The quest to stay young looking has become a virtual passion especially as baby boomers move through middle age.  You can see it in commercials, particularly for women, who maintain that the effects of age can be defeated so the skin can remain smooth, soft and wrinkle free.  While it’s easy to discount this quest for great looking skin as vanity, there is truth to the idea that taking good care of our skin is a worthwhile ambition for baby boomers as they approach their retirement years.

Often we don’t think a lot about our skin.  It seems so self sufficient and self healing that we take for granted that it will just get better when it suffers mild abrasions or cuts or other ailments.  Few of us take the time to appreciate the fact that the skin is one of vital organs (the largest one) and that we should take care of it with as much concern as we do for our heart and lungs.

Maintaining robust health is a goal for baby boomers who have always been driven to fight the effects of aging and stay youthful.  So just as we all have worked together to become aware of the risks for heart disease, cancer and other endemic problems as we age, we should also become well informed on lifestyle choices that can affect the ability of our skin to stay healthy and able to take good care of us well into our golden years.

There is no other body organ that is so exposed to damage and so rugged in resisting the wear and tear of the world than the skin.  But the elements and even things we do can cause wear and tear on the skin and cause it to become dry, wrinkled and eventually more susceptible to disease.  Some of the things we can do from a lifestyle point of view to give our skin a head start on staying healthy throughout our lives are…

·    Protect the skin from the extremes of temperature such as harsh wind and cold.  These elements will dry the sin and lead to preliminary aging if we don’t take care earlier in life.

·    Similarly being sensible about exposing our skins to the sun just makes sense.  The quest for a good tan, while attractive in the short term, is not good skin care long term.

·    It doesn’t pay to wash the skin in harsh soaps or to scrub it too harshly.  While it is good to maintain a clean lifestyle and clean the skin regularly, we have to remember that harsh soaps and being too aggressive with the skin can wear it down and remove natural lubrication and cleansing agents that the skin generates to take care of itself.

·    Some habits such as smoking which we already identified for other health risks, are also hard on the skin.  All you have to do is to look at the face of a lifelong smoker to see the deep lines and the deterioration of the skin caused by that habit to make you want to throw your smokes out the window.

Good skin care like tooth care and care of other part so your body require regular attention, good life style habits and common sense.  Just as over attention to brushing the teeth can be as harmful as good, excessive washing and obsession about the skin is just as damaging as neglecting it.

There are proactive things we can do from a lifestyle point of view to give the skin the care it needs to do it’s job of keeping us healthy.  Routine use of coconut oil each night helps the skin remain smooth and healthy and is a pleasant nightly ritual for you.  Good diet with an emphasis on Vitamin A and including generous portions of fruit, vegetables and carrot juice can keep your skin healthy and robust well into those sunset years.  And as baby boomers move into that stage of their lives, they will benefit from a lifestyle of good skin care that started early and continued throughout life.

Baby boomers may not have a corner on the market for an urgent desire to stay youthful but they certainly have set a high standard for creating a virtual avalanche of products and services to attend to that need.  The quest to look young in baby boomers has resulted in an explosion of profits in the cosmetic and plastic surgery markets.  It’s easy to criticize the desire of baby boomers to want to see themselves as youthful as simple vanity.  But it goes a lot deeper than that.

It doesn’t take a lot of research or analysis to see that baby boomers grounded their identities in the youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s.  Before the boomer generation erupted like a generational volcano, there really was no youth movement.  But in the 1960s, when youth culture virtually took over American and indeed world culture, everything changed for baby boomers and that change was never really reversed.

The culture of that time that now seems very long ago, was one of the adoration of youth.  That desire to put age on a pedestal and worship everything about being young has permeated the culture even as the boomer generation moved into middle age and now is on the verge of creating the largest retirement generation ever.

Not all of the youth worship that is easy to document in baby boomers is just about looking sexy and dreading the physical changes of growing older.  Some of what boomer’s love about the concept of youth has to do with the idealism and the commitment to causes that is common in young people.  The desire to change the world and to be a force to make mankind better was part of what made the new youth culture in the 1960s so unique.  And because those values are laudable, we really can’t completely condemn the desire by baby boomers to stay youthful.

So the quest to stay young often manifests itself in cosmetic attempts to look young.  You can almost understand the appeal.  We all like to look good.  But the real source of youth is not a tight butt and abs and smooth, wrinkle free skin.  The phrase “you are as young as you feel” is often scoffed at by baby boomers as a cheap cop out.  And it can be used to have an excuse to behave younger than you are and perhaps want to socialize with younger people in an inappropriate way.  But it can also reflect that an inner youthfulness which is fueled by a youthful outlook on life and a basic policy of good health and exercise will keep anyone spy and vital well into their senior years.

It is when baby boomers combine those elements of “inner youthfulness’ with their cosmetic efforts to stay young that they really do retain much of their youth beyond what their years would report.   We all have met an elderly man or woman who is so full of life and fun that they leave you feeling older than they are.  The sparkle in the eye, the curiosity about everything life has to offer and that optimism and idealism that you ordinarily associate with teenagers is truly inspiring when it is being expressed by a senior citizen.

This is the real youth movement that the baby boomer generation is pioneering.  It is more than dying the hair or using Botox and wrinkle creams.  It is about being strong role models to the youth coming up that they don’t have to give up on their dreams and that their idealism and excitement in living can thrive no matter what age they are.  And if that is the legacy of the baby boomer generation, it’s a fine ethic for them to leave behind for future generations to enjoy.

