An Examination of Changing Values in Israeli Television Commercials between 2012 and 2016

Researchers have argued that advertisers use the public's values and conventional beliefs in their own interests, which allows us to learn about the dominant values in a society from its advertisements. In this article, we analyze the change in values reflected in Israeli television commercials between 2012 and 2016, and uncover messages that advertisers did not necessarily intend to convey. The analysis of the commercials in this study reveals how advertising has dealt with major changes in Israeli society. On the one hand, television commercials represented Israeli social values that appeared to have the intention of creating a positive feeling in the members of the target audience, such as a sense of home, familiarity, and belonging. In many cases, advertisers based their advertisements on family values, empathy, trust, and a pleasant aesthetic environment. But, at the same time, opposite messages were also being represented. We found that the television commercials emphasized inadequacy, social division, distrust, infidelity, irresponsibility, financial anxiety, and the subversion of child-adult and male-female relations.