INTRODUCTION

Norman Douglas said - "You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements." So lets evaluate our nation's ideals based on the ads we see. It is ideal to be super thin, almost invisible. It is also ideal to be sexually motivated all the time. Children strive to look like Barbie and Ken when they get older. For women professionality is ideal, yet they must still be able to cook a full course meal and take care of the kids. For men it is ideal to make enough money to purchase everything.. o and to constantly be seduced by women ( if you are not being seduced something is wrong with you ... FIX IT!).

If Norman Douglas is right, our nation's ideals are highly distorted. And if advertising has the power to reflect a country's ideals then our advertisements need to change... fast!

Traditionally, the word culture entailed all fine arts such as music, theatre, painting and architecture. Culture today is defined as a way of life or a shared practice among a group, where meaning is made out of visual, aural and textual representations. Our society relies on these representations to communicate with one another. Whether we are writing letters to communicate something or taking pictures to remember moments, messages are constantly being encoded and decoded. In essence, communication is based on the ability to convey and understand the meaning of words and also non-verbal images.

Images and messages also have a primary role in the functioning of commerce through advertising. Advertising is the newest and most influential addition to culture. As advertising influences people to make choices about what purchases to make, it also communicates cultural ideas about lifestyle, self-image, instills beliefs and attitudes – in sum causes a mass-audience to think a certain way. Advertisements usually invite consumer into the life of the advertisement, claiming that their lives would be such if only they purchase that specific product.

Most fashion ads use beautiful supermodels and desirable men to advertise their brand. Since the images of these models are paralleled with the brand being advertised, whatever feelings the images create in the viewer is applied directly to the brand as well. Most fashion ads with gorgeous models create feelings of arousal and desire. Consumers, equate the brand with the images they see as desirable and therefore desire the brand as well. For example, when D&G (seen in picture below)illustrate gorgeous models in an ad, people who are attracted by those models automatically associate the brand with the images they see. Therefore, considering the models attractive while they wear D&G clothes, also leads them to consider D&G attractive.

The image of a specific brand relies heavily on advertisers and marketers. Advertising agencies are constantly creating new campaigns to reposition brands closer to their target audience. Through this process messages are created to have a greater appeal to their audience and therefore increase sales. One approach is when advertisers take a concept or ideology that is commonly shared by all and appropriate that concept to mean something else. For example, A Diamond is Forever, a jewelry company that is well known for their catchy slogans in magazines released an interesting ad campaign for their Journey Diamonds (ad illustrated below). This line of diamonds is said to symbolize the growth of a couple’s love and how their unbreakable bond intensifies over time during their unique journey through life together. This "growth of love" is illustrated by the growth of the size of diamonds on the necklace. The slogan says, "Journey Diamond Jewelry - with every step love grows..." This ad, much like all A Diamond is Forever ads, appropriates love to mean diamonds. The consumer is told that the bigger the diamonds are the greater the couples love is for one another. This also relates to Althusser's notion of ideology.

Advertisements or the media, incorporate certain messages that appeal to the audience in order to gain adherence to their ad, and influence consumers to buy. Because of this ad and those of its genre, many women have and will believe that diamonds are true representations of love; and men will feel obliged to purchase bigger and more expensive diamonds in order to prove their love for the women in their lives. It is no wonder why women flaunt their engagement rings, compare sizes with one another and brag about the "3 qt. Rock" they got. By equating the meaning of love – something so prized in our culture – with diamonds, the ad informs its audience that the larger the diamond the larger the love.




We live in a consumer society, which means that buying is a natural daily activity. Within recent years our consumer society has also become our commodity culture, where what we own says something about who we are. On an individual scale this is known as the commodity self. What we buy or use communicates a message about our lifestyle, attitudes and the ideologies we believe in. Concepts such as the commodity self would not exist if it weren’t for advertising. Advertising encourages people to think of a commodity as an encoded message, which others decode to learn about who you are. Advertising gives qualities to products or brands, which they would otherwise not have in and of themselves. These qualities are created in the form of exchange value and not just simply use value. For example, designer clothes such as Cavalli can have the same use value as a piece of cloth – covering bare skin. However, the exchange value differs. The Cavalli (seen below) outfit gives messages of wealth, fashionable taste, and defines a person’s lifestyle a belonging to a particular status. Overall, as the production meaning of an item is undone and filled with a new meaning that mystifies the product – commodity fetishism is created.



Advertising has many strategies that influence people to consume more heavily. People in general like to identify with others and feel as though they belong. Everywhere we go, anywhere we turn we are constantly seeing images of what true beauty is, how women should be, how men should behave, and how we should all function in society. These images create codes of conduct that get infiltrated into our society through repeated exposure. For example, seeing multiple perfume ads, all of which illustrate the same lustrous female who is seductive and mesmerizing – coupled with clothing ads which portray that same supper thin body – and the facial products with their flawless skinned model – give out a certain message. They hail young women into the ad and make them spend countless dollars to become super thin, have flawless skin and maybe then be as desireable as the girl on the 30x24 billboard.

This is why ad campaigns such as Real Beauty by Dove are so important for us to embrace into our advertising culture. Dove portrays real women in their ads. No body sprays to have a flawless tone or photo shopping images to have that perfect Barbie figure. The same potential to increase a person’s sophistication or personality that exists in music or theatre, also exists in advertising. The only exception is that one particular ad has more of an influence on a greater audience than does one song or one play. Therefore, we must understand the capability of this powerful tool and use it for the benefit our society, not for its destruction.

Dove Campaign Commercials:
AD #1
AD#2