COP2 ESSAY - Study Task 4 - Triangulation

Triangulation Exercise 

At this point it's time to start planning and putting together the essay,  the subject has been decided and research material selected, This exercise is to identity books, articles, research, then find the most important ones and to discuss their relevance and how the relate to each other and the write a 500 word triangulation of the relevant literature which should be part of the essay. 

sheet from session -

Packard, Riechrt and Joblin link, explore this for this text exercise. 

Tom Reichert, professor and head of the department of advertising and public relations in the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication believes sex is used in advertisements as it major means company and adverts can promote/sells via causing a grabbing attention subject matter or imagery.

‘Advertisers use sex because it can be very effective… Sex sells because it attracts attention. People are hard-wired to notice sexually relevant information, so ads with sexual content get noticed.’ (Reichert, 2012)

Reichert states that sex is used due to the nature of the sexual content being use the adverts causes people to notice and pay attention to the content consequence what every is being advertised, its grabs the audience attention on a privative level using primal desires that humans are hardwire with. Therefore, using this content in advertising forms effective campaigns as using sex and sexuality explicitly means the audience to pays more attention thus increasing sales/promotion of the intent item. Due to the effectiveness of this style this type of strategies produced are heavily used throughout the industry but is it ethical to commercial gain and sell using this style which is widely seen as inappropriate, degrading and controversial? Reichert is not alone with his view sex sells, Vance Packard, discusses how sex has been used to grab attention for many years

‘Sex images have long been cherished by ad men purely as eye stoppers’ (Packard,195)  

Packard explains that sexual imagery has been used and love by ad agencies for years due to the attention grabbing aspect, as it causes the audience to pay attention to the advert. This therefore agrees with Reichert opinion that the use of sex in advertisement promotion as a way to attract the audience as people notice it, but is this way of selling products ethical? Should advertising use sex as a way to increase consumerism or are the negative effects of using this technique out weighing the use? This essay aims to explore how and way sex is used along with the downfalls and benefits of the traditional advertising strategy.  

The idea that sex is used widely to grab the audience’s attention in advertising is widely agreed with thought the industry as well as by J. Scott. Armstrong who discuses the topic in his book Persuading Advertising

‘Certainly, sex attracts attention. In empirical studies, even monkeys will ‘pay’ to see females’ rears (Deaner, Knera, and Platt 2005). However, sex might attract those who have no interested in the products, and might annoy some customers who would be interested in the product’ (Armstrong, 2010)

Armstrong here agrees that sex does attract the viewers’ attention, then uses data collected via relevant research in to monkeys (humans’ close relatives) which he compares to the humans in the study, the monkeys where fundamentally attracted to the exploit sexual imagery which reflects how primitively humans are attracted to this type of context. This backs up the statement from Reichert where he states that sex attracts as its ‘hard-wired’ due to our primitive nature.