AP English Practice Essay
Advertising both contributes positive and negative effects to society. As advertisements promote prosperity, it also is propaganda. Although one effect of advertising is to encourage people to help the less fortunate, overall the negative effects of promoting poor decisions about health and creating divisions in society outweigh any benefits.
Advertising positively impacts society in that it promotes prosperity by encouraging people to help the less fortunate. One of many advertisers who promote prosperity by encouraging people to help the less fortunate is the American Red Cross. In the American Red Cross advertisement, the band aid symbolizes how simple and easy it is to donate blood pain free (Red Cross). This promotes prosperity in that it makes it easier for people to take part in saving people’s lives in need of blood. Being this simple and easy, people all around the world will be convinced to donate blood, resulting in no shortage of blood donations and a decrease in death rate. St. Jude’s Research Hospital is another example of how advertisements promote prosperity by encouraging people to help the less fortunate. In their advertisements, they show sick kids diagnosed with cancer and ask for donations to their cancer research program. St. Jude’s Research Hospital promotes prosperity by also saving lives of people in need and more than that, it funds cancer research. This is significant because the research for cancer could possibly lead to the finding of cures so that nobody in the world has to suffer of cancer.
Advertising negatively impacts society in that it is propaganda because it promotes poor decisions and creates divisions in society. Smoking advertisements produces confusion in having "promoted the continued social acceptability and encouraged the incorrect belief that the majority of people smoke" (Shaw). The effect of the encouragement of smoking advertisements on society is making people believe that