Advertisements and Social Responsibilities

I watch advertisements these days with some amount of curiosity and concern. In their effort to sensationalize, I see adverts are going off track to sell their wares. You see someone gyrating for the entire duration of the Ad, just to find out that they are selling hair oil.

But what really concerns me is some advertisements showing dangerous stunts to prove that their products are better than others. We had the Mountain Dew sales pitch which saw these youngsters plunge from a cliff on their bicycles. Then there are all these motorcycle ads which push the “go fast” concept (0-60 in 5 secs). The latest advertisement for Hero Honda has this guy speed across the path of a speeding train and “escaping” by inches and then doing a wheelie at the edge of a clip. Thats all we need more stunts to try out !!

I know that this is only an Ad, but do we need to be giving our youngsters these ideas? Isn’t there a social responsibility as well? The argument could be that it would be silly to ape what these advertisements show (hence the little barely visible disclaimer at the bottom of these ads about how these are performed by professionals and are not to performed at home).

What led me to write this post? Yesterday evening my son and his friends were standing around watching an “older” kid do wheelies at the edge of a gutter using his older brothers new bike. His dad saw that, came over and whacked him. FYI that kid is in 10th grade.