Please buy me!

  Obviously, advertising serves a purpose of transmitting information. How else am I supposed to know that there’s a sale on at JB Hi-Fi? But some tactics employed by some ads go beyond the transmission of information and enter the realm of manipulation.

So how do ads manipulate us?

According to one anonymous advertising exec, the greatest ads will appeal to emotions. “Fear, envy, vanity, health, utility, profit, pride, love and entertainment. If you ever spend money it will be for one of those reasons,” he said.
    There is evidence that supports his claim and apparently consumer decision making is motivated more by irrational, emotional needs, as opposed to more rational and logical needs. Which leads us to the biggest selling tool ever devised: sex.
    It’s everywhere and even banks have found ways to inject a bit of hanky panky into their commercials. Sex is supposed to be the second most powerful psychological appeal after self-preservation, so it is no surprise that advertisers have been trying to associate their product with the instinctive reactions for many years now.
    Every ad will try to get your attention, if they don’t then they fail. The quickest way to grab a man’s attention is with a sexually attractive woman, (or “hot chick”). The ad will then establish that what the woman wants in a man is the product being advertised. The logical (?) conclusion is since the woman wants this product in a man, then all you need to do is get the product and you get the girl.
    Women are more complex when it comes to selling them sex and are not as gullible as men, making it harder to target them with the “sex sells” approach, which explains why these types of ads are made to target men more than women. In place of lust, romance is often a common theme in ads that are aimed at women. More flowers and less sleaze.
    Whether or not the ads are aimed at guys or gals, the fantasy factor running through these types of ads is what appeals to our basest desires. We want the life of the people on the screen, and apparently the way to get it is through the product.
    Sean McBride sums this up well, saying, “Many social critics have stated that advertising is essentially concerned with exalting the materialistic virtues of consumption by exploiting achievement drives and emulative anxieties, employing tactics of hidden manipulation, trivialising, eliminating objective considerations, contriving illogical situations, and generally reducing men, women, and children to the role of irrational consumer.”
    Simply put, advertisers appeal to our most primitive emotions, fears, and desires. That’s how they hook us.

According to a former advertising agency creative director named Donald Gunn, there are 12 types of ads used on television. Knowing and being able to identify each type will help you become a more astute ad viewer as opposed to a passive consumer of corporate ideologies. 

1) Demo
A visual demonstration of the product’s abilities that we have all seen a thousand times on those awful infomercials. There are much better examples with stain removal ads and other such that display a product’s abilities. Simple and effective.

2) The problem solver
There is a problem, and what do you know, the solution can easily be found in the product. Simple and easy to follow, these have been effective for years and remain popular.

3) Graphic to show solution
An extension of the problem/solution, this uses graphics, analogy, or symbols to show the problem and solution. With the use of CG technology, these ads have become more common. An example I found online has a man throwing a ball at a tyre trying to get it through the centre hole. He keeps missing and hitting the side. After using the product he gets it in every time. What’s the product? An erectile dysfunction medicine.

4) Comparison with competitor
Exactly what it sounds like, this type of ad tells you why one company’s product is superior to a rival’s. There can be some cross-over between this format and the problem solving one, but this one will have specific focus on what is wrong with the competitor.

5)  Exemplary story
These ads have a brief narrative structure that helps exemplify the benefits of the product. The drunk driving ads fall into this category as they tell a story that eventually shows the message (in place of the traditional product).

6) Benefit causes story
Taking the previous method and tweaking it a bit, this tells a story that begins unrelated to the product and may not make sense until the end when the product is revealed. Remember that Ben Affleck Lynx ad where he is clicking the number of looks he gets, only to be out done by the geeky elevator guy? That falls into this category.

7)  testimonial
Whether it is a scientist in a lab coat or a mum who needs ‘X’ product to help raise her kids, getting someone who has used the product to vouch for its greatness is another common tactic. It is also often the cheesiest method you will see.

8)  Ongoing character or celebrity
Pretty self-explanatory. Celebrity endorsements are a long-standing tradition in helping to give a product credibility and star quality, while recurring characters (like the American ASB guys, or the Sky duo) make ads more memorable and give them a familiar feel.

