Politics in Everyday Life - Commercial Advertisement

 

On Local and Popular Culture – Politics in Everyday Life

In today’s modern life, mass media—whether in the form of magazines or television—has provided us with countless amount of information. These information is presented in various ways, such as movies, songs, news, and even advertisements. If you watched television or bought magazine, you will see a bunch of commercial advertisements in it. In its efforts to persuade us to consume their products, we unconsciously are ‘told’ to be one  reflected in the pictures. Meanwhile a huge amounts of commercial advertisements has being produced for economical reason. In which, economy is one crucial factor that affecting our social system. With its gigantic amount, frequent and endless production, mass media has empowered commercial advertisement to the stage where it becomes beliefs. Therefore, I would like to analyze how commercial advertisements unconsciously shaped our conscious standard of ‘perfection’ in several aspects of our daily life as a part of social systems.

The most intriguing phenomenon occurs with commercial advertisement in which subject of the products is the youth. In order to impress the youth, these kind of advertisement usually shows us a good-looking models to promote their products. How good-looking? The following picture are a good example of this and it contains of three different commercial advertisements. I will provide you a brief analysis using these advertisements.

 Image 1.(left) a commercial advertisement of beauty product: Image 2 (right) a commercial advertisement of a soft drink. Image 3 (down) a commercial advertisement of  men deodorant

From the pictures above, we are able to see that even though they are promoting different kinds of products, they shared similar images of ‘good-looking’ girls. They use the same type of slender white flawless-skinned female models to promote the products. As fancy as it may seems, this sorts of images are implanted to our mindset through its frequent appearance in mass media. Eventually, people believes that those categories are the ideal standard of a 'perfect'  female.  In addition, that kind of female is also ‘loveable’. ‘Lovable’ here means that the opposite sex (male) is more likely to go crazy for a white female  with beautiful face and slender body rather than a fat dark skin female with pimple(s) in her face. As the result, girls are striving to have white skin (at least for her face), slim and slender body, beautiful hair, etc. In the end, they end up buying products that (they think) can fulfill these images of ideal beauty. 

Now we arrived to the point where capitalism lies. In case anyone has not realize yet, the products I’ve mentioned above are mass produced. It means that from the beginning, the companies which produce them are aiming to sell the products to mass people. Automatically, it becomes their homework to create images that is acceptable. When the images they’ve created is accepted by the society (mass people), it becomes stereotypes or values attached in their social life. An essay entitled The Effects of Advertisement in Gender Hegemony (2006), stated that hegemony is achieved when stereotypes or values of these advertisements has been accepted as reality and synchronized in people's daily life. 

Even the products itself has became a lifestyle. For example, people are proud to carry Pocary Sweat around rather than just ordinary mineral water because, in the advertisement, oriental people is drinking it (see image 2). As we know, in Indonesia, oriental people like Chinese is considered as the upper-class society. Why do you think the advertisement did not use local people who has darker skin and Javanese faces? That is because they are ‘local’ and most of them are live as lower class citizen. What is so special about drinking the same drinks as lower class people drinks? 

Look at image 1, the product name is Pond’s White Beauty, well judging by the name itself, we can barely grasp the motive. There is a picture of a beautiful white girl being kissed by a white handsome man. The girl’s face is smiling right to the camera (to us) to indicates that she was happy and proud of her skin so that she deserved to be kissed by a handsome guy. This is just one small example why many Indonesian girls out there going around with a look in their faces that express pride and satisfaction about their white face. It is good enough for them to have white face, although their other skin is darker or contradictive with the rest of their skin. 

As for image 3, it is a men deodorant, AXE. It has the most interesting tags than the other two. As you can see, there are five girls in angel costumes posing with some kind of alluring expression on their faces. I notice the four on the left are Luna Maya, Marissa Nasution (VJ Marissa), Chantal Della Concetta and Uli Auliani. All of them are Indonesian top and sexy female artists. They dress in white dress with withe wing on their back, and acted as angels.  The scenario is that they all fell down to earth one by one because of a guy is spraying AXE before going to bed. The guy himself looks retarded. But the angels do not seem to care, and try to seduce the guy because they are ‘hypnotized’ by the smell of AXE. Obviously this is what every men must have dreamed of. But the question is, why does the angels have to be portrayed as a kind of ‘bitchy’ rather than ‘graceful’? Well, if we look closer to what lies behind this scenario, the advertisement has put forward, again, the ideal images of women that men would die for. This is absurd because not all women matches those criteria. Thus, the advantage comes to women who share the same images and put them as superior. The superior ought to experience appreciation and satisfaction easily. But what happen to women whose not able to fit in the criteria? They treated as subordinate in the society and have to suffer and struggle to fill their deficiencies of beauty. One of the efforts by consuming products in the image 1. 

In conclusion, mass media, specifically commercial advertisement has overwhelming power that influenced our society. It can divide us into different categories. In the commercial advertisements i have provided above, it categorized us into different boxes; boxes of the upper class and boxes of the lower class (image 2), boxes of good-looking person and boxes of bad-looking person (image 1 & 3). These boxes divide us into two main categories in the society; superiors and subordinates. In doing so, these advertisements also explicitly saying that being categorized as the subordinate is lack of joyful. This is how politics of the advertisement works; they classify us into different social classes, and then mocking the groups who do not belong to superior society. On the other hand, the superior becomes more powerful because their existence is supported by  tremendous power of mass media.  In the end, the subordinate society is homogenized; they are forced to follow the same ideologies in which the superior lives in.

 Wynne Ert

References:

WriteWork contributors. “The Effects of Advertisements on Gender Hegemony” WriteWork.com. WriteWork.com, 20 February, 2006. Web. 11 Mar 2012.

deff. Lintas Cafe: Pendukung Gaya Hidup Anda. 18 February 2012. 11 March 2012 <http://lintascafe.com/2012/02/18/penampilan-terbaru-luna-maya-yang-seksi-dengan-rambut-pendek/>.

Yuono, Eko. Kompasiana. 24 May 2011. 11 March 2012 <http://ekonomi.kompasiana.com/marketing/2011/05/24/dahsyatnya-iklan-pocari-sweat/>.