tessellate

Advertising has always fascinated me when I was little. It is one of those things that are simply unavoidable. They are found on billboards, in magazines, in the form of a commercial, and now they are posted all over the internet. I used to wake up at six in the morning to watch television before going to school. I would come down in my pajamas and sit in front of the television while I was eating breakfast. It wasn’t just the show that I was watching that I cared about; it was also that five minute commercial in between them. Did you know that the average American child today is exposed to about 40, 000 television commercials a year? That is about 100 commercials a day.(1) This makes me think how crazy it is that one of them does not stick in our heads for the whole day like an engrossing song we hear on the radio. Anyway, I would then go out to the bus stop; it was about Fifth Grade, and a few kids on the bus would always ask me to recite an entire commercial that I saw. I was literally known on my bus as “Ad Boy” because I had memorized most of the commercials on the television channel that I watched, and the kids were crazy. They wanted to hear ever single one of them, for humor, of course. There was this one song for a commercial that I had memorized for macaroni and cheese, and they would repeatedly ask me to thing that one as a “special request”. Now that I look back on it, no doubt about it, I was wasting my time and looking immature in front of everyone. I might still remember a few little songs to commercials nowadays, but I have mainly moved away from that.

A couple of years later after I had moved away from my recital of commercials, the most fascinating thing had happened to me. It started on a cold, winter morning in Seventh Grade. I came to school early because I was taking Choir, which was almost every day, and there was a sign on the door that said that it was canceled because the teacher was out. Like everyone else who was in Choir, we all went to the library. I decided to wander around, and I supposed that I could check out the nonfiction section for a couple of reading ideas. To my surprise, I had found one of the most moving books I have ever read on advertising. It was called Made You Look and I learned so many new concepts that are used in advertising. I felt like all of the pieces of the puzzle were coming together on why us kids are victims of advertising. In 1983, the amount of money spent on advertising for kids was only $100 million. (2) Now, advertising of kids has jumped up so high that those big, chubby businessmen at the head of the big corporations now spend $15 billion on us. (3)

You probably know someone who is a victim of advertising. What I have always wanted to know is, why do we fall for it? What makes it so that we “have to have it” ? There has to be something that goes on in our brains whenever we look at a billboard, a magazine, or watch a television commercial. That is the one thing that the Made You Look did not get at. I know a couple of my friends who are victims of advertising, especially the ones in commercials. Whenever I go to hang out at my best friend’s house, I notice in his pantry a lot of junk food items that have been advertised on television a massive number of times. They are all brand-name products like Goldfish Crackers, Oreos, Cheese-Its, and Chips Ahoy. One day while he was eating, I asked him, “Why do you only buy snacks that have a brand name?” For some reason, and I am still confused by this, he said, “Because they taste better”. First of all, how can he taste the difference between the no-name brand and the named brand when he hasn’t even tried both foods? Ladies and Gentleman, this is a victim of advertising. It is a person who does not give up their addiction to named product. There are other reasons why people might fall for advertisements. According to a national survey commissioned by the Center for a New American Dream, in 12-13 year olds, 62% of the people say that eating named-brand products will make he or she feel better about themselves. Remember those days when you were five-years-old and you sat in the front of Mommy’s shopping cart? When you go down that cereal aisle, you say, “Mommy! Mommy! I want the cereal with the tiger on it!” You probably don’t even like Frosted Flakes, you just want it because it makes you feel better about yourself: that cartoon tiger. You scream and pout until you get what you want. When you are a tween, you don’t even bother looking at the generic brand cereal on the bottom self. Why would you want a product that doesent have Toucan Sam on it? I learned in Made You Look that there is a reason why they place things in a grocery store on the shelf that they are on. They put all of the brand name products on the shelf at eye-sight level and all of the generic brand products at the top and bottom shelf so that nobody will see them. Try it the next time you are at the grocery store.

