General thoughts

Classism in the media is a very big issue that society seems to turn a blind eye on.  Classism is seen everywhere, from movies to TV shows, to magazine ads and billboards.  But one outlet that it is seen basically daily is in television commercials.  A particular industry has a spot in my mind that I know tends to come across as classist every time that I see one of these ads on TV.  That particular industry is the automobile industry.  I find there to be just three target audiences to a car commercial, and of course it depends on the car company doing the branding that determines what class the ad is portraying and marketing to.  As one would expect, car brands such as Lexus, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac and Jaguar all portray a very high-class lifestyle and a stereotypical upper class person in their ads.  On the contrary, I was able to find a used car ad with a dancing chicken, which in a way displays a lower class car buying situation.   And as for the middle spectrum, there are the brands that you would expect such as Ford, Toyota, Hyundai and Chevrolet marketing their products to the middle class.  The ads that I find most interesting are those of the “higher class” brands, because they try so hard to be sophisticated and sometimes humorous to try and make the wealthy people watching that they would fit in with their brand.   The flip side of this would be that the “lower class” used car ads show two types, a humorous person yelling at you that they have low prices, or a compassionate person telling you that they have cars with low prices and that they are willing to finance and will not check your credit.