Nowadays, advertisers carefully select the people they use for their commercials and most of the time, gender usually plays a role in communicating certain ideas to different audiences. When trying to appeal to male audience, usually a sexy female is used in the commercial for example T-Mobile commercial use a “sexy lady” to advertise a phone coverage plan. The lady is wearing all black with her hair being blown by a fan. This makes me think what does being sexy have to do with phone plan? Once again, if the men are switching to t-mobile, they will most likely be getting their women to switch.
Another way that advertisers are using sex appeal to see their products is in one of the Trojan ecstasy condom commercial. A man is surrounded by a lot of extremely happy women rejoicing about the fact that the condom “feels like there is nothing there”. Another way of looking at this is that condoms are advertised as if it is only meant for men. It is amazing how the women are in the background in the commercial basically accepting the fact that the man would be the one to wear the condom. As far as I have been able to discover, there has not been a single commercial about female condoms. Another commercial that baffles me is the GMC car commercial. GMC……. may the best car win. Although there were no people in the commercial, a male voice advertised the entire time and I got the feeling that the advertisers were only appealing to men (i.e. why aim a car commercial toward women when it is the man that buys the car anyway- stereotypical).
I saw an ad in a newspaper (AM New York to be exact) and it says “look good, spend less” an ad for laser treatment and it says buy one get one free with a picture of a man standing tall and macho and a scared woman holding him from behind for protection. So what they are trying to say in other words is that he can come for laser treatment and bring her along for the buy one get one free sale event but my question is why cant she go along with her girlfriends and why does he have to look macho and she look scared just because they are going to get laser treatment.
If the positions of men and women were reversed in these commercial, the message that the advertisers are trying to get across will change since the messages are tied to gender. I have come to the conclusion that men and women are depicted differently in the media. When the audience that is appealed to is a man, usually women are objectified to get the message across however, when the audience that is appealed to is a woman, another woman is just made to appear as though she’s perfect so that the other woman can wonder what is wrong with her and want to fix it by buying the product.
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