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The purpose of advertising is to make you feel dissatisfied with your life, unfulfilled and discontented. Somehow your life is not complete, something is missing. What will bring that sense of peace and fulfillment? The most successful ad campaigns connect a fundamental human need with a product. The individual develops a sense of “needing” the product.
One of the strategies for resisting commercial messages is to gain knowledge about how these messages are constructed and the techniques used to persuade us to buy. Listed below are some common techniques used by advertisers:
- Bandwagon – everybody is doing it!
- Humor
- Fear
- Testimonials
- Nostalgia
- Warm & Fuzzy
- Beautiful people
Do you understand the language of media?
Advertisers spend big bucks constructing commercials to influence your spending. In fact, far more money goes into producing commercials than producing the programs we watch. It is important for all of us to be media literate – to be able to look at a piece of media such as a magazine ad or television commercial and do a deconstruction. This is a basic media literacy skill. When you view a commercial on TV for example, are you able to answer the following questions:
- Who created and/or paid for this message and for what purpose?
- Who is this message intended for and how can you tell?
- What techniques are used to inform, persuade, entertain, and attract attention?
- What are the specific messages being communicated about certain people, places, events, behaviors, lifestyles, etc.?
Doing a deconstruction reminds us that we are being persuaded to buy a product or service (or an idea) and the techniques used are specifically to appeal to us as a target audience. Some of the best examples are tobacco advertising. It takes some pretty slick advertising to convince us to buy and consume a product proven to be hazardous to our health.
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Come and buy your Shards O’Glass!
This is an ad produced by www.americanlegacy.org to demonstrate the irony in having the tobacco industry develop a prevention program.
» WEBSITE
Techniques used to sell tobacco – can you spot these in magazine ads for cigarettes?
- Beautiful people – men in women in print ads for cigarettes are attractive
- Youth – usually print ads depict young people
- Healthy – Individuals look like the picture of health
- Engaged in physical activities such as swimming, line skating, surfing, etc.
- Branding or connection with an image - independence, toughness, femininity, power, strength, the cowboy, sexiness etc.
Who is the primary target of tobacco advertising?
Targets of Advertising. (If you guessed “youth,” you were right!)
Anti-tobacco organizations have used media literacy and the ability to deconstruct and analyze ads by tobacco companies to demonstrate to youth the sophisticated techniques used to persuade them to consume a product that is potentially life threatening.
The truth campaign is the largest national youth-focused anti-tobacco education campaign. It is designed to engage teens by exposing Big Tobacco’s marketing and manufacturing practices, as well as highlighting the impact of tobacco in relevant and innovative ways.
Television cannot advertise hard liquors, but the commercials for beer (often televised during sports) are also excellent examples for deconstruction. What do most beer commercials imply about the importance of relationships, for example?
How do advertisers target underage drinkers?
Explore this website for some more examples of the techniques used to persuade us to drink alcohol, especially those who are underage.
The Truth Campaign and Adbusters have done a great job with “spoof ads” that mock the messages of tobacco and alcohol advertising. Here are some examples from the Adbusters website.
And these spoof ads are from The truth campaign
» WEBSITE
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Advertising at its best is making you feel that without a product, you’re a loser.
Nancy Shalek,
Former President, Grey Advertising
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