What Are the Hidden Messages Behind the Bacardi Limon Advertisement?

With increased industrialization and various production machines, products that are available in the market are getting more numerous and diversified. In order to compete for a share of the consumer market, manufacturers are willing to spend vast amounts of money on advertising their products to attract the consumers. This may be an indication of economic growth. However, the keen competition has also led to many socially irresponsible advertisements as dry advertisements can no longer keep the products in the public eye. Socially irresponsible advertisements refer to the advertisements that have negative effects on our social values and norms. In such advertisements, misleading or fake information is employed to exploit people's emotions, rationality or even greed, so it is harmful to students if we publish this kind of advertisement on Sentinel. [The Bacardi Limon advertisement, for example, is obviously socially irresponsible and should not be published in our school magazine because it is not simply promoting liquor; it is guilty of promoting sexism, encouraging teenagers to drink, hiding the real effects of getting drunk ,so it is strongly recommended it not be published in Sentinel.]

"Get fat on Lorings Fat-ten-u and corpula foods"; ...

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The Bacardi liquor advertisement promotes sexism through its appeal to sex. Since all human beings have the "need for sexual intercourse" (Fowles 65), many advertisers are using the sex appeal, which is "an appeal to the audience's sexual drives" (Fowles 65), to promote their products. In a Dodge commercial, a young man in an automobile peeps at a woman as she is dressing herself in her apartment (Solomon 54). Another example is a Black Velvet liquor advertisement displaying "an attractive woman wearing a tight black outfit, recumbent under the legend, 'Feel the Velvet'" (Fowles 66). While in the Bacardi advertisement, the man is looking at the woman in a sexy dress through the glass. All these...