Women On Mtv

10 Pages 2481 Words

imagery is excessive in today’s advertising. This is the second year in a row “that young girls are ‘insulted by ads that make it seem like women only care about their looks’” (Tsui, 2000). This should concern MTV considering they tend to have a young audience following. Videos themselves have been compared to commercials. “Music videos have broken through TV’s most hallowed boundaries. As commercials in themselves, they have erased the very distinction between the commercial and the program. As nonstop sequences of discontinuous episodes, they have erased the boundaries between programs” (Aufderheide, p.57).
It is no surprise that music videos resemble commercials. The basis for videos comes from commercials. Music videos are short, catchy, and fun. They are created to captivate the audience for a brief moment in hopes of the viewer developing an interest in purchasing the artists’ latest album. Videos are simply selling the singer along with the song as well as an image, which could be interpreted as the ideal image considering these people are famous, or at the very least, on television.
Considering music videos to basically be ads, their portrayal of women affects the viewing audience in a similar manner as television ads. Kilbourne (Knutsen, 2000), p.1) notes in her first book that advertisements influence adolescents for three main reasons. One is that their money is more likely to be spent on what they want, not necessarily what they need, because they often do not have bills to pay. Second, adolescents are at a stage in their life where they are not partial to one individual product, also referred to as ‘brand loyalty.’ This is beneficial to advertisers who will in turn gear their ads to an adolescent audience in hopes of them developing loyalty to their products. Most importantly, “adolescents are at great risk of addiction, and addiction is profitable. If a young person becomes an alcoholic in her t...