The Persuaders Frontline Summary

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Stephen O’Neill The Persuaders “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 …show more content…

TiVo was one of the very first products that allowed people to do this. Advertisers were now worried about their industry. How were they supposed to advertise to people if the people refused to watch them and you could no longer force them to? Their solution was to put the advertisements within the products themselves. They could pay producers to put their products in their stories. Then they found out that their advertisements would be more effective when they put them in the product, even more powerful when the advertisement evolves and turns into a character themselves. Another new strategy is using specific words and emotions to make customers more interested and retain information. Frank Luntz believes that 80% life is emotion and only 20% is intellect. He says we should focus on selling an emotion with the product, and to do this you use very specific words. Words provide us a way to understand emotion. Specific words trigger specific emotions which are able to change our outlooks on certain products or …show more content…

Starbucks and other companies have found a new way to add economic value, and what they are selling is emotion and a feeling of belonging. Companies have now stopped trying to sell just their products, they are now making you feel good about buying their product. Bill Silver uses the example of the blueberry muffin. If you buy the blueberry muffin, then you get to eat a tasty pastry. But if you don’t buy a muffin, you still feel good about yourself because you resisted urge of buying that blueberry that would have costed you money and make you not as

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