How advertisement effects peoples lives Essay Example for Free

How advert effects hoi pollois lives Es understandAs Americans we ar exposed to advertisings eitherday. pile are pressured from every direction by advertisements which exploit their deepest fears, attractions, reads, and desires, shaping their behaviors, goals, and thoughts. They are led into believing false information and promises that are mostly never kept, all for the simple reason of selling the product and making profit. We see advertisements everywherein magazines and newspapers, on the radio, on TV, online, in the mail, even over the phone.These advertisements use the basic ideas of either providing an elite status with the stubbornness of the product, or giving a sense of belonging to a group or community. Since the recent war machine activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nonher ever present idea has been made prominent and that is using patriotism to evoke peoples desires. Americans are persuaded into geting un requirement items everyday however, we need to realize that no matter what advertisements say we should purchase items for their usefulness, non to fill voids in our lives, so we can help eliminate the problem we cause today of being a materialistic society.The patriotic theme affecting peoples hearts, minds and senses, is comm hardly use to check them into purchasing things. Since everyone has love for their country, using it to sell products is a brilliant idea, merely I believe this is a bad practice. It substantiates people believe they are not ideal Americans, nor are they similar to the people some them if they do not buy that product. The Palmolive advertisement, in Seeing and Writing 2, is a key example, it appeals to the wives of the men at war in World War II (417). On the top of this advertisement there are three medals which contain picture of three different men in their uniforms and the words For Him appear close to each picture.In the lower part of the advertisement there is a woman feel up at these medal s and above her head are the words, I pledge myself to guard every bit of watcher that he cherishes in me, and finally in the background there are several faces of women in addition looking towards the medals. This advertisement is basically communicating to the wives the idea of guarding their beauty, by using this soap, just like their husbands are guarding their country. The wry fact is that soap cannot make someone beautiful, nor do people lose their beauty if they do not use the correct brand of soap. This advertisement is connecting a heroic and patriotic actto one used for mere beauty, in order to sell the soap.The Palmolive advertisement was run in 1943, but a much current advertisement which uses similar attributes is Chevrolet and its slogan for its recent line of cars, An American Revolution. This slogan is always pose on a blue sky background and the writing is in bold white letters, shut out for the E in Revolution, this letter is written in red ink. So when you c ome across this slogan, not altogether does the slogan sound patriotic to you, it also appears to be patriotic because it incorporates the red, the white and the blue.This phrase says to its consultation that every American is buying and driving a Chevy car and so should they. Another dot that could be interpreted out of this advertisement is that since the U.S. is currently at war and fighting a change against terrorism, a person living in the U.S. can participate in this patriotic revolution by purchasing a Chevrolet. This would be true only if Chevrolet was funding the war, instead of the US government.Along with this, some other advertisement that exploits this concept was the Netzero advertisement run during the time before the elections. In this advertisement the spokesman was running for chairman under the alias of Candidate Zero. His main goal was to provide cheaper and faster internet to every family and household. In order to get peoples attention, this clever idea w as used, and it certainly worked on people like me. Viewers could also connect the advertisement with the actual presidential race and that way the product of the advertisement was stuck in their certain awareness. The whole patriotic theme is strange because the connection between patriotism and the product does not make the product function break off, so why do we feel obligated to pay attention to the advertisement and even purchase that product.Along with patriotism another concept used widely is the elitism the product brings to people with its self-will. As Jack Solomon wrote in his essay Masters of Desire, We Americans dream of rising to the highest degree the crowd, of attaining a complaisant summit beyond the reach of ordinary citizens (1). He is basically saying that Americans want to be better then the people aroundthem and this belief is what marketers feast on, creating status symbols like Rolex, Mercedes, BMW, etc. One advertisement that crosses my mind in terms o f using elitism would be the new U2 iPod Special Edition advertisement. This promotes an iPod with a benighted cover and laser engraved signatures of the U2 band members everything else is similar to a regular iPod whereas, the price is $50 more. People are led into believing that the U2 iPod is better than the regular one only because it is endorsed by U2.Another wry detail is that a normal iPod itself is a product of elitism, because even though it has similar functions to a Sony or any other MP3 player, it costs $100 more only because it comes with the signature white headphones. These headphones, unique only because an iPod come equipped with them, puddle made themselves and the iPod a status symbol. Most people only buy an iPod because they want the headphones to show the illusion of superiority and uniqueness. Solomon says, The explanation is quite simple when an object (or puppy) either costs a lot of money or requires influential connections to possess, anyone who possess es it must also possess the necessary means of influence to acquire it (3). This explains why the white headphones have made the iPod a status symbol, since its shows possession of an expensive item, even though rationally speaking the color of the headphones does not make the iPod function better, they only make it different.Solomon also talks about another part of the American Dream, in which belonging to a group is important. The Chevrolet slogan connects us to the entire American population the iPod connects us to other owners of an iPod, and so on. We need a sense of connection and belonging, fill uping our need for attention and affection. Abraham Maslow, a founder of humanistic psychology, created a trilateral in which he placed a persons needs in the order they needed to be fulfil and the need for love and belonging was the third basic need. Disillusioned by the advertisements, people try to fulfill this need by buying the products. This proves that using this theme adver tisers are able to affect the person on much deeper levels then recognizable, yet by no means does the product itself become more useful.It is graspable that advertisers need to appeal to people in order tosell their product and that is why they use these tactics, but what is not understandable is while knowing the truth people believe the hoaxes and let advertisements dictate what they are going to buy. People need to realize that products should not be used to fulfill our weaknesses they should be consumed ground on our needs, because companies will keep manufacturing status symbols until we accept that products and items are only materialistic and we can never attain all the luxury items around us. We are scammed into buying false promises everyday, after we realize that we have a choice against it, we can choose not to let advertisements or minor details about the product like the endorsements, or the color of headphones, or the catchy slogan persuade us into buying a certain item.