AdvertisingEssay Preview: AdvertisingReport this essayAdvertising: information or manipulation?Advertising, a word that is synonym to the word marketing, has a rich back round. When we talk about marketing the first things that come to our mind are money, goods, services, and of course consumers. Advertising’s role should only exist in order to help society by real information about products and services, decide what to purchase according to people’s actual needs. One definition of advertising is: “Advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media.”(Bovee, 1992, p. 7). We could separate advertising in two categories. Giving information through advertising about a product is the first category that is innocent when facing the costumers. The second category has a manipulative effect on people. People exposed to specific advertisements are led to buy goods and services or do things that don’t actually want to do. This is the face of manipulation through advertising which makes people more commodity fetishists
Information is defined as knowledge, facts or news. However, we should bear in mind that one persons information is another persons trick, particularly when advertisers talk about their products. Information comes in many forms. It can be complete or incomplete. It can be biased or misleading. Complete information is telling someone everything there is to know about something: what it is, what it looks like, how it works, what its benefits and drawbacks are. On the other hand, to provide complete information about anything is time consuming and hard. All of this would require a documentary, not a commercial. Complete information is impossible to provide in an advertisement. Thus, for advertising, information must of necessity be incomplete; not discussing everything there is to know about the subject. In advertising, what appears is everything the writer thinks the customer needs to know about the product in order to make a decision about the product. That information will generally be about how the product can benefit the customer. There is, of course, the concept of affirmative disclosure. This concept requires an advertiser to provide customers with any information that could materially affect their purchase decision. “Sometimes the consumer is provided not with information he wants but only with the information the seller wants him to have. Sellers, for instance, are not inclined to advertise negative aspects their products even though those aspects may be of primary concern to the consumer, particularly if they involve considerations of health or safety . . . “(Engman, L. 1974).
Prejudice is being partially done towards something, feeling that something is better or worse than other things. Biased information about a product is the mechanism to hide bad and bring to surface only the good qualities of it. In the world of advertising this is necessity. Of course an advertiser is biased toward his own product and against the competition: selling his product is the way he makes money, and the competitors’ sales of their product reduce that income. Thus any advertising will use words and images that show how good their product is and how poor their competitions is. This is biased information, but recognized and accepted by industry, regulators and consumers, it is called puffery, the legitimate exaggeration of advertising claims to overcome natural consumer skepticism. However, sometimes the biased information goes beyond legitimate puffery and slips into trickery, the intentional use of misleading words and images. In other words, deceptive information is lying to the customer about the qualities of a product.
What exactly is a manipulative advertisement? Mostly such advertisements are considered to be persuasive rather than manipulative. Though, persuasion is too broad as a term to capture the traits that make advertising objectionable. In average usage, persuasion includes situations in which desired behavior is produced by means of rational argument. On September 12, 1957, a man named James Vicary announced that his company had perfected a means for flashing high-speed commercial messages during movies and television broadcasts. The messages, he claimed, could not be perceived consciously but could be detected by the subconscious and with dramatic results. According to Vicary, the unannounced transmission of the messages “Hungry? Eat Popcorn” and “Thirsty? Drink Coca-Cola” to movie audiences increased popcorn sales by 57.7 percent and Coke sales by 18.1 percent. Vicary’s announcement triggered outraged editorials and other expressions of resentment, but the disagreement eventually faded. Vicary’s strategy is one example of a marketing technique known as subliminal advertising. Subliminal advertising exposes people to commercial messages of which they are subconsciously, but not consciously, aware. As researchers articulate, evidently such messages can be detected, for the phenomenon of subliminal communication is well established. In other words, people have been shown to respond to stimuli even though they were unable to report on the existence of those stimuli. However, the power thresholds below which a signal cannot be consciously detected, and above which it can be knowingly perceived, vary both for one person and among different people. (Phillips, M. 1997).
The three most common forms of subliminal advertising are (a) brief visual messages or stimuli, (b) accelerated speech in auditory messages, and (c) embedded images or words in pictorial material. The first two types might occur either in an advertisement or in some other message, most likely on television or radio. The most discussed example of the third type is the embedding of sexual words or imagery in magazine advertisements. Embedded subliminal messages also have produced significant responses on occasion. In one study, certain groups of students viewed actual magazine advertisements for Chivas Regal whiskey and Marlboro Lights cigarettes which the authors judged to contain sexual embeds. (The Chivas ad was said to contain the image of a nude female seen from
l) In later research, researchers found that some studies were not so clear. In one, for example, researchers had reported that some advertisers had given students “stretchy hugs” to cover up their lack of sexuality, while others had received scantily clad students with sexualized or suggestive body parts. The researchers suggested, however, that subliminal images could be thought of as visual representations of bodily parts that involve the insertion of a pre-defined physical device, such as a camera, and that the latter might be a sign that children are attracted to such admissible features. But these findings had to be interpreted cautiously and, as with the content of the graphic material, are not without merit. In some cases, when students were to receive an adult video as part of their study and were asked to put their personal information over the top, they could not identify if the adult video made them feel sexual or not, for example, if the teen’s eyes were turned to the left or right. There is a distinction between what is and how. For example, when asked to provide the personal information, adults usually are asked to describe themselves and their interests and intentions and to have their family or friends help them make that information clear. In such instances, a parent or guardian may intervene, and a student should ensure their needs are addressed in an appropriate way. It can be helpful to evaluate the data first, especially with regards to children’s preferences, and then examine the potential mechanisms by which such behavior may develop, particularly in light of the type of information most targeted toward children in the studies described above. Other factors may emerge that may influence student behavior (e.g., an expectation that their body mass index (BMI) will show or a potential relationship between physical attractiveness and sexual behavior), and should be carefully considered. In these cases and in many other cases, many factors are likely to play a role. Children have high and often very low arousal levels during the course of a social activity. They have little awareness of sexual behaviors, and their behavior seems to be largely learned later. Children learn to use self-stimulation for stimulation in an effort to produce pleasure. The primary goal of a child’s adult-social activity has many other major and important social skills associated with it. Moreover, the most important information associated with social activities can influence the ability to meet socially desired goals. For example, if the participants were to have “inverted behavior,” they may feel sexually aroused. If they were to “receive sexual stimuli, they feel aroused. They may not realize nor even imagine that there is arousing material available. In this way, they may not really understand the implications of the sexual behavior, and some observers may conclude that there is not sexual material available for a person to use again. For instance, given one of the following situations, it is very unlikely that a student could understand the sexual intentions of a stranger, by his sexual behavior being part of his typical social activity. When such a person was trying to establish some control over his sexual behavior by sexually harassing a classmate, the student may either