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Title: Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel by Jean Kilbourne ISBN: 0-684-86600-5 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 02 November, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.54 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Save your soul: read this book!
Comment: I encourage you to buy and read this book. It's a source of reason, enlightenment, passion, love. It's meaningful, revealing. I read it in a few days, subtracting time to my other activities. Each time it has been difficult to stop reading and close the book. If you are going to read only one book this year, choose this one.
This book is focused on a few, fundamental, issues (excerpts are between "quotation marks").
1 - It explains that advertising works. Most people think they are not influenced by advertising. But advertising works best precisely because people don't think it works on them.
"If you are like most people, you think that advertising has no influence on you. This is what advertisers want you to believe. But, if that were true, why would companies spend over $200 billion a year on advertising? Why would they be willing to spend over $250,000 to produce an average television commercial and another $250,000 to air it? If they want to broadcast their commercial during the Super Bowl, they will gladly spend over a million dollars to produce it and over one and a half million to air it. After all, they might have the kind of success that Victoria's Secret did during the 1999 Super Bowl. When they paraded bra-and-panty-clad models across TV screens for a mere thirty seconds, one million people turned away from the game to log on to the Website promoted in the ad. No influence?"
2 - It makes you understand that the message mass media and advertising repeat us moment by moment ("The average American is exposed to at least three thousand ads every day") is that happiness comes from products. Alas, products are only things: no matter how much we love them, they won't love us back. By the way, didn't you ask why - in the car commercials - there are all those cars entering tunnels?
We are sold models impossible to follow - and just wrong. But effortlessly advertised: you are made up to think they're true. Thus, a sense of strain comes. I think that many problems our society faces (high divorce rate, violence, alcoholism, drugs) come from this split. I'm a pharmacist: it's amazing how many tranquilizers I sell every day.
3 - It lets you to realize that advertising often turns people into objects.
"It is becoming clearer that this objectification has consequences, one of which is the effect that it has on sexuality and desire. Sex in advertising and the media is often criticized from a puritanical perspective - there's too much of it, it's too blatant, it will encourage kids to be promiscuous, and so forth. But sex in advertising has far more to do with trivializing sex than promoting it, with narcissism than with promiscuity, with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that it is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical. (...) We never see eroticized images of older people, imperfect people, people with disabilities. The gods have sex, the rest of us watch - and judge our own imperfect sex lives against the fantasy of constant desire and sexual fulfilment portrayed in the media. (...) We can never measure up. Inevitably, this affects our self-images and radically distorts reality. "You have the right to remain sexy", says an ad featuring a beautiful young woman, her legs spread wide, but the subtext is "only if you look like this". And she is an object - available, exposed, essentially passive. She has the right to remain sexy, but not the right to be actively sexual."
4 - Did you know that we are a product? Mass media sell us to advertisers.
"Make no mistake: The primary purpose of the mass media is to sell audiences to advertisers. We are the product. Although people are much more sophisticated about advertising now than even a few years ago, most are still shocked to learn this."
"Through focus groups and depth interviews, psychological researchers can zero in on very specific target audiences - and their leaders. "Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends absolutely free", proclaims an ad for MTV directed to advertisers. MTV presents itself publicly as a place for rebels and nonconformists. Behind the scenes, however, it tells potential advertisers that its viewers are lemmings who will buy whatever they are told to buy."
5 - I think this book is also valuable because it re-states the ethical principle that there are no shortcuts to riches, no shortcuts to happiness. There are no free lunches.
"Today the promise is that we can change our lives instantly, effortlessly - by winning the lottery, selecting the right mutual fund, having a fashion makeover, losing weight, having tighter abs, buying the right car or soft drink. It is this belief that such transformation is possible that drives us to keep dieting, to buy more stuff, to read fashion magazines that give us the same information over and over again."
Rating: 5
Summary: The truth about ads
Comment: I didn't think ads affected me in any way, until I've read this book. It talks about the strategies ads do to sell their products. This includes making women appear as sexual objects and how ads teach men to treat women as objects. And How this affects our society. Don't think it does? Oh it certainly does!
This is the truth about ads. The harsh truth is ads don't care about you or your well being or how we treat women or men, they just want to catch our attention so that the product will sell. Its disgusting but its the truth, how we're so used to the messages that ads give us that we think that what their telling us is the truth.
When in fact its all lies! The reviewer below is right, you'll never look at ads the same way after reading this. The writer doesn't try to be funny, but is angry and has a right to be. Its disgusting the way ads depict women as objects, I feel so sad for women everywhere that are exploited by the ads.
This book will open your eyes and tell you the truth about ads.
Rating: 3
Summary: I read it
Comment: The book I have just finished reading is Can't Buy my Love by Jean Kilbourne. I think it's a well-written book. She really breaks down the different styles of advertising and the way each person is affected.
Ms. Kilbourne also talks about how some ads influence men and women. Here is an example from the book its woman talking she dressed very sexy and says, "Until I find a real man, I'll settle for a real smoke". This is just one of the many different ways of advertising.
If you are looking for an informative book that will teach you about advertising. I believe this is the book you have been looking for. So tell a friend about it!!
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Title: Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (Ideas in Progress) by Judith Williamson ISBN: 0714526150 Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers, Ltd. Pub. Date: March, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising by Jean Kilbourne ISBN: 0684865998 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: November, 1999 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Twenty Ads That Shook the World : The Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All by James Twitchell ISBN: 0609807234 Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 26 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising (Postmodern Social Futures) by Anthony Joseph Cortese ISBN: 0847691756 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing (via NBN) Pub. Date: 01 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society by Michael Schudson ISBN: 0465000800 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: August, 1986 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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