There was this one time in Seventh Grade, in Sunday School, our class took a field trip to a grocery store. We were supposed to do this project in which we bought items at the grocery store for a homeless shelter. Each group of five people had to solve the enigma on how to feed a family of 5 people for a week, and under 50 dollars. By instinct, the first shopping items that our group picked out were name brands: bad choice. We went over our quota by a ton of money. The reason we had the instinct to buy named-brand food was because that was the food that we ate in our own household. We had to put everything back and start over from the beginning and choose cost-efficient food items. You probably do not realize it, but name-brand food is drastically over-priced. We do not realize this because normal people do not even bother looking at the price tag on things. Just because something is more expensive does not mean it is better for you. Most of the time, even, there is less food in a package that is advertised. One food that I enjoyed when I was little so much was called Kid Cuisine. It was an individual-sized dinner. On the television, the product looked like it was worth the money to purchase. What I realized when I read Made You Look, was that there are special ways that food advertisers use to make their product look more appealing to the public. For example, in a hamburger advertisement, they might stick a few slabs of Styrofoam in between the bun and the patty to make it look bigger. They also might put a glaze of glue on the bun to make it shinier. Yet the consumer does not realize that the product is fake because we think it is “to good to be true”.

There is one last example that I would like to give from my life. I decided to take a class on Religion this year in high school. In the class, we just started studying about Taoism. The teacher had everyone for homework go home and draw a picture that goes along with a reading that was handed out. It was of an old man fishing in a river between some mountains. (If you want to see my version of it, it is on my other website). Anyway, the next day the teacher taped our drawings up on the board, and right next to it she posted a Chinese landscape painting. There were many differences between them. I felt like in our drawings that it was influenced more by the media world. For example, the old man was in the foreground, signifying that man is more important than nature. The other thing that was different was the mountains in the background. Every mountain in our drawings were almost perfect. They look like an upside-down “U”, which is what we were born into thinking. I mean, I have been to a very rocky area before and I have seen a mountain. I know that mountains don’t look like that, but for some unknown reason, why did I draw that very media-based mountain? It might have been because I had an instinct to do that. The point I am trying to get is that advertising masks everything. What we see on billboards and in magazines is just blocking our vision of nature. The only place where advertising does not exist is in nature. I know when you think of some place like the Himalayas, or the Rocky Mountains, you do not picture all these billboards hanging off the side of the cliff or something. Nor do you see a giant television in the middle of a dense, dark forest. I remember seeing the commercials for Wal-mart. It always showed these overly-happy people, and as the audience, you are supposed to believe that that is what life really is. The thing is, when you walk into a Wal-Mart, you aren’t going to see smiling cashier-people. You aren’t going to see that cartoon smiley face as their mascot, bouncing around the aisles. We have become over-dependent on advertising to show us what this “real life” is.

I believe I am a pretty creative person, there is no arguing with that. Ever since I was little, I have always loved to draw, paint, build, cook, act, and sing. I was in the Art Club for every year of middle school, I participated in a ceramics class when I was about eight years old, and who could forget my lead role for the play I was in at overnight camp. My mom would tell me to keep going at my dream of being more creative. My drama teacher in high school would see me in the hallway and always encourage me to join the next play that the school was performing. And my art teacher could not stop praising me enough to continue art in the future. You might be confused what I am getting at and why this has to do with advertising. Well, I decided last night I would plot the three rules to follow while looking at an advertisement so that you would not fall right into their grasp and buy their product. Well, those rules turned into only two guidelines, and eventually those two guidelines merged into one massive rule: don’t let your mind run wild. That is a very tricky rule to follow when you are one of the most creative people in the world. Everyone telling you that you should try and be more creative in order to do well in life. Well, that rule does the opposite effect when it is applied to advertising. By letting your mind run wild, you think of the endless possibilities of things to do with some product you see on a billboard, or in a commercial. This is more common among younger children. Young children are not able to distinguish between commercials and TV programs. They do not recognize that commercials are trying to sell something. (4)

