Playhouse Commercial

 This playhouse commercial highlights the pitfalls of stereotyping, this “dream home” consists of the boy playing the role of home provider and the little girl played the role of the homemaker. Today's more clever campaigns could turn the entire thing on its head and provide the same message yet give it a shock value targeted at a more mature and hip young crowd, although the might be going for the more traditional home demographic, in which case the commercial could have some sort of cute appeal. However, I see commercials like this becoming more and more rare as the overall population is not so keen on traditional domestic roles anymore.

Gender Stereotypes

 

Gender profiling is still highly prevalent in must of todays advertising for one simple reason, SEX SELLS. It always has and always will as long as its target audience is humans. However, I think that there is more and more sexual innuendos in advertising themselves today. 

With America in general becoming less prude and more open to non traditional family roles, theres much more public talk of sex, advertisers are becoming more daring in order to garnish sales. While not necessarily a bad thing, they must learn where the current “line they cannot cross” is when it comes to this type of stereotyping as there can be a harsh backlash if the advertisement pushes itself too far past the comfort zone of the targeted demographic.

Racial Stereotypes

 

Racial stereotyping is a byproduct of the human need to categorized and make connections within unknown communities. Buying into the racial stereotypes is not so much as a malicious intention, but rather an unpleasant side effect. Advertisers capitalize on that idea, making associations between products and popular known stereotypes. 

Obviously, most advertising stays clear of negative racial stereotypes, but that doesn’t mean it wont creep into profiling glasses on asian models, nikes on african americans, etc. While advertising in general could use a bit more diversity, associations between cultural groups and products or services still do exist, and you don’t want to be sending your consumer the wrong or conflicting messages.