thesis

             When I had initially started thinking about my topic for this paper I thought that finding the differences in advertising to men and women would be an easy topic.  I figured that there had to be different ways in which to appeal to genders differently and I was convinced it would be an easy code to crack.  However, as I have done my research and gone to the mall in the hopes of finding these different advertising techniques I found that gender is defiantly not a large factor in advertisements, at least in the mall.  There are defiantly differences in advertising to men and women; however, the ideas are all pretty much the same.

            I recently went to the mall and took pictures of the ads in which I saw that were trying to appeal to either men or women. They were not much different in their advertising techniques.  I found, however, that when I looked in magazines or other places in which to advertise, the differences were much greater.  For the most part, the techniques were predictable. They used famous people in their ads, had good-looking people modeling their clothing, or showed that their product helped others making it more appealing to a consumer.  This, along with other techniques that I learned throughout my research, were used both in ads appealing to male and female consumers.

            After looking through the pictures of the ads that I found at the mall I see that all of them use different somatic or nonverbal systems in their advertisements.  It greatly shows how important the sense of time, perceptual spaces, interpersonal distances and personal front is in these advertisements.  I used our book, discourses in place, to figure out exactly what these ads are trying to portray and it was by far my most useful source.  I used these things to review every ad that I looked at and it really helped me to be clear on what the ad is trying to do and what its purpose is.

            My latest research has been good and bad in certain ways.  It has been great in the sense that I really am starting to understand the ads and what they are trying to say and what their creators are putting in them and why.  This is a very cool thing to learn in general, and is very useful to my paper.  However, I feel as though I have gone far from my original goal in trying to find differences in male and female advertising.  I don’t really see in my research how it is very different, which can be detrimental to my final paper.

            I have been trying to think of a way to spin off of my original idea in order to help make my paper better in the long run. I originally though that this idea was a great idea for a paper, however; with the research that I have been doing, that no longer seems to be the case.  Another idea I had was to just switch it and try and prove that in essence, even though there are some differences in advertising, at the mall with the ads that I have found, it seems as though the techniques are mostly the same.

 

There has been question to how advertising is portrayed differently between men and women and in some cases this is so, however, for the most part, advertising techniques are usually unisex and used in the same ways to call out to both men and women.