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.
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