All I have for now

Advertising is part of our lives, used constantly and commonly by everyone. It can be very useful and entertaining to inform, express, promote and communicate ideas, but it can also be very harmful at some point. The excessive manipulation, discrimination and stereotyping that the process of advertising creates in society should decrease, but beyond that, what has to change is society itself. People have to become advertising literate, learn how to interpret different messages sent by advertising, and don’t let those messages influence them to the point of shaping their lives solely according to patterns created by it. The techniques that advertisers apply are perfect to persuade the audience directly or indirectly, and the audience is the one who has to learn how to live with advertising, not from advertising. This language has grown so much in the past years, and it is going to continue developing new and fresh techniques to influence audience. As well, audience’s awareness has to keep growing too, and in that way the language of advertising will not be harmful to them.

I hope that throughout these seven entries about the techniques and influence of advertising I have given some interesting information that could help you to learn something new or entertain yourself. There are many other aspects of advertising that have not been covered, but at least this is a start. I hope to be writing more and maybe about advertising as well.

The Old and Actual Techniques

People need to be very careful with advertising. Advertising finds and knows every possible way in which they can get into people’s minds. Advertisers target their audience according to a person´s actions, age, gender, income, occupation, and household size. This reflects how they study the audience very much and know their weaknesses or strengths. For example, advertisers have been using a lot more ambient media, which are ads that become part of the environment of the targeted audience, and they are using it for a reason. Now a days the consumer tends to be wary of the ‘hard sell’ and constant exposure to advertising, so it often allows the message to slip beneath the ‘consumer radar’. Here it is seen how advertisers try to catch the audience or trap them when they least expect it using new tricks that people don’t know yet.

Advertisers have also realized that repetition of the message isn’t as influential as it used to be. Some years before, they would repeat a message several times to pass it along consumers, and in that way make them become familiar with the brand or product every time they would hear that message, but as already said, now audience has a greater power of decision whether to pay attention or not. For that reason, advertisers have concluded that instead of repetition of a message, people are more interested in something that would make them think a little bit more. Among these strategies is the use of figures of speech, also known as rhetorical figures (rhyme, hyperbole, puns, metaphor). The purpose of placing a rhetorical figure in a headline is to increase the probability that the consumer will pause on the ad, however briefly, and process its message to a deeper level. This technique of using rhetorical figures can be very useful in advertising because it makes people want to read ads even if it is just for fun, and in that way, at least advertisers can get people´s attention.

Another way of getting to people is through social advertising, an indirect form of advertising used to influence consumers´ decisions. Social advertising is when companies start helping a cause, usually environmental or of great interest to the society. Social awareness has grown tremendously in societies, and businesses want to be interested in what society is. The major reasons why companies get interested in this kind of advertising are: they want to build or strengthen good reputations of them and their products, make a strong, good impact on the public when they help social causes and maybe the third reason could be in some cases that they also want to help others. The point here is that traditional techniques are not working anymore.

One bad trick that was used in the old days, and still happens today is manipulating the truth. Even though, contrary to what happened a century ago, legislation has made it possible for audience to be protected against direct lies in advertising, it still deceives the public in many other ways. Sometimes advertisers change the real qualities or effects of a product just to sell it faster, but this trick doesn’t have a lasting effect. It is frequently used in special offers or short period products because the company wants to sell the product fast and get the money. Pete Barry, an advertising design professor at Syracuse University, says “If I had to pinpoint one reoccurring theme throughout the majority of the greatest advertising over the last fifty years it would have to be this: A truth”. People who know about advertising, know that a lie may work at first, but then the company, product, and agency can lose credibility forever.

Symbols and Fallacies in Advertising

Another technique that advertising uses to appeal to the emotional side of people is the use of symbols. “The symbols form a universal language which knows no frontiers, yet at the same time carries different associations or emotions depending on the viewer”. Symbols also unite and gather people together. In different cultures, symbols may be perceived differently, and sometimes that makes people identify with their community. Advertisers take advantage of this situation to get to masses. They use symbols that have emotional meaning to a group of people and in that way appeal to them. An example of this technique is when some advertisers use a country´s flag to appeal to the patriotic feeling of the audience or they say something like “our product is made entirely in America and we only hire American workers”. So in that way they motivate people to feel like patriots when buying that specific product. This use of symbols to defend an argument is an informal fallacy, which advertisers commonly use as another one of its tricks.

There are several fallacies used by advertising to try to influence the audience. Among them is the “appeal to emotions” fallacy. This one manipulates people’s emotions in order to get their attention away from an important issue. When someone’s appeal to you to accept their claim is accepted merely because it appeals to your feelings like anger, fear, grief, or love they are committing the appeal to emotions fallacy. Another fallacy, the bandwagon fallacy, creates the impression that everybody is doing it and so should you. If someone suggests that a claim is correct simply because it’s what most everyone is coming to believe, then they are committing the bandwagon fallacy. Another very common fallacy that they use is the appeal to false authority. Arguers appeal to false authority when they use famous persons (often movie stars and celebrities) to testify on issues about which these persons have no knowledge or expertise. Those commercials are very common; celebrities using a product and saying it really works, and because they say it, some people believe it.