Outdoor advertising is a low budget and effective way of advertising a company’s product. Among the entire methods billboard advertising is the most sort after method, which has been proven to be the best sales strategy in the recent times. Nearly 5.6 billion dollar was spent on billboard advertising alone, in the year 2006, as analyzed by Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

Billboard advertising is the best bet in outdoor advertising and isn’t that costly. And with the amount of exposure the product gets the money is worth it. In the past few years several factors have triggered billboard advertising and cost effectiveness being one of the prime reasons. One of the reasons being if an ad is placed in the local newspaper or a television channel the advertisement gets noticed for only thirty seconds and when the same advertisement is placed on billboard, it gets noticed through out the day, for months. Thousands of people view billboard everyday on their way to jobs or home, it doesn’t get lost in the pages like an advertisement placed in a newspaper or magazine. There is a frequent and continuous delivery of message. No other advertising method can grab the attention of people like billboard advertising. It creates brand awareness and strong name recognition.

One of the reasons behind the cost being low is technology. In the early years the billboards were hand-painted due to which the labor cost was high. Now, advertisers design and print their advertisements on a huge poster board or vinyl board by a computer-aided printer, which is very cost effective. Creativity can be achieved to the highest extent, with ease and less money. The brighter, colorful, creative the advertisement is, the more eye-catching it is. With the advancements in technology, it takes very less time to design billboards with unlimited possibilities.

Before placing a billboard advertisement in a particular area it’s better that a research is done about the interest of the people in and around that area. Like if the advertiser desires to post a billboard advertisement on a highway, he can choose the advertisement on a motel, cafeteria, or gas station. Depending on the locality specific potential customers should be targeted.

The cost is really reasonable. It varies from $1,000 to $3,000 per month. Ten advertisements will cost around $ 30,000. It might look like a big amount, but it costs almost same if placing a full-page ad in a newspaper for only a day. And if the effectiveness is considered for both the methods, newspaper advertisements are not even half as effective as billboard advertisements. When an advertisement is placed in a newspaper or in a magazine, the customer should reach out to see the advertisement, but when an advertisement is placed on a billboard, it is like reaching to the customers.   

Thus, Billboard advertising has high-impact on people and is a cost-effective method of advertisement. The above-mentioned advantages are few of the many advantages of billboard advertising. And that’s the reason why all types of companies and businesses are choosing to go with billboard advertising. From placing the billboard at a theater multiplex, highway, airport, and even pasting them on cars, any kind of product can be advertised to any kind of audience. And the effectiveness of it can never be underestimated.

Featuring a female model in advertisements initially started with advertisements on products like alcohol and adult entertainment. The trend then spread like a wildfire in the market and is still being widely used although being exaggerated. It has become a compulsion now to have a beautiful model in all kinds of advertisement, which sometimes seems unnecessary. They seem to sell anything from shaving gel to cars.

Many women right activists say that the women are being projected as merely an object by such advertisements. But the harsh truth is that advertisements featuring women is influencing viewers of all ages and advertisers have realized this. The advertisement starts with an attractive woman posing in seductive ways followed by the product or the service offered by the company. The beauty of the model already lures the customer, so advertisers do not have to put in more effort to motivate them.

But there are certain drawbacks in using women models in some advertisements and if a consumer is smart enough, it won’t take time for him to realize that. It is totally irrelevant to feature a female model or an actress in advertisement promoting men products. Some good examples of this point are showing a woman in axe deodorant commercial and comparison of a partially nude woman’s body to the body of a car. Second drawback is due to more concentration on the model, the attention deserved by the product is not sufficient. The main focus of the advertisement is lost.

Surprisingly only few male models advertises for male oriented products. Even a picture of a woman on an Internet commercial seems not logical to some extent, as there are thirty percent of female internet users and seventy percent of male internet users, worldwide. To add to it, advertisers cannot explain why beautiful bodies bring success to advertisement.

Advertisements are convincing and motivating tool, which can leave a deep impact on the minds of the viewers and plays a major role in molding the culture and attitude of the people. Expansive and extensive portraying of women in this manner merely reduces their image to an object of passion. Emphasis is laid only on the physical beauty of the woman like features, body curves. After the commercial has been shot, using graphical technology, any kind of imperfection of the body is altered which in a way sends out the signal that only perfect people are meant to use the product.

The companies have a moral responsibility also in the society. These commercials have a negative impact on the society and leads to problems faced for the common woman. The major ill effect is the pressure on woman to get those near-perfect bodies. They get so pressurized that they take the unhealthy way to reach the set goals. They develop eating disorders; their health gets affected which may sometimes result in irreparable damages. And those who never make it to that point, face humiliation and get taunted by everyone around them. This results in depression and other long-term psychological diseases.

According to researches and surveys conducted, most of the women vow that commercials lower their self-confidence and they visualize themselves as unattractive due to the image being portrayed of the perfect woman in ads. In America, seventy-five percent of healthy females think that they are over-weight. Half of the women populations are on some kind of diet program and nearly ten million women suffer from serious eating disorders. The weight of a fashion model is twenty three percent less than an average weighed ordinary woman.

Advertisements haven’t spared women being beaten up. In a particular after shave lotion commercial, the background voice says that its essential to learn martial arts because once a man applies the company’s product, women around will be attracted and will pounce on him. Towards the end of the commercial, they show a male model kicking several women model that seem to have attracted to him. This is degradation of respect of women to the lowest level.

After all this exposure, women viewers identify themselves as the weaker sex. Some think that males decide their self-worth. Over exposure of women as sex objects have triggered cases of physical assault and rapes. Majority of the women are taking the wrong way to get those stick figures, which are results in diseases, sometimes leading to death. And most of this is attributed to the advertisements that pour into the lives of innocent people everyday. Marketing ethics should be built to raise the status of woman in the society and give them the due respect but not degrade them.