An Anorexic Ideal: Television Advertising Delivers Negative Effects on Its Viewers

With the television came another more influential opportunity to advertise and eventually sell products otherwise forced to hang out on billboards and in print magazines. With the increase of the number of channels, opportunity allowed for markets to expand and so did the opportunity for those markets to become irresponsible in their displays to the American public. As new technologies allowed for colored television, advertisements themselves became colored. Though technology allowed for less static and a clearer picture, advertising agencies were still hiding behind the unclear static of glamorization and partial truths. The negative effects of advertising began to manifest in a shift from moral. Gluttony, vanity, materialism, and other unhealthy ways of thinking began to take form.


Though television advertising has been popular since its origination, its effectiveness has been waning, making one wonder why advertisers continue to produce advertisements that seem to not only produce negative effects on children, young women, men, and society in general, but also has a tendency to cause adverse effects from those originally intended by the advertisers themselves. Unfortunately such a decline has not deterred advertisers from producing advertisements for television that negatively affect its viewers. They have become no more responsible with their freedoms and now there are too many channels, leaving room for too many advertisements for assigned agencies to monitor.


The truth is that advertisements are less effective in producing the results they once did. Consumers are willing conspirators in this interaction between buying and selling, …if advertising is so powerful, then how come the failure rate [of new products] is so high? If these guys were really smart, we'd all be driving Edsels and listening to 8-track tapes. (Twitchell, 1999).