Values in Advertising

Often in advertising people are selling a lifestyle by associating the product with certain values. Rather than selling a product, they are selling something intangible such as ease, class, prestige, sexual appeal etc.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-4jVHJ0M11C2ZjLHNsxuEl17Qb8-NY9h/view

In the campbell soup ad above:

• Women
  • wearing red like the soup
  • She looks at ease, confident, relaxed
  • Use of composition as a formal convention
    • she takes up more space than the soup
    • they aren’t selling the soup, they are selling the lifestyle
  • They are selling ease
  • Hosting a party is hard
  • Brand association
  • Banister, dress, jewelry
    • associating wealth with the product

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• Dominant brand
• brand recognition
• Nike no longer needs to say nike, they just use a swoosh and everyone knows

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• • Advertising, just like propaganda and rhetoric, demonstrates the persuasive power of language How does it also serve as a window into a culture? 

An advertiser’s job is to alter the behavior of people. They do this by using subtle techniques in their advertisements to enforce ideas and perceptions into people’s heads. A successful advertiser will alter their techniques to suit their target audience in order to make the consumers shift in mindset more subtle and effective. Culture is a big factor advertisers consider when creating adverts. By analyzing adverts, we can:

1. Recognize the culture the advert is creating and/ or contributing to.
2.  Comprehend the considerations the advertiser took into consideration in order to cater to their specific target audience.

• How can the effectiveness of an advert be measured? / When do we know whether an advert has been successful? Money? A shift in mindset? A shift in culture?
• What are the effects of scantily dressed men and women in advertisements? It is reasonable to assume that advertisers who dress men and women scantily in advertisements do that to sell their products using sex. Selling a product using sex can be harmful because it contributes to the idea that people’s value can be measured by their sex appeal. When adverts using sex to sell products, they are essentially saying “people who use this product are sexy” or “if you use this product you will be sexy.” This gives the message that being sexy is the ultimate goal. Even more harmful, the standards set by the media of what is sexy are really unhealthy. 

• • Do such images distract from the product or do they draw our attention to the product? On the one hand, you could argue that they distract from the product because when we looked at the 10 ads on slides ( 21-30 ) it was hard to identify what the product was. But on the other hand, clearly, these adverts have been successful in selling the product since the adverts continue to use the same techniques and the brand is well-established. Perhaps the purpose of the advert wasn’t to draw appeal to a certain product, but instead to an idea. Perhaps the advertisers have:

1. Valued sex appeal and drawn the audience into wanting to feel sexy
2. Drawn appeal to the brand as a whole by selling the idea that this brand is sexy. 

Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that:

“a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider ‘real’ value”

…and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life:

“When you place a value on things like health, love, sex, and other things, and learn to place a material value on what you’ve previously discounted for being merely intangible … you realize you’re much, much wealthier than you ever imagined.”

My definitions: Real value—what the product is actually worth Perceived value—what the product is sold for

My interpretation of this is: a product is what we make of it. We have the power to manipulate the product into being more or less desirable. By changing the culture and implications that come with using a product, a producer can change how valuable the product is.

This is a very optimistic approach. Essentially it reminds us to value things like health, love, sex etc. over material things. I assume this connects to the first statement Sutherland made about perceived and real value because perceived value actually refers to the tangible, material things we can measure the worth of. Whereas real value is everything. By changing our mindset, we can learn to value intangible things.

Vocab:

Brand: a products identity and the feelings and values associated with it (eg. apple—slick, modern, easy, minimalistic, high quality)

Marketing: the process of creating, developing, promoting, and selling goods and services, managing the customers’ interest and in and need for the product

Focus Group: a group of people the company asks to come in and discuss a product or ad

Brand loyalty: a consumers habit of buying a product regularly (because they like it)

Buy-ology:

• Several Factors influence sales, therefore a lot of sales may not mean it’s a good advert
• People imitate
• Brand loyalty is neurologically similar to religious devotion

Advertising Techniques

Problem and benefit—Identify a problem and offer a solution to a problem (even if the audience weren’t aware of the problem)

More about something people don’t actually need

eg. flex tape

Bandwagon Effect—display growth of popularity of a product

Trends—when you notice many other people buying it

Testimonials—Ordinary people recommending products

Celebrities—using celebrities to endorse a product. (people want to copy and identify with the people they see in ads)

Association—linking a product with certain values in order to achieve association in an ad.

John Boyega- advertising w/ Joe Malone

The character—Engaging, out-of-the-ordinary characters will grab attention

Cereal brands- tony the tiger (frosties), lucky charms lepricon, Ronald McDonald,

Visual Language

Mise-en-scene: the arrangement of props on a set

Salience: Being noticeable

Omission: Something that has purposly been left out or excluded

Iconography

ALL OF THESE APPLY TO EVERYDAY, REAL LIFE SCENARIOS, NOT JUST ADVERTISING

 

Rhetoric (persuasion):

• sell the quality (logical reasoning)
• build trust
• evoke emotion

 

• ethos-trust(celebrities, values)
• pathos- emotion (buy it because it’s sexy)
• logos-logic (buy it because it’s fast, comfortable)

 

Anchorage

They need each other and don’t work in isolation (visual and lexical)

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KA8-DW9VSTghiktVIWpGrQb1UOfjGRVApxjwZ9g7nlA/edit#slide=id.g9a70dae808_0_17

• 1. Headline 
• Often the most obvious portion of the advertisement. Not necessarily mentions the name of the product but will try to be intriguing.
• Size, color, placement, diction, connotation and tone are important.
• 1. Main image/Body Copy
• • Small print text
  • Gives some information 

  about the product

  • Can be a ‘story” to 

  associate with the product

  1. Tagline/Signature
• Usually the most prominent text (other than the headline)
• Should be short, catchy and poignant and catch reader’s attention
• Must be memorable
• Embody the brand personality
• associate with the product
  1. Anchorage
• The image is given meaning by the text
• The text ‘fixes’ (i.e. ‘anchors’) the meaning of an image
• Helps narrow the possible interpretation of the image
• 1. Product photo-photo of the actual product
  2. Slogan- phrase/ saying
  3. Logo-

 

Headline: the coca-cola logo. It is the biggest, boldest text. The white against the red makes it pop. Easy

Main image: Coca-cola bottle in a sunny field. There is a ladybird. Branding: associating the product with happiness. The background looks heavenly, happy.

Tagline: open a coke, open happiness

• • Sentence types: interrogative, imperative, declarative, exclamative

 

• Second person address

• Eye-line composition

• Colour contrast