Subliminal Advertising
1.) On television, a common technique to influence a viewer is to flash messages or images for so little time, that it almost seems like a flicker that really never happened. Ways that this has been used is by flashing images that are pleasing to the eye, like a flashy color, or maybe even a picture with sexual innuendo. The cheapest technique, usually used by people, like car salesmen, is to ask the viewer a string of questions, which we all know will have the answer "yes." By doing this, the commercial gets you ready to agree with any pitch they are trying to make you buy.
2.) A more cunning way to make you buy a product is to brainwash your emotions, questioning yourself, "Would I be a bad person if I do not by this product?" For instance, the people that would like you to donate money to the sick, hungry children is some run-down village. They show you pictures of babies crying, adults with hardly any meat on their bones. The commercial then claims that by your donation, you can save a life, but if you do not, you're letting a life die. This technique is an effective way, but I believe that there are some ethics involved in purposely tampering one's emotions.
3.) A technique usually described as using "buzz words" is found more in print than on television or radio. If we are scrolling through a newspaper and we see an exciting flashy word, our eyes tend to draw towards it. Companies are entirely aware of this, so that’s why they flash words on their ads like, "FREE," "NEW," "HURRY." Something about these words makes us want to see what the fuss is all about, and to read the company's ad. Now when you do read the ad, there will be "buzz words" embedded into the ad that do not even look flashy.
It is always words that do not actually have any significant meaning, but they are added in anyways. For example, words like, homemade, improved, 100%, tasty, just to name a few.
4.) Michael Jordan is selling you Gatorade, Jerry Seinfeld is backing up American Express, and Paul Reiser wants you to use AT&T. Why do these famous stars appear on commercials and ads? The purpose is to subliminally give the product traits that it never even deserves, like wealth, fame, and success.
The question often is what makes a good advertisement? The answer is simple, it should be able to grab the attention of the targeted audience, and even better it should be able to make the targeted audience fall in love with the advertisement so that they can be persuaded to achieve the desired results. Of all the forms of advertisement, TV commercials always are the best considered effective way to pass the message to the targets. I believe that the combination of audio-visual effects can engrave the commercial into the hearts and minds of the viewers and that is why I have chosen to analyse a TV commercial by Weetabix: Weetabix Chocolate Dubstep Cereal Commercial.
In this generation businesses use commercial to persuade different types of audiences to buy their product or to persuade them to help a certain caused. If you analyze commercial you can see how certain things play a major role in the success of a commercial. The ad I decide to analyze as an example is the commercial snickers used during the Super Bowl in 2010;”Betty White”-Snickers. This commercials starts off with guys playing a game of football with an elderly women know as Betty White. As Betty White tries to play football she is tackled to the ground. Her teammates refer to her as Mike when they come up to her to ask why she has been “playing like Betty White all day”. This helps inform the audience that Betty White is not actually playing but instead represent another teammate. As the guys keep arguing Mikes girlfriend calls her over and tells her to eat a snicker. Betty White takes the first bite and then suddenly a man appears in her place ready to finish the game. At the end of the commercial the statement "You're not you when you're hungry" is shown followed by the Snickers bar logo. What this commercial is trying to show is that hunger changes a person, and satisfying this hunger can change you back to your normal self. They use different types
One of my favorite commercials to watch is the Chick-Fil-A commercials. Their commercials are very ironic but at the same time interesting and entertaining. The main purpose of their commercial is to persuade an audience to go and buy their product or maybe convince an audience to come back again and buy more of their product. They are able to influence their audience through the use of rhetorical elements. Rhetorical elements include: the rhetor, discourse, audience, and rhetorical triangle. Their commercials don’t necessarily target one particular audience, they incorporate different ideas into their commercial to target different audiences such as families, and football fans.
What captures the attention of people when they view an advertisement, commercial or poster? Is it the colors, a captivating phrase or the people pictured? While these are some of the elements often employed in advertising, we can look deeper and analyze the types of appeals that are utilized to draw attention to certain advertisements. The persuasive methods used can be classified into three modes. These modes are pathos, logos, and ethos. Pathos makes an appeal to emotions, logos appeals to logic or reason and ethos makes an appeal of character or credibility. Each appeal can give support to the message that is being promoted.
Have you ever seen an advertisement for a product and could immediately relate to the subject or the product in that advertisement? Companies that sell products are always trying to find new and interesting ways to get buyers and get people’s attention. It has become a part of our society today to always have products being shown to them. As claimed in Elizabeth Thoman’s essay Rise of the Image Culture: Re-Imagining the American Dream, “…advertising offered instructions on how to dress, how to behave, how to appear to others in order to gain approval and avoid rejection”. This statement is true because most of the time buyers are persuaded by ads for certain products.
emotions. Sut Jhally describes ads as "the dream life of our culture" and explains the persuasive
The power of subliminal advertising in effecting consumers is still unproven. The concept of subliminal advertising is based on a "threshold". "This [is] thought to be a fixed point below which awareness does not extend." (Sutherland: p.30) If a word is flashed on a television screen for 50 milliseconds a person would not be conscious of it. If the time of the exposure is increased the word crosses the threshold and a person becomes consciously aware of the word. This process varies within the same person from day to day. For example, if a person is hungry while watching television, advertisements of food will be noticed more than if that same person just ate. Sometimes we are more alert than at other times. The effects of being tired, using drugs or alcohol can also vary when a stimulus is registered.
