Roughly sixteen thousand are witnessed every day. They are prevalent in almost every part of our lives and there is almost no way to stop it. Weather we locate them on busses, planes trains, streets, cars, or any location, they are similar to a cancer that cannot be removed because of the society we live in. They can have a huge influence on us or sometimes they can fly by us; or so we think. Advertisements influence audiences by appealing through emotion and providing a solution, however, the main impact is through a technique called “referencing”.
When trying to sell a product or service, advertisements will often include actors that display the same feeling about an item or service that they wish the audience to feel or they will associate the product to a feeling. The managing director of BrainJuicer Labs, a service in the field of advertising and marketing, Orlando Wood, stated that “Fame and emotional advertising is the best predictor of effective marketing and sales just about every time.” This is because the audience wants to be like society and the actor in the advertisement is displayed as a stereotypical person of society. His or her emotional appeal on the advertisement towards the product will in turn be displayed to the audience as similar to “everyone else” in the world and in order to fit in with the group, they will act the same way towards the product. According to chron.com, “advertising that inspires basic emotional responses, such as hope, fear and desire, offers the chance for resolution of these feelings by buying a particular product or service.” In this case, it is somewhat of a reverse emotional appeal. For example, an advertisement could make someone feel terrible towards blue shirts so they would by t...
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... the positive feelings associated with the amazing yet impractical situations in the ad can make the audience aspire to own the product that could make them live in a world “just like the ad”.
We may not always be on the upper hand when it comes to advertisements. Many different techniques that ad developers have created influence their audiences greatly. If the salesmen can tap into the thoughts of the audience so to speak, then they can sell the product to the audience. After choosing a targeted audience, if they are able to appeal to the emotion they would like them to feel, solve a problem for them, and/or “reference” a utopia for them, the product or service will flourish. We may feel as though we are smarter than the advertisement, however, are we? We always need to watch out for the tricky methods that ad developers are evolving to sell the “next big thing”
emotions. Sut Jhally describes ads as "the dream life of our culture" and explains the persuasive
Today, we are bombarded by messages; not just text messages, or electronic messages, but marketing messages. With modern technological advances, advertisers are competing for the consumer’s attention. When we are crowded by these images, we no longer recognize them and fall into their carefully designed traps. This behavior leads to more extreme tactics deployed by the mass media to catch the attention of its demographic. Eventually, the companies are producing and promoting propaganda. This trend is pointed out in the non-fiction book, Age of Propaganda: The Use and Abuse of Persuasion by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson. The two authors explain how the media and advertisers use a calculated formula to convince viewers and consumers to buy their product. The way advertisers do this so effectively is through using the “four stratagems of influence,” as coined by Pratkanis and Aronson. These stratagems are as follows: pre-persuasion, source credibility, message and emotions. Each section is a complicated and yet applicable device to influence and dupe consumers.
A person is subjected to numerous advertisements throughout their everyday lives via television, applications, radios and the internet. Due to the massive numbers of advertisements seen by the public, advertisement designers pose manipulative tactics known as propaganda techniques. As seen in the article “Propaganda Techniques in Today’s Advertising,” the author Ann McClintock states and lists the seven tactics of propaganda used and seen unknowingly in common advertising. McClintock shares “One study reports that each of us, during an average day, is exposed to over five hundred advertising claims of various types” (McClintock 205). This factor causes advertisements to incorporate propaganda into their selling of products. Two advertisements which are composed for opposite audiences do not only contrast but are similar in the form in which they are portrayed to the audience.
“Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.” ~J.B. Priestley sums up the reality of our media today. We are constantly being influenced and affected by advertisements and how we react to them. Advertisements have a great effect on us and how we operate. Advertisements attempt to control what we should wear, how we should look, what we should eat, what we should do, how we should think, and how we should smell. This magazine advertisement is very convincing of what type of perfume we should wear. “Moschino Couture!” uses an attractive woman, simplistic layout and sample perfume to sell us the product we all yearn for.
Advertisements are tricky, and often deceiving. The marketing techniques implemented by various companies are meant to attract the consumers to their products, and simply get them to buy the product. There are ten distinctive methods that Jeffery Schrank notes in his article “The Language of Advertising” including the following: weasel claims, “we’re different and unique” claim, endorsements, rhetorical questions, the “so what” claim, the vague claim, the unfinished claim, the “water is wet” claim, the scientific or statistical claim, and the “compliment the consumer” claim. These claims are discussed in the subsequent paragraphs and example advertisements are given.
Postman states, advertisements were created to “appeal to understanding, and not to passion” (60). It is also stated that producers would make the assumption “that potential buyers were illiterate, rational, and analytical.”(58) Though Neil Postman makes it apparent that advertisers are not always truthful about what they say. Advertisers also tried to appeal to the masses by coming up with catchy slogans to lure people in.
