Advertising Stereotype Essay Example

Stereotypes in Advertising Media stereotypes are inevitable, especially in the advertising, entertainment and news industries, which need as wide an audience as possible to quickly understand information. Stereotypes act like codes that give audiences a quick, common understanding of a person or group of people—usually relating to their class, ethnicity or race, gender, sexual orientation, social role or occupation. But stereotypes can be problematic. They can: reduce a wide range of differences in people to simplistic categorizations transform assumptions about particular groups of people into "realities" be used to justify the position of those in power perpetuate social prejudice and inequality More often than not, the groups being stereotyped have little to say about how they are represented. Anyone who examines North American entertainment and news media will notice that members of ethnic and visible minorities are inadequately represented in entertainment and news media, and that portrayals of minorities are often stereotypical and demeaning. This tendency is particularly problematic in a multicultural country, where some of the population is immigrants and some is visible minorities, along with larger urban centers. Visual representation of reality is influential in shaping people's views of the world, where everyday realities are articulated mostly by what we see in the media. The role of advertising in this interpretation of reality is crucial. The target audience's self-identification with the images being a basic prerequisite for an advertisement’s effectiveness, makes advertising one of the most important factors in the building of behavior models and values systems. The way a certain notion is managed at a visual level determines how people will perceive this notion and whether they will identify with it or not. Meaning is encoded in the structure of the images, which thus become potent cultural