Prompt: Advertisements provide information about available products and services. Many people argue, however, that something else is going on: advertisements try to convince people that when they buy things, they are also buying satisfaction and happiness. Advertisements merely fool people into believing that the next “new and improved” product will make their lives better, and the result is that people are even more unhappy and dissatisfied than they would have been without the advertisements.
Do advertisements contribute to unhappiness and dissatisfaction? Plan and write an essay…etc.
Essay:
Advertisements throughout history have been known to create change - social, political, and especially economical. Through this change, the intended audiences of the advertisements are affected both positively and negatively. However, ass a whole, advertisements contribute more to unhappiness and dissatisfaction because of the controversial topics covered within, as well as the lofty goals displayed that are often too difficult to reach.
The Campbell Soup ad that was featured on national television four days ago featured a homosexual couple enjoying family time with their son, a union made possible by their consumption, supposedly, of the soup brand’s products. As a result of the homosexuality in the video, many Americans were angered at the company for supporting a political viewpoint that these Americans strongly detested. Due to their dissatisfaction, the advertisement was pulled from the program it was originally in, in fact, and became a national concern discussed on nearly every news organization/channel in the country. In reality, while the ad was meant to support equal rights along with Campbell Soup, it ended up in the eyes of many to mean to support only gay rights as the soup became a nonfactor, causing unhappiness in many due to their reactions to the controversy.
Secondly, an ad can often cause unhappiness by displaying impossibly lofty goals that viewers envy, as in the example of the recent shampoo ad that showed an otherwise unkempt man that was surrounded by admiring females attracted to the smell of his hair. Upon seeing this, viewers shunned the ad for its “exterior” meaning, stating that all the ad cared about was appearance. However, this was all solely because they were all jealous of the man and ended up inadvertently turning that envy into hate and extreme dissatisfaction. Thus, the impossibly lofty goal shown in this ad made its audience rear in unhappiness caused by their own disapproval and dislike.
With both causes of unhappiness and dissatisfaction there exits a connection. As a result of consumer reaction to the ads, both ads failed to reach their originally intended goals. Interestingly enough, not only did the ads make people more unhappy than happy, the ads also totally failed to the their intended points across, showing the threat many ads today, in fact, pose to themselves.
The Campbells Soup ad and the shampoo ad may have had different creators, but both contributed to unhappiness and dissatisfaction, and furthermore, because the two ads are parts of more broad archetypes of ads, many more will do the same, and have done in the past. Because many ads incorporate into their timelines controversies and impossibly occurrences, they cause unhappiness and dissatisfaction through reaction and response.