Advertising has become an important commercial act overwhelming almost all the aspects of our lives nowadays. Under careful observation and comparison, it is worth noticing that different countries have their unique advertisements. In other words, under close and judicial scrutiny, advertising can enlighten a lot about one country.
One important character that could be grasped from the advertisements concerns the natives’ aesthetic appreciation. As is known to all, in order to attract consumers, advertising agencies over the world would like to employ beautiful girls or handsome boys as models in their designed advertisements. These advertising models are often chosen from the natives and their appearances have to meet with the natives’ standard of beauty. So from these beautiful models it is easy to discover the aesthetic value of the public. Taking Japan for example, female models there are mostly little girls with oval faces, and a great many male models have female-like appearance. But in America, tall and hot girls or strong, masculine men are likelier to be picked as models. These differences speak of the differences of aesthetic sense - people take little, sweet and feminized figures as beauty in Japan, while vitality and masculine appearances are favored by American.
Advertising can tell us not only the aesthetic appreciation, but also the customs of a country. Cultural symbols, social conventions, religious traditions and etc. may be interspersed into the advertisements by advertisement designers who hope to attract more relative natives. Just think of how the festival advertisements are like in the feast days. Here are several concrete examples include the Christmas Day - when Santa Claus, Christmas trees, kinds of little gifts would appear in advertisements, All Saints’ Day - when ghost and horrific masks will become the leading roles of many advertisements, and the San Valentines Day - when a lot of advertisement will choose love as their themes. From these advertisements overflow with festival mood, a foreigner who has no idea about these feasts can learn a lot about their distinct customs and culture.
Some opponents of advertising may argue that the knowledge deduced from the advertising is not trustworthy because the reliability of the advertisements themselves is questionable. Nevertheless, these unreliable or mendacious advertisements, if under correct analyzing and investigating, could help to seize the real information and uncover the social problems harbored behind the curtain. One fit example is the medicine advertising circumstance in China, which is flooded with fallacies. Every year, nearly 90 percent of the advertisements concerning newly designed medicine are found to be fallacies. These scandals can not only tell the public about the valueless of advertisements scandals, but also uncovered the problems of the legal systems regarding the process of the medicine producing, monitoring and publicizing. Now the government has began to gradually set up new laws in order to strict the management of the medicine market. Certainly, false advertisements function as sirens here.
From what have discussed above, a safely conclusion that advertising can tell a lot about one country could be drew. In fact, the characters of one country can not only be reflected from its advertising, but from the behavior of its people, from situation of industrialization and foreign trade, from the works of literature, arts and movies. After all, to truly understand one country, we should depend on as many resources as possible.
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发表于 2007-8-7 23:13:00
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