Children see, children do

Advertising sends messages that have to be carefully interpreted and discerned by the receiver, but as children sometimes don’t know how to discern the message, this way of communicating can become very dangerous for them. Children are very vulnerable to change and shaping their habits according to what they see, and now a days, they are mostly seeing advertisings that can shape them in a negative way. Actually, children are exposed to a lot of dangerous media. Advertising of new toys is making them consumers since they are little, and getting them used to manipulation. Worst of all, children are learning to be discriminative and stereotyping from advertising. Commercials make them believe that they have to get the latest toy of the moment to be able to fit in, and that if someone does not have the new toy or fashion, then they don’t fit in.

Using his own experience as a father of a two year old child, journalist Constantine Von Hoffman explains and criticizes the influence that advertising has in children since they first open their eyes to the world. Decorating a baby´s room with commercial exposed themes like Disney or Warner Bros. is, according to Hoffman, probably the first unrealized media exposure that children experience. He also marks television as the downfall of parents and the main source of commercial exposure to children. The fact that sometimes working parents need a break from constant co-babysitting or just half hour to cook or clean makes it inevitable for them to let children watch some television.

Advertisers can´t deny that they are becoming every day more interested in children advertising. They are making researches about the impact of ads on children because they are seeing them as potential customers and an effective way of increasing advertising power. There are some researches that point that advertising among young people is negatively influenced by their specific age, for example, the older the child, the lower the ad effectiveness. This exemplifies the interest of companies to target younger children, to have a more effective advertising influence. Even though they are aware of the fact that children do change their behavior with specific advertising, they are willing to do what it takes to get their attention and make them buy specific products.

Images Creating Concepts

There are a lot of techniques and ideas that advertising uses to get to people’s minds. One of the most popular and effective in these days is through images. “The visual is typically seen as the quintessence of advertising culture, and the term ‘image-based culture’ has come to mean visual dominance in culture”. Images are very important to actual society. An example of this is watching movies from forty years back, when special effects were simpler and movies were a lot slower. People used to have so much fun watching them. Now, the more visual effects and the faster the scenes go, the better the movie is. Image strategies relate images, social issues and in some cases symbols to the brand, and appeal psychologically to the consumers. The psychological appeal of advertising is showing in these days the great effects that it has created. Women with anorexia and bulimia, people with very low self esteem, and a culture obsessed with looks.

Advertising has created a culture of appearance. It has made people believe that everyone has to be perfect. Women, since they are very young, have the idea and goal in their heads that they need to have the perfect body shape and proportion to be beautiful. They have to obtain the softest skin, and when they start to grow older they have to definitely do something about age marks. It’s not known if beauty products were made because people wanted them, or if people want them just because the products are made. I found out that Chinese women have increased their status and independence, and are inspired by western brands, music and images. This is a good example of how advertising and the use of images can have such an impact in a culture, to the extreme of even changing traditional beliefs and values. The same influence and manipulation has been applied with teens, but children take the worse part. In the next blog entry I will discuss how advertising influences children.

Advertising Does Work

It is very common to hear people saying that advertising does not affect them in any way; that only uneducated people could be influenced by it, not them; but this is not true. Some people might be deceived by the fact that advertising works in a lot of ways, some obvious, but others tricky. That’s why they could think that it hasn’t influence them. A good example of how almost everyone gets influenced by advertising is that people are getting medicines from advertisings more than from doctors´ prescriptions. So advertising does work, and it is not a bad thing. In fact, every person has advertised something at least once in their lives; when someone introduces itself to another person, defends a thought or idea, and other daily situations. It is clear, then, that advertising is in fact part of everyone’s lives, and for that reason it is important that people start understanding and paying attention to its benefits and controversies.

Not only is advertising part of everyone’s lives, but a very important part in it. People don’t realize how influential it is in current society. It supplies cultural patterns that have become the ones which shape and guide the lives of people. Like always, people are very used to shape their lives according to social patterns, given in most cases by advertising. For example, if someone doesn’t wear the kind of clothing or style, or use the technology considered to be the best by society, in many cases that person is rejected. Society listens and obeys to media and advertising orders. When people least expect it, they are already trapped in an advertising game, get influenced by it and end up buying what it tells them to buy. For this to stop happening, people need to become familiar with the term advertising literacy, which is described as “The skills of analyzing and evaluating persuasive messages across a variety of contexts and media”. Potentially dangerous messages are still going to be delivered by advertising, but as long as the audience is advertising literate, meaning they know how to react and protect against them, rarely any harm will be made.

The Language of Advertising

Advertising is one of the many forms of human communication. It works almost the same as any other; the sender transmits information to be understood by the receiver, but it can also be more complicated than that, because besides transmitting a message, it also tries to persuade the receiver in a specific way with any information sent. To do that, it has had to develop its own language that as any other, presents rules, slang, and different interpretations. Advertising has a special, interesting but also dangerous language that can influence every person in one way or another. It´s a language that requires everyone to be their own interpreter of the message, and when the receiver doesn’t know how to discern it, the language of advertising can become very dangerous.

