Although Nowadays There Are Lot of Topics That Are Important and Interesting in Education

CMNS 428- media and education

Final project-advertising and gender

Target Market

Cecilia Wong, Rossetti Ng

Although nowadays there are lot of topics that are important and interesting in education and media, our group has picked advertising and gender as our topic for the final project. Advertising is the foundation of the mass media. It is powerful and it is in everywhere in our society. Advertising can be not only regional, but also worldwide. Some of the people may claim that advertisements contain different languages, but the image itself is already powerful enough to influence people’s perceptive. In recent decades, women have been shaped differently. Women have been stereotyped as weak, dependent and portrayed as sex objects of sub product in different advertisements. Also advertising has instilled and distorted the concept of “beauty” to women. Our group thinks that it is important to address our target audiences on how the advertising is affecting their perspective and help them to aware the consequences of advertising and gender.

In our lessons’ plan which about advertising and gender; it is focusing on the female teenagers in the age of fourteen to fifteen. Teenagers are important to our society. They are the potential group in the next generation. At the age of fourteen to fifteen, teenagers have the ability to simply understand the society. They know what is advertising. They may know advertisements are promoting commodities, which persuade audiences to consume. However, they may not have the ability to decode messages in advertisements. Advertising is definitely selling products, but it is also selling value, images, conceptual of love, beauty, sexuality and romance. Advertisers try to encode different exotic images and words to surprise and attract target audiences. Moreover, advertisers usually create a social climate in which imply certain ideas and action are acceptable. It will make people to have a tendency to make bad choices ( Kilbourne, 2000) . Furthermore, the images of females are frequently portrayed than the images of male in distinctive ads for promoting different commodities. Those images are usually devaluing females in associations, and always distort females’ perspective on beauty.

Usually, teenagers in the age of fourteen and fifteen may starts to have the consuming power to purchase goods, but they do not have any financial burden. They can buy whatever they want. At this point, advertisers are always seen adolescents as the target buyers. For teenagers, they are not mature enough or have the ability to identify how they should be in the future. In this case, they may easily perceive improper attitudes and concepts in advertisements. Since teenagers are the potential group in our next generation, they are important to us. If they have perceived the improper attitudes and concepts, our society may also be affected in the future. Moreover, advertisers are usually devaluing females and use the ideal beauty in their advertisements; female teenagers may easily to feel shameful to their bodies and have low self-esteem.

Since these young girls may feel shameful to their bodies and have low self-esteem from advertising, the consequences of advertising will lead to some social problems such as eating disorder and sexual abuse. Since advertisements have portrayed the women are adorable and acceptable only if they are young, no winkles, white and have big breasts. These young girls may want to be one of the ideal women, they may stop eating or eating different diet products to lose weight. Also, these girls may also become the salves of commodities, who are addicted on consuming and to become materialistic eventually. On the other hand, since advertisers sometime use the image of women with improper materials which are devaluing women as sex objects, that may cause the sexual abuse and rapped in our society.

Since female always portrayed improperly in advertisements, advertising may cause different serious and enormous impacts on women. In this case, advertising will influence young girls physically and ethically, it is important to educate our potential female teenagers to understand the powerful advertisements.