Critical Corner

 

                            “They are not selling soap or petrol, but a vision………

                                                      ……….a way of life.”

  

Have you ever wondered about the impact of advertising on your daily life? Advertisements have been constantly bombarding us with messages while making us accept them as a normal part of the reality. Advertising can simply define as the process of building brand awareness about certain products, brands, ideas and services among the consumers. Nowadays this field has become wider with the tremendously competitive economic system. Thus, advertisements are undertaken in various forms such as TV commercials, product placements, billboards, posters and online advertisements. Despite a handful of benefits, advertising is considered to have numerous negative effects on humankind but it has permeated our lives so much to the point that we are not even conscious of it.

         Advertising changes the buying behavior of consumers and contributes to wasteful consumption. It conveys messages of certain products through entertainment. Thus, whatever that is sold is presented in a positive light along with unrealistic expectations. It makes the audience unsatisfied with who they are, and what they have, and it ultimately generates greedy for what they do not have. This background leads the people into a status of identifying themselves with the products they own. Consequently, it directly affects in altering the consumer behavior from desires to needs. Finally advertising which functions as a fountain giving birth to uncontrollable desires wastes our money on stuff that are not really essential for the survival, or in other words, it contributes to wasteful consumption.

              “Advertising; the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it”

               Moreover, fast food, alcohol and tobacco advertisements can have a long lasting effect on human health. Most of the fast food advertisements promote the misbelief that consuming a specific food or drink makes people happy and success, but being exposed to such advertisements over a long period of time effect peoples’ food preferences and consummation patterns. Eating foods with overdose of fat and sugar give rise to serious health problems like obesity, diabetics, chronic diseases and, cardiovascular disease. With the exceptions of the above fact, advertisements provoking alcohol and tobacco consumption also can have significant repercussions especially on children and teenagers. They often target the vulnerabilities of youth depicting drinkers as laid-back, attractive, successful young people having fun in glamorous social situations, but it ultimately leads to potentially lasting issues like heart disease, lung cancer, kidney failure, and liver damage.

           Sometimes violent and aggressive thoughts are provoked through advertising. Such correlation between media violence and children’s tendencies to fallow them has also proved through numerous researches. Consequently promoting certain products with violent contents makes children likely to engage in aggressive behaviors

       In conclusion, what is understood up to this point is that there is no escape from advertising. Oftentimes we are unconscious about how much we keep on buying things and fallow the contents established through advertisements. You yourself can be the solution for this problem by understanding and helping your kids understand what commercials and advertisings are all about.

 

                                               “Don’t let them fool you”