).
In modern society there is more and more digital editing without the knowledge of consumers. Currently there are various reasons for why women develop negative body image, low-self-esteem and eating disorders. According to Naomi Wolf in her novel “Beauty Myth”, one of the many reasons women obtain concerns with their bodies is due to the universal images of young female bodies presented through advertisements in fashion magazines. Advertisements in magazines are altering and shaping the desires of men and women. Magazines sell viewers images of beautiful, skinny, flawless confident young women. When people are constantly antagonized with the magazine industry’s ideal of “perfect beauty” the viewer’s then, subconsciously believe these images to be true and begin to form biases about what they themselves should look like and what other people must also look like. People who view magazines get mislead by advertisers because they are unaware that all the images displayed are digitally altered through Photoshop and airbrushing. Today’s magazines are formed completely on false ideals of flawless beauty and unattainable body images, to prevent women and men from falling victim to the magazine’s deceitful images we as a society need to become aware and educate ourselves.
The media can also use sex and sexuality to sell products. By using this approach, the media are essentially selling status or popularity, not just products. They use the allure of sex to make people insecure and think they need a certain product or they need to look a certain
American culture idolizes beautiful women, and Playboy has helped with this in many industries whether it be in magazines, in television shows, the fashion industry, or even in the entertainment world. Playboy is a prime example of how American culture idolizes beautiful women. The magazine is mainly known for displaying nude o...
The average American is exposed to hundreds of advertisements per day. Advertisements targeted toward females have an enormous effect on women's thoughts, attitudes, perceptions, and actions. Most of the time, women don't even realize these advertisements are formulating self-image issues. These ideals surround them daily and they become naturalized to the ads. Advertising creates an entire worldview persuading women to emulate the images they see all around them. In order to create a market for their products, companies constantly prey upon women's self esteem, to feel like they aren't good enough just the way they are. This makes women constantly feel stressed out about their appearance (Moore). Advertising has a negative effect on women's body image, health, and self-esteem.
An article by Christina N Baker, Images of Women’s Sexuality in Advertisements: A content Analysis of Black And White Oriented Women’s and Men’s Magazine emphasizes on how women’s are portrayed in media such as advertisements and Magazine. The author analyzes how media has a huge impact in our society today; as a result, it has an influence on race and gender role between men and women.