Advertising

What`s advertising?

Advertising is a paid form of communication through which messages are transmitted orally or visually designed to inform and influence the target audience, using the space and time in various kinds media available. Advertising is a dedicated to the dissemination of ideas related to companies, products or services, in other words, commercial advertising.

Strategies used by advertising

Advertisers have many ways and methods to try and get you to buy their products. They use some tricks of the trade. For example:

• Ideal kids or families: They use families or kids that seem perfect. They are attractive and represent the types of people that kids like and try to imitate;

• Facts and figures: They use facts and statistics to increase their product`s credibility;

• Star Power: Advertisers pay celebrities to promote the product and their fans believe that this product is the best on the market. But, they don`t realize that the star is paid for endorsing it;

• Sounds Good: use of sounds add to the excitment of commercials. They create jingles with the goal of influencing people, making it hard for them to get it out of their head;

• Cartoon Characters: Advertisers use cartoon characters so kids identify with products. e.g. Tony the tiger sells cereal.

Influence of advertising

Many people say that ads don`t influence them but they are wrong, because everyone are influenced and to not be influenced by advertising they would have to live outside day to day culture but no human being livesoutside of this. Ads make our image and a personality . Teenagers are always influenced by magazines and they create their image with goal of imitate their favourite celebrities.

Consequences of ads

Ads promised us a world of illusion. Ads make us to believe that if we don`t have something we willbe less important than others that have this product. Companies spend a lot of money to investigate target people to try to understand their minds with purpose of influence their opinions, to buy their products. Ads are like poisons in our lives because they create a unreal life and they limit our own choice of products.

Advertising everywhere

It is impossible to ignore the advertising of products because they are everywhere, TV, schools, magazines... Everyday, we use a brand-name without realizing it. For example, your schoolbag is Adidas, your pecilcase is O`neil, and other examples.

Ads also use promotions; they are spread on the internet, billboards with the only purpose of making people choose this or that product.

The Good of Ads

Publicity is a form of knowledge for the world. It is true that ads can have a negative effect on culture but at the same time publicity can also be a way making of sensitive to problems that exist in society. For example, this image that portray the poverty in towns and some people don`t care about it.

The dark side of the big brands

The book " The dark side of brands" was written by Klaus Werner and Hans Weiss speak about multinational companies that support corruption, child labor, trafficking of arms, destruction of the environment and the torture animals. For example: Adidas, Apple, Pantene, L`oreal and others brands. Recently, Apple admited that explored child labor in a factory in China to make Macs, iPods and iPhones.

Conclusion

The bottom line, we speak about some aspects of publicity and we can say that publicity can have negative and positive effects. We can like this world but we should be balanced, im other words, we should be able to choose what we really want and to be careful with things that can be dangerous to us. Really people who aren`t gullible don `t have anything to fear but people who are easily convinced about a products merit have to be more cautions.

By: Fátima Sousa 11ºD and Vera Sousa 11ºD