Commercial Advertisement

Still discussing social phenomena around us, my silly thinking goes to commercial advertisements existing in this country. You might find them in television, streets, radio, or magazines. My friend says we cannot live without seeing any commercial advertisement wherever we are. Let’s say, in a morning journey to the office, we can find more than ten commercial advertisements displayed in every corner of the street. Then, when watching television for only an hour, have you ever counted how many advertisements appear?

It seems to me that all marketers are competing each other, attempting to perform the best product they’ve ever had. When certain marketer declares that their product is able to change the skin into white, another proclaims their product does not only whiten the skin but also makes the skin healthy, though we don’t know the limitation of being ‘healthy’ itself, though genetically Indonesian people mostly have brown skin. Let’s see another silly advertisement. Many shampoo producers claim that only their products that are able to make super-duper hair.

As usual, marketers display good-looking people in their advertisements. Let’s see, are there any ugly, fat, or short women who become the role model for skin product advertisement? Most of the advertisement stars are tall, white-skinned, and (better) Indonesian-German, Indonesian-English, or Indonesian-France. Those are the people that are performed as the figure-you-have-to-wanna-be.

Consequently, the world (even life) is seen from marketer’s point of view. You are happy because you are white-skinned. A woman can find her true love because her ex-boyfriend is impressed by her new beautiful appearance. An ordinary university student becomes popular among the guys in the campus because her face is (suddenly) white, shinny, and (perhaps the term) beautiful. The world seems to get close to the end of the day because you have acne right on your nose. All beautiful things belong to those who are physically perfect.

I just wanna say that be careful, perhaps so many views from commercial advertisements are influencing the way of our thinking.