Advertising and Our Teens

Advertising and Our Teens

Every time you sit down to watch television you have to view two to three minutes of commercials with the majority of those being advertisements by companies wanting to sell their product. Driving down the road you can look at all of the many billboards that are advertising even more products. Unlike any previous year, what kids and teens do today are majorly influenced by what is seen on the advertisements.

Recently, while looking online for images, I came across an image for Camel cigarettes. Above it was the title, "New Cigarette Targets Girls."

When looking at this I immediately noticed the nice, sleek, black box with the pink trim, of course, pink is the favorite color of 90 percent of women. "Camel has traditionally been thought of as a predominantly "male" cigarette. With this new marketing strategy, Reynolds claims to be attempting to capture some of the female smokers who usually purchase cigarettes like Virginia Slims and similar brands." (Carney, Susan. (2007).) Advertising is not the only reason that the youth would want to pick up the smoking habit. Peer pressure is a big cause of it as well but

Ads and Teens 3

with a female aimed box of cigarettes on the release, more and more are going to want to start this habit because, "the box is cute." If you were to walk into an average American high school today, you would see so many of the things that are advertised. You would see the American eagle clothes, smell the many types of perfumes and cologne, see the makeup and jewelry and hear the music.

So many teen girls have eating disorders, if you were to ask one why they think they need to starve themselves or constantly throw up, they would all say, "Were fat." I came across another image for an ad. It is for Calvin Klein jeans. It is said that, "the body type portrayed in advertising as the ideal is possessed naturally by only 5% of American females, 47% of girls in 5th-12th grade reported wanting to lose weight because of magazine pictures, 69% of girls in 5th-12th grade reported that magazine pictures influenced their idea of a perfect body shape." (Collins, M.E. (1991).)

When I saw this, I thought to myself, "What is it that they are trying to sell? Sex or clothing?" When teens see these types of sexual ads it makes them want to be thin like the girls in the photo and the guys see it and it makes them think that they need to buy the jeans in order to get the same type of action that the models in the photo are getting. So