I’m afraid I’ve become nearly totally blind to advertising.
And that may be a bad thing.
It’s not bad in the sense that it so rarely influences me to buy anything anymore. I’m sure I’ve saved a lot of money. But when you become blind to something, you no longer see how others are looking at it.
Advertising is everywhere now. It’s on the floor at the supermarket. It’s on the bus that takes your kids to school. It’s in elevators and public restrooms. And just because some of us are feeling immune to its siren song doesn’t mean everyone is.
Especially tweens and teens.
But because so many of us so utterly tune it out, the kinds of things that are getting advertised (and how they’re being presented) is changing around us without us really noticing. Or protesting.
Here’s a recent example reported by adage.com: For a decade, the alcohol industry has had a set of self-imposed advertising restrictions that, theoretically, keep its advertisements away from most underage readers and viewers. But according to a new study by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the industry is running afoul of its own guidelines. In 2003, beer and liquor companies said they’d only run ads on programming that attracts predominantly adults. Under the current guidelines, that means that if a show’s audience exceeds 28.4% of under-21 viewers, you won’t see any alcohol ads there. And yet the study identified alcohol ads on shows such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Tosh.0 and Deadliest Warrior—all of which, according to Nielsen’s ratings, have an underage viewership that eclipses 28.4%.
So-called e-cigarettes are getting lots of page and screen time, too, right now. And then there’s this report we passed along in yesterday’s Culture Clips:
A new ad encouraging young people to sign up for the Affordable Care Act is getting attention for promoting not only birth control, but casual sex as well. The Colorado-specific ads, created by the advocacy groups Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and Progress Now, feature an attractive man and woman named, the ad says, Susie and Nate. She’s holding birth control pills and giving a thumbs-up sign. The “Got Insurance?” ad (a play on the famous “Got Milk?” campaign) is titled “Let’s Get Physical.” Beneath that, ad copy says, “OMG, he’s hot! Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers.* I got insurance. Now you can too. Thanks Obamacare!” Beneath the ad in smaller print is the asterisked warning, “*The pill does not protect you from STDs, condoms and common sense do that.”
Looks like it might be time to open my eyes a little wider.
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