Analyzing the Construction of Television Advertisements
For my research project, I chose to research television commercials on the United Paramount Network, more commonly known as UPN, which is channel 13 in my area. I chose this station for two main reasons. Firstly, UPN is currently in trouble, both financially, and programming-wise. The reason is related to its wandering demographic focus during primetime, because of the wide ranging variety of shows it airs. UPN’s current lineup is geared on different nights toward market segments. On Monday’s, its lineup consists primarily of African-American sitcoms, Tuesdays, towards African-American women, science fiction fans with “Enterprise,” and related shows are on Wednesdays, young men with “WWE Smackdown,” on Thursdays, and a demographic that can change by the week with its Friday movie. Therefore, it lacks a cohesive, loyal audience base on any given night, and has difficulty luring advertisers. The second reason I chose UPN is because it is a station I hardly ever watch, in fact, I do not recall the last time there was anything of interest to me on the station. Prior to working on this project, I had no real picture of the types of television shows, or commercials aired on the network.
Unlike the major networks such as ABC, NBC or CBS, the UPN does not have any daytime soap operas such as “All My Children” or “Young And The Restless.” Instead, I felt it had something that would be a suitable substitute, the “Montel Williams” show, which airs weekdays from 11 am to noon. After watching for just a short time, it was clear that the “Montel Williams” show is geared toward stay at home mothers. The show deals with topics ranging from family problems, and dealing with...
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... why they were using either a male or female model, and why that model was of a particular race or ethnic background. These are metamessages, which, according to Bem, are transmitted from childhood on. People simply become accustomed to seeing certain things being performed by men, and other things by women. I would be included in this category. Prior to working on this project, I had never really paid attention to details in commercials. I simply viewed them as advertisements, but didn’t understand their construction. When advertisers are marketing a product or service to a particular group of people, they use models and images that the target group can most closely identify with and feel comfortable about, regardless of whether it resembles reality or not. Analyzing six hours of television really has made me see advertising and marketing in a whole new way.
The name General Carl ‘Tooey’ Andrew Spaatz has become synonymous with the phrase air power and strategist. Air power has come along way since Wilbur and Orville launched the first airplane in 1902 in the city of Kitty Hawk. Famous engineers have taken the Wright-Brothers design and made great improvements to them while slowly integrating these new powerful means of transportation, weaponry and communication aids into the military. Since the onset of World War I there has been a debate on how to most effectively use these new airplanes in the Army’s collection. Most individuals believed that airplanes should be under control of the Army theater commander, while very few felt that these airplanes should be a separate entity from the Army. One of these few people who believed that the Air Force should be separate is General Spaatz. General Spaatz possessed perseverance, leadership attributes and military knowledge; all factors leading him becoming a substantial proponent of a separate Air Force. Spaatz legacy continues to live on; his leadership skills continue to influence people today as General Spaatz is still able to impact air power in the 21st century.
In this generation businesses use commercial to persuade different types of audiences to buy their product or to persuade them to help a certain caused. If you analyze commercial you can see how certain things play a major role in the success of a commercial. The ad I decide to analyze as an example is the commercial snickers used during the Super Bowl in 2010;”Betty White”-Snickers. This commercials starts off with guys playing a game of football with an elderly women know as Betty White. As Betty White tries to play football she is tackled to the ground. Her teammates refer to her as Mike when they come up to her to ask why she has been “playing like Betty White all day”. This helps inform the audience that Betty White is not actually playing but instead represent another teammate. As the guys keep arguing Mikes girlfriend calls her over and tells her to eat a snicker. Betty White takes the first bite and then suddenly a man appears in her place ready to finish the game. At the end of the commercial the statement "You're not you when you're hungry" is shown followed by the Snickers bar logo. What this commercial is trying to show is that hunger changes a person, and satisfying this hunger can change you back to your normal self. They use different types
Targeted Audiences: Which One Suits You? According to Steve Craig in Signs of Life in the USA, the economic structure of the television industry has a direct effect on the placement and content of all television programs and commercials. Craig is a professor in the department of radio, television, and film at the University of North Texas, Craig has written widely on television, radio history, and gender and media. His most recent book is Out of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America (2009). Craig talks about the analysis of four different television commercials, showing how advertisers carefully craft their ads to appeal, respectively, to male and female consumers.
"Wrights’ Perspective on the Role of Airplanes in War." Wright Stories Wright Brothers Inventing The Airplane History of Flight Kitty Hawk Wright Contemporaries Military Airplane RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr.
The documentary Killing Us Softly 4 discusses and examines the role of women in advertisements and the effects of the ads throughout history. The film begins by inspecting a variety of old ads. The speaker, Jean Kilbourne, then discusses and dissects each ad describing the messages of the advertisements and the subliminal meanings they evoke. The commercials from the past and now differ in some respects but they still suggest the same messages. These messages include but are not limited to the following: women are sexual objects, physical appearance is everything, and women are naturally inferior then men. Kilbourne discusses that because individuals are surrounded by media and advertisements everywhere they go, that these messages become real attitudes and mindsets in men and women. Women believe they must achieve a level of beauty similar to models they see in magazines and television commercials. On the other hand, men expect real women to have the same characteristics and look as beautiful as the women pictured in ads. However, even though women may diet and exercise, the reality...
