User:Yuraponto

=Analytical Writing=

Bio
I want to create my own world! :D

Group Name
Team 4

Personal Essay
Cuddled in my warm jacket and my favorite hat, I walked in the cold and gloomy street of Seattle. I let my eyes wander across around me when I noticed a billboard that is advertising the meaning of true beauty. The image was a picture of a famous actress holding a cosmetic product. Her face was flawless, no wrinkles and perfect. As I reached my apartment entrance door, I was tempted to do research on the product line that was advertised. And so I did. The result was rather surprising because there are a lot of reviews from the customer who used it, they were unsatisfied. Without realizing it, we as viewers are made to research the product that was advertised or even worse, buy the product. My point of views was changed since then. How I look was different, how I walk is different, everything is different.

Advertising is like a virus that infects you, or like something that creeps on you like spiders. They will attack you slowly from your feet and slowly make their way into your brain, causing you to lose your confidence and hungry for more products. Superbowl was one of their places to show off, or can we say, gladiators. They are fighting for acknowledgement and profits from us, consumers by manipulating our minds. Thousands and thousands dollars were wasted while we should have been used it for solving the world hunger. According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube. This so called human are turning into robots, they will buy everything that the TV says. Once they tried they will never stopped, they wanted more and more. Without knowing, they could get into the monstrous advertising trap. Ending up with debt and even all the things that we have bought. All was full with lies. This monster have many ways in portraying their products. There are ones that attract mothers in all over the city. They called it “home shopping”. This particular TV channel, only advertised their product and encouraging viewer to buy it while it last, giving promos, good deal of installments pay, free shipping and so on. There are some mothers that got addicted to TV shopping. The reason was, they want to build their self-esteem. Mothers always stayed home, busy with home chores and children. TV shopping is one of their getaways. The impact of advertising can cause a negative view within society. For example, what is considered to be the “Victoria Secret Angels” body. As a personal experience, living in Singapore was not really a good thing for my body-image due to advertising. The dream body of average women there is extremely skinny. For my height, I needed to lose many pounds in order to get the perfect body there. They were influenced by the supermodel bodies. One other thing that could be considered to be advertising is government opinions about certain subject in society, like swine flu. The government advertised that swine flu is dangerous and highly contagious. As a result, society is terrified and worried; they would line up for hours just in order to get the H1N1 shots. While in reality, there are more people died from common flu compared to swine flu in the usa. Advertising is not always negative; it could have positive impacts towards society. Without advertising, the media, including newspapers, television and radio would never be much strong. Advertising also help the economy by advertising products and raised new customer in order to buy domestic made products. This is especially important when a country has a trade deficit. Another positive aspect of advertising is non-commercial advertising. This non-commercial advertising is talking about awareness in drugs, smoking, drinking issues and other illegal issues. They gave us facts and shows images that will affect the society to be scared of illegal drugs and so on. Some teenagers probably would believe all the facts and decided not to use drugs that would lead to addiction because of the message of the advertisement. “According to advertisers, they state that people are capable enough to set their mind and no one can force them to buy anything which they dislike or which they think is not a necessity. Advertisers also think that there are positive impacts of advertising on our society and culture. For example, it can be used to generate awareness among the public that which product is OK or to which they should say NO. In other words, advertising also acts as an educator in the sense that it educates people what is good and what is bad for them and puts a ceiling on the harmful products like smoking and drinking etc.” (Maaz Iqbal, Social & Economic Impacts of Advertising)

In conclusion, the impact of advertising could be either negative of positive. It seems that there are more negative impacts compare then positive impacts of advertising in our society but if we looked carefully, advertising also helps the society in economy and awareness campaign. It is up to us, viewers whether we want to absorb such information or not, no matter how biased they are.