Advertising is all around us, all the time. Sometimes we don’t even realise the more subtle types like logos on rucksacks, but most of us are aware of the fact that the media is always trying to attract consumers. There are several places where advertising is apparent, including newspapers, magazines, billboards, television and, more recently, the Internet. All of these are examples of how people are constantly pulled in to the goods, services or charities that they are, in a way, forced to see; and are made to think exactly what the advertisers want them to think. Many advertisements attempt to sell a product by promoting a lifestyle. That is, viewing a moving or static image of an attractive person who the consumer wishes to be like and then being drawn to what he or she is doing within the advert.
The initial aim of any advertisement, that probably all of them achieve, is to make the product look good. In television advertising, a vast number of techniques can be used to aid the promotion of the item. The positioning of the audience and camera angles are important factors in an advertisement. The way the audience is positioned encourages them to be thinking what the advertisers want them to be thinking.
This helps to appeal to the ideal consumer of a product (for example, if you were selling anti-wrinkle cream, you would want to target middle-aged women as the ideal consumer). Camera angles are also used to an effect. Filming in close-up or slow motion on certain events or characters gives the impression that whatever is happening at that particular moment is significant. The product is then promoted well because this helps focus the viewer’s attention on the objects and ideas that advertisers feel should be seen.
Members Resources is a psychological concept that is used widely in advertising. It is the use of ideas that are already in the general knowledge of the consumer and can be recognised by most people when they are shown in the advert. Advertisers try to use the Members Resources of their target audience, although this is not always the case. Synthetic personalisation is apparent in some advertisements.
It is used to appeal to the viewer as an individual by saying, for example, ‘YOU need this product to improve YOUR life’. Many advertisements make use of music or slogans to sell their product. A catchy slogan will help the consumer remember the product and, the more likely they are to remember the product, the more likely they are to purchase it. music is very powerful in television advertising because the viewer will associate the song with the product. In theory, whenever someone who has seen the advert hears the song, they will think of the product.
The attractiveness of an advert is also important. To pull in potential customers, the advert should contain one or a few good-looking, desirable main characters that the targeted age group will aspire to. Aspects such as sex, humour and sympathy can also be used to sell products. On television, because of broadcasting expenses, advertisements are only approximately thirty to forty seconds long. This means that the promoters of an item need to fit in as much as they can, using many of the concepts I have mentioned, in this short space of time.
The ‘Impulse’ body spray advert is an excellent example of effective advertising. It commences with a woman half-walking, half-jogging, down a busy street, carrying a bag of shopping. She then bumps into two men who are walking in the opposite direction, and her shopping goes flying. One of the men stops and bends down to help her pick up her groceries, and appears to smell her. Both of them attempt to pick up the woman’s apple at the same time, so their hands touch, and the woman licks her lips, making it obvious that they are attracted to each other.
The other man then taps the first man on the shoulder and beckons him to hurry up and stop helping the woman, which makes the first man look apologetically at her. He gets up, but the woman looks disappointed and confused, maybe because she didn’t notice the man who didn’t help her with her shopping. She also gets up, and proceeds to look around at the people on the street. She sees, to her surprise, several images of stereotypical homosexuals, including men wearing dungarees and a dog in leather.
The woman then touches her hand to her head because of her incompetence and feels like she should have known that the people around her were gay. She looks back at the two men that she bumped into at the beginning of the advert, and she notices that the man who helped her has his arm around the other man. He shrugs at the woman as if to say ‘sorry’. The filming cuts to a light blue screen showing a blurred female figure spraying herself with the body spray, before displaying the slogan, ‘Men can’t help acting on Impulse’.