People come across hundreds of advertisements daily without giving it a second thought. Advertisements are presented to people by TV commercials, magazine ads, billboards, radio commercials etc. They surround people in almost every aspect of life. These companies use consumer psychology to invoke emotions or feelings in the consumers to make them want the product being advertised. An extremely effective way to appeal to consumers emotions is the advertisement tool of short commercials. The company Johnson’s appeals to customers very well in their advertisements. They use the Nurture appeal to attract mothers/care takers to take an interest in their products.
Charles A O’Neil explains how advertising is made of a simple language which includes short words, pictures, symbol and slogans. He writes that advertisements is being edited into its simplicity form which is the advertising language. These advertisements may seem casual and natural but they are carefully made to get our attention into buying what they are selling. “Every successful advertisement uses a creative strategy based on an idea intended to attract and hold the attention of the targeted consumer audience”. O’Neil also lets us be aware that advertisement wasn’t as easy as we thought it was, like slogans have been engineered so that we remember them even if we refuse to, or that images have been carefully chosen
Advertisements are one of many things that Americans cannot get away from. Every American sees an average of 3,000 advertisements a day; whether it’s on the television, radio, while surfing the internet, or while driving around town. Advertisements try to get consumers to buy their products by getting their attention. Most advertisements don’t have anything to do with the product itself. Every company has a different way of getting the public’s attention, but every advertisement has the same goal - to sell the product. Every advertisement tries to appeal to the audience by using ethos, pathos, and logos, while also focusing on who their audience is and the purpose of the ad. An example of this is a Charmin commercial where there is a bear who gets excited when he gets to use the toilet paper because it is so soft.
This book has opened a whole new perspective on advertising and the reasons we buy things and regret them later. Thinking that I have the urge for a McDonalds hamburger may feel real, or it might just be an elaborate, expensive advertising technique used to manipulate my buying behavior.
“The Persuaders” by Frontline is about how advertising has affected Americans. It starts out by stating the problem of attaining and keeping the attention of potential customers. Balancing the rational and emotional side of an advertisement is a battle that all advertisers have trouble with. Human history has now gone past the information age and transcended into the idea age. People now look for an emotional connection with what they are affiliated with. The purpose of an emotional connection is to help create a social identity, a kind of cult like aroma. Because of this realization, companies have figured out that break through ideas are more important than anything else now. But there are only so many big
The technology of today has allowed for advertising to reach every corner of our lives. Commercials show on the television, pop-ups and sidebars are on your favorite website, and in the games you play on your phone. Noël Sturgeon and Jean Kilbourne both look at the effects that advertisers use, with Sturgeon it is nature used in ads, and Kilbourne focuses on women.
Helen Ingham states that “Depending upon the media used, adverts generally consist of images, text and sound. Each of these aspects are encoded with various meaning and messages, some of which are associated with the particular product the advertisement is trying to sell, and some of which are associated with its image.” According to Ingham, ads/commercials are everywhere, and they all have one thing in common. They all contain the messages that mainly aim to persuade people to consume their product. By various different methods, they slowly engage the consumers’ needs in certain ways. The most common strategy that ads/commercials are using may also include any of the fifteen basic appeals by Jib Fowles. In Fowles’s article “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals”, he discovered the 15Human emotional appeals that advertisers use to market their products. He writes, “By giving form to people’s deep-lying desires and picturing states of being that individuals privately yearn for, advertisers have the best chance of arresting attention and affecting communications.” The Ultimate Driving Machine BMW nine minute commercial called “Star” directed by Guy Ritchie is focused on their new model of BMW M5 2000 featuring celebrities Clive Owen and Madonna. More to the observation, their strategy was to use one celebrity style of catch the audience’s attention, and four emotional appeals, which were the need to escape, the need to aggress, the need to achieve, and the need to feel safe to persuade their audience.
Advertising generally tries to sell the things that consumers want even if they should not wish for them. Adverting things that consumers do not yearn for is not effective use of the advertiser’s money. A majority of what advertisers sell consists of customer items like food, clothing, cars and services-- things that people desire to have. On the other hand it is believed by some advertising experts that the greatest influence in advertising happens in choosing a brand at the point of sale.
Nowadays, advertisements are everywhere embedded in our daily life. They are powerful resources that inform people the latest news about a particular product or brand in many different ways. Most of the people are being able to get more information and detail of a product from media, radio stations, newspapers and internet. Even though advertising is a big informative source, it also can be considered as a marketing tool to control the mind and desires of the consumers to manipulate and persuade them to buy things they do not need.