On a regular Sunday morning, my Dad, my sister and I had this daily routine that we would go around to the stores in our hometown and look around. My father would stop at the local Dunkin Donuts for a coffee, we would then go to the Walgreen’s, the Target, or the Michael’s Craft store. When we usually go to Michael’s, it is because my sister needs some project to work on at home. I usually wander around the store and look at the different craft ideas. There is one thing that bothers me though when I walk down the aisle of the different types of clay. There is this modeling clay bag on a hook on the wall. On the package, there are always these great ideas on what to make with the clay, but they are always impractical when you actually sit down to try and make them. When looking at the picture on the bag of clay, the creativity in my mind runs wild. I really think I am able to build something like that turtle, or that fancy car, or that teddy bear. I would then beg and plead to my father to get the clay so that I could make that masterpiece. By the time I got home, I would rush straight for the bag and try and create that impossible figure that only a professional could make; only to end up in tears: not all of the colors were included in the kit, there was too much of one color and too little of another. There’s a flaw with people: they always want something to come out their own way. They want everything to be perfect. Even if I had tried to make something my own way, I would have still ended up in tears because, compared to the photograph on the bag, it is supposed to come out perfect like that. The same thing applies to you builders out there. There was this one commercial I kept seeing on television with these kids playing with these magnetized rods and silver balls. It was called Magnetix. The product showed a group of children building a giant skyscraper, and a scale model of a bridge with these magnetic rods and balls. Watching television, I actually thought I could make something like that. The thing is, the box of magnets didn’t include enough pieces to build that skyscraper. In fact, you probably needed to buy at least 30 others sets of the same thing in order to make it: a waste of time. The best example that I can think of for a product that is a total waste of time is a pet rock. Pet Rocks were a popular fad in the 1970’s, and finally people had the common sense to not play with a rock. Who would want to play for a rock, and what kind of person would pay money for one when they can be found outside? It’s like a doll mixed with nature.to form a complete disaster. Being creative when looking at an advertisement makes something seem like it is the greatest product in the world; it is making it sound like you absolutely need it. You develop an idea in your head and you try to make it happen through this product. Yet, it completely fails.

There are some pretty convincing advertisers out there. One of the ones that me and my family fall for a lot is Billy Mays. He is the man who has a large beard, and usually advertises products for home-use. His tactic for advertising is very unique: he yells at the consumers so that they buy a product. I swear, Billy Mays will go to any limit to try and sell a product. It may be one of the craziest products, yet he still advertises it. There are a lot of products out there that can be completely useless, and it is your job as a consumer to find out which of the products aren’t what they seem to be. I remember this one product, which I actually bought; which turned out to be one of the biggest pieces of junk that advertising has to offer. I was watching television when I was little, and I saw this advertisement for some slime that looked like a lot of fun. Without any thought, my mom decided to get it for me. There were so many things wrong with it. The biggest problem was that it stuck to our rug in our old house and we had to replace it. Also, after a few days the slime wasn’t sticky anymore. In fact, there was lint and dust stuck to it, which was impossible to get out. I ended up throwing that slime out in the garbage. Even later in life I still get problems with products that ruin other things in my house. My parents had to throw out their computer and replace it because the computer game I had bought at the store had a huge virus in it and it totally destroyed everything. The sad part of it is, that game turned out to be my favorite computer game of all time. Of course, I wouldn’t want to mention that game on here. My parents banned the game from the house; we aren’t allowed to talk about it. Anyway, there was this book that I have heard of about crazy inventions that ended up being completely useless. It was created by some Japanese group of people. One of my friends had recommended it for me a long time ago, and I never got to it. These are inventions that, at first, you think are going to be very useful in every day life, yet they turn out to be completely useless when you really think about it. There is one that I see every time I look at the book. It is a t-shirt that you wear, and it has a grid on the back of it. The point of it is that you have to try and tell someone a pair of coordinates on your back and that is the area that they should scratch if you have a hard-to-reach itch. Seriously, what person would want to scratch your back? This is a perfect example of some useless invention.

