Killing USftly 4

Through the vast expansion of advertising within society, it can be said that public relations and advertising directly affect socialization and one’s depiction of society. This concept goes deeper than the intended purpose of public relations and advertising. These agencies intended purpose is to attract audiences towards the consumption of their products. However, through this pursuit of customers, producers shape these ideas mentioned above. This is due to the fact that advertisers and public relations agencies want to portray their brands as high-class organizations, with attractive people and popular products. The attractive people and popularity causes society to conform and strive to be similar to these people and organizations. Throughout …show more content…
In the class, the experts mostly used movies, books, and newspaper articles to highlight their points. There were many examples of valuable information about this topic in each of these platforms. However, there were a few specific examples that stood out from the rest, due to their horrifying information. Killing Us Softly 4 is a movie that highlights the manipulation of people’s bodies and images to produce an ad that will attract a wide audience. To give an example of this, movie producer Jean Kilbourne states, “Sometimes people say to me, ‘You’ve been talking about this for 40 years, have things gotten any better?’ And actually I have to say really they’ve gotten worse. Ads sell more than products. They sell values, they sell images, they sell concepts of love and sexuality, of success and perhaps most important – normalcy. To a great extent they tell us who we are and who we should be” (Kilbourne, Killing Us Softly). This quote signifies how advertising is affecting socialization and the public’s depiction of society and ordinariness. This quote, accompanied by other points throughout the film, is able to show why Kilbourne believes that advertising and public relations is creating wide cultural consequences. In a similar fashion, another movie, Advertising and the End of the World, underscores the fact that the amount of advertising is at an all-time high. This mass accumulation of advertising and public relation material is having a stronger effect on socialization. In reference to this point, the movie says, “More thought, more effort, more creativity, more time, more attention to detail has gone into the selling of the immense accumulation of commodities than any other campaign in human history to change public consciousness” (Advertising and the End of the World). The inclusion of the last statement in the