Throughout seven entries in this blog I will present and discuss the various, different techniques that advertising uses to communicate with the audience. Techniques used directly in ads, like images, symbols and cultural meanings will be explained, as well as indirect forms of advertising to influence the public’s decisions, as social advertising. I will also explore different ways or options that advertisers are taking to seek people’s attention, which every day seems to be decreasing with traditional advertising.

In the same way, throughout the seven different blog entries I will present how people are being influenced in many aspects by all the advertising techniques. It is also going to be analyzed more deeply how children are being the most negatively affected by harmful advertising, and that if there is no interest in this issue future generations will grow up having even more serious problems with consumerism, stereotyping and low self esteem. So, to be able to react positively against some dangerous content, it is important to first analyze and understand the way in which advertising works to make an impact and influence the audience.

Viral Marketing

When I thought of viral marketing I thought it was viruses coming through the internet in forms of advertising, I wasn’t sure of what it was. After researching about it I realized I was wrong. Viral marketing seems to be increasingly popular and in some cases very effective for branding or selling. Viral marketing is one of the new forms of advertising that have come to exist because of the internet. As people have such a freedom of access using the internet, it has been possible to create many ways in which advertising can get to them. I am going to talk about its concept, some examples and other information that I found.

So, what really is viral marketing? After analyzing the relation between the two words, and also reading about it, I found out that viral marketing is marketing or advertising that can be easily spread like a virus. The name may sound a little bit offensive, but that´s the term that defines what this marketing does. Even though it seems relatively new, viral marketing has been around for many years. In 1994 media critic, Douglas Rushkoff, was the first to write about it in his book Media Virus. Viral marketing is also referred to as “word of mouth” or “creating a buzz”.

To understand viral marketing better, I am going to explain the most common and known example of it, Hotmail.com. Everyone seems to put it as the classic example of viral marketing. What happens is that they first give away fee e-mail addresses and other services. They attach a tag at the bottom of every free message sent. The tag reads "Get your private, free email at "http://hotmail.com". In this way, people spread this advertising among their networks and contacts maybe without even noticing. In that way there is always someone else new getting the free service and at the same time spreading the message to more and more people.

What I also found out is that viral marketing does not work so easy. In fact, not many viral marketing campaigns are successful. In order for them to be successful they have to be really good and contain some basic elements in their strategy. Some of the elements are: Give away free products or services, provides effortless transfer, scales easily from small to large, utilizes existing communication networks, and takes advantage of others´ resources. Another important aspect that makes a viral marketing campaign good is making people feel something about it. I found out that is all about emotions. You have to create a really good story or something that would not seem as an advertisement.

Not every viral marketing campaign works as the Hotmail.com does, but some other examples of viral marketing are Dove Evolution campaign in YouTube, Smirnoff viral, HP FingerSkilz, and others. Viral marketing is not very known or recognized by users. When we see a video or a type of advertising that comes in this way maybe we don’t know how to call it. In a world were traditional advertising does not work as effective any more, viral marketing seems to create a good response.

Rift Fournier

I got here to Lindenwood on August of 2008. When I came, I didn’t know what to expect. I was very afraid because I was not in my country with my family or friends. Some people said that college here was a lot harder than it is in Ecuador, so I was really afraid about going into advertising here. My advisor picked my classes the first semester as I didn’t have too much knowledge about that. So I had this one class called History of Television. At first I thought, it is going to be so boring and hard! I was scared.

It was my first class from all, so I when early, and then, found Rift. I don’t know how to explain the peace and comfort that he caused in me after getting to know him not only as a teacher but as a person. I thought teachers were supposed to be so strict and demanding, but not him. Rift Fournier (find him in twitter here) is one of the best teachers I´ve had in my life. I loved going to his classes and not only learning a lot in a very entertaining way, but also sharing and having fun. He made the class so personal and created this friendly environment. I remember that he didn’t just say hello every morning, he would ask me how I was and how was I feeling. When he noticed that I was a little bit sad, he would ask me what happened and try to do something to make me feel better.

One very important thing, among everything I learned from him, is that to be good at what you do, you have to love it and be passionate about it. He talked about that in class a lot also. Rift got a lot of important achievements and never worked because of the money, but because he had fun doing his job and enjoyed it one hundred percent. Another important lesson that his life may teach to some young students making a career is the importance of knowing people. Even without internet, networking was so important. It helps you to make contacts and relations with people who could later help you find a job. But most important than that, he is an example of how making and keeping friends is also very important. After all, we are all going to be working at the same time, maybe in the same business.
Rift is a very special man, who has so much knowledge to offer, but still he is very humble and friendly. He is a man that says things just how they are, without feeling embarrassment of anything. We should learn a lot from him, I think that my first semester wouldn’t have been as good if I hadn’t take History of Television with Rift Fournier.

Rift wrote an episode for Charly´s Angels