11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D5xgk78vHw

My overall topic for this semester was the portrayal of middle-aged housewives and how the stereotypes of them have only slightly adjusted over several generations. Stereotypes are prominent in the United States and they are what most companies base their advertisements off of. An example of an advertisement that is based merely on a stereotype is the above the influence commercial with a group of Black teenage boys in a diner. This video is actually comical because of the stereotypes used through language, setting, dress, etc. The stereotypes being portrayed through this video target a poor, lower class “ghetto” area where young Black teenagers do drugs. Two critical texts from the semester that relate to my topic and this advertisement are “Advertising and the Political Economy of Lesbian/Gay Identity” and Black Sitcom Portrayals” because both articles deal with stereotypes heavily in their topics. In Fejes article, she discusses “the effort to construct a market profile of lesbians and gays is fraught with a number of major problems” meaning that to construct this types of market stereotypes will play a significant role in targeting this audience. Similar to this article, in Coleman’s article about Black sitcoms, he analyzes the dynamics of these sitcoms and how the characters are portrayed. In shows like Fresh Prince of Bell Air the stereotypical “poor, ghetto-dwelling African Americans” are depicted. They relate to my topic and the video because these all show how the media uses stereotypes to appeal to a certain target or demographic. This is a successful technique because though stereotypes can be viewed negatively, there is some truth to them which helps major corporation succeed.