Gender Advertisements

Over the past four decades, the media, especially visual media, have become a powerful force to shape and reflect societal attitudes, perceptions, beliefs, and values. In their everyday life, people are exposed to different kinds of visual advertisement through multiple sources like magazines, newspapers, billboards, the Internet and so on. Advertisers use images as a persuasive means to organize the experience and understanding of a viewer. Images are used as symbols in advertisements to convey meaning, which enables people to decode these symbols, their thoughts and feelings about their social world. The meaning of advertisements is created through their reception by an audience, which puts bits of information in a specific context by using commonly shared cultural knowledge. Cultural norms and values play very important ...