Usually I want to skip commercials, but this article made me pay closer to them. I think babies are good for marketing because their cute appearances attract more people to them.
When I was younger my favorite baby commercial was for a company named “Evian.” The commercial portrayed the babies to be professional swimmers. The slogan for it stated “Approved by your body as a source of youth.” It is funny because in this commercial all the babies look the same. I think the reason why the babies all look similar is because the advertisers make it look like anybody can use those products and if it is good for babies, it must also be good for older costumers.
I notice the majority of commercials use white actors, which include white babies. Caucasians are the major target of almost every store. Also, most commercials have an underlying youthful pitch to sell their product. Although, if you come across an ethnic channel such as Latin television channels or Black Entertainment (BET) almost all of their commercials have that ethnic focus in them.
I feel that nowadays we can see stereotyping in almost everything and any given situation. It seems that even today it is a given to see diversity everywhere, but some may be surprised. For example, Apple just released their new iPad 2. I watched the commercial for it on their website. It was a surprised to me that they used a whole African American family to pitch their new product. I don’t know why it was surprising, but I am guessing it is for two reasons. Apple is usually associated with white designing in every aspect of their company. Secondly, it makes me wonder why they used an African American family this time. It is new in their commercials and it makes me think that they are trying to raise their product sales from that particular ethnicity, which is probably the least likely, or someone said they barely use other minority groups in advertising. As I wrote this sentence that made me remember a contradicting thought. Their first generation iPod commercial actually shows a man who appears to be Arabic or have Indian descent. Nonetheless, diversity is used more so than ten years ago.
Questions
1. Why do you think mostly Caucasians is shown in commercials?
2. How do commercials reinforce stereotype?
3. Do you think the general public is aware that most commercials attempt to send direct, or indirect/subliminal messaging?
4. Why the advertisers don’t try to diminish the stereotype through commercial?
In response to your third question, I think that the general public is somewhat aware that commercials send subliminal messages. Most commercials associate products with certain positive feelings. Like beer commercials always show people who are having fun/relaxing.
ReplyDeleteThis tells us subconciously that if we buy that product, we might have similar experiences to the actors on the commercials. So even though the commercial is not always saying it directly, it's because they are communicating the message in other ways that we may or may not be aware of. And I think that this is something that the general public would recognize, even though they don't know exactly how it works.