Are advertisements lying?
Advertisements are everywhere we look, from the screens of our phones to the billboards in the streets. Just like flies, they chase us everywhere. Truly, people have grown so used to all the advertising around them, that they never stopped to wonder; Are all these advertisements really truthful?. Personally, it strikes me that advertisements are not as truthful as they seem.
To begin with, the cause of advertisements has been blurred over the years. Their initial cause had been to inform people about a specific product. Now, their cause is purely to lure potential customers into buying their products. This shift in the goal of advertisements, proves just how much the industry aims to by all means deceive the customer into buying a product. How is this achieved? Firstly, by omitting crucial information about the product in order to make it more appealing to the viewer’s eyes. For example, advertisements are overlooking the side effects of a medicine in order to make it look more likeable. Moreover, advertisements can straight up lie, by using photoshop or other means of picture alteration to ameliorate the look of the advertised product. For instance, this is done a lot by fast food companies to make their food seem more healthy, thus more desirable to the viewer.
“Advertisements are everywhere we look, from the screens of our phones to the billboards in the streets. Just like flies, they chase us everywhere.”
On the other hand, there are people who are firm believers of the idea that advertisements offer all the information needed about the product. They claim that there are legislations which limit the freedom of the advertisement, therefore industries cannot lie, as doing so is illegal. What they fail to comprehend, though, is that the advertisement industry always finds ways to legally lie to us. In particular, even if pharmaceutical companies are obligated, in some countries, to include the side effects of a medicine in an advertisement, they will do so in small letters, in a way that it is not easily seen by the viewer.
Overall, if someone took a closer look at the advertisements that surround us on the daily, they would immediately notice this normalisation of lying through them. But, it is impossible for advertisements to cease to exist in today’s world, due to the capitalistic, free-economy system that feeds off these advertisements. What people should do, though, is keep a critical stance towards advertisements, because there are a lot of disguised lies lurking.
By I. M.
EN 
EL