Youth & AdvertisingStereotypes, prejudices, invisibilization and adultcentrism

Abstract

The aim of this article is to contrast the category of youth, known as traditionally instituted social imaginary, with the perspective of a group of university students, from their statements about a group of advertising commercials. Results show that social imaginary has generated stereotypes, has tried to homogenize and invisibilize to youth people and that advertising had contributed to this situation through its statement. But also, findings evident certain resistance of the participants to this reduction and show their propositive role, distantly to the conception of passive and alienated consumer that the traditional critique has restored. Nevertheless, it does not stop considered to be the possibility that such a role should be promoted also by the statement itself as part of the advertising contemporary trends.

Inside the findings we find that adultcentrism imaginary of youth people as stage with characteristics that contrast with the adulthood answers to a simplification that does not contemplate the possibility that parents and children could share as “peer”, that is to say, as speakers who are validated mutually. This affirmation appears also as an affective need of friendship and dialog.