In this week’s Media Bites we look at a new Sobe commercial that was featured on the homepage of YouTube. The commercial uses traditional gender stereotypes where objectification of the female body is not only the norm, but is a male fantasy.

The commercial also uses some of the 2011 Sports Illustrated swimsuit models as a means of cross promotion of both the beverage and the sports magazine, something that appears on YouTube and FaceBook.

We direct people to resources that take a more detailed look at the objectification of the female body in advertising, with both a documentary film and an online resource called About Face.

In this week’s Media Bites we look at a Budweiser commercial that ran during the 2011 Super Bowl. The Budweiser spot is mocking the reality of Product Placement in films with numerous exaggerations.

In many ways the commercial depicts the pervasiveness of product placement in Hollywood Movies and Budweiser regularly buys time in films. We look at some recent examples of Budweiser being used in Hollywood films – Wolverine: X-Men Origins, Friday the 13^th and Star Trek. You can track product placement in films by year or brand at the online source BrandChannel.com.

In this week’s Media Bites we look at a new Axe body products commercial, which passes as a promotional piece for a new Axe charity challenge for college students.

The video invites colleges to participate in a competition to donate clothing, but the images continue to normalize sexualized gender roles and male fantasy. The reality for college campuses is less about sex and more about sexual assault, a fact which will not sell scented body spray.

In this week’s Media Bites we look at a series of ads, which are part of a campaign for the Toyota Highlander. The campaign uses child actor Riley Thomas Stewart to sell the company’s new line of SUV’s.

This ad campaign uses a child to pressure parents to purchase products based on what is cool. According to the documentary Consuming Kids, children under the age of 12 influence adult spending to the tune of $700 billion a year and this campaign is just one example of how influential children can be in adult consumer spending.

However, the commercial and the game itself does not only provides a false self of reality, particularly for what US soldiers truly experience, it also serves as a tool to normalize the use of violence and war as a means of resolving conflicts.

This ad is essentially trying to get viewers to associate all things American – baseball, cookouts, and concerts with their product. Thus montage of scenes and build up of the music underscore this message.

However, the commercial also uses images of a woman that seeks to present her as nothing more than a sexual being woven throughout the spot.

In this week’s Media Bites we take a look at a recent commercial from the Dodge car company. The ad wants viewers to equate their vehicles with political freedom and use a re-creation of a battle from the Revolutionary War to illustrate this point.

The big difference with this battle scene is that George Washington is driving a Dodge Charger instead of a horse. The reality is that car dependency in this country has not really brought us more freedom. The social, political and ecological consequences have been devastating.

However, it is important that people understand that the shift away from mass transit systems in the 1920s was due mostly to an effort by General Motors and the Firestone Company to buy up urban trolley systems as is well documented in the film Taken for a Ride.

The commercial doesn’t make us think about global warming in systemic way, rather we are led to believe that if we just buy something we can save the planet. This is a growing theme presented by corporations and defenders of capitalism.