Introduction
According to research, the typical person sees between 280 and 310 adverts daily (Zhangboy, 2019). The mass media, mainly advertising in magazines and newspapers, significantly influences people’s everyday lives in today’s society. The most significant destructive impact of the press is that it imposes beauty ideals on society since most beauty advertising is harmful to young girls and women. In reality, this form of advertising can change a person’s mental and physical health, reducing self-esteem and leading to despair. The media can skew a person’s perceptions of attractiveness.
The essay also mentions how commercials make individuals feel inadequate and that whatever is being sold must be purchased. The publication includes information on how advertising causes people to link happiness with shopping and several recommendations on how to withstand the detrimental impact of marketing (Zhangboy, 2019). Advertising hurts people, lowering their self-esteem, forming unnecessary needs, and imposing beauty standards, which is revealed by analyzing viewers’ reactions using the cultivation theory.
Folk Theories
Modern consumers are bombarded with advertising daily, and many believe that new items may be discovered through advertising. Others believe that the objective of an advertising agency is to deceive people and that the firm must persuade consumers to buy something they do not truly need (Hopkins, 2021). For them, advertising is a total fraud since if there is something nice in the product, praise is lavished upon it, but if there is something terrible, the makers remain mute.
The only acceptable advertising type is a separate site or channel with things that a customer wants to buy, complete with a detailed description and actual reviews. However, advertising does not seek to deceive but rather to highlight the most significant features of a product and appropriately convey it to potential clients. This is one of the fundamentals of marketing that no entrepreneur or firm can do without.
People have limited confidence in advertising and believe it educates them about items or services. Most people believe that what matters in advertising is the catchy phrase and the celebrity featured (Hopkins, 2021). Most students are upset by commercials on television, but they see more of them on the Internet (Hopkins, 2021). Some claim that commercials do not force them to buy anything since they make their own purchasing decisions(SurveyMonkey, n.d.). However, from a scientific point of view, advertising, in one way or another, encourages a person to buy, which can be considered an imposition of necessity. This distinction can be called a clash of scientific and folk theories as the understandings diverge.
Scholarly Theories
Gerbner researched the process of generating, organizing, and disseminating the flow of communications and recognized enduring pictures in media material by comparing them to reality. As a result, the cultivation hypothesis emerged, which sees the media as a system of repeated images and perceptions that impact individuals. Such long-term exposure results in the absorption of shared beliefs as cultural norms. “Storytelling” is the most common technique of exposure.
Television and, in particular, advertising are especially effective in this regard. Man becomes enslaved to the artificial world produced by stories and lives in it more often. Gerbner regards television and advertising as key forces in molding modern culture. Television changes the traditional storytelling process into a centralized, standardized system driven by the market and backed by advertising. Priests, teachers, and parents performed this duty in interpersonal and group communication with individuals. The mass media now does it with many individuals by expanding exposure time and space. Television has a particularly significant influence as a reflection of society’s life and an instrument of control over people’s thoughts.
Applying Scholarly Theories
Advertising presents a socially created representation of reality to modern man. This is accomplished by standardizing, simplifying, and familiarizing life’s primary standards. What is intriguing is Gerbner’s comparison of power development to the importance of cherry pie in American culture (Stein et al., 2021). Force and the violence connected with it are the most straightforward and accessible means and rules in the battle on the stage of life for a national culture, but to win, one must use force (Al Ibrahim, 2023). This is the key to comprehending the gravity and significance of violence depicted on television.
Advertising can implant in individuals a wide range of attitudes regarding a product (Stein et al., 2021). However, the influence of attitudes extends beyond forming people’s ideas about an object. Viewers can establish a method of thinking that will shape our complete worldview under the impact of a set of attitudes (Al Ibrahim, 2023). Such views leave an impression on people’s perceptions of the world and how they understand it. The interplay of media information with a person’s life experience might result in what is known as cultivation.