I had a couple of ideas for a step two to talk about, yet this mainly goes along with not letting your mind go wild. When you look at that slide at the end of a commercial, there are tiny bits of information that are found, along with some gigantic printed text. When you look at that screen, your mind only focuses on the larger text. The larger text usually consists of a phone number, a price for the product (not the actual price), and of course the name of the product. The reason the advertiser makes certain text bigger is because he or she wants you to think that that is important and the rest is just a jumbled up mess. Yet they have to put the small text in for legal reasons. They really don’t want you to read that. And neither do you: you want to think that that item you see in front of you is a good deal. By doing that, you are letting your mind run wild. So you show your parents just the larger text. “Mommy, mommy, look at that it is only 30 dollars for that fishing pole!” you say. Then mommy gives you a look and decides to buy it, just because she loves you, but she knows in her head that that item actually costs over 100 dollars. I am just going to focus on that price that they give. There are so many smaller words that will throw the price off: two/three/four payments of, shipping, handling, processing and of course tax. It can be quite tricky to calculate that actual price in your head. They don’t show you have to add tax to that on that information slide. Why would they? So mommy notices that she needs to pay three payments of 30 dollars, and then another 8 dollars for shipping and handling. Then possibly another 2 dollars for tax. Wow, isn’t that fun? By not telling you about it when you are little, it is just one more lesson that needs to be taught in consumer education.

I like being creative. It really is a skill that you don’t want to lose. I hope you thought I wasn’t saying it was bad. What I really wanted you to get out of this is that you can apply creativity to almost anything, but please don’t apply it to a consumer watching an advertisement.

Using the computer is one thing that I can not go a day without. There are many websites that I just have the need to visit, including this website, my other website, Youtube, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Google. There are emails that I just need to check. If you did not know, I have four email accounts that I need to check regularly. And there is homework that has to get typed. If I were to be stranded on a desert island, one of the things I would bring is my laptop with internet connection. At home, I would zoom right up to my laptop as soon as I woke up and check to see if anything changed. Because of my love for computers and laptops, I decided that today’s post be focused on internet advertising. No matter where you look, you are always going to see one form of internet advertising every day. It may be the smallest thing, but it is on the page. In 2007, the total amount of money spent on internet advertising was nearly 17 billion dollars. (5) Although it takes up only 6% of all of the advertising (5) , most of it is seen by people who have access to the web.

I have heard that advertising on websites changes as it gets to know you more. There is a thing called a “cookie” on your computer. Dictionary.com defines it as a message, or segment of data, containing information about a user, sent by a Web server to a browser and sent back to the server each time the browser requests a Web page. And what it does is store information about you, which can be a good thing if you have a little bit, because you wont have to retype in login information or something. But if you have too much, it can be very dangerous because too much personal information is given away. Anyway, what it does is see what kind of websites you visit, and on those websites it will show advertisements that match who you are in order to make you want to click there. This is only accurate when you allow your computer to accept all cookies, which many people don’t choose. I actually think that this is a pretty good method of advertising. I am not into sports websites at all, so I feel comfortable that I do not have to see any sports related ads. The smallest piece of information can change a lot. There was this one Youtube video I watched that contained the classic Duck Hunt game by Nintendo, and when I went to look at Facebook, there was a Duck Hunt advertisement on almost every page. For all of you Club Penguin users, you probably see a lot of advertisements for multiplayer games online, like the frequent IMVU pop-up that I see almost every time I go on my piczo website.