Have you ever seen an advertisement for a product and could immediately relate to the subject or the product in that advertisement? Companies that sell products are always trying to find new and interesting ways to get buyers and get people’s attention. It has become a part of our society today to always have products being shown to them. As claimed in Elizabeth Thoman’s essay Rise of the Image Culture: Re-Imagining the American Dream, “…advertising offered instructions on how to dress, how to behave, how to appear to others in order to gain approval and avoid rejection”. This statement is true because most of the time buyers are persuaded by ads for certain products.
According to Robert Scholes, author of On Reading a Video Text, commercials aired on television hold a dynamic power over human beings on a subconscious level. He believes that through the use of specific tools, commercials can hold the minds of an audience captive, and can control their abilities to think rationally. Visual fascination, one of the tools Scholes believes captures the minds of viewers, can take a simple video, and through the use of editing and special effects, turn it into a powerful scene which one simply cannot take his or her eyes from. Narrativity is yet another way Scholes feels commercials can take control of the thoughts of a person sitting in front of the television. Through the use of specific words, sounds, accompanying statements and or music, a television commercial can hold a viewer’s mind within its grasp, just long enough to confuse someone into buying a product for the wrong reason. The most significant power over the population held by television commercials is that of cultural reinforcement, as Scholes calls it. By offering a human relation throughout itself, a commercial can link with the masses as though it’s speaking to the individual viewer on an equal level. A commercial In his essay, Scholes analyzes a Budweiser commercial in an effort to prove his statements about the aforementioned tools.
Common sense seems to dictate that commercials just advertise products. But in reality, advertising is a multi-headed beast that targets specific genders, races, ages, etc. In “Men’s Men & Women’s Women”, author Steve Craig focuses on one head of the beast: gender. Craig suggests that, “Advertisers . . . portray different images to men and women in order to exploit the different deep seated motivations and anxieties connected to gender identity.” In other words, advertisers manipulate consumers’ fantasies to sell their product. In this essay, I will be analyzing four different commercials that focuses on appealing to specific genders.
The video describes how our society may not even care about the product being advertised, but we still read the billboard or watch the commercial. Also mentioned was the use of colors in a commercial, the marketing effects in politics, and even market research obtained by studying different cults. Frontline takes an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar “persuasion industries” of advertising and how this rhetoric affects everyone. So whether this is in the form of a television commercial or a billboard, pathos, logos, and ethos can be found in all advertisements.
As of the modern day, advertising is everywhere; it is on our televisions, we hear it on the radio and we see it on cars and trucks. Advertising can take many forms, one of which is propaganda. Propaganda techniques are useful in persuasion and drawing people to a certain cause, but mostly we hear of propaganda being used in times of war. However, the Dove’s Real Beauty campaign is a modern day example of propaganda that uses many known techniques of persuasion. This campaign is very prevalent in today’s society because it targets body image among women; more specifically, the campaign aims to positively change how women view themselves.
Advertising in American culture has taken on the very interesting character of representing our culture as a whole. Take this Calvin Klein ad for example. It shows the sexualization of not only the Calvin Klein clothing, but the female gender overall. It displays the socially constructed body, or the ideal body for women and girls in America. Using celebrities in the upper class to sell clothing, this advertisement makes owning a product an indication of your class in the American class system. In addition to this, feminism, and how that impacts potential consumer’s perception of the product, is also implicated. Advertisements are powerful things that can convey specific messages without using words or printed text, and can be conveyed in the split-second that it takes to see the image. In this way, the public underestimates how much they are influenced by what they see on television, in magazines, or online.
Analysis of an Advertising Campaign We are swarmed by advertising. Companies constantly battle to compete for the sale of their product. Adverts appear in every form of media including radio; television; Internet; billboards; newspaper; flyers and magazines. The advertiser wants us to buy their product above their competitors. The basic aim of advertising is to convince the target audience that their product is the best in the field and superior to the other products of similarity.
In the essay “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” author and philosopher Susan Bordo discusses the history and current state of male representation in advertisements. While using her feminist background, Bordo compares and contrasts the aspects of how men and women are portrayed in the public eye. She claims that there has been a paradigm shift the media with the theory that not just women are being objectified in the public eye, but also men too. Since the mid-1970s, with the introduction of Calvin Klein commercials, men have started to become more dehumanized and regarded as sex symbols. In a similar fashion to how Bordo describes gender, race plays a similar role in the media. People of all different ethnicities and cultures are being categorized into an oversimplified and usually unfair image by the media over basic characteristics.
Advertising surrounds the world every second of the day. This form of influence has had the power to influence how society views gender roles ever since men and women began to appear in advertisements. Through the exposure to many different gender portrayals in advertising, gender roles become developed by society. This stems from how men and women are depicted, which forms stereotypes regarding the individual roles of men and women. People often shift their definition of an ideal image towards what they see in advertisements. From this, they tend to make comparisons between themselves and the advertisement models. Advertisements tend to be brief, but impactful. The different portrayals of men and women in advertising show that advertisements
Thomas Edison is widely regarded as one of the most influential inventors and innovators of the Twentieth Century. Edison’s efforts ushered in a new era of technology; a world in which electricity would be harnessed and made to bow before man’s will. Walter Lippman wrote, “It is impossible to measure the importance of Edison by adding up the specific inventions with which his name is associated” (qtd. in Baldwin 409). Edison’s decades long career was a synergistic melding of his success as an inventor and his prowess as a promoter and businessman. He exemplified the ideals of intelligence married to hard work and perseverance. He forever changed the landscape of American invention and the limits of technological change (Baldwin 409).