Advertisement, a common way to inform and
educate people, possesses “enormous power and economic value.” (Source B) Due
to its overwhelming influence on public, a number of negative effects of
advertising have risen as serious issues, making people to “be precisely the
ones most vulnerable to the ad’s attack.” (Source E)
Throughout the 20th and 21th
century, the cigarette industry had grown big, making advertising an instrument
to “create a mass market and apportion shares among brands.” This effect of
advertising resulted in “continued social acceptability of smoking and
incorrect belief that the majority of people smoke.” Despite awareness of
detrimental effects on health and restrictions on advertisement increased,
cigarette advertisements continuously increased the size of market by “targeting
every conceivable consumer niche and developing an impressive array of
advertising and promotional tools.” The success of tobacco industry shows that
advertisement can be highly powerful in harming people. (Source B)
Dramatic effects of advertising attack
people by planting a “belief that there is no attack taking place”, which is “being
laughed at, belittled, and all but ignored.” Advertisements infiltrate into
human’s unconsciousness through uses of symbols, color and imagery, leaving
audience defenseless to “persuasive techniques used in ads.” The endlessly
disseminated information about products combined with “psychological hooks used
to gauge values and hidden desires of the common” (Source E) establishes
avarice inside our mind. “It can make us unsatisfied with who we are, greedy
for what we don’t have, and oblivious to the miseries of millions who have not
a fraction of the comforts we take for granted.” (Source D)
The difference between the scene shown in
the advertisement and that of reality create “psychological violence” in the
mind of people. Unfulfilled desires that comes from the “contradiction between
the way of life presented and the product sold attract and control consumers of
every age, sex, race and religion.” The emotional appeal and techniques
unconsciously force the consumers to become like the one comes out in the
advertisement. For example, an advertisement of powedered milk in countries
which have no sanitary water supply caused diseases and death to a great number
of babies. On the other hand, without any economic interest in advertising
breast-feeding, the best and the cheapest way for the babies to grow strong and
healthy is ignored. This form of violence psychologically makes control of
consumers’ hands to pick up more packs of powdered milk.
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