Month: September 2010

Advertising is a very effective way to promote your product and allow customers to be familiar with it, however when does advertising get to the point where it could actually harm us? This new way of advertising in Edmonton allows taxi drivers to have on the back of their taxi a giant billboard like ad. This is a great way to capture the customers attention, but is it a good idea to put them at risk while driving? If I saw an advertisement for a company while I was driving in front of me, and if something happened and I got in a car accident my attitude and emotion would change and have a negative outlook on the product. Although billboards cost around 900$ a month and this new form of car billboards is only 250$ the means of advertising is a lot cheaper but provides a hidden cost passed onto the customer of danger. We just started to become more cautious and safe about driving as we now have the no texting and phone calls in the car rule and now they are willing to accept this, which really doesn’t make sense as they both distract from the drivers attention yet one is allowed while the other is not. I believe that advertising has become very dominant and a custom to our lives and this trend will continue. If there is an empty space or open spot and companies are willing to pay for it advertising will be there.

Axe

If most of you were wondering why I smelt so delicious and good today it’s this new line of product I was wearing, some of you might have heard of it, it’s called Axe. Just like most of you I was sucked in to the temptation of possessing the so called “axe effect” that one attains after using an axe product. It was not until I took a deeper look at the commercials and several advertisements by this line of product, that I realized that the marketing tools used portray a very unethical and immoral concept. For some of you who are unfamiliar with this, Axe is a line of “personal care product” that comes in forms of a deodorant, shower gel and even hair care products, the beauty of this product is not only is it produced in the different styles but also different scents. The commercial consists of a guy who is spraying Axe over his clothes while women are going crazy over the vigorous scent and dropping dead. This scent is supposed to capture the senses of beautiful woman seducing them to the man who is wearing the product, there for the axe affect. This clever approach to target the young men of our generation takes a toll on a very strong issue faced in today’s society, sexism.  It portrays that a women will practically do anything for a man only because he is wearing an axe product and this itself is very discriminatory towards women. It also objectifies women in over-sexualizing them in commercials. How can a spray lead to women randomly jumping on you? In the other commercials the women go through great lengths to get to him such as running through cars, jumping through obstacles all for the scent of axe. This is hard to believe, since I sprayed axe on me this morning I would expect that all the girls in the marketing room would have been all over me, which unfortunately did not happen, well except for a few ladies who were holding it in. Therefore, Axe advertisements conveys a false image, false advertising as this leads to an unethical commercial as it doesn’t truly show the real axe affect, just a falsified version that helps them sell their product to naive customers who buy into the commercial. Also this is degrading to women because it makes them seem stupid, desperate and easily influenced. So gentlemen unfortunately the ad’s have being fooling you, you’re going to need more than axe to get you that girl, sorry.