9) Symbol, analogy, or exaggerated graphic to show benefit
Similar to number 3, these use visuals to emphasise the benefits (as opposed to solutions) of products. The Fresh Up ones at the moment use this method as the way the beverage makes the guy who drinks it feel like he’s being freshened with a blast of wind and loud energetic music.

10)  Associated user imagery
This is the simple format where basically some really cool people are seen using the product, which is meant to make the viewer think they will be cool if they use the product too. If the All Blacks drink Powerade, maybe it will give me that athletic edge as well, or so they would like us to think.

11)  Unique personality property
To differentiate the product from competitors, advertisers will try to promote one feature that others cannot. These can include the country of origin, a special ingredient or technical aspect.

12)  The parody or borrowed format
This ad uses the format of another medium, like TV show, film, or other for humorous effect. Think of the Sky ad that has the big and small duo with their own version of a Living Channel show where they display their home.

There may be the odd exception, such as the Benetton non-ads, but most ads on TV will fall into one or more of these categories.

According to a poll in the New York Times, the public opinion
of advertising is continuing to go down with a majority saying they avoid buying products that bombard them with marketing, and even more are interested in products that help them skip or block advertising, such as Tivo.
    There’s a very underrated film called ‘Idiocracy’ in which Luke Wilson (the most average man in the US Army) is kept in stasis for 500 years. When he awakes he finds himself all of a sudden the smartest man in the world due to a rapidly deteriorating number of intellectuals. In this consumer fuelled world even conversations are sponsored. The president even has Mountain Dew as a middle name.
    In ‘Minority Report’, ads even know your name and can talk to you directly as you walk through a mall. Is this the future for ads in our society? Well not yet, but there are new developments in the media industry that
are trying to break free of the standard ads people are slowly becoming immune to.
    To the people raised on Sky, when watching a movie on regular TV constantly being interrupted by breaks, ads have become more a nuisance than service. With the growing popularity of cable TV like Sky and inventions around the world like Tivo, combined with the increasing annoyance level felt by most viewers (I always channel surf or hit mute during the breaks), advertisers have looked for new ways to get their products out there. One such way is product placement, something that has also become more prominent in recent years.
    TV shows, movies, music videos, games, and even novels have been known to cut a deal with companies so long as their product gets some favourable mention. The most obvious examples are cars and cell phones.
    Like newspapers and TV stations (and poor little magazines), you can’t blame the producers of such media for trying to keep costs down by either charging for some product exposure or in exchange for some supplies, after all, Jack Bauer has to drive some kind of car, it may as well be a Ford. But there have been times that such blatant attempts have been made to promote a product that it interferes with the medium. You can’t help but cringe as Will Smith describes his Converse shoes as “classics, from 2004” in the futuristic ‘I, Robot’, which just so happened to be released in 2004.
    From the same film, the car Smith drives was made by Audi specifically for the film that does not exist in the present reality. It was not a case of just slapping a logo on something the production team designed, Audi did all the work and put as much thought into it as they would a real car that existed in the world the film creates.
    So product placement (or integration) is good for the advertisers who are suffering from the likes of Tivo. I’ve never watched American Idol, but apparently it is filled with Coca-Cola logos, such as on the glasses in front of each host. According to AdAge magazine, companies like Coke, AT & T, and Ford have spent about $26million each for such sponsorship deals on ‘American Idol’, so it is clearly becoming a very lucrative alternative to the traditional forms of advertising. We can only expect it to continue to grow from here.
    The next time you watch a TV show or film, keep an eye out for any suspiciously placed logos, then count to see how many more times this product is mentioned. If it is only once, then it may just have been an accident, a product used solely for reality purposes; but if it continues then you know that a deal has been made. It has been said that the best form of advertising is when you don’t even realise it as such, so this could possibly be the best form of advertising yet developed.
    Many of you probably already know all of this and think you are astute enough not to fall for advertising. In fact, most people believe that advertising has no affect on them at all, but the truth is it does, even if you don’t realise it.
    There are many other forms of advertising not discussed in-depth here, like the ugly billboards that haunt our city (and the quest to get them banned) and the ways newspaper ads will allure you in with eye-catching graphics and appealing slogans. Oh well, maybe next time.