While reading Baudrillard’s essays, I began to get a sense that the difference between the realities that advertising presented is very different from the actual. Every day the American public is bombarded by advertisements the proclaim they have the answer to make life; easier, faster, bigger and well just better but those common promises fail most of the time. Baudrillard called this fake reality a type of hyper-reality; this reality is an exacerbated view of what is really there. In one of his essays, Baudrillard found that the public pursues this hyper reality in order to get away from the truth, he used families that go to resorts like Disneyland as an example.
Like I said above, advertisements commonly offer promises that they cannot keep. For example, AXE body spray portray an image to a young male that if they wear their product females will be all over them almost to the point that it will just seem natural. This is far from the truth, I have tried AXE and not once have I got jumped on by a hoard of excited girls. Instead of thinking the cologne developed by AXE is no different from any other; males have this idea that it will help them become the quintessential “Chick magnet”. Now this saying, our society always is looking for that one product that could change our life forever. This search is an example of Baudrillard’s idea of hyper-reality at work and it doesn’t just stop here. This idea is used throughout the advertising industry.
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