Advertisement is thought to be the foundation and economic lifeblood of the mass media, and the primary purpose of the mass media is to sell audiences to advertisers. The 130 billion advertising industry is a powerful educational force not only in the United States. For example, the average American is exposed to over 1500 ads a day and will spend 1 1/2 years of his or her life watching TV-commercials. Ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images and concepts of success and worth, love, sexuality, popularity and normalcy. Although ads sometimes seem to be trivial, their cumulative effect my be serious. This fact is nicely demonstrated by the "Farrah-effect": males who viewed a short clip from the TV-series "Charlie's Angels" develop unrealistic mate choice criteria in respect to female attractiveness.
Moreover advertisements are, in my view, a product of cultural evolution. If we take the product as the individual, the customer (and sales) as the resource, advertisement is supposed to enhance the fitness of the product.
"Get fat on Lorings Fat-ten-u and corpula foods"; ...
Advertising
Images of pretty women often appear in ads even wi...In the course of time advertisements thus will "evolve" towards an optimal exploitation of the adapted mind. One if the themes which are prone to exploitation are human mate-selection criteria. Basically, two advertisement strategies could be used to exploit men's and women's cognitive adaptations to mate-selection and the protoypic "triggering-signals" associated with this complex. The first strategy is sensory exploitation of the opposite sex. This means that advertisement would pair products for one sex with the stimulus of the other sex, thus exploiting the possible excitation the stimulus would evoke which then would be paired with the product. The second strategy could be called comparison with a normative self. In this case, the product for one sex is paired with same sex-stimuli that would be a perfect...