Is There Degradation of Women in Advertisements?

Is there Degradation of Women in Advertisements?

An Academic Paper

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements in

 ENG 240

 English in the Media

By

Jan Marini N. Bibliotica

AB English, 4-B

To

Dr. Claudette Baluran

October, 2017

INTRODUCTION

“We live in a universe of icono-sphere.”- Gilbert Cohen- Sẻat

We are surrounded by signs- literally, they are everywhere. Signs have been man’s way of communication, too. Signs tell us what to do and what not to do, where to go, and even what to eat and what not to eat. Whether we are aware of it or not, we cannot deny the fact that signs govern our actions.

One field known to have been using signs carefully is advertising. “Advertising seeks to influence recipients and motivates them to purchase goods or services or change their awareness of a brand” (Solik, 2014). Advertising “utilizes” these signs “for commercial purposes” (Solik, 2014).

Though different forms of advertisements have been exposed to us every day, many people regard them as nothing to less important. “For most people advertising is something to encourage or persuade them to buy a special product,” (Vahid 2012: 37) but advertisements also “amuse, inform, misinform, worry, warn, … though it may be argued that these functions are all in the service of the main function” (Cook 1992: 5) : to sell the product.

These signs we encounter everyday play a vital role in our society. They somehow shape the mentality of the people seeing them. These signs send significant messages to the public, and with just the slightest mistake in choosing the appropriate sign could inflict a wrong notion to the audience. Controversy now arises.

Everything matters in an advertisement. The signs, the images and texts, are arranged and analyzed thoroughly by advertisers, using different language strategies embedded in the advertisements. With the advertisement you see on TV that lasted for less than 30 seconds and the still images people see on social media sites with just a single scroll down, the advertisers of that certain product have spent a lot of studying and research that required time and effort to  be able to come up with a result.

Belch and Belch defined advertising as “any paid form of nonpersonal communication about organization, product, service, or idea by an identified sponsor” (2003: 16). The nonpersonal nature of advertising means that when advertisements send messages to different recipients, there is no opportunity for immediate feedback from the receiver (except in direct- response advertising). Advertisers create advertisements to be able to communicate to the consumers. Though it is a one way communication, the messages sent by the advertisements have effects on how the way will people think. Lapsanka writes that in advertising, there is “an attractive power, which is able to manipulate the consumer; an invisible voice of advertisement advocates, encourages, asks, announces and deeply embeds into peoples’ minds” (2006: 11).

My interest in the English language and the language of advertising has led me to conduct this study. I have found the language of advertising fascinating. “Advertising’s mirroring of society and vice versa, its transmitting of meaning and message, and its social significance have lead people to consider it as a discourse type” ( Hossein 2012: 37).

Advertising comes in many forms. We were tasked to look for recent posters that has a significant impact today. In looking for my data, I emphasized the role of social media in advertising, where the data of this study were taken. “The role of media is very obvious in constituting people's realization of world, constructing realities, highlighting cultural values and norms and implicating power” (Iqbal et al, 2014: 1). What is presented in advertisements is usually what people who see it come to believe. The advertisements portray socio-cultural ideologies that shape the consumers’ mind set to buy their product.

In this study, I am interested in knowing and unveiling the ideologies behind the images in Ginebra San Miguel’s posters showcasing its calendar girls of the years 2015-2017. Are women, presented in these posters, degraded? The unveiled ideologies have played a big role as strategies made by advertisers for the selling of their products.

The researcher has chosen Ginebra San Miguel for it has been one of the biggest and influential company producing drinks in the Philippines. Advertising gives influence to many men in making decisions of purchasing the product or not purchasing the product. The (5) chosen Ginebra posters portray Filipino women having their bodies flaunted. The chosen advertisements for this study depict a Filipino belief that women are instruments for men to attain sexual pleasure.

The researcher has come to encounter advertisements, same as the subject of this study, every day and have come to see the bigger picture out of what is presented in the surface. The researcher has come to realize that everything included in these advertisements stand for something else, aside from their literal meanings. These meanings were identified by looking into the images that the advertisers have used in these advertisements, through identifying different signs seen in them.

These signs have corresponding signifieds. The researcher has identified these signs and signifieds using Ferdinand de Saussure’s Dyadic Model of Signifiers and Signifieds. These meanings in the signs seen in advertisements usually involve ideologies about certain subjects, depending on the product promoted. These ideologies are then relayed to the public, without the public realizing that there are underlying messages in these product advertisements, aiming to influence their way of viewing the society and eventually persuade them to buy the product.

This raises the questions as to “how”- how are the goals of advertisers in selling their products mentioned earlier indirectly fulfilled, how still picture advertisements on appeal to the cognitive being of persons, and how they are able to manipulate people to believe what’s put in them through the use of language−images in the advertisements.

There was a study by Maryam Najafian and Azzizollah Dabaghi titled  “Hidden Language of Advertising: A Semiotic Approach”. This study analyzed two printed Omega watch advertisements taken from Time Magazine issued in 2002 to investigate the hidden ideologies embedded in these advertisements. This study takes semiotic analysis as a practical approach toward the study of advertising. As Williamson (1978) points out," ads ask us to participate in ideological ways of seeing ourselves and the world". (Eagleton 1991: 9) defines ideology as a matter of 'discourse' rather than 'language'. Semiotic analysis, an attempt that has been made in this article to critically examine the theory, is proposed by Kress and Leeuwen (1996) for analyzing visual communication. According to Bignell (2002: 32) the first step in analyzing an advertisement is to note the various signs in the advertisement itself. It is now concluded that every sign in the advertisement carries meaning. This is where Saussure’s theory of signifier and signified is applied.