Ambiguity In Advertising

From the outside looking in, the advertising Industry has always been controversial. Starting with the era of the Mad Men (Ad men) on Madison Avenue in New York City, the ad world has had a rocky reputation. How moral is it to persuade people to buy things they might not really need? Thanks to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), regulations on advertising have been enforced throughout the years. Human attributes, both physical and psychological, are instrumental in how advertising is constructed and executed; an actor’sbehavior in an advertisement often follows stereotypes based on race, gender and age. Marketers argue that the use of stereotypes helps consumers make connections more readily, allowing them to make sense of the communication

The point of showing people who looked racially ambiguous was to talk to a larger group of people . The idea behind this strategy is that if the consumer sees themself (or rather, someone that looks like them) in an ad, they are more likely to pay more attention to it. Since mixed race people are of multiple ethnicities, it was thought these kinds of people would appeal to more of the target audience. Kimberly DaCosta in her book Making Multiracials explains: “During the 1990s, racially ambiguous-looking people and even interracially intimate scenes began to appear in advertisements designed to appeal to a broad, ethnically nonspecific audience”5. This strategy was used before the days of targeted marketing, a more specific type of

The brand has had a history of using their voice to speak on these issues. In 2014, the Chobani Twitter account posted a picture of multicolored packages of Chobani yogurt with the copy, “Naturally empowering everyone” in response to Russia’s anti-gay laws . The following year, Chobani released a new television commercial as part of their new “Love This Life” campaign . The commercial featured a suggestively lesbian couple which prompted a lot of negative responses claiming that the yogurt brand was “pushing the LGBTQ agenda” and making unnecessary associations between selling yogurt and gay people. In both these situations, the goal was to sell more yogurt, yes, but the message shared with viewers was one of unity, letting Chobani lovers know that they stand with this marginalized group. Remember, brands are belief