In his 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard warned the American public that "Large-scale efforts are being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes... Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, hidden" (1). Packard was convinced - perhaps rightly so - that advertisers were "professional persuaders" whose marketing techniques were deceptive and overly manipulative. Not only were advertisers becomingly increasingly adept at developing campaigns, pitches, and slogans to send specific messages to targeted consumer populations, but some had gone so far as to suggest that such messages could be effective even if they were presented below the level of conscious awareness. James Vicary, one of the market researchers and entrepreneurs profiled in Packard's book, claimed to have developed a machine capable of flashing such unnoticeable, "subliminal messages" within big screen movies. Vicary had allegedly tested his technique by altering movies so that messages urging viewers to "Eat Popcorn" and to "Drink Coke" were displayed at regular intervals throughout the film for such brief durations that they could not be consciously perceived. Vicary claimed that his subliminal messages resulted in a significant increase in sales of popcorn and coke (1). Although no experiment involving subliminal messages has ever replicated the success which Vicary claimed to have achieved and, in fact, Vicary later admitted that it had been no more than a marketing gimmick, the possibility of subliminal or unconscious perception has not been dismissed. In fact, although the use of subliminal messages is generally considered a foolish and invalid practice, the more general phenomenon of subliminal/unconscious perception deserves to be reevaluated in light of current debates surrounding the nature of consciousness.
An average American is said to be exposed to about five thousand advertisements in one day. Through these ads, producers can connect with consumers at a manipulative level. That instead of just simply displaying their product to attract the consumers’ interest different motifs and sale pitches are used to manipulate customers into buying their product.
Advertising is designed to get information from the companies to the consumers. With that being said, there are several ways in which companies will go about this to ensure that their information is relayed to the consumers effectively and efficiently. According to George N. Root, from Demand Media, “advertising uses misguided promises of desired results to convince customers to purchase a product.” Nancy Day expresses in her book, when there are many of the same products, companies need to convince the public that their product is superior. Which results in an increase in the demand for advertising (7-8). This is when informative advertising turns into manipulative advertising. Root goes on to explain that advertising agencies use manipulative techniques such as “expert” opinion, attractiveness, lifestyle, and fear to control their audience.
In conclusion, I believe that the advertising can affect and manipulate consumers to buy things they do not actually need. Nevertheless, if we want to buy something, our decision-making processes will be additionally influenced by our income, relatives and lifestyle.
This paper is a piece of research involving a new measure in the ability to understand the effectiveness of a commercial. The project was evaluated by the rate of work given to be able to watch or listen to commercials. Techniques like the ones used reach back to a familiar name, B. F. Skinner. Recently, his techniques have been refined in order to study the behavior of humans. Changes and additions have been made to increase the ability of the recording apparatus. These include the recording of both forms separately, the ability to control slide or sound stimuli to keep from repetition or delays, and variations in the required amount of reaction for each subject. D’Arcy Advertising Company asked Associates for Research in Behavior (ARBOR) to use four separate, 60 second commercials. The main reasons for selecting four different commercials was to measure the different focus level for each, the different amount of interest for different forms of commercials of the same commercials, and to develop rankings for the commercials (Nathan & Wallace, 1965).
The textbook used in class (Huffman, 2002) describes that “advertising has numerous” methods to hook the individual into “buying their products and services.” The advertising. company surrounds a particular candidate such as a child and immediately sinks their teeth into the child’s mind to manipulate the child into desiring their products. Through TV, cartoons and magazine ads, children are hit by one subliminal message after another. They are shown how this product will improve their status by making them the envy of all their friends.
Advertisements are located everywhere. No one can go anywhere without seeing at least one advertisement. These ads, as they are called, are an essential part of every type of media. They are placed in television, radio, magazines, and can even be seen on billboards by the roadside. Advertisements allow media to be sold at a cheaper price, and sometimes even free, to the consumer. Advertisers pay media companies to place their ads into the media. Therefore, the media companies make their money off of ads, and the consumer can view this material for a significantly less price than the material would be without the ads. Advertisers’ main purpose is to influence the consumer to purchase their product. This particular ad, located in Sport magazine, attracts the outer-directed emulators. The people that typically fit into this category of consumers are people that buy items to fit in or to impress people. Sometimes ads can be misleading in ways that confuse the consumer to purchase the product for reasons other than the actual product was designed for. Advertisers influence consumers by alluding the consumer into buying this product over a generic product that could perform the same task, directing the advertisement towards a certain audience, and developing the ad where it is visually attractive.
Businesses are in game in order to earn money and advertising is the strongest weapon that helps to sell a particular product . An advertisement can be harmful and misleading as well as helpful and beneficial . Advertising in ethics is an unclear concept , but truly the main goals of corporations should be avoid misleading their customers by setting up wrong expectations and to keep their current clients .The major problem with advertising is that most of them are misleading . Advertisements create an unrealistic and sometimes irrelevant impression of an any particular product. Unfortunately, often , consumers become the victims of their tricks .