Advertisements: A Commercialized Society?

Every day, we are exposed to almost 500 advertisements. By the time we hit seventeen years old, we had already seen about 250,000 commercial messages. Business advertisements prey on people with low self esteem. Advertisements for products such as weight loss pills, fat-free foods, exercise videos and equipment, skin products, makeup and fashion magazines want society to believe that its ideal to be "perfect" by "adding" or "fixing" something. The things is, there is no such thing as perfect.

In a recent study, sixty-eight participants in a sample of Stanford undergraduate and graduate students felt worse about their appearance after looking through women's magazines. By this, we can clearly note the amount of pressure these advertisements place on body image.

Model with the average sized mannequin

Diet business advertisers, for example, make forty to one-hundred billion dollars per year in revenue by selling temporary weight loss products (Cummings, 2005). Forms of persuasion such as a certain form of advertisement -- the before and after ad -- have shown proven negative effects about obesity and body image.

"While highlighting dramatic weight loss, before and after images ignore the reality of dieting and encourage the notion that losing weight is easy," says Andrew B. Geier, lead author and graduate student of Penn. State's department of psychology. "When someone believes that weight is easily controlled, it reinforces the negative stereotypes that obese people are inherently lazy due to a lack of disciple."

Weight loss industries give out an idea that without their product, basically, you're "fat", and therefore, not good enough for these high ideals. Similarly, with promotions of products such as rejuvenating treatments and cosmetic "enhancers" advertise the same idea; basically, "our product is necessary to be beautiful."

These advertisements are only looking out for the well-being of their profit, and steadily continue to decrease the amount of self-esteem in their target markets, only emphasizing the modern unattainable ideals of beauty.

"Maybe she's born with it, maybe its Maybelline."

The obvious decrease in values for original beauty can be seen in this Maybelline logo. Fifty-six percent of television commercials that are aimed to female viewers use beauty as a product appeal, including Maybelline.

"The media markets desire. And by reproducing ideals that are absurdly out of line with what real bodies really do look like," says Paul Hamburg, an assistant professor or psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "The media perpetuates market for frustration and disappointment. Its customers will never disappear."

Today, we live in a commercialized society, which is only obtaining more and more unrealistic and unattainable values for body image. A majority of the advertisements we see every day portray messages of beauty and physical appearance, and studies show that these advertisements can have detrimental effects. 

"If women woke up and decided they really liked their bodies, just how many industries would go out of business." -Dr. Gail Dines