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.