Young people and advertising...

Comment on the following sentence:



“Advertising has always sold anxiety, and it certainly sells anxiety to the young. It’s always telling them they’re losers unless they’re cool.”

Mark O. Miller

Advertisement is a picture, set of words or a short film used to broadcast about a product or service and it is intended to persuade people into buying them. It is a way to publicize and sell things to people. And when it comes to Mark O. Miller’s quotation, I have to agree with him because people, especially kids, are very influenced by advertising.

For example, there are a lot of commercials running on television right before Christmas time, which gets the attention they want from kids and parents, whether it is about buying toys for their kids as a Christmas gift or buying food promotions for the special holidays.

Teenagers and young adults are also strongly influenced by advertising as they dream about having “that shiny and bulky hair” guaranteed from a certain shampoo, or having “the most delicious fragrance” that you desire, or just simply get the latest videogame product that just arrived at stores.

The thing is that along with the peer pressure that teenagers live up to and relating to the sentence above, young and older people feel the anxiety and the pressure of consuming in order to be cool and hip like the stunning celebrities in the ad campaigns and if they don’t do so, it leads them into feeling that they will be all a bunch of losers. The problem about advertising is that it displays the illusion of perfection about the products or services instead of keeping the publicity realistic and, unfortunately, people get blind with the advertisement’s charm, not resisting the purchase of the product.

Rebecca Fernandes, 11º12

Advertising is a huge mechanism of the consumer society that makes people buy things they don't really need. Its main target is the youth, specially teenagers, since their concern about other people's opinion is extremely high.

Advertising techniques are pretty simple. They consist of making people think they need a specific product to feel better, however it's not a realistic feeling since their appearance may not reflect their actual emotions.By exploiting the lack of confidence that teenagers usually experience, advertising makes them feel like losers until having their product. In other words, advertising manipulates them by taking advantage of people's insecurity. Moreover, what they normally sell is not really necessary, so their activity consists of trying to make people purchase irrelevant products.

But if advertisements don't sell important goods, what do they really sell? Just anxieties.

José Daniel Gouveia Abreu, 11º15