Everyday Advertising Context: An Ethnography of Advertising Response in the Family Living Room

This paper explores the gender stereotyping of women in the contemporary space of Indian television commercials. The paper endeavors a discourse analysis of one ad campaign Fair & Lovely over the last many years. The study deconstructs the discourse built by the brand through propagating a myth of womens beauty as only one kind of beauty i.e., fair skin – which becomes imperative to attain anything in life. Such a discourse mainstreams a racist version of beauty on one hand and trivializes the essence of a woman by representing her as a dependent on body image to attain success and approval. Keywords: Women, Indian Television Commercials, Ad Campaign

Advertising research has focused exclusively on the solitary subject at the expense of understanding the role that advertising plays within the social contexts of group interaction. We develop a number of explanations for this omission before describing the results of an ethnographic study of advertising's contribution to the everyday interactions of adolescent informants at a number of English high schools. The study reveals a series of new, socially related advertisingaudience behaviors. Specifically, advertising meanings are shown to possess social uses relating to textual experience, interpretation, evaluation, ritual use, and metaphor. The theoretical and managerial implications of these social uses are then discussed.

2017

Purpose: To study the attitude of working and homemaker mothers towards TV advertising and its effect on their children. Methodology: Self structured questionnaire and convenience sampling technique was used for data collection. The Sample comprises of 400 mothers (age: 25 to 45 years) of children (age: 8 to 16 years). The response was generated regarding 32 statements related to different aspects of TV advertising measured on a five point Likert Scale. Findings: Factor Analysis of working mothers revealed 8 dimensions while homemaker mothers revealed 7 dimensions. Both mothers find TV ads informative for their children. The attitude of working mothers is more liberal and favorable towards TV ads than homemaker mothers. While, working mothers are bothered about ads being persuasive and materialistic; homemakers find TV ads featuring adult content and unhealthy eating habits worrisome. Research limitations: Although there is a possibility of applicability of the conclusions about at...

Purakala (UGC Care Journal), 2020

This research study aims to explore and critically evaluate the gender and masculinity in Television Advertisements, and to analyze the representation of women in TV commercials. It addresses the frequency of appearance of men and women and how they are portrayed; besides, by using the framework for analysis and the methodology developed by previous researchers in the field. The research study also indicates the gender-stereotyped content and seeks to represent women's relationships across the mass media in the objective analysis as advertising is part of persuasive communication. The research further provides a wide variety of studies conducted on the inclusion of women in TV advertisements and the pattern of presentation.

Women in some advertisements today are portrayed as independent, taking their own calls in relationships, managing home and professional life with élan. The storylines are innovative and directed towards the ‘woman of today’. Shourini Banerjee describes some of the ads that offer a more equitable portrayal of gender roles, breaking the sexist stereotypes that have existed for long.

NORDICOM

The ‘tween’ segment has matured into an important market making it the focus of attention from both advertisers and consumer rights activists. The present qualitative study of Danish children in the tween segment (10-12 years) shows that the children are very sceptic, mostly disinterested and highly selective when appreciating TV-advertising. Almost all the children in the study showed very good understanding of the advertisers’ persuasive strategies, and some revealed impressive knowledge of the conventions of TV-advertising. But the ‘tween’ conception of ‘good’ advertising is less sophisticated: straightforward selling points and slapstick comedy.

2021

The aim of this thesis is to provide an analysis of advertising on television based on a comparative approach to textual contents and structures which attempts to identify some of the ways in which semantic, pragmatic and textual elements interact and exert mutual influence. The main focus is on the way in which advertisements activate specific fields of discourse (the semantic aspect) by engaging the viewer in an interpretive activity (the pragmatic aspect) through specific visual and aural elements (the textual aspect). Preliminary to the analysis is a brief review of some of the philosophical and socio linguistic positions on textual meaning (Part 1). Particular attention is paid to the main contributions to a pragmatically oriented textual analysis, including Halliday's concept of social semiotics, which has been especially useful for the definition of the theoretical framework for the analysis. In Part 2 the issue of the specificity of audio-visual language, as a language t...

2004

Television advertisementsand publicity media in generalhave among their aims those of attracting the spectators’ attention and reaching a target audience of potential consumers. These two purposes do not usually imply separate processes or different stages of perception on the viewer’s part: if the advertisement achieves its goal, the interest it will arouse will mainly be the interest of those who are targeted as likely to buy the product or to perform whatever action the advertisement seeks to promote. The more precisely these people are contacted, the more specific, direct and, consequently, successful the effect of the message will be. It may seem a paradox that one of the procedures used to catch the attention of the audience is to introduce an advertisement whose meaning is not understood at first sight. But it happens to be a useful resource. The perception of some advertisements is similar to the reading of poems or even some short storieswe tend to read them several time...

