This is a frame grab from a Neutrogena commercial on Channel One News.
The girl is pulling her hood down because she wants to hide her face. She has… dare we say it… acne.
The purpose of a TV commercial is to sell a product or a service. When “beauty aid” companies advertise a product, they have to first make the viewer feel ugly or less than whole in some way. If viewers feel good about how they look, then they won’t go out and buy what the advertiser is selling.
Acne control products have always been advertised on Channel One News. An audience from 10 to 18 is perfect for their sales pitch. Unfortunately many ads for such products play “hard ball” with young people. Acne is a fact of life for many teenagers. Companies like Neutrogena feel like they have to make acne a hideous, disfiguring disease before a young person will want their acne products. So they show commercials where young people are hiding their faces. You have seen these ads so often that you might not think about how brutal they are.
Channel One rakes in the money off these ads and they never consider how embarrassing these ads are for young people or how they make them feel bad about their body and their body image. To Channel One News, kids are merely a target market that has to be exploited.
Below is just one of many different commercials for acne products students are forced to watch while they sit at their school desk.
Notice another technique used to manipulate student viewers – the celebrity endorsement. Emma Roberts starred in a Nickelodeon TV series and would be known to many in Channel One’s captive audience. Many young students may not fully comprehend the reality of such endorsements. They may not know that they are paid to say what they say. Channel One News used to have a set of News Standards that did not allow celebrity endorsements. Those News Standards were discarded in the late 90’s. The show is now not much more than a hyper-commercial TV program where anything goes.
Parents, if your child is in a school that requires the viewing of Channel One and its commercials, then your child has been told over and over again, day in and day out, in very sophisticated and subtle ways that they are inadequate and ugly. Consider too that these ads carry more impact than the ones at home because these are implicitly endorsed by the school district. “The commercial must be true, why else would my school require me to watch it?”
