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Media Revision List

SOURCE / Link to Media / Comment
Dolce & Gabbana advert
5 men standing up
1 submissive woman lying down in the middle / Stereotypes – how men and women are presented in advertising / Suggests that men are superior to women and can control them.
It may also have a dangerous message about male dominance over women – even suggest rape.
American Pie Movie / Stereotypes. / Suggests that all young people are irresponsible and obsessed with sex. It creates a negative image of young people.
L’Oréal Advert and newspaper article discussing this advert.
Beyoncé was shown with lighter skin and blonder hair.
The company denied photoshopping her image. / Dangers of advertising
Identity and negative self-image.
Adverts which only show one kind of beauty. / It perpetuates the myth that the beauty standard is white skin, and blonde hair. This can create a negative image amongst black people who cannot “live up to” such an image. Parallels can be made with The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
DVD – Outfoxed
A film documentary about Fox News Channel which accuses it of bias and spreading propaganda for the right-wing Republican party in the USA. / Propaganda and Bias / Using euphemisms to encourage a more positive image of the war in Iraq e.g. sharpshooters instead of the war snipers.
Shows how watching Fox News means that people have unrealistic understanding of world events:
33% of Fox viewers believe that they have found WMD in Iraq. Only 11% of viewers of other news channels believe this.
The Dove Campaign – using their magazine adverts and the Dove website: Campaign for Real Beauty. / Advertising and its dangers.
Self-image. / They claim that by using “real women” they are challenging notions of beauty and trying to say that we are all beautiful in our own way.
A video on their website called EVOLUTION shows how adverts completely transform a woman so that at the end she no longer resembles herself. This shows that Photoshop completely distorts the image we have of women and creates unrealistic images – young girls aspire to an image that does not really exist.
In another advert called ONSLAUGHT, we see a young girl confronted with thousands of images of women. The company claims that such images means that young girls will have low self-esteem and so may develop illnesses such as anorexia or even turn to plastic surgery to change “imperfections”.
Adbusters – an organisation which campaigns against the dangers of advertising and tries to make us aware of its lies. / Dangers of advertising / An anti-McDonald’s advert which shows a Big Mac Attack – a man lying in a hospital bed attached to a heart monitor. On the monitor we can see a M for McDonalds. The advert therefore suggests that the company does not show the true dangers of eating fast food – heart problems.
Adbusters also have anti-Nike advert where they ask questions about where the company produces their trainers – reveals details about factory conditions and low pay etc. Suggests such companies lie or hide such information.
Some mock adverts imitate Calvin Klein perfume adverts: Obsession and Reality. They suggest that these show unrealistic images of people which causes negative self-images especially in young girls. In one image a model is shown vomiting into a toilet – suggests the reality behind such an image of thin models.
DVD – Merchants of Cool
A PBS programme which looks at how advertisers aim their products at teenagers. / Dangers of advertising on young people / In one part of the programme, they look at how MTV markets their programmes at categories of teenagers: the Mook (young boys) and the Midriff (young girls).
Suggests that young people are now the target and the victims of hard sell approaches. Could this be dangerous?
The Independent on Sunday news article: 07/10/2007 / Adverts as omnipresent. Danger of adverts on young minds. / By the age of 12, girls have seen about 77,500 adverts. This suggests that we are bombarded with adverts and so are unable to avoid them.
Advert – Barnardos
Shows a baby on a dirty floor injecting drugs.
It showed how battered children are at risk from growing up to become drug addicts unless helped. / Positive side to advertising – how charity adverts raise awareness. / In this advert we can see that we need to make a difference between adverts which are selling a good, and those which set out to help others.
In this advert, the charity tries to raise awareness of a problem, and to make us give money to help others.