Advertisements are essential to any campaign, to gain a benefit, such as winning covergirl by broadcasting, or by hanging up posters for a garage sale. Essentially, advertisements are made when many firms or individuals exist in a single industry or are working towards the same goal.
Biggest example, fast food chains. For a person who has never tasted a burger in their life, how can they choose between McDonalds and say Burger King? Well, it all comes down to these ads you see on billboards and commercials they air on TV. But are those advertisements depicting the real deal? Hmm, lets see...
The advertisement has perfect proportions, because to catch the perfect frame those in-charge of such ads have to make sure that the cheese isn't over flowing, the burger is juicy, the lettuce isn't a week old, the ketchup shows at the right places. Well that looks appetizing doesn't it?
No, not really. Not when you look at the burger on the right.
The same goes for these chocolate chip cookies. Just look at the container, its full of scrumptious little pieces of chocolate that make you want to go ahead and buy a packet but what does one find inside? A cookie with ONE chocolate chip.
Where'd the rest go? :(
And possibly the most important and prominent example is of the false advertisement of beauty in magazines. Models are chosen specifically for their beauty right? Their cheekbones, their facial features, their age etc..
But aren't those models people too? I mean how can they have no flaw? Nothing a little makeup and photoshop can't fix right?
Oh look...
Love,
Maggie
I love this post. It's so true and really has a good point. Great job!
ReplyDeleteI think that ads and real life are different things.
ReplyDeleteThe burger makers at McDonalds aren't the ones who made the ads... So, I'm okay with "perfect" ads, it's also their job to show the best of the product in order to sell it. So, we can't know in advance what it will be in real life, but there is a word for that : experience. Then, you got a point, some ads are false but I think we knew it. :)
It's especially amazing to see models who we feel are like living embodiments of "perfect," but without the heavy makeup and the photoshop they seem just shy of normal. Great post :)
ReplyDeleteAmazing Maggie >:)
ReplyDeleteI hate false advertisements, they're everywhere. The fact that they 'perfect' models so much gives young girls a false idea of they should look which is awful.
This was a great post! I agree, It's like those bags of chips which promise utter deliciousness but then there's like, nothing in the bag.
ReplyDeleteThe thing about models also bothers me, a while back Lea Michele and Dianna Argon did a photoshoot for some magazine. The slight flaws that would make them relatable to any girl were pretty much photoshopped away.
@LadyGagaMcQueen: I get your point, its their job to make the ads look perfect to get the customers; but what I'm focusing on is not the fact they make them - we all know they do - but the fact that they dont even try to make their actual products respectable enough, I mean, the actual McDonalds burger looks very unappetizing, so to a person who thinks they're getting what they saw in an add, its a couple of dollars spent on something that they hoped they'd enjoy eating.
ReplyDeleteThing is, I even heard from some sources that some vegetables such as lettuce, tomato or pickles are kept for weeks in their kitchens, used no matter how fresh they are. That is repulsive...
Very good posting. Smart of you to remind us that advertising's sole existence is to SELL. The worst, in my opinion and for this audience, is the air-brushing and photo-shopping of models. Young girls aspire to look like these fake women. And young guys see the same fake women and feel that's supposed to be the ideal.
ReplyDeleteWell, guess what? Not all males like skinny, skeletal women. And that's the truth. I never have met a guy who loves all that makeup, either. It's true that women don't make themselves look good for men. They do it to impress other women.
Oh, and to LadyGagaMcQueen: you're saying it's their job to show the best of the product. They are not doing that. They are showing a fake product. Period.
ReplyDeleteI read an article for an exam last year, and it was explaining the process of food advertisement... like where they had to pluck off the hairs off raspberries, use glue as milk in cereal, and these people would continuously look for that "perfect" chip to use in their advertisement. Its kind of disgusting, maybe even more than that. The food industry just befuddles me (hehe), and sometimes I'll go all vegetarian for days because I can't stand knowing what they put in chicken nuggets, etc. etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's whatever sells. A burger you would normally get at McDonald's is obviously not made with the same care as the advertised one. It's called fast food for a reason. The employees have a limited time frame to make these burgers in order to please the customer. They don't have the time to make it look like a masterpiece. The customers obviously don't mind if most keep returning. That perfect burger in the commercial is enough to make us go to McDonald's and try one. It's not false advertising, it's just the burger's better side. We're just going to eat it anyways, does it really matter if they alter how it looks? It would be one thing to advertise a brick as a computer, but that's not the case here.
ReplyDeleteAs for the photoshopped makeup, clothing, etc. advertisements... Do you really think I'm going to buy some company's foundation if the model looks like crap? Obviously not. Sure almost all advertisements giving off that 'perfect' skin feel are photoshopped, but there is only so much you can do with photoshop. One of Covergirl's ads was banned because it was over photoshopped. You can only manipulate a photo so much. A lot of the models are truly beautiful or look true to their picture, or at least with their makeup on. They aren't all ugly. The woman in the last picture is probably not as unattractive in person as she is in that picture. Just as you can take pictures and edit them to make them look good, you can so make them look bad. I know so many people who are gorgeous in person, but are the least photogenic people I've ever met. Not all of us can take pictures and look great in them 24/7.