[SPOTTED]: Media Manipulation in the Tide Philippines commercial ad during the Pandemic.
Since the start of the pandemic, several brand companies have used the situation of the world as a concept for their product advertisement. This strategy is seen across social media, where people usually spend most of their time, especially during the lockdown period. Brand endorsements in the Philippines also use this strategy to promote a product as it is timely and relevant to consumers' experiences. With that, a product advertisement of Tide Philippines entitled "Mag Tide PERFECT CLEAN with NO MORE BRUSH or BLEACH!" was uploaded on their youtube account on August 7, 2020 (Tide Philippines, 2020). This television commercial was about Tide being the standard for cleaning and detergents. The advertisement began by using the situation of the pandemic wherein a barangay officer says the word "bawal" to the people violating the pandemic rules, such as the girls that have no social distance between each other and the other girl who has no face mask. All these scenes lead to the officer pointing at brand x, an anonymous detergent brand, and saying the same word, "bawal," and then suddenly saying yes to the Tide product, which comes with the animation of Tide quickly passing through a dirty shirt and then suddenly becoming clean. The concept of applying these pandemic guidelines was intended to attract social media users, especially Filipinos, during the lockdown of 2020.Â
As there are various detergent and cleaning products in the market, the Tide detergent commercial is necessary to attract consumers to choose the product out of all the rival products. Advertising the Tide product will benefit consumers that are exploring different cleaning and detergent products. Also, this type of product advertisement will tend to lead the users into using their product as they are manipulated by the techniques used to create the commercial (Gupta, 2022). One of which is the propaganda technique called name-calling because the other cleaning and detergent product or so-called brand x in the commercial was being shown as a poor-quality product to make Tide stand out from the rest of the products (Gupta, 2022). Another type of media manipulation is visual media manipulation, which was present in the scene where a Tide sachet passed on a dirty shirt, making it instantly clean. In visual media manipulation, using a fake video and skit instantly catches the audience's attention (Spacey, 2020).Â
All in all, may this post enlighten the users about the different perspectives of media manipulation and how it affects the audience. Some manipulations could barely affect someone, but more advertisements negatively affect people. With that, let us all critically analyze everything we see in social media to avoid being manipulated by these techniques.
References:
Gupta, S. (2022). Types Of Propaganda Used In Advertising.
 Incrementors. https://www.incrementors.com/blog/types-of-propaganda-used-in-advertising/
Spacey, J. (2020). 17 Examples of Media Manipulation. Simplicable.
https://simplicable.com/society/media-manipulation
Tide Philippines. (2020). Mag Tide PERFECT CLEAN with NO MORE
BRUSH or BLEACH! [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmauKjBZbRs