Analysis of Two Advertisements
One of the massive international industries in the world is
advertising. The money that it makes is inestimable because it
successfully sells, and attains most the aims of their business. It
promotes ideas and products to people using the media. A lot of people
feel overwhelmed by the huge number of ads that bombard them everyday.
It saturates every media around to meet its target. Adverts now appear
not only on television; they also appear on radio, billboards,
Internet, cell phones and numerous other ways. It can be argued that
they have a profound effect on people’s appearance and our society.
Advertising in my view is a competitive industry. Advertisers are
fierce to sell their products and work extremely hard to get the
attention from the specific audience they try to target. To do this,
advertisers need to create ideas that would interest their audience.
If a product were to be sold to a woman, advertisers would have images
or texts to show mainly femininity and also include freshness, erotica
and purity. However, products advertisers sell to men portrays that
they are powerful, muscular and in control of their environment. The
advertisers successfully sell their products making both genders
create a standard image or a fixed idea of how their appearance could
be. It is believed that generally ideas that appeal to woman will not
appeal to men in the same way. This is the reason why women appear as
objects, making themselves desirable and adored. Men however appear as
subjects, looking dominant and in control.
In this essay, I intend to examine two advertisements I have chosen
and studied. They both show how the media targets to sell their
product to women and men audiences differently. The industry creates
and reinforces stereotypes of what it means to be a man and a woman.
This would then create great confusion to both genders of how a
person’s image should be. For example, advertisers have made men, as
mentioned before, obsessed with their performance and women obsessed
with their appearance.
The first advert I have chosen is targeted to a female audience. The
feature of this particular advert shows a young woman staring back at
the audience, smiling. It is a really close picture to her face, her
hair neatly tied back, and her eyes have a slight glow. Her lips have
a slight shine and her skin is perfectly clear. This instantly
indicates that the model of this advertisement takes care of her looks
and appearance. It is inviting the target audience, as if calling you
in to a completely perfect world. Already, we can tell advertisers are
concentrating on physical appearance and presenting the product as a
cure for unattractiveness.
This advert is trying to sell ‘Maybeline Fresh Matte Foundation.’
Beside the model is a clear picture...
