The Student News Site of Utica University

The Tangerine

The Student News Site of Utica University

The Tangerine

The Student News Site of Utica University

The Tangerine

Trends in society dictate advertising content

Jaime Evanoff, Staff Writer

 

Utica College Assistant Professor of Sociology Kyle Green has been studying the representation of gender in Super Bowl commercials since 2010.

Sociologists tend to see patterns throughout society and genuinely want to understand why these things are happening.

Commercials usually tend to trend with current societal issues because companies spend a great deal of money on research to figure out how to get to the consumer.

“Advertisers do a lot of the work for us, they form focus groups and are able to study the current trends,” Green said. “Commercials’ tend to have very common themes each year because of their research.”

This year’s commercials were less interesting to junior Luke Pena.

“They weren’t as good as they use to be,” Pena said. “I wasn’t laughing much. There were a few funny ones but overall it wasn’t exciting.  This year, companies played it safe because of all of the turmoil within our country.”

According to Green, companies “played it safe” because they don’t want to risk alienating their marketplace. People viewed some commercials as politically charged, but according to Green, most of these would not have been viewed that way a year ago and that is directly related to the current state of our society.

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