Speaking of pop-ups, there is one type of advertisement on the web that annoys people the most. You may know of this kind of advertisement as the “You’ve been selected to receive a free iPod Nano!” or “Answer this question correctly and you’ve just won a free gift card to any restaurant of your choice!” Don’t you just hate those? It actually looks pretty convincing. So you look for any details, and of course, there are none. Oh wait, what is this? Do I see a little asterisk right at the end of the sentence? That little asterisk means a lot in advertising. It can be the difference between an excellent deal and the biggest mistake of your life. So you decide not to trust the ad. Has there ever been a time where you actually tried it out? So you decide to click one, I mean, you have to do it at least once in your lifetime to see what it is like, and you fill out all of the information with a fake name, fake address, basically fake everything. And that email you put, that fake one which someone on the other side of the world has, will be totally spammed forever. And there is this point in the process, there is this long list of different restaurants and stores, and an endless number of pages. This is the point where you reach your impasse. You become so frustrated and there is no way to continue. The point of this advertisement is to make the advertiser money. There is a concept in internet advertising called cost-per-action, and first the page wants to obtain as many views as possible by drawing in an endless number of people to click it. Then, if the consumer does one of the following specifically defined actions listed on the page, then the advertiser is paid, and you just end up closing the window because of the deadlock.

Pop-ups are the most annoying of them all, they are like little pesky bugs that keep coming back for more. Yet, we have found ways to get around them by creating pop-up blockers to make sure that we never see them again. There are some cases where we need to turn the pop-up blocker off for a certain website, and that is only used if we need to see an important window that can only come up as a pop-up window. That is when the real ones start tumbling on to your screen. We all know the classic pop-up ads. There are the ones for classmates.com, which bothers me so much. It says, “try and find your old class from when you graduated!” Who even needs to do that nowadays? There are social networking websites like Myspace or Facebook where you can stay in contact with people. It might have been different when our parents were around, but technology has changed, and that is why this pop-up bothers me. There are also ones that I see a lot for “mortgage rates are low!” and there is a dancing cartoon person next to it or something. More recently, pop-ups have been found in other forms of annoyance to people who even have pop-up blockers. They are found to pop up at the bottom of videos on YouTube. It is quite annoying to keep closing them every time you try to watch a video. Other video websites contain pop-up advertisements, such as MSN Video and Hulu.com. MSN Video has them at the beginning of almost all of the videos you try to watch. Hulu.com has a 30 second commercial break pop-up several times in a full length show. So no matter where you go to get videos, there will always be a way for advertisers to get to you. Most of the time you can’t avoid them like commercials on television. My grandparents always mute the television and do something productive during the 5 minute commercial period. But during that 30 seconds online, it is almost like you are forced to watch it, waiting patiently for your feature presentation to come back on because you can’t do anything else in those 30 seconds.

There was this website that one of my friends showed me: Uncyclopedia. It was supposed to be a joke website of Wikipedia, and I just thought the content was hilarious. There was this one search page for the internet, and it showed it just like the layers of the ocean. There was the shore, which were websites like Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Youtube. And the further you progressed into the ocean, the darker and more frightening the websites would get. At the bottom of that deep trench were websites that people would not dare to visit because of how absurd they are. Well, I thought to myself, and I believe that advertising is the same way. On the shore would be websites that have no advertising at all: Google, Wikipedia, Ask, and even Club Penguin could fit in. These websites are very well off; they have many visitors, and people enjoy the fact that they are advertising free. As you go deeper, the advertising starts to get pretty out of hand. Small clickable banners for advertisements start appearing. Then, pop-Ups start emerging, and finally you get to the point where it starts to feel pretty uncomfortable. There are websites that, no matter what you are trying to accomplish on the website, advertisements get literally in the way of everything. These websites are chock full o’ viruses. And you know what virus websites do, right? They work to find out your personal information and then mess with your computer. One thing they would do is use your email to send spam. Of course, that isn’t the only way spam occurs. It also happens when you fill out one of those email address blanks in advertisements. It is a way of them saying, “Thanks for visiting, but I have to make your life miserable by sending spam to your email forever.” Those spam messages can be pretty random at times. I know me and my friends get a lot of spam from some Irish Lottery that keeps contacting us to say that we have won. There is one spam email chain that I love to hate: the Bank of Africa one. There was a video on Youtube that made fun of this piece of spam by re-enacting it, and I could not agree more. I had such empathy for it because I was also a victim. Of course, these advertisements may be a pain, but it is pretty fun to make it a joke. You don’t have to take internet advertising so seriously sometimes. Instead, make it welcome, because those spam messages are going to keep coming for the rest of your life.

