Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Advertising: The enemy of all innocent children, teenagers, college students and parents was the message provided at the 10th annual Child Welfare Conference, “Who Is Raising Our Children?” which was held on Tuesday at the Bangor Civic Center.
Keynote speaker and nationally known media analyst Jean Kilbourne presented “Deadly Persuasion: The Impact of Advertising on Children’s Health” at the conference. The University of Maine’s School of Social Work sponsored the conference.
Named by the New York Times as one of the three most popular speakers on college campuses, Kilbourne received the Lecturer of the Year away from the National Association for Campus Activities. She has also served as an adviser to the surgeon general and has testified for the U.S. Congress. Her most famous works include the videos “Slim Hopes,” “Killing Us Softly” and “Pack of Lies.”
Thinking about the media was the goal Tuesday, as Kilbourne referred to slides of advertisements from the tobacco, alcohol, diet, beauty and pharmaceutical industries. She said she focuses on advertising because it is the “engine that drives all of it,” and because it affects her life personally.
“I’m raising my daughter in a culture that’s against everything I want for her,” Kilbourne said.
Despite the fact that many people see the alleged wrong-doings in the ads, most still feel exempt from advertising’s influence on them because they think they tune them out, Kilborne said. This couldn’t be accurate when the average person sees 3,000 ads each day and spends approximately two years of his or her life watching television commercials, according to Kilbourne.
“I don’t think you can grow up in America and not be influenced by advertising,” Kilbourne said. “We are constantly sacrificing our health and well-being for corporate profit.”
Americans – primarily children, teenagers and college-aged students – are influenced most dangerously by the tobacco, alcohol, diet and beauty industries, Kilbourne said. These industries spend billions of dollars each year on ad campaigns targeting the younger generations.
“The smoking industry is in the business of getting children addicted to smoking. That’s their business,” Kilbourne said.
The tobacco industry spends about $9 billion each year on ads and promotions in the U.S. endorsing the deadliest drug, Kilbourne said. Tobacco kills more people each year than heroine, cocaine, fires, homicides, suicides and AIDS combined, she said. In the 20th century, tobacco killed more people than war, according to Kilbourne.
“They are constantly having to create new customers. Why? Because when you sell a product that kills people, you’ve got a real problem – your best customers die every day so you’ve got to replace them,” Kilbourne said.
Ninety percent of teenage smokers in the U.S. smoke one of the three most heavily advertised cigarette brands – Camel, Marlboro and Newport. This is no coincidence, according to Kilbourne.
Ironies are often prevalent in ads, Kilbourne said. For example, most tobacco ads portray happy-go-lucky men and women when the reality is that heavy smokers are four times more likely to be depressed. People do not become depressed from smoking; depressed people begin smoking and are still not happy afterward, Kilbourne said.
The tobacco ads also play on women’s general fear of gaining weight, as it is rare that cigarette ads do not include the words “slim” or “light.”
“Slim Hopes,” the title of one of Kilbourne’s videos, describes images women are bombarded with at early ages by the diet and beauty industry.
“Failure is inevitable because it’s absolutely flawless,” Kilbourne said.
Model Cindy Crawford once said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford,” Kilbourne said, pointing out that images in the media are airbrushed, computer-generated and unrealistic.
An example of this “inhumanly perfect” portrayal of women is that actress Julia Roberts’ body was not used on the cover for the movie “Pretty Woman.” A body double was used for the cover picture as well as any nude scenes in the movie because her body was not “right,” Kilborne said.
“Of course this affects women’s self-esteem. How could it not?” Kilbourne said. “All women are judged by this standard all of the time. We can’t opt out. It’s really inescapable.”
Kilbourne stressed that unrealistic images are also put forth in the media about men, but those are less personal and less related to the body than the stereotypes about women.
Cutting women’s bodies down to size is allegedly the aim of the diet and beauty industry. Kilbourne said it is no wonder that one in five American girls has an eating disorder.
“In order to be acceptable we need to be painfully, unnaturally thin,” Kilbourne said. “The only body we see [in the media] is one that 5 percent of American women have, and it’s the only one we see as desirable.”
The ad industries are filled with deceptions, according to Kilbourne.
The cover story of a Time magazine about heart disease and its danger to women did not once mention that tobacco is a leading risk factor, Kilbourne said. This was because the back cover featured a full-page ad from a tobacco industry, she said. Media depend on their advertising for revenue, hence the lack of printed material regarding information that may lose an advertiser, according to Kilbourne.
“You can’t get accurate information from media that depend on huge advertising industries,” Kilbourne said.
The alcohol industry spends $3 billion each year on ads and promotions, endorsing the most widely used illegal drug for minors in America – beer.
Juniors and seniors in high school spend about $500 million each year on beer, and college students spend more on alcohol than on books each year. This signifies no coincidence why advertisers target the younger generations, Kilbourne said.
“The fantasy that they sell is almost always the exact opposite of the truth of alcohol,” Kilbourne said. “They want us to believe that freedom comes in a bottle, and all too often what we get is slavery.”
If every person in America drank the normal limit – one drink each day for women and two drinks each day for men – the alcohol industry’s profits would be cut by 80 percent, according to Kilbourne.
“They need alcoholics. They need our [children] to be alcoholics. They need to create a climate of denial to say high-risk drinking is OK,” Kilbourne said.
Another industry that Kilbourne said plays off Americans’ insecurities is the pharmaceutical industry, which spends about $14 billion each year in ads and promotions, endorsing the idea that pain and boredom are not to be tolerated.
Raising taxes on alcohol and tobacco might restrict the number of young people who succumb to the advertising ploys, Kilbourne said. Implementing more media literacy campaigns in classrooms across the country might help students understand the misperceptions in the media, she said.
The old fashioned way is one of the best people can follow – write letters to senators and representatives, as well as to the advertising companies. Kilbourne’s Web site, www.jeankilbourne.com, also offers an “Action Page” where people can sign petitions against various advertising.
“Who’s more likely to tell the truth – an industry that wants my money or someone who cares about me and my health?” Kilbourne said. “I guess we couldn’t expect truth in advertising, could we?”
