Objectification In Controversies In Contemporary Advertising

Jean Kilbourne is an advocate for women and is leading a movement to change the way women are viewed in advertising. She opens up the curtains to reveal the hard truth we choose to ignore or even are too obtuse to notice. Women are objectified, materialized, and over-sexualized in order to sell clothes, products, ideas and more. As a woman, I agree with the position Kilbourne presents throughout her documentary Killing Us Softly 4: The Advertising’s Image of Women (2010) and her TEDx Talk The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women (2014.) She demonstrates time and again that these advertisements are dangerous and lead to unrealistic expectations of women.

Old Spice is very blatant in the way they attract their customers. An obvious example is The Man Your Man Could Smell Like commercial. In this advertisement Old Spice envisions their audience to be anyone who is in a relationship or trying to be in relationship. The more obvious targeted audience is the female audience. To attract the female audience they put an attractive man in the commercials and try to make it seem that if their “man” uses old spice body washes their “man” will be like him.

There are bodily hygiene advertisements in almost every magazine, TV station, radio station, billboards, and even postal mail. Every one of them is different and is trying to send a different message to a certain group that the product would most likely appeal to. The 0ctober 2011 issue number 1141 of Rolling Stone magazine there is an ad for Old spice men’s soaps, cologne, and deodorant that is a very interesting to the college age kids and music enthusiast that would normally read it. Through the advertisements use of layout and models, Old Spice has effectively caught the eyes of the many people that would stumble across it.

The commercial’s appeal to women relies not only on the attractiveness of the actor and the settings, but to the humor that is based on the idea that such a perfect man can exist at all. Conversely, not only do these commercials reach out to women, but also there are men in the target audience and there is a message for them as well. These ads present an ideal image of how a man should be and what he should smell like. By using a good looking, fit, man for this advertisement, it gives the product an image that men want. The logical fallacy, ad populum, is present in this commercial. This ad almost shouts out the ideas that if you use the product you can look, smell, and be exactly like the man you see on your television. The Old Spice man, Mustafa, does everything better than you do and will give your woman more than you can give her. You can smell like the “ultimate man”, or as the slogan used in the ads says, “Smell like a man”. The ad

The saddening feeling at the end of the commercial where the narrator is in his bathroom, is an indirect way of appealing to pathos in this commercial. As an audience, you feel sorry for him, missing his chance with “Susan Glenn”. Therefore, of course you don’t want the same thing to happen to you and miss the girl of your dream because you don’t smell good, from not

Gender role bias in advertisements has been so prevalent for so long that the untrained eye wouldn't even discern it. All the same, these biases, for the most part, put women in subordinate positions and men in dominant ones. This assumption on both the genders is unfair and demeaning. These ads portray women as subservient and play toys for men. Not only do the models depict an image nowhere near close to reality, but their bodies are scantily clad and what few clothes they are wearing are very revealing.

Sexist ads show that society is dominated by the same masculine values that have controlled the image of women in the media for years. Sexist advertisement reinforces gender stereotypes and roles, or uses sex appeal to sell products, which degrades the overall public perception of women. The idea that sexism is such a rampant problem comes from the stereotypes that are so deeply embedded into today’s society that they almost seem to be socially acceptable, although they are nowhere near politically correct. Images that objectify women seem to be almost a staple in media and advertising: attractive women are plastered all over ads. The images perpetuate an image of the modern woman, a gender stereotype that is reinforced time and time again by the media. These images are accepted as “okay” in advertising, to depict a particular product as sexy or attractive. And if the product is sexy, so shall be the consumer. In the 1970s, groups of women initially took issue with the objectification of women in advertisements and with the limited roles in which these ads showed women. If they weren’t pin-ups, they were delicate

Advertisements these days use many different techniques in order to sell a product. The Old Spice Company uses several methods to convey a message and sell their product. Old Spice commercials are well known for using the famous Isaiah Mustafa, wrapped in just a towel, to talk about the company’s product. While Mustafa walks and talks, the background and setting of the commercial changes and the actor never loses eye contact. The product is always shown throughout the entire commercial. By combining all the elements of gender stereotyping, sexual imagery, and racial innuendoes, Old Spice is able to convey a message to sell their hygienic products.

The Old Spice body washes commercial” The Man Your Man could smell like” was aired during the 2010 Super Bowl. In the beginning of the commercial, Old Spice man located in the bathroom and standing in a towel, bare-chested. Old spice man said “Hello ladies, look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me, but if he stopped using ladies scented body wash and switched to old spice, he could smell like he’s me.”(Old Spice). Old spice man asks his audience this question as he transitions from the bathroom, to the sailboat, and riding on a horse. The commercial ends with Old Spice man saying he’s on a horse. The camera zooms out and unveils to the audience that he was sitting on top of the horse. The

Leo Burnett once said, "Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret . . . to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink." We see ads every day as we go through our lives, whether it’s on the TV, stamped onto the clothes we wear, or played through the radio as we drive to work or to school. Not all of these ads are effective or memorable. An effective ad is one that appeals to human emotions (pathos), logic (logos), ethics (ethos), and how timely it is (kairos). The Mr. Clean | Cleaner of Your Dreams commercial is efficacious in selling cleaning products because it uses pathos, ethos, and kairos to appeal to a male demographic.

The ad had negative social implications on the perception and attitudes of sex and gender because of the prevalence of stereotypical actions and diction, such as running like a girl for instance. As a female it is hurtful to know that these stereotypes exists. If we are primed at such a young age that the words “like a girl” is associated with being weak it doesn't send a positive message to females of all ages. These issues of associating girls as weak do not only affect females, they affect communities. By allowing these stereotypes to continue, we as a society are degrading women and putting women in a position of lower status.

Everyday we expose ourselves to thousands of advertisements in a wide variety of environments where ever we go; yet, we fail to realize the influence of the implications being sold to us on these advertisements, particularly about women. Advertisements don’t just sell products; they sell this notion that women are less of humans and more of objects, particularly in the sexual sense. It is important to understand that the advertising worlds’ constant sexual objectification of women has led to a change in sexual pathology in our society, by creating a culture that strives to be the unobtainable image of beauty we see on the cover of magazines. Even more specifically it is important to study the multiple influences that advertisements have

The Tiger Beer advertisement shown in the appendix is a clear example of the objectification of women in advertising. The Tiger Beer advert was made to appeal to men from the age of 20 to 60. The advert seeks to get a cheap laugh from the target audience with the image of the woman in a sexual pose and the picture of the beer. The ad promotes the idea that beer is the most

Cleaning commercials use various techniques to persuade their audiences to buy their products. Through different advertising techniques, they are able to convey their messages and identify who their target audience is. This is true for most, but in the end some companies are more successful than others in doing so.

Sex is everywhere you turn. Victoria’s Secret is notorious for their ads that plaster billboards and the sides of buildings, featuring scantily-clad women suggesting an obvious sexual air. The bags you receive at Abercrombie feature half-dressed models, often two of which may be kissing or touching one another. These sexual images are far too present in the every day lives of young children, much younger than what used to be acceptable. Aside from this moral questionability, ads such as these often contain images of unrealistic body types, which exploit insecurity to make consumers use their product, the result of which can be dangerous to mental and physical health. Finally, when I see ads like the one to the right, and rack my brain