Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Influential Athletes

     Sports have became a big part of the American culture. Whatever sport you follow, you root for "your team,"and in away by playing for a specific city each team has a target market. People look up to athletes as role models and a lot of people are inspired by some athletes. I've found that companies using athletes are target marketing, such as the ad below for Hanes.

Michael Jordan in an advertisement for Hanes.
   
     This is ties into Joseph Turow's essay "Targeting a New World," because being an athlete or a fan of Michael Jordan is part of someone's lifestyle.

     Tattoos have became mainstream in society,and now they have became very popular among professional athletes. If you're watching basketball, baseball, boxing, or football you will see a lot of tattoos. In John Leo's "The Modern Primitives" he describes how we have a cultural crisis at hand. Body-modification has spread, but you rarely see athletes with piercings. Here is a picture of the athlete who really brought tattoos and piercings to the public eye.

Dennis Rodman

     Dennis Rodman is a prime example of what John Leo would call a member of the body-modification movement. In Stephanie Dolgoff's essay "Tattoo Me Again and Again"she described how each one of her tattoos represented an event in her life. Dennis Rodman, like Dolgoff, is the type of person who is who he is and proud of it regardless of what others think. I'm sure that he would agree with Dolgoff in that his reasons for getting his tattoos make sense to him and that's all that matters. He didn't have the best reputation in the NBA, he was always looked at as a loose canon. Regardless of his actions on the court, he represented a change in professional sports with his tattoos, piercings, and dyed hair. Now if a player dyes his hair, has tattoos, and/or has piercings they don't stand out like Rodman once did. This supports John Leo's theory of people in the body-modification are having to go to extremes to stand out from the crowd now, and maybe in some ways it may represent a lack of power in willing to change the way things our. Cultural crisis or just modern society, either way athletes are influencing us more and more through the media.

Heres a link of an article discussing how athletes are being used in the media for advertisement purposes.
http://www.talentzoo.com/news/Why-Athletes-Are-the-Perfect-Team-Players-in-Media/788.html

1 comment:

  1. Great post, good visuals and interesting observations here. Made me think about how athletes are definitely made into celebrities in our culture. The scary thing is how often we make them role models, and how often they prove they are human just like the rest of us. (Example, Tiger Woods). And just like all celebrities, we idolize and worship them until they make a mistake. Then it seems like the culture turns on them and rips them apart. I guess it is part of the human condition.

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