Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Advertising Ethics: Deceitful celebrity endorsements through social media


There are a lot of ways to market a product through social media. Some of the famous social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. Social media sites are an advantage to companies in promoting their products; it is cheap and very effective. In order to get the attention of the netizens, the company uses celebrities or individuals who are famous in the internet to market these products.

There is a difference in advertising through television and advertising through social media. Advertising in television makes it obvious that the celebrity or commercial models were paid to promote the product. In contrary, social media does not give the idea of celebrities or famous internet personalities being paid of what they post and share online. This is somehow deceiving in a way that consumer gets confused if they really use the product or if it is really the product of their choice that they decided to choose for their personal use.

Not all endorsers on social media are celebrities, there are also non celebrities that posts different products online. One cannot really tell what the story behind those pictures is whether it’s the real thing or not. I have been actively browsing on social media a few years ago and I have decided to quit it because I believe that it is just a total waste of time with too much exaggeration and nonsense. I remember scrolling accounts on social media where I see celebrities and internet personalities post different kinds of things like their outfits of the day #OOTD. Other things that they post regularly online are the gadgets that they use, the food that they eat and the places and events that they go to stressing out the sponsors and brands every time.

It is heartbreaking to see those persons change over time. I could recall following someone’s account and I think I was one of the few to start following her. She posted her everyday life online where it looks very real, normal and natural. After a while she became popular having gained many followers, this is when she started being someone else entirely posting random things online that is irrelevant to her everyday life which obviously looks fake. The bad thing there is, instead of disclosing that she had been paid or sponsored to post some products, she denied the whole thing and just continues to make things look natural from there on. As I’ve realized these flaws, I have recently read an article similar to this story that shows exactly what I’ve meant about the deceitful, untrue and pretentious posts that we see every day online. You may have to rethink again that almost more than half of those things that we see on social media is just a total waste of time.

Posted on November 2, 2015 on elitedaily.com here is 19 year old instagram model Essena O’Neill from Australia who recently caught fire on social media when she edited her posts to reveal truth behind her photos.

Her Instagram account, which featured a standard mix of scenic and seemingly candid photos one can expect from someone who makes her money looking good next to waterfalls, boasted close to 580,000 followers. She had another 260,000 subscribers on her YouTube account and 60,000 on Snapchat. That was before her Will McAvoy-esque breakdown — a breakdown that led her to delete over 2,000 photos and go inactive on her YouTube and Snapchat accounts in an attempt to expose the fabricated reality behind social media modeling.


She re-captioned the posts she left up on Instagram to reveal the lengths she went through to make certain shots look perfect, yet spur-of-the-moment.

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This change all seems to be in line with O’Neill’s new website, Let’s Be Game Changers, which so far consists of some personal blog posts, a lengthy info section, a community forum and a series of supplemental anti-modeling blogs giving you a look into what exactly is going on in her mind as she aggressively steps away from the career she built.


In a video (which has since been deleted), she explained the business of social media, what it’s like to work as a model in the field and what changes she made to get her to the point where she felt quitting was nothing short of mandatory to her wellbeing.
In the website’s description, Essena spoke more about reasons she specifically quit modeling on social media.

She wrote,
I was miserable. Stuck. Uninspired. Angry. I didn’t enjoy the act of creating art, writing or any forms of self-expression like I once did as a child. When no one judged it, I created without limitation or filters. When it was for no one else but myself, I fell in love with it. And it loved me right back. It made me feel alive. It was like capturing and expressing real life, real feeling, real beauty — it gave me this joy that I still can’t explain. You know that feeling of inspiration, passion and purpose you get when you do something you just love? That’s why I do what I do. I don’t want approval anymore, it traps me into thinking I need more and more and more. I don’t want to be liked or judged either. I want a place where I can give with no expectations or outcome. I don’t want followers anymore. I want a world of individual beings.

Elsewhere on the site, she pleaded with the greater online community, writing,
PLEASE CAN SOMEONE MAKE A SOCIAL SHARING PLATFORM NOT BASED ON VALIDATION IN VIEWS/FOLLOWERS/LIKES BUT SHARED FOR REAL VALUE AND LOVE. THANK YOU. PLEASE HURRY UP.

We need more people like Essena.

Yes, theblogs and some of the YouTube videos do come across a little preachy and sound like a beautiful, blonde 19-year-old Howard Beale yelling, “I’M MAD AS HELL” into an iPhone 6S, but there needs to be change like this.

References:

Elite Daily Former Instagram Model Edits Her Posts to Reveal Truth behind the Photos
 (Levine, 2015) Retrieved November 11, 2015 from

1 comment:

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