If you are a player of Club Penguin, you may wonder why the prices are so much higher than other multiplayer game websites. Well, the reason is because it really costs a lot of make a website advertisement free. A large amount of the money is used to pay for the website to keep it standing up straight, and so Club Penguin uses memberships to pay for that. Other important websites that are standing up, like Runescape, have advertisements on the homepage of the websites, which means their member prices are a lot lower than Club Penguins. Don’t think that Club Penguin’s member prices upset you, because if there were advertisements, it would probably be the same price as all of the other multiplayer games.

Whenever you are feeling down; whenever you feel like you are about to give up and return back to where you came from, there is always one person that you have in mind to follow; to guide you in life. There are those times where things just do not turn out the way you want them to. You just want to hang up the skates and go home, but you don’t; because there is an urge that you have to keep going and tough things out in society. This urge may be because of an adult figure, like parents. In Religions class in school my class started learning about Confucianism, which is a belief system that declares that the adult figures guide you when you are young. and that they are the foundation of the tree trunk of society. It may be from a famous movie star or someone who you believe has achieved their potential. There must have been a time in everyone’s life when some biography in English class really sparks some light into your own life. You become inspired to follow the same steps of this person to guide you. This person: this parent, movie star, athlete, politician, is your role model. Everyone has a role model. This role model maybe not exactly be defined in bold print. Must people don’t go around wearing a sticker that says, “Hello, my role model is *so-and-so*” because it may just be a personal connection between your role model that is private. But most definitely, there is always a time in your life where you have a temporary role model without even knowing it. In advertising, role models play an essential part in drawing you to buy a product. Because role models are people who you follow in life, you may be attached to whatever product that person appears to enjoy on a billboard, magazine, movie, or television program. And this leads on to our main topic: role models and advertising. There are two types of ways that the role model is used to convey thoughts about a product. This can be done with permanent role models or temporary role models.

Permanent role models are usually conveyed in movies or in television shows that contain many well known actors and actresses. Brands don’t even have to be mentioned by the character like regular commercials or billboards. Research shows that consumers want to identify with the characters they watch on television and that seeing real products helps them to do that. Instead, there is a much more clever way that movie or television productions introduce products; and this process is known as product placement. Product placement is the practice of intentionally placing a specific brand or product as a prop into filmed entertainment (6). It is very rare to see if happen by accident. You might not even notice that a product is utilized in the movie or television program until you pay close attention to it. Possibly the most famous example of the use of product placement is in the television show American Idol. The companies American Idol and Coca-Cola have developed a strong bond to each other. They both help each other to gain a profit using product integration, which is when a company funds a program and in return their product is integrated into a show (6). This is an example of a visual placement; occurring when a product, service, or logo can simply be observed. If you did not notice, the judges of American Idol are always shown drinking out of a Coca-Cola glass. Although the cup does not get much of attention, the cost of placing it there is pretty high. A few seconds of exposure on a popular drama or comedy series can be worth as much as $500,000, based on the cost of a 30-second commercial(6). There have been other events where Coca-Cola appears in American Idol. The “green room” in the show was renamed to the “Coca-Cola Red Room” and special taped segments of the featured contestants became known as “Coca-Cola Moments” (6). This product placement is used because the judges might be your role model; they are well-known people. And if they are your role model, then the television show and the Coca-Cola company profit from it because you go out to buy some of the soda. If you already drink the soda, all this advertisement does is make sure that the bond between you and the company is strong so that you will not switch to buying a different brand (they surely don’t want your spending to go to Pepsi).

