Blog Post Advertisement and Culture

In our last class my group and I presented an ad from OLAY. This ad was based around the image of a woman who is overjoyed because she feels ‘complete’ by using the new moisturizer from OLAY. However it wasn’t simply that, in the image the woman had a description of her roles…what does that tell us about our society? This brings me to gender roles in advertisement. Unlike sex which is the product of biologically based male-female difference; gender is a result of socialisation in a culture. Gender signifies the association between men and women or femininity and masculinity. It is this connection that advertisers focus on, because people express themselves by their gender, and gender can be noticed at a glance making it much easier for advertisers and marketing agencies to use this theme in their work. For example: if an advertiser wanted to target the male audience they would include things that men think make them masculine (women, beer, monster trucks etc). Going back to the original question what does that tell us about our society? Well it should tell us that we are sort of sexist, because we classify products and goods as to being only for one sex. Take the OLAY ad for example, they are only targeting women for their moisturiser, however why can’t men use moisturiser as well? As well as that women are used as objects in ads and are classified as certain things. In the OLAY ad (as mentioned before) the woman has roles “mother, wife, shoe aficionado” etc, therefore classifying her, and thus targeting the women who are those things. In conclusion I believe that people need to start seeing the tricks in advertisement and start asking questions, because we are open to thousands of ads a day and we are starting to not notice what that is really trying to convey in their message.  

Smoking Kills

Smoking Kills...STOP! (By: Medicine Plus) 
Smoking is accountable for numerous diseases, such as cancer, continuing respiratory diseases, and heart disease, as well as untimely death. Over 440,000 people in the USA and 100,000 in the UK die because of smoking each year. Smoking causes cancer. 90% of lung cancer patients established their disease due to smoking. Lung cancer is one of the utmost communal reasons of cancer deaths in the world. Smokers also have a considerably higher hazards to evolving cancer as well. Not only that but they have the greater risk of smoking reappearance (which means the cancer coming back). This article (by “Medicine Plus”) is being written to really show the significance that smoking has on people. Smoking really does affect us and des cause cancer because, it affects our cells and how they grow. In some cases they may grow rapidly causing tumours, or in other cases may kill the cell fully. Not only that it causes breathing problems because your lungs get so clogged up with tar that it affects the way you take in oxygen. Smokers are twice as likely to have a heart attack due to the clogging of arteries. Kids do it nowadays as well not just adults, because of several reasons: bad influences (peer pressure, or parents who do it etc), some of these kids die by the time they are thirty five years old. Save yourself, the people around you and the kids…stop smoking