So Much Media
Entertainment & Advertisement Media
The mass media of entertainment serves the purpose of informing and captivating its audience through such subjects as current news, world news, celebrity gossip, political happenings, and more. The technologies used for entertainment media include devices like movies, television, newspapers, and magazines (Vault).
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Advertisement media is extremely similar to entertainment media. It also uses the modes of television, newspapers, and magazines to spread its message. However, the main purpose of advertisement media is to convince consumers to buy whatever product is being sold.
Now that we've loosely defined both advertisement and entertainment media, we are able to examine just how common these are in our daily lives.
Pervasiveness of Entertainment & Advertisement Media
Entertainment and advertisement media are continuous aspects of our daily lives. If you want to know just how constant they have become, check out this site. On the site, Bryce Sanders examines the claim that the average American is exposed to 4,000 ads daily, which was an assertion made by Red Crow Marketing, Inc in 2015.
With the incredible amount of media we are continuously absorbing and consuming, it's important to examine different messages in and from media, as well as the consequences these messages can have on us.
Consequences
It's clear that advertisement and entertainment media are a large aspect of our everyday lives. All of these advertisements have an impact on how we view and think about certain things, especially when it comes to beauty.
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In Healthy Place's online article "Eating Disorders: Body Image and Advertising," it was found that the average woman sees between 400 and 600 advertisements per day. That means that by the time a young girl turns 17, she has seen over 250,000 media messages (Healthy Place 2000).
While these mass media messages are not all about beauty - only 9% directly state something about beauty - they do affect perceptions about beauty and ultimately, views on body images (Healthy Place 2000). This alteration of what beauty is can be seen in the fact that 69% of girls said that models in magazines have shaped their ideas on what a "perfect body shape should look like" (Suggett 2017).
Magazines are not the only media shaping our ideas of 'natural beauty' or what the ideal body looks like. Commercials on television, ads on the sides of webpages, billboards driving down the highway and other types of advertisement media are continuously badgering us with what beauty looks like. And it works.
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According to a 2010 Beauty Study, more than two-thirds of participants consider beauty products a necessity, saying they would still buy such products even if they were watching their budgets (Souza 2010).
Makeup > Money
Advertisement and entertainment media don't affect just consumers wallets. As stated above, the models used in these media affect our perception of the ideal body type. As Wysocki explained in The Sticky Embrace of Beauty, women are at risk when they are subjected to being seen as aesthetic objects for viewing rather than actual people (168). Wysocki brought up the harmful ideas portrayed in advertisement media can lead to forms of "self-discipline," which can be seen through disorders like anorexia and bulimia (168).
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The disorders that Wysocki notes in her text are on the rise. Anne Becker's research demonstrated how the introduction of Western entertainment media to Fiji severely affected how young girls viewed themselves and their bodies. Before the introduction of Western media to the island, there was only one known case of anorexia nervosa in the entire country and the "culture valued large, robust and strong-boned women... [and] encouraged women to eat a lot" (Becker).
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However, after the launch of Western advertisement media, the views of body image in Fiji changed drastically. Disorders like anorexia and bulimia increased drastically. This example is just one demonstration as to how entertainment and advertisement media have and continue to affect our body images, leading to self-destructive and harmful behavior.
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Now that we've examined how prevalent media is in our lives and noted some of the consequences of this prevalence, let's take a look at two popular beauty campaigns and their messages in advertisement media.