European Journal of Marketing, 2008

Purpose -The aim of this article is to explore children's understanding of television advertising intent. Design/methodology/approach -A different perspective on advertising intent is offered in this paper, as evidenced in an interpretive study of Irish children, aged between seven and nine years. A qualitative approach was employed, involving a series of focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with 52 children. Findings -The findings indicate that the participating children view advertising as serving interests including, but not limited to, the advertiser. The existence of other interested parties is suggested by the children, namely the agendas of viewers and television channels. The authors assert that these children view advertising as being larger and more complex than the advertiser's perspective, which has been the traditional focus in the extant research. Originality/value -Adopting an advertising literacy perspective, the authors seek to explore children's "reading" and understanding of advertising. Advertising literacy is an approach to understanding advertising that has not received substantial attention in the child-advertising literature. The literature to date has tended to focus on the following question -do children understand the persuasive intent of advertising? This question is suggestive of a "yes/no" answer. In contrast, the authors view the concept of understanding as being more complex and multi-faceted, and accordingly, seek to develop this concept by way of a classification that suggests four different levels of understanding that children may exhibit towards advertising

Parents are concerned about the influence of advertising on children, their T.V viewing habits and their consumption of advertised products. They want to protect their children from the undesirable effects of advertising. As a result, they exert a lot of control on the T.V viewing behaviour of their children and also consumption of advertised products.

This paper explores the levels of television advertising literacy amongst the young media consumers in Urban India. Through group discussions with children around 12 years, it was found that while young audiences love to watch and talk ads, their abilities to read between the lines or grasp the hidden intent is still limited or illogically driven. Cultivation and cross association of images from across media and onto the real world was visibly evident. The young are circumspect to the guile of ad tactics highlighting the need for advertising literacy to empower the new age consumer, especially against misleading claims and sexual imagery in advertising.

Gender Inequality is prevalent in every sphere of our life and is a burning issue globally. The media harps on the issue and there have been significant changes yet many things remain unchanged and biasness can be witnessed almost everywhere. As far as showing women in advertisements is concerned, things seem to have only worsened over time. In most of the advertisements of recent times too, a woman is either washing clothes and utensils, cooking, serving food to family members or trying to make her husband feel better who's at that time reading a newspaper or suffering from cold. A woman does all this even when she's headache or backache. These advertisements arguably encourage sexism. They reinforce the old belief that a woman is supposed to forgo her own comfort and keep on doing household chores without getting tired. Television Advertisements are a persuasive form of communication which helps in setting trends and influences the taste and perceptions of people to a considerable extent. The advertisements pertaining to the host of men’s products from face wash to jeans depict a very stereotyped picture and uphold male supremacy. The man is exercising his masculinity and claims to regain his manhood after utilizing the services of these products. It is essential that there is a strict check to these commercials as it has profound influence upon the people. This study has analysed the commercials appearing in Hindi Television Channels namely- Aaj Tak, Set Max and Star Sports 3 over a period of 4 months- August, September, October, November 2015 and how the notions of masculinity, domination and gender biasness is depicted through them. This is a qualitative study wherein the advertisements have been analysed using specific codes.

The central inquiry of this monograph is how advertising practitioners in Britain and the Netherlands viewed television advertising - and especially its content - in the years before and after its launch: from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s in Britain and from the early 1960s to the early 1970s in the Netherlands. The coming of the new medium offered advertisers new opportunities to reach their public, but it also forced them to find a new rhetoric. How did the views of practitioners regarding television advertising content develop in the first ten to fifteen years after its launch? Did they change, and if so, how can these changes be explained? By studying its early historical development, this monograph seeks to add to our understanding of the phenomenon of TV advertising in general. The discourse among advertising practitioners on the content of television advertising forms its heart. This publication is the result of the HERA research project Technology Exchange and Flow (TEF).

2011

This paper focuses on an analysis of advertising reception and explores how audiences interpret advertisements. The study attempted to answer how female and male participants interpret advertisements with symbolic expressions and advertisements with direct messages. The main purpose is to define differences in interpretation of advertisements based on gender. In this process, a two-stage approach is employed in order to examine the audience reception in the context of television advertising. In this study, we first identified the characteristic features of the advertisements, later we intended to explore the reception of advertisements. The first stage of the study evaluated the contribution of 21 participants in Antalya, Turkey determined by snowball sample with male and female participants within the age range 21-55 years. The participants articulated written reactions to two advertisements instantly displayed on computer screen. Participants were subject to viewing those advertis...