Are Advertisements feeding into stereotypes?

How much do we really give into the media? How many hours of the day do we spend indulging in television, magazines, and online? The average American is never without a smart device whether it's an iPad or Samsun phone. We’re always fighting to get the latest gadget that we fail to see how controlled we are by these companies.

Social media has taken its toll on today's youth to the point where instead of spending time with our friends, we go home so that we can FaceTime or snapchat them. We post our every movement on Twitter and snap pictures of everything we eat before we even take a bite. I'm not going to act holier than thou because I have succumbed to the means of the media myself. I love Instagram or reading the latest gossips in a magazine but I stopped looking to these outlets as a source of truthful information.

The influence that the media has on the youth is insane. I see toddlers with iPads or kindles more than I seen them with a book! People try to distract their kids with movies and toys instead of actually spending time with them. They let television teach them! It's gotten to the point where people start believing everything that’s fed to them through these advertisements. What kills me the most is that most of what they've read has been tampered with to please the mass. Nothing's real anymore.

We’ve all know that one friend that gets their news from Facebook statuses instead of looking up the facts for themselves. Or the person that believes every website they view is a credible source. What they fail to realize is that each media is programmed to cater to their target market needs and showcase overpriced items that they might want.

Even the news, which prides itself in providing accurate information isn't always true. They feed you the information that they want you to know and don't care if they have to bend the truth to make their story more exciting. What should we believe when the things we watch daily, lies to us. How are we going to uncover the truth? Has promotion and marketing tactics gotten the better of actually providing quality?

If you really think about it Marketing is basically a group of people sitting in a room, creating ways to make things more appealing to you, so that you spend more money. They analyze everything from the color of the shirt the actress is wearing, the location she's at, to the words that she says. Where you live, your age, gender and ethnicities are all factors that marketers take into consideration when they create their advertisements. It started to make me question why certain commercials had people of color, while others did not.

At first I thought that maybe McDonald’s just happened to choose a natural black girl in their commercials because they loved her audition. But something told me that there had to be more to the story. What made it even weirder to me is that they started having a series of different commercials clearly targeting black people. However, the commercial that Burger King issued featuring Mary j bilge singing about crispy chicken wraps took the cake.

I understand that not all commercials are the same, but after analyzing a few I started questioning the messages behind it. I started to wonder about the settings and the limited brands that featured people of color. Commercials would show black or Hispanic women doing laundry, shopping at Target, eating fast food but you'd rarely find a commercial with a family of color in an extravagant home. There was, however, a surplus of commercials featuring Caucasian families in clean well designed homes, or driving expensive cars.

And before everyone says that I'm quick to play the race card, which is not at all what I am trying to do. I am just referring to how my interest in the stereotypes that commercials help establish came about. Even if I flipped around my words to focus on gender instead of race you can still see my point. Have you ever noticed how food commercials tend to have only men eating the hefty meaty sandwiches? And women are usually in a commercial that features taking care of children for example the one for Ensure. Where are the commercials for sports or television companies that feature women sitting around eating chips and drinking while cheering the game on?

Boys are often portrayed as rough or aggressive, while girls are portrayed as more dainty or feminine. The Socjournal website points out a print advertisement where a boy is standing inside a gray pop-up castle, taking on a posture of power and dominance. A girl is shown cowering in fear outside the castle as if afraid to enter. A pink version of the castle is shown in a corner of the ad, indicating that the gray one is for boys while the pink one is for girls. (Joseph – Demand Media)

The fact of the matter is that advertising feeds into stereotype. The way that white people are portrayed in advertisements varies from the way minorities are portrayed. My big question is to whether or not this is intentional. A post in the Huffington Post only further heightened my interest:

Black people were more commonly associated with low incomes and low social status, while East and Southeast Asians were depicted as unemotional, robotic "Asian technocrats. “Whites, by comparison, were associated with four major themes in food advertising: Nostalgia (white people as defenders of traditional food and agriculture), natural foods, high-brow food products, and nuclear family, associating white people with “healthy families”.

So ask yourself before you pick up the remote, are white people the only ones with healthy families?