To present myself, my name is Arianna Manfredi and I’m a communication major at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. Born and raised in Genoa (Italy), I decided to move to Rome in 2018 to get my Bachelor’s Degree in a new and bigger city. Doing so, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and be able to catch the many opportunities that the Capital can offer. Since I started my university career, my curiosity about the communication side of marketing increased and it got deeper into a specific branch of marketing: advertising techniques and practices.

During this semester, I decided to explore the world of advertising in a peculiar way: investigating the hidden practices that corporations use to make profits, most of the time at the expenses of society. My first research was about subliminal advertising; through a blog, I went back to the history of subliminal messages and how those have been implemented in advertising.

In my blog posts I then analyzed the effects that the subliminal has on the society, and how this practice is still alive in the modern days. In my next project, the PSA, I studied how advertising has a great impact on women behaviors and it can lead to a mental problem called compulsive buying behavior, also named shopping addiction.

I was so fascinated about this topic that I also decided to do my press release about it, asking to the BBC to review the multimedia exhibition I was organizing. The third sub-topic I analyzed in the world of advertising is the objectification of women and how they are represented in advertising; I wrote the script of my Podcast about this topic, analyzing the presence of such issue in our modern times.