There are some good things and bad things about using product placement. The good thing is that the consumer has someone to associate the product with. The bad thing is that the consumer has someone to associate the product with. How can this be a good thing and a bad thing? Well, let us take for example the advertisement in which Britney Spears is seen with a bottle of Pepsi. There are an ad in a magazine with Britney Spears with the can; and now people who had Spears as their role model could associate her with Pepsi and start drinking it. Back when it was released to the public in early 00’s Britney Spears was a popular singer for that time and now times have changed and Britney had her own problems with life like driving drunk and shaving her head bald. Now anyone who saw that advertisement would not feel right associating Pepsi with her. The people who had her as a role model would not only dump the role model but also the drink that she was associated with. There are some instances that have worked over the years and still continue to be seen nowadays. The famous “Got Milk?” advertisement features famous people and characters all with the milk mustache. There are plenty of role models that are shown in the Got Milk advertisements and there is always one that you are compare with. Although the milk product hasn’t been given much praise lately, other companies are starting to follow on to the trend. Recently, the company that makes M&M’s has started to show advertisements featuring famous stars in the shape of an M&M to try and promote their product.

The second type of role model used in advertising is the temporary role model. These role models are not famous at all, yet they do things that make you wish you were in their shoes. These advertisements have people in them that are relaxing and enjoying themselves when using the product. I had stated before in another post that Wal-Mart commercials make your mind run wild with ideas. Well, they also contain temporary role models. A mother might look at the mother in this commercial and see everything orderly and enjoyable and that is her temporary role model until the commercial is over. A child might look at the group of kids playing in the sprinkler in the summer with his or her friends and eating ice cream. This person is the child’s temporary role model until the commercial is over. You look up to this person because you want to be just like this person: enjoyable, relaxed, and fun. This is what makes you want to buy products at Wal-Mart. There are some ways in which this kind of advertising can be a bad thing– when it attracts the wrong kind of crowd. What I am talking about are advertisements for alcohol, cigarettes and other drugs. There advertisements almost always utilize this temporary role model concept, in which people are shown having a good time with these drugs. Most of the time, the product isn’t even shown in the ad. For example a tobacco advertisement will just show a group of people having fun in the forest around a campfire. You feel like you need to smoke in order to have fun like this group of people, and so they become your temporary role models. What is really being sold is the desire to be around friends who enjoy being together. The real truth is that tobacco isn’t the reason why the people are enjoying the campfire. The same thing applies to alcohol advertisements. An ad may show a beach scene with some nice, attractive looking people playing volleyball. It makes you feel like you need to drink beer because that person becomes your temporary role model. You feel that the beer is the reason you have fun with your friends. The truth is that the picture is staged. In fact, drinking alcohol impairs coordination, this, the ability to play volleyball would be affected. The two examples can drastically affect your health if you follow the temporary role models.

Although having a role model helps you get on with your life, mixed messages are played when looking at the role models of advertising. It is important to figure out who you should follow and not to be blown away by the advertisers who are trying to hurt you with staged clips or scenes.

(1) American Psychological Association, “Television Advertising Leads to Unhealthy Habits in Children; Says APA Task Force,” February 23, 2004,<www.apa.org/releases/childrenads.html> (accessed March 8, 2006).

(2) Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004), 21.

(3)Susan Linn, Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (New York: The New Press, 2004), 1.

(4) “Children And Advertising.” Mediawise. 7/08/02. National Institute on Media and the Family. 30 Dec 2008 <http://www.mediafamily.org/facts/facts_childadv.shtml>.

(5)”Industry Facts.” Thinking Forward. 2008. Performics. 4 Jan 2009 <http://www.performics.com/think-tank/industry-facts>

(6)Kinney. Lance. “Product Placement,” 24 Jan 2009 <http://comm2.fsu.edu/faculty/comm/sapolsky/research/ProductPlacement.doc>