Advertising has been a means of increasing sales over time, and various means, forms and types of advertisement have been employed to increase the sales of goods and services as the various chains of production have evolved through the times. Now this in itself is not a bad idea, but quite nagging and mind boggling is the fact that most practitioners putting together these adverts also known as advertising agencies, and companies producing the items being advertised have all decided to engage the use of sexuality and lewd materials just to achieve their aims, without thinking of the long term negative effects of their choices.
This trend has become so common place that even a toothpick pack could be advertised with a semi-nude or a half-naked woman, bringing the question to our minds; what has a toothpick got to do with a half-naked woman? Definitely there is no correlation between the both of them. They do not even care that all of these naked figures are being shoved in our faces whether you want to see them or not. They are placed on large billboards placed in strategic points in the cities, put in print media, placed on the visual media, and they go as far as creating lewd images in the mind of listeners when these adverts are being run on the radio which is the most popular arm of the audio media. It has even gotten to the extent of displaying clips or pictures from such worrying adverts on items commonly found in our homes such as the toothpaste, toilet soaps, and cream tubes.
None so far has been worried about the fact that our kids are watching and their rights to innocence at this age, and stage in life is being infringed upon with such flagrant disregard and unrepentant apathy; with images forming in their heads and young minds when they could very much as to do without them. It has been proven in psychology that images we see everywhere get to stick in our sub-conscious, and pop up soon enough in our characters and somewhere in our everyday living. All of these get to contribute to a chain reaction generated from this negative process or trend as the case may be, resulting in an alarming increase in certain vices in our society, such as casual sex, unwanted pregnancies, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS and a whole lot of other wrongs. Although most people would say that all of these have to do with adults, but this trend could get as bad as incest in the home which arguably can be regarded as the nadir in this rather strange hierarchy of vices already mentioned.
To imagine that the vices listed are only a few in the long list of mention, and the very truth that all of these could very well be avoided merely by arresting this negative trend beats the mind of any right thinking person. This would very much amount to selling our souls for money all in the name of marketing products and trying to maximize sales. It also throws up the question; must we sacrifice the lives of not only our younger generation but the whole society on the altar of money making and product sales?
As a popular adage says “a stitch in time saves nine”, but I would like to say here that a decision made in the right direction to arrest this worrying trend would mean a move to save millions of lives and hinder the outright destruction of what is left of our societal values, protecting our own communal future and collective destinies in the process. They say a word is enough for the wise. Our authorities have to take note of these and take very urgent steps to exorcise this crazy trend from our societies and our lives in general. We would definitely be the better for it. It also must be reiterated here that if nothing is done about it, then we would very much have ourselves to blame for whatever results which crop up from our costly neglect of sane social responsibility.
All these and more also available on http://dakes83.blogspot.com.You will be INSPIRED!!
