Advertisements and Culture

This advertisement is promoting a moisturizing product by Olay. It portrays a close up of a distinguishably happy woman with intentional text around her, identifying the roles she plays in life and how the facial cream can suit the needs of those roles. With he wide smile dominating the picture, the stress-free woman is described as a "shoe aficionado" "wife" and "mother." Overall, Olay makes an successful job in plugging in the product to suit this stereotypical woman's needs in the roles that she plays in her everyday life, thus objectifying the product to a universal audience. The use of gender stereotypes plays a significant role in this advertisement. In order to create a medium that is suitable, acceptable and understandable for a vast amount of targeted audience, advertisers often turn to stereotypical relations. It has been realized that the woman portrayed and the text surrounding her in the advertisement generalizes the female population in a certain way that is not necessarily true. 

Generally, women are seen to be low positioned workers, loving wives and mothers, responsible for raising children and doing housework. In the ad, this stereotype in brought forward and communicates the woman as someone who is concerned with taking care of herself and meaningless concepts like shoes. It could therefore be argued that the ad values beauty and care-taking as most important for the female population. From this, it is clear that it also neglects the fact that women can have much more larger ambitions and goals. It ignores the ambitious women that are committed to making a change and impacting the world. Olay advertiser had the choice to transform the ad's theme into suiting their product in much more important aspects in a woman's life, including work.  This shows that their product was promoted by focusing the message of the ad to communicate that women should focus on feeble things (like their product) rather than real and important things in life. This is vital for the placement of their product in the story that they are trying to sell. Olay creates this image of an "ideal woman" and then emphasizes the importance of their product in this.