Advertisments
It's really no secret and pretty easy to comprehend what the goal of advertisements are; to get the consumer to buy its product. But what sometimes is hard to comprehend about advertisements is the way some companies present their commercial or ads to the public. Advertisements can come out very sexist, racist, or just plan offensive in so many ways, the only difference now is that people are catching on to them and actually have caused enough chaos to have certain ads removed because of it's content.
With that said it still does not stop the stupidity. In Bell Hooks "Representation of Whiteness" she says Stereotypes, however inaccurate, are on form of representation. Like fictions they are created to serve as substitution, standing in for what is real." I feel like this is true because if you have no personal experience with a particular race, religion, etc., you're only going to go off of what you see on the television or any-other source of media; and they way they portray people can mess up anyone's perception of another person. When it comes to ads you start to see a trend into what parts certain groups are going to play. I remember a Kool-Aid commercial that has a whole bunch of black people playing basketball with some hip-hop music playing in the background. Now I understand there is a sterotype that all black people drink Kool-aid, but did they have to play basketball(they could have been playing cricket) and ther had to be hip hop music in the background. I get that they are trying to reach a certain target market but I am sure white, Spanish, and Asian, people drink Kool-aid too.
There's one in-particular commercial that got banned even before it could hit the television screen that happened a few years back with Burger King and Mary J. Blige singing about how good chicken. I personally found it kind of funny, but a lot of people were upset by it and felt like it furthered the stigmatism of all black people love fried chicken and it was offensive. They ended up not airing the commercial. Here it is below:And even more recent there was a big uproar about a magazine having a young white model playing an african women. The uproar was about why couldn't they get real black woman to play the part because they are sure they could have found one. Here is a picture of her and see the article at : http://theybf.com/2013/02/27/speak-on-it-should-these-ny-high-school-parents-be-angered-over-all-white-casting-of-the
Sexism
Sexism has been a problem in advertisements since the beginning and may be getting worse by crossing too many boundaries to the point that your jaw drops like "what were they thinking?" Bell Hooks said " in a variety of ways the mass media helped make us the cultural schizophrenics we are today, women who rebel against yet submit to prevailing images about what a desirable, worthwhile woman should be." This is important because like Wolf says "the markets' reports described how to manipulate housewives into becoming insecure consumers of household products." We all have insecurities and advertisements use that against you.
An alternative of ads is to have more realistic ads of regular people of all shape and sizes being beautiful, they might actually get more of profit if the represented everyone in a good way instead of making people conform into what society wants you to think is beauty. Beauty is different in everyone's so why not catch everyone's eye and not just be narrow minded. There were some strides to making a change of what a beautiful woman could look like but it was unfortunately banned by Fox and ABC. The commercial was a full figure model from Lane Bryant who was modeling lingerie just like every other Victoria Secrect Angel would do, she looked amazing; but apparently these stations felt that nobody wanted to see this kind of woman so they pulled it. Here's the banned commercial below
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