Many women right activists say that the women are being
projected as merely an object by such advertisements. But the harsh truth is
that advertisements featuring women is influencing viewers of all ages and
advertisers have realized this. The advertisement starts with an attractive
woman posing in seductive ways followed by the product or the service offered
by the company. The beauty of the model already lures the customer, so
advertisers do not have to put in more effort to motivate them to pay attention
and watch their ad(s).
But there are certain drawbacks to using women models in some
advertisements and if a consumer is smart enough, it won’t take much time for
him to realize that. It is totally irrelevant to feature a female model or an
actress in a advertisement promoting men’s products. Some good examples of this
are showing a woman in a deodorant commercial and the comparison of a partially
nude woman’s body to the body of a car. The second drawback is due to more
concentration on the model, the attention deserved by the product is not
sufficient. The main focus of the advertisement is lost and the model becomes a
distraction to the product being sold.
Surprisingly only a few male models advertise for male
oriented products. Even a picture of a woman on an Internet commercial seems
not logical to some extent, as there are about thirty five percent female
internet users and sixty five percent of male internet users, worldwide. To add
to it, advertisers can’t explain why beautiful faces and bodies can bring
success to an advertisement.
Advertisements are a convincing and motivating tool, which
can leave a deep impact on the minds of the viewers and plays a major role in
molding the culture and attitude of people. Expansive and extensive portraying
of women in this manner merely reduces their image to an object of passion.
Emphasis is laid only on the physical beauty of the woman like features, face, body
curves. After the commercial has been shot, using graphical technology, any
kind of imperfection of the body is altered which in a way sends out the signal
that only perfect people are meant to use the product or service.
The companies have a moral responsibility also to the
society. These commercials have a negative impact on society that leads to
problems faced for the common woman. The major ill effect is the pressure on
woman to get those near-perfect bodies. They also get so pressurized that they
take the unhealthy way to reach their goals. They develop eating disorders;
their health gets affected which may sometimes result in irreparable damage,
and those who never make it to that point, can sometimes face humiliation and
get taunted. This can lead to depression
and other long-term psychological diseases.
According to researches and surveys conducted, most of the
women vow that commercials lower their self-confidence and they visualize
themselves as unattractive due to the image being portrayed of the perfect
woman in ads. In America, seventy-five percent of healthy females think that
they are over-weight. Half of the women populations are on some kind of diet
program and well over ten million women suffer from serious eating disorders.
The weight of a fashion model is twenty three percent less than an average
weight of the ordinary woman.
After all this exposure, women viewers identify themselves as
the weaker sex. Some think that males decide their self-worth. Over exposure of
women as sex objects has triggered cases of physical assault and rapes. Many of
the women are taking the wrong way of getting those stick figures, which can
result in diseases, sometimes leading to death. And most of this is attributed
to the advertisements that pour into the lives of innocent people everyday.
Marketing ethics should be built to raise the status of woman in the society
and give them the due respect but not to degrade them.
In closing it seems there is no way around the fact that it
is almost impossible to survive in today’s marketing world without using women
in your ad(s) to help gain the viewers attention. It is our responsibility however to use this
method with respect and to realize the long term impact it can have on all of
us as a species here on planet earth.
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