The Confusions Advertisements Bring - Case Study Example

Shu Rong DasBender The Confusions Advertisements Bring (An Explanatory Essay) 30 October Introduction Advertising is a prominent feature of a modern free market economy. According to a definition of advertisement from the online Oxford Dictionaries, advertisement is “a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event or publicizing a job vacancy”. Firms that choose to advertise products want to gain public attention and sell more products at current market prices. With the advances in technology and development of mass media, an increasing number of companies decided to propagandize commodities to attract consumers and increase profits. Consumers are bombarded with their multifarious advertising information through various media such as television, radio, Internet, newspapers, magazines, etc. However, information being conveyed through advertisements is not always appropriate, correct, accurate, or put another way, often very misleading to consumers. Every seller wants to convince consumers to buy what they produced. In order to sell more, it is common to see exaggeration and embellishment in advertisements. It is difficult for consumers to distinguish what is actually true and what is not from the advertisement they will see or hear. Discussion People should look at advertisements in a critical way instead of believing it without analysis. Robert Scholes emphasizes this point in his essay “On Reading a Video Text” that “we would do well to pause and consider the necessity of ideological criticism.” He is trying to tell the reader that whatever you see in the advertisement, you should pause for a while and try to think critically towards advertisements and what its real message is (Scholes, para.10). This applies to print advertisements but more especially to all visual-text advertisements. In the SKYY Vodka advertisement, there is a man and a woman on the beach. The woman in a bikini is lying prone between the man’s legs. The man is standing over her which signifies a position of dominance over someone lying down. The relative positions of these two persons indicate some kind of gender bias. The man can only be seen from his feet up to his waist; he is dressed in a nice corporate suit and wearing brand new, shiny shoes. In his left hand he is holding two intersecting empty martini glasses and in his right hand, he has a blue bottle of the SKYY Vodka, holding it by the neck. Based on his very appearance by way or manner of dressing, it is safe to conclude this man is wealthy. What the advertisement implies or suggests is this brand of vodka is an expensive, high-end product. In a subliminal message, the advertisement implies having this vodka will attract beautiful girls to the drinker. The background of the advertisement is a beautiful beach and sea. There are also some clouds in the blue sky. There are many things in the advertisement which are blue. The sky is blue, the sea is blue, the man’s formal suite is dark blue, too. Even the bottle of the vodka is color blue also. From all this, the blue color is predominant in the advertisement; a color blue is associated with coolness and most often described as safety, calming, comforting, and sleepiness (Albert 22). The only three things that were not blue in the advertisement are the woman’s skin, her hair and the beach. With all these characteristics associated with blue color, the man appears to be cool and provides safety, comfort, and security to the woman lying on the beach sand, this is why the advertisement is mostly blue. In his essay “Being a Man,” Paul Theroux talks about his ideas on a certain type or version of masculinity which he found to be insulting and abusive. He states in his essay that even the expression "Be a man!" strikes him as insulting and abusive because it means, “be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient, and soldierly and stop thinking (Theroux176). Theroux does not like the idea of being a man. He thinks to be a real man is to stop thinking; the whole idea of this kind of manhood is pitiful. What happened in the advertisement is completely against his ideas on masculinity. The man is standing without showing his face, so we can see this makes the man very mysterious but at the same time indicative of a lack of self-confidence and of his insecurity. Most people will judge the man as cool because he is standing over the woman but the position is a way to express the man’s superiority and domination towards that woman. The whole stereotypical picture of domination is not his idea of what masculinity is. It instead betrays a sense of inadequacy with regards to women, not treating them as equals. A picture like the SKYY advertisement will certainly anger most women and the feminists. However, it is very critical and misleading that the company is trying to suggest that if you get alcohol, then you will get women. This also makes a number of teenagers, especially male teenagers thinking alcohol will be the fastest and easiest way to have sex with females. Theroux thinks most people equate masculinity with heavy drinking (to be a drunkard is to be masculine, even). This distorted idea or mentality about masculinity can be seen in movies and advertisements. People would go to a drinking pub and drink until they are stone drunk, and the film portrayals depict drunk people starting doing something sexual in nature. Many people think this is true but in real life, it is not normal. People will try to imitate what they see in the movies to get laid but most often, they end up with nothing. The only thing that has changed after all the heavy drinking is a marked increase in the crime rates committed by the same people who got heavily drunk and not knowing what they were doing at all. We can see a lot of situations in our daily lives where we are bombarded with all kinds of advertisements wherever we go. In the parks, in the supermarkets, in subways, the trains, on the bus, and even on the airplanes (advertisements are painted on the fuselage of airplanes) or inside a public toilet, there is bound to an advertisement for some product or service. But the main point is to not get carried away easily by these advertisements and their messages. The SKYY Vodka advertisement is an example of what Scholes had warned about. It portrays a cultural and social myth by which men are supposed to be dominant over women. It is sexist that indicates gender discrimination because the woman in that advertisement is lying down while the man is standing over her, a position of dominance by any interpretation. It is a very bad scene to show to people because it perpetuates this gender bias against females. This woman appears to be virtually and totally helpless against the man standing over her. This man-over-woman picture is a derangement of what is normal visual processing because people usually see two persons either standing together or sitting together but never with one person standing up and the second person lying down in a submissive position that is sure to anger feminists all over the world because of its depiction of helplessness and docility. The woman is practically in the very posture of absolute submission because she is at the very mercy of the man standing over her, a show of male physical dominance. The advertisement is really an abnormal portrayal of what two people of equal stature normally do together. In this sense, it may have achieved its ultimate purpose of relieving the boredom of the viewer as it is a provocative photograph that evokes strong emotions and perhaps even stronger feelings. The camera’s angle taken from the viewpoint on the top of the woman’s head shows its power over the viewer by depicting the woman’s gorgeous body to ensure to excite any man. It is an expression of the subconscious fascination of men over women’s bodies and it further indicates a power derived from visual fascination, a form of pleasurable voyeurism. A woman lying down in the sun who is scantily clad with a two-piece bathing suit will excite a man physically or sexually but not mentally perhaps because anything sexual is a basic instinct that further reminds men on their need to control women at all times. In other words, it is a form of masculinity which Theroux did not like and detests to a high degree because it hints of physical violence, the man’s brute strength triumphing over the woman. Conclusion We live in a word that is full with advertisements; a lot of times, the advertisement would bring us many confusing ideas, thoughts, and emotions. We should filter everything with our brains instead of accepting everything at face value. People should resist the power of advertising which can be manipulative through disinformation and misinformation. People can recover from their initial shock by using critical thinking of what they see in visual-text advertisements which invade their minds without the people being consciously aware of it. It is one reason why the advertising industry adopted a code of ethics for its members, to desist or prevent them from resorting to misleading claims or inaccurate information on their ads. An advertisement must be truthful at all times. This builds up customer credibility that in turn promotes customer loyalty because they got the correct information (Gitomer 53). Works Cited Albert, Amy. “Color Hue and Mood: The Effect of Variation of Red Hues on Positive and Negative Mood States.” Journal of the Behavioral Sciences 1 (Fall 2007): 19-26. Print. Gitomer, Jeffrey H. Customer Satisfaction is Worthless: Customer Loyalty is Priceless. Austin, TX, USA: Bard Press, 1998. Print. Scholes, Robert. “On Reading a Video Text.” Center for Media Literacy. 1989. Web. 30 Oct. 2013. < http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/reading-video-text>. Theroux, Paul. “Being a Man.” Sunrise with Seamonsters. Ed. Paul Theroux. New York, NY, USA: Mariner Books, 1985. 309-312. Print. Read More