One of the most essential constructive elements of cultivation theory is unification, or channeling people’s various perspectives on social reality, into a unified path. This unity is achieved by constructionism, in which viewers acquire “facts” about the real world by seeing the reality portrayed on television (Stein et al., 2021). The impressions that remain in the mind after seeing an advertisement are automatically saved (Al Ibrahim, 2023).
People then create their impressions of the real world based on the stored knowledge. When the manufactured and real worlds are well matched, the resonance phenomenon develops, and the cultivation effect becomes even more prominent. Gender roles, political opinions, attitudes toward science and scientists, and habits are all examples of the social reality that uniformity fosters. This can include thoughts about beauty, fashion, or the ideal figure. Advertisers specifically cultivate what can be sold, creating an urgent need for people to get it.
Critique
There are several methodological and theoretical issues concerning the unique expressions of the cultivation process. Typically, the cumulative influence of repeated pictures is the emphasis of cultivation theory. However, specific pictures may have a considerably more substantial impact on people than others. According to Greenberg’s hypothesis, for example, a popular positive television character may have a significantly higher influence than a dozen other characters seen and connected with by a much smaller number of viewers. Although cultivation theory is widely accepted, it has detractors (Swaniet al., 2020).
First, several research has demonstrated that rigorous testing of other sociodemographic and psychological characteristics tends to decrease or remove cultivation effects. Second, cultivation research has been questioned from a philosophical and methodological standpoint, with special emphasis on inaccuracies in estimating responses and issues with measuring devices (Swani et al., 2020). Some of the assumptions behind the cultivation hypothesis have also been questioned. For example, without proof, it appears to presume that television broadcasts are essentially homogenous and that viewers interpret what they see as some form of reality.
In contrast, in the United States, a strong belief has evolved that individuals proceed sequentially through awareness, interest, desire, and action (AIDA). According to this hypothesis, advertising can enhance people’s knowledge and modify their attitudes about something. Hence, it can persuade them to buy a product if they have never before (Zhang & Hwang, 2023). This leads to the advertising conversion hypothesis: someone who was not a buyer becomes one. Advertising has a considerable influence on purchasers, according to this idea.
Conclusion
Advertising has a detrimental influence on individuals, decreasing their self-esteem and creating unneeded desires, as indicated by an examination of viewers’ reactions using the idea of psychological manipulation. In other words, it is information transmitted to a large number of people through various methods to capture potential consumers’ attention without the need for personal interaction.
Advertising has advanced how we raise awareness about any product or service. It has enabled consumers to obtain information on a service or product before purchasing. Conversely, advertising has a powerful ideological impact on people’s thinking and ethical, ideological, and political value systems. As a result, the mechanism of action of advertising is addressed not only within the framework of the sociopsychology of the advertising industry but also within the customer’s psychology.
The application of the cultivation theory to the study of the effects of advertising on a person will assist in understanding how to mitigate the adverse effects. Advertising information has become the most essential resource influencing harmonious human development and constructing an individual’s values and worldview. In this regard, it is essential to emphasize the unique function of advertising in personality socialization. The importance of advertising in shaping human worldviews should not be ignored. It is vital to consider the value-orienting function of advertising as one of the fundamental functions that reveals itself in the effect on human perception of the surrounding reality.
References
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Hopkins, I. (2021). What do consumers actually think of ads? GWI. Web.
Stein, J. P., Krause, E., & Ohler, P. (2021). Every (Insta) Gram counts? Applying cultivation theory to explore the effects of Instagram on young users’ body image. Psychology of Popular Media, 10(1), 87. Web.
SurveyMonkey. (n.d.). 74% of people are tired of social media ads-but they’re effective. Web.
Swani, K., Brown, B. P., & Mudambi, S. M. (2020). The untapped potential of B2B advertising: A literature review and future agenda. Industrial Marketing Management, 89, 581-593. Web.
Zhang, Y., & Hwang, J. (2023). Dawn or dusk? Will virtual tourism begin to boom? An integrated model of AIDA, TAM, and UTAUT. Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research. Web.
Zhangboy, A. (2019). How advertising affects society and our life. Boyces Blog. Web.