Over the span of time, changes have been evident. There has been an obvious advance in technology, communication, and language. These are all a big part of our culture; a huge part of who we are as human beings. And within all of this evolution and advance in our culture, there is a subsystem that controls our behavior without us even realizing it. One way that this can be evident is through advertisement. We as c collective do not realize that the things that we see and hear over and over unconsciously control and influence some of the choices that we make every day. This could also affect and develop our character and how we act towards others. Different things can affect us either in a good or a bad way. This is what Robert Lull and Brad J. Bushman were studying. They believed that the inclusion of sex and violence in different types of advertisements have a small but negative effect on the people of which the commercial is shown.  

       By looking at the way that the world is today and the way that the media uses sexual references, the study seemed to show the exact opposite results. To conduct the experiment Lull and Bushman compared sexual ads, violent media, violent ads, and sexual media to see the various effects it had on the people that watched them. They did this experiment 53 times on 8,489 participants. They wanted to test and measure the brand memory, attitude the customer had toward the brand and buying intentions of the customer. In the experiment, Lull and Bushman showed different commercials to the different groups of people. They showed an assertion between commercials that are positive and the commercials that had sex or violence related to it.   They showed these different commercials and ads to the control group of people. After the commercials were shown, they asked the people which commercial they remembered the best. Lull and Bushman also asked which commercial made a good impact on each individual. Then they asked which product would they buy after seeing the ads. This was the information needed to show the data of the buyer’s intention.

After the experiments were conducted the results that came back were similar to the hypothesis in the beginning. Overall, negative media ended up having a negative effect on the audience of which it was being presented to.  Violent media tended to be remembered much less than media without it. Different people from the experiment reported feeling “uncomfortable” with images being displayed. Therefore this will also bring down the likeliness of the product being purchased. Nonviolent ads were valued much more. They were seen as more appealing and professional. When a commercial didn’t have anything related to violence in it, inappropriate slang, or vulgar language, it was more likely for the recipient to retain the information that they were being shown. I also showed that people tended to actually watch the commercial.  Also on the sexual side of the study shows that as the intensity of the sexual content in an ad increases, then the positive attitude toward the ad decreases and have lower buying intentions. A lot of times, the intensity of the sexual content turns people away. They don’t feel comfortable watching it and so they don’t retain the information. In most cases, they didn’t even finish the commercial.  Again, if the commercial is not remembered then the product will not be bought and in the end, the company loses its audience.

         This study initially showed the problem with incorporating sexual innuendos and violence into commercials. The effect of injecting these negative influences into something like television, something we watch and see every day, it has an overall negative effect on different people in different ways. One prominent group or factor that went into this was the age of the participants. After the experiment, the data showed that people of older age had the most problems with the incorporation of sex and violence in commercials and ads. Most of the older generation had children. A key point that was consistent across the board was the children. A parent is not going to want their children seeing and hearing negative influences from television. They want to be able to feel that their children are safe to watch television without having to worry about negative influences or inappropriate language or images. Another factor of age was the cultural aspect. The older generation found that the ads were offensive and they didn’t want to see them at all.  

         Gender also played a large part in the experiment. In the study, there was a higher percentage of brand memory impairment among the men when it came to the sexual content. However, when it came to the commercials with violence, males were more likely to engage in aggressive behavior. A common theory is that males would be more drawn to, or have more interest in physical attractiveness. So, it made sense that they had memory impairments.

         After looking at all of the data and the effect that it had on people, one can see how much we are influenced by media. Companies are always trying to get our attention, and sometimes they use unorthodox approaches to do so. I don’t think that we could ever reach a point where we wouldn’t be influenced by the images and media that we are faced with. However, I think that it is better to be more aware of what is going on and how it could affect us as individuals. We should not condone sex and violence to be incorporated in our media. It is a different time and that sell tactic does not have the same effect that it did back in the day. But the media will continue to work as it has been; there is not much we can do. But we can be aware of what we are watching and how it influences us.