Effects of Advertising

Advertising can have adverse effects on the minds of the people who see it. In an advertisement the company tries to promote only the advantages of its product and of course, none of the disadvantages.

For example, many years ago, cigarette manufacturers used advertising to show how cigarettes were highly fashionable and desirable. This led to many people taking up smoking. Nowadays, we can see the results of those advertisements in the many people who have smoking-related diseases.

Children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to the messages that are put forward in advertisements. Fashion advertising is a good example, how many times have you seen images of anorexic-like catwalk models in magazines or billboards? These images have influenced some adolescent girls to the point of putting their lives in danger through anorexia.

Teenagers like to impress their peers, and sometimes display this through the very latest pair of trainers they have seen advertised in a magazine or on television. Teenagers will pester their parents to the point where mum or dad will part with a small fortune for such items. Advertisers call this ‘pester power’ and use it quite deliberately.

A popular advertising strategy is to make the consumer insecure and create fear, which can be overcome by purchasing the product. Examples of this are adverts for bleaching and cleaning products used by new mums. The adverts show how the mum is protecting her baby from germs by using the bleach to clean surfaces. The surfaces become so clean, that the baby can eat off them.

This kind of advert suggests that if the mother cares for her baby, she should clean using that product, and if she doesn’t, terrible germs will attack her child, and subsequently the child will die a horrible death.

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