Saturday, April 3, 2010

Women in Advertisements are subject to sensationalism

Advertisement type: Print ad

As we all know that the media of today which includes advertisements is a powerful way of influencing the perceptions of people which can then be used for positive or negative changes in the society. Media has played a huge role in building up various stereotypes in our society. As defined by Wikipedia, a stereotype is defined as a commonly held public belief about specific social groups, or types of individuals.

As seen from the print advertisement above, a lady has been shown wearing an attractive dress with high levels of exposure. Women’s physical attributes are made use of for commercial purposes and are presented as ‘items’ or tactics that serve as an attraction and help in increasing the sale of the marketed commodities. The advertisement shown above is of low fat, high calcium milk ‘Olwell’ which lacks creativity and just to give the brand a superior look, a female individual has been added with un-wanted exposure of her body parts.

In this case, the advertisement should have rather emphasized on the attributes of the product i.e. high calcium milk. This could have been done through showing a masculine body which depicts a healthy body structure. Whereas on the other hand, in this advertisement the marketer chose to just add a lady in an attractive posture to increase the worth of its brand. Increase in brand equity for the companies, allows women to attain high salaries as their presence result in high sales for the companies. Hence, for this reason they are paid high salaries and makes this activity as one of the highly paid professions for women.

Commercialization of media has been the main reason for this deteriorating image of women in our society. The way women are being portrayed in our society through advertisements, despite of it being a Muslim country is a very alarming situation.

1 comment:

  1. but dont u think advertisements are meant to increase sales and for that it is justified to use women?

    Ali Abbass (LSE, BBA SEC C)

    ReplyDelete