Selling More Than Just a Produ

Advertisements for various products are seen everywhere a person looks—on billboards, in magazines, on television, and countless other places. What draws the consumer into the advertisement—the actual product, the display of the sensual woman as she drinks a glass of milk, or the muscular man sporting a Ralph Lauren blanket as a loincloth? These types of advertisements display unlikely depictions of men and women to society. Today, advertisers use the influence of gender and sex to sell various products to consumers, resulting in unrealistic expectations of men and women to society.

According to Vernon Fryburger, author of the book The New Age of Advertising, “The most important job for advertising is to “make a sale” for a product or a service, and to do so it must clearly establish a rapport with its audience, which means that it must consciously stay within relatively narrow bounds of acceptability in terms of language, visualizations, and general background and frame of reference” (15). Advertisers use many different strategies to sell their products to consumers. They spend over 200 billion dollars per year attempting to get the attention of consumers and to influence their decisions

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Advertising guarantees health, long life, sexual success, financial success, companionship, popularity, and acceptance (Baran 291-92). The slogan for this ad states, “In a small business, it’s just you and your work. However, by using these techniques, advertisers know that the product that is socially unacceptable by some will be engraved in the minds of teens and adults because of the stir it caused these individuals. Basically, consumers no longer respond to mass-market appeals; they have more individual tastes and are searching for a more individual style.

Countless evaluators say that a large amount of advertising is intrinsically misleading in that it completely and sometimes overtly assures to enhance people’s lives through the

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expenditure of a sponsor’s products.

Image transformations of genders are not only seen throughout ads in print, but also in ads on television. ” The couple isn’t really laughing and carrying on, as seen in the ad itself; they just look like pictures of store mannequins instead of real people (Moog 60). Even in those times, advertising was seen as being very biased and objective. There were hidden messages throughout many ads in that era, which is prevalent in advertisements yet today.

Much has occurred since the 1970’s era. In 1963, Betty Friedan, author of the infamous book, The Feminine Mystique, discussed in her book about the American advertising industry and how it manipulated the portrayal of women. Certainly the primetime ads in this illustration were established to symbolize a more stylish and unbiased depiction of gender. Others find the use of advertising techniques today, that emphasize sex, violence, or body functions, to be in poor form (Bovee and Arens 49). People buy the products because of what they view on the streets, in magazines, on billboards, or on television because they desire to feel and look like the person in the ad; happy, in love, loved by someone, sexy, etc. In this particular ad, a man in his boxers is seated in a chair in front of a desk, holding a pamphlet that he put together for the company.

Approximate Word count = 2502
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)

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