The Tribulations of Global Image Promotion

“Advertising that works in one country could very well wind up inhibiting sales in another.”
-Rodman p. 444

When a product sells well in one country because of a great advertising campaign, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will sell equally well in another country with the same campaign. This demonstrates how advertising executives need to be creative with their products and take into account many factors regarding their audience so as to streamline their message in the best way possible. Advertisers need to know their consumer demographic and understand how to manipulate that consumer demographic’s wants to sell more product.
I recently ran into an example of how advertising campaigns work differently in different countries based on conflicting projections of the “ideal beauty.” During my travels in South and Southeast Asia last year, I observed many advertisements for beauty products such as lotions, creams, deodorants, and face washes. In SE Asia, all the advertisements I saw were for “whitening” skin products. According to the advertisements, people would be able to see a considerable change in the lightness of their skin color after use. The advertisements in this region portrayed the ideal woman as having pure white skin. I thought about how this portrayal was almost a complete 180 degree turn from the ideal beauty portrayed in American advertising. In the majority of ads I see in our country the ideal beauty is bronzed from head to toe. A walk down the beauty isle in any US supermarket reveals a plethora of tanning products: tanning spray, bronzing lotion, tanning oil. Many of the whitening skin products of Asia and the tanning products of the US are made by the same company. The advertisers need to have an understanding regarding the cultural ideals of the demographic they are targeting. If the company marketed it’s whitening products in America and it’s tanning products in Asia the profit made off these sales would decrease. SE Asian people with tan skin wouldn’t buy tanning products and Americans with light skin wouldn’t buy whitening products. It seems like a revelation in body image problems: to market the ideally beautiful skin color as one that many people of a population already have. But then, advertisers and producers would never make any profit off this idea so we’ll likely never have to worry about this logical solution in the future.



Victoria's Secret Models: tans all around encourage American women to buy tanning products like this:

Tanning spray, which the women of SE Asia would never purchase. Tan skin in SE Asia is considered ugly by many. Tan skin is a likely sign that a woman is a lowely laborer and work out in the sun all day. White skin is seen as a sign of affluence, while in America tan skin is seen as a sign of luxury. A tan Western woman has the time to go frolic on the beaches of the Carribbean and spend money on her appearance.


No point in marketing this product in SE Asia. No profit = No point.


White skin is a sign of affluence in Asia. There is a huge market for whitening skin products. While a huge industry in Asia, this would never work in the West.

Whitening deodorant.

Skin whitening products on foreign shelves.

News as Entertainment

The somewhat new phenomenon of “News as Entertainment” and how this affects media consumers is of great interest to me. Since the advent of “yellow journalism” and “The Penny Press,” techniques of sensationalism have been used to create stories and sell newspapers. Readers want to read interesting stories and be entertained while simultaneously learning about what’s happening in the world. Is this possible? Television today is full of “news” programs that report the latest redundant stories on celebrity gossip and pregnancies. These programs are all about flashiness and attractive images to get viewers hooked and keep them watching. Celebrity news programs like these are the ultimate rechanneling of the sensationalist techniques used by yellow journalists decades ago. The unfortunate part is that these sensationalist techniques have actually made the passage through to hard news stories on real channels such as CNN, Fox, and NBC. A few months ago, I was watching the 2008 election primaries on CNN. I watched the Oregon primaries unfold minute by minute on the TV screen in front of me. I’m not usually an avid TV watcher and was quite taken aback at how the election was approached on CNN. I felt like I was watching a horse race of a Ali vs. Foreman fight rather than the most important election so far in my lifetime. The coverage was all about glitz and glam, “Hilary vs. Obama,” I felt as thought this was more like ESPN than anything else. I started thinking about why the election was being covered like this. People want to watch the elections and they can watch them on a variety of cable channels. CNN was obviously competing with channels such as Fox News, for the highest election week ratings. Just like any other show, it was be attractive and flashy to captivate audiences, and most importantly, entertain them. I felt that CNN’s main goal was not to inform me about what was going on, but to entertain me and keep me hooked to their station with sensationalist techniques. This just shows how the idea of entertainment as news, and news as entertainment, has taken to a whole new frontier.

Television Addicts?

