Abstract

Advertising is information that aims to persuade. The phenomenon of advertising connects the professional supplier (creator) and the consumer (receiver) under particular market dynamics and within the framework of a specific social and cultural context that reveals the complexity and significance of the act of consumption. However, the regulation of advertising has been mostly focused on the professional supplier’s duty to inform, on the one hand, and on the consumer’s access to information. In this article, I argue that in order to assess the scope of the impact of the phenomenon of advertising in our society and, in particular, of advertising that conveys gender stereotypes, we must abandon the simplified construal of advertising as information, of the professional supplier as informant, and of the consumer as informed sovereign. Such representations that completely disregard context can hardly help in the tasks of rethinking regulation of current advertising and proposing legal responses that are more sensitive to advertising’s persuasive aspect and thus better suited to deal with the problem of stereotyped advertising in our society.

Keywords

advertising gender stereotypes abusiva advertising cognitive biases manipulation in the market persuasive advertising subliminal impact gender identity gender equality