let me start this week's blog by saying with a disclaimer, i am a pacifist and therefore do not believe in war, so this will shape my review of the commercial, just slightly. but dont worry all of you military supporters, there will be a good point or two made in their favor.

personally i feel the america's army video is the army's newest way to recruit poor innocent teenagers to signing years of their lives away to an unsure fate. to them the commercials werent enough, and now they have come up with a much more underhanded way to do their recruiting. the first america's army games was released in 2002 and has since released quite a few more games aimed at teenage boys ages 16+. in order to make these games, the army had real soldiers mimic the moves that they would make in combat so people get a realer feel for what its like. the game even takes the player through boot camp. so with all that training that theyre getting just from the game, it makes more sense that they would eventually join the army. a week ago i saw the army recruiting video that is inspiring this blog, but unfortunately i couldnt find it anywhere, believe me i looked for multiple hours, it made me that mad. in the commercial, a teenage boy is playing his army video game, and his friend walks in and says "you know you can play that for real." i find that an immoral way of recruiting, because the army is deliberately trying to blur line between fiction and reality in order to send more people to the slaughter.

but alas, as i said before that commercial was not available online, so i found another one that disturbed me. this one is a mix of the america's soldiers game blurred with a recruitment video. this one made me mad because its set to the song toy soldiers, which is a peace song. how can you use a peace song to promote war? its just not right. you cant use peace to promote war.

sadly as promised though here are the good points i have to make about the commercial, it was very creative, i would have never thought of them using video games for recruitment. and them using the real soldiers and probably real missions they went on was also a creative basis to create the game. i read something on how they used real snipers and put them on a green screen to capture the movements they make to move, fire, and reload, it was actually an interesting article. its amazing how far technology has come in the last 20 years. in the days of nintendo and sega, this would not have been remotely possible because the technology was not there to support such life like graphics. but now, graphics are getting so good that it wont be long until a person wont be able to distinguish the video games from actual tv. and i fear to see what that will really do for army recruiting. they're already doing a pretty good job manipulating people with all these war games, and as graphics get better and better, that fine line will become more and more blurred. and it just might backfire and create an army of people who have just gone crazy and think they do live in the game and their family, friends, and innocent bi-standards are the enemy and they might take action against them, and this could lead to a very scary terrorist situation in our own backyards.

In Tuesday's class, we talked about how society puts a lot of pressure on girls to look thin, and how this is depicted in media. It is most notably shown with runway models, these girls who are often teenagers are pressured to be so thin that they harm themselves to do so. But this may soon be a practice of the past. In Spain, they no longer allow models to be below a certain BMI, because of the negative self image this can instill in children. I feel that this is a step in the right direction, it is very scary that young women are dieing because of their jobs. As much as many many women refuse to admit that the thin people shown in advertisements has an effect on them, I believe it does. I actually know a 52 year old woman, who is still very obsessed with being thin. she is 5'6" and 130 lbs wears a size 4-6 and complains that this is the heaviest she has ever been. and sadly there are many more instances of this. But to help combat this, Hanes has launched a campaign of more realistic looking women in their ads, and I hope more companies will follow this.

on tuesday, grimm talked about how advertisers are directing their advertising at the stereotypes of a generation. i dont know if i exactly agree with those stereotypes, however. they say that the baby boomers are obsessed with youth, generation x are slackers, and generation y is narcissistic. personally i dont agree with any of this. i think that every adult in the united states is at least a little bit worried about getting older, its how society shapes us. all the focus is on the young and the beautiful, there's no room for the reality that we're all going to get old and die some day. generation x wasn't really slackers, they just didnt want to be like their parents and spend theyre whole lives working in a job they hate until retirement. they actually seem to be the generation with the most small business owners. and i dont think we of generation y are as narcissistic, like generation x, we dont want to follow in the footsteps of our parents, but create our own paths on our own terms. we are also perceived as more fickle consumers, but i also do not agree with that because the growth of the internet has made it easier for us to find what we need at the lowest price. its not fickle, its smart, why should we spend the extra income that we could be using for other things. we can still be brand loyal, especially for low involvement goods, but when it comes to spending a little bit more, we would rather spend a little bit of time shopping around on the net to get the deals.

these untrue stereotypes, however, are a big basis on how advertisers market their products to us. for example, these mac commercials.

theyre using the stereotypical young guy to represent the mac because they are trying to update theyre image to a younger audience. the mac guy goes along with the younger population because we're on the go more than our parents and the computer is also on the go, its even ready out of the box. we also want more stuff from our products, such as its ipod compatibility and the magnetic power cord. this ties into our supposed narcissism because we want the computers to be up to date with our terms, and we don't want to wait for someone to say we're allowed to have it. but this, like many things is not just for the young, most people want the latest, greatest products with more things on it than they could ever need. look at all the middle aged men who buy sports cars and motorcycles, they don't need them, but they want them so they go out and get them.





















so it shouldn't be the types of stereotypes associated to a generation that the advertisers should market to, but the general demand of the population because most of the population wants the same items and many times for similar reasons, to look cool to all of their friends.