“Adults who describe themselves as addicts watch an average of 56 hours a week” (Rodman, p. 313.) I was shocked by this huge number, 56 hours a week equals a staggering 8 hours of TV a day. As opposed to a self-described “addict,”the average adult watches 30 hours a week (4 ½ hours a day). In my opinion, even 4 ½ hours a day is astoundingly high. After reading this, I started to wonder why people become so easily addicted to television and what effect it has on viewers.

Why is television so addicting to the point that people are willing to sacrifice 8 hours of their free time? That’s 33% of a day, and if you get about 8 hours of sleep, you only have 8 hours for other things like family, social time, work, school, etc. Rodman suggests the theory that people use TV as a distraction from an unhappy life. TV becomes a means of self-medication. It has numbing qualities that allows the viewer to get lost in another world and leave their own reality behind.

I have another theory about television addiction. We live in an incredibly voyeuristic culture. We love watching people’s lives and knowing every detail concerning what they do. What they eat, who they date, their sex lives, their jobs, their social habits. As a culture we are fascinated with this. Just look in tabloid magazines and you’ll see pictures of the latest celebrity grocery shopping or taking out the trash: “See! They’re just like us!” And it’s not just celebrities’ lives we’re fascinated with. There’s a huge number of reality shows on TV including The Real World, The Bachelor, Laguna Beach, Flavor of Love, Survivor, and The Girls Next Door. These shows play on our culture of voyeurs (were we already voyeurs or did TV create a culture of voyeurs?). Let’s take The Real World as an example. It’s a show of supposedly “real” people going about their everyday lives. In actuality, it’s a completely sensationalized version of “real life.” Constant parties, beautiful people, glamorous lofts, buzzing cities, exotic vacation. Whose life is really like that? We watch because it’s a sensationalized version of reality, much more interesting and dramatic than our everyday lives.

This TV addiction based on voyeurism has some major effects on our society. It ties in directly with cultivation-theory which states that the world perception of heavy TV viewers will be greatly distorted. I think watching sensationalized reality will only make self-medicating with TV a greater problem. Addicts will compare their “average” lives to the “average” lives on TV bringing on further unhappiness and addiction. Another effect? Only one in four Americans read a book last year. Besides just voyeurs, we’re quickly becoming aliterates too.


From US Weekly website. Titled: "They Pack Their Own Trunk!" Uma Thurman, packs her own trunk. See other funny ways they are "Just Like Us": http://www.usmagazine.com/just_like_us_08_01_07?slideshow_id=247&o=0


Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County??


Flava-Flav and his ladies. Mind-numbing fun.

Investigative Journalism Today

In Chapter 4, I found the topic of investigative journalism to be particularly interesting. Investigative journalists often go undercover or put themselves in situations they normally wouldn’t be in to understand an issue more deeply and personally. They are then able to reveal truths based on their findings to the general public through the media. Reading about the famous investigative journalist Nellie Bly (1864 - 1922) reminded me of many modern day journalists who have followed in Bly’s footsteps.

Investigative journalism seems to have boomed recently. A few names that come to mind are Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me, 30 Days), Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine, Sicko, Fahrenheit 9/11 ), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), and Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickle and Dimed). In Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock throws himself into fast-food culture by eating McDonalds three times a day for 30 days. Spurlock also investigates the corporate side of fast-food. The movie revealed much about the industry that the corporate giants would have liked to keep under wraps. Shortly after Supersize Me was released, McDonalds began to make nutrition facts available for their food and introduced healthier options to their menu such as salads. Investigative journalism like this, while entertaining, is also very revealing about practices and policies we would not otherwise know about through daily newspapers. Spurlock, Moore, Pollan, and Ehrenreich delve into great detail in their investigation. As shown by Spurlock the often appalling findings, when made public, can lead to major positive change.

Although investigative journalism can be very revealing about important issues in society, it has recently crossed a fine line between enlightening and morbidly entertaining. The realm of the obscene has been entered with shows like Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” with Chris Hansen. The show involves Hansen going undercover to catch men who are hoping to engage in sexual activity with young girls they met on the internet. The men believe they are entering a private home, only to be surprised by NBC’s television cameras, then broadcast on national television. This show is not based on revealing important issues to the public but on our society’s voyeuristic obsession. While going undercover may require some “cheap tricks,” investigative reporters should still try to uphold strong journalistic ethics.



Supersize Me: An example of good investigative journalism.



To Catch a Predator: Where the line should be drawn.