Kilbourne Response

KILBOURNE RESPONSE
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Kilbourne Response
Advertising has a big impact on culture. And advertising promotes values that are3 detrimental, or directly opposed to wellbeing, a fair society and environmental sustainability, therefore making any regulation on it necessary. Indeed it is one notable advertiser who was quoted as saying, “I’d rather be thought as evil than useless.” That is how advertisers see it. They are sucking out our brains through our own eyes. So next time you want to think of big corporations, banks, lobbyists, and politicians are the real enemies of the society, think again.
Advertisers claim to enhance the consumer’s choice, yet they offer little choice about what whether we hear or see it, and even lesser choices about whether we respond to it. Advertisers have been militantly devising ways of subverting our defence. While in public they argue that people have become informed consumers who even school their children in media literacy and so there is no need for alarm from their attempts at persuasion, in private however, they enlist the services of neurobiologists to try and fork out more cleverly yet cunning ways of bypassing the conscious mind.
Repetition and persuasiveness is like a battering ram against our minds. Ads are designed to incite and trigger the emotional rather than the rational response. In a flooded advertising market, implicit and passive learning become imperative drivers of emotional attachment. They are to a higher degree powerful among children (Sheehan, 2004)
The impact of advertisement on values cannot be underestimated. While it reflects the society to a certain extent, it also has the potency of ‘normalizing’ behaviors or values. The average American is exposed to approximately between 500 and 1,000 ad messages in a single day, it therefore holds a substantial power over what one would consider normal. For instance there are commercials on cosmetics for men nowadays. (Mehra, 2009)Years ago, this idea of men using moisturizers would have raised eyebrows, or even laughable. An aggressive advertising campaigns by such companies as Nivea, with billboards allover ‘normalized’ this whole concept of men using products such as hand cream.
Many advertisements today have taken the approach of using (actually I think its misusing) experts. We see it all the time when researchers, scientists and other experts are quoted in ads and no validity of those assertions is made. A good example is the “sensodine” toothpaste Ad which shows a presumably dentist in the white doctors coat vouching for the product. It is assumed that since those are expert opinions, then what they claim is valid information. And so we see doctors being quoted in regards to latest medical development. People are bound to with such information because they lack the background knowledge as well as the current information that those experts have (Shields, 2002).
Moreover, many other companies have taken the approach of using famous people to advertise their products. And so the organization will vaunt that a certain public figure agrees with them and their product. This is due to the fact that the public holds these celebrated people in high regard, even idolize them. If your favorite athlete or pop idol is endorsing a clothing li...