Covergirl Persuasive Techniques

In today’s society, no matter where you are, there is always a good chance that you have seen an advertisement. These little creatures are everywhere. You may see them when you are reading a magazine, watching TV, or surfing the internet. We have become so used to them. Advertisements are good at making us stop what we are doing and giving them our full attention. What is an advertisement? An advertisement is an announcement made to the public. In Jib Fowles’ article, “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals,” he is informing us that companies are spending millions of dollars on advertisements to grab our attention in order to manipulate us into spending or thinking of spending our hard-earned money on their product. Even though a lot of people do not want to believe that a paper that is eight times eleven with an image and no more than five words is manipulative because we want to think that we are not that easy to trick. Nike created an advertisement for one of

Every day, companies present the people with advertisements everywhere they go. Advertisements have become very prevalent in today’s society nowadays focusing in on a negative connotation. Advertisement has become an effective way for producers to display their new products. In present day, they come in forms of billboards, flyers, e-mails, and even text messages. It is widely known that companies create advertisements to persuade people to buy specific products or goods; however, it is not widely known that advertisements can make a negative impact on today’s society. The companies manipulate people’s mind and emotions, swaying people by new promotions and therefore generating a strong desire to fit into the society, that causes them to make inessential expenditures. Advertisements pose a critical impact on the American culture.

For the longest time now, advertising has played a huge role in how we identify ourselves in the United States with the American culture, and how others identify themselves with all the cultures of the rest of the world as well. It guides us in making everyday decisions, such as what items we definitely need to invest our money on, how to dress in-vogue, and what mindset we should have to prosper the most. Although advertising does help make life easier for most, at the same time it has negative affects on the people of society as well. Advertisement discreetly manipulates the beliefs, morals, and values of our culture, and it does so in a way that most of the time we don’t even realize it’s happened. In order to reach our main goal of

Every minute of every day, millions of people are exposed to advertisements. They plague televisions, streets, radio waves, and all means of communication. These advertisements employ many methods of persuasion and their influence is irresistible. Just like prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we are told every day to invest our time and interest into the subject of these advertisements, and to accept the forms of reality they serve us. Whether it be a commercial for a must-have new car, to a spot featuring desirable fast food, or to magazines with photoshopped models; we are seduced to accept these false

Advertisements are everywhere. From billboards, to magazines, to newspapers, flyers and TV commercials, chances are that you won’t go a day without observing some sort of ad. In most cases, companies use these ads as persuasive tools, deploying rhetorical appeals—logos, pathos, and ethos—to move their audiences to think or act in a certain way. The two magazine ads featured here, both endorsing Pedigree products, serve as excellent examples of how these modes of persuasion are strategically used.

The average United States Citizen views about 5000 advertisements a day (Johnson). Advertising is everywhere. Billboards on the way to work, ads on the internet, and paper products such as magazines or newspapers display a sale or a promotion of a good or service. Usually, the ad will give a brand or company name, and uses the product’s merits to draw the consumer closer. This has grown exponentially as advertisements in media in 1970 were estimated to be 500 a day, a ten percent increase in the last 48 years. (Johnson). This is due to the rise of technology, as the computer has become a household gadget within the new millenium. These advertisements are meant to give a synopsis of the product or service’s purpose, quality, and efficiency. If a consumer views 5000 advertisements in a single day and assuming the commercials do not repeat, 5000 goods or services are introduced. With more options to choose from in such little time, the consumer has a harder time differentiating the quality and perhaps necessity of the product. The marketers rely on the quick, impulsive decision making of consumers. With the misleading nature of many infomercials or radio broadcasts, the people of American society are bombarded with constant propaganda, thus making seemingly harmless promotions more potent to filling industries’ pockets and lessening the common population’s

When people see or hear advertisements, whether it be in a magazine or on television, many do not stop to consider or analyze the techniques that go into making the advertisement effective. For instance, the Center for Disease Control has a campaign that has the purpose of promoting the influenza vaccination. If you examine the campaign closely, it becomes clear that the advertising campaign targets a diverse audience of all ages, genders, and races who could all benefit from getting an influenza vaccination. In this advertisement campaign, the Center for Disease Control effectively promotes the benefits of getting an influenza vaccination to a targeted audience using numerous persuasive techniques such as association and universal appeal.

The Cover Girl ad from March 2011 includes a picture of Queen Latifah in a beige like colored background with her green eye shadow on. Queen Latifah has small brown eyes with very long and luscious black eye lashes. She has a big and beautiful smile with shiny white and straight teeth. Queen Latifah also has a nice pair of small, gold, round dangling earrings in her ears. The word “Cover Girl” is displayed in big and bold green letters across her forehead, all to help improve her the way she looks. Queen Latifah is written in small green letters underneath in the right-hand corner right underneath the word “Cover Girl”. This picture of her is from her head to her shoulders, just enough for the viewers to focus on Cover Girl’s product, which is the makeup. You cannot really tell what type of shirt she is wearing in this photo but the little piece of frill coming off of her shoulder matches pretty well with the whole color scheme of the ad. She also has her hair pulled back into a long pony tail to also help show off their product even more. This advertisement by Cover Girl effectively uses logos, ethos, and pathos to convince the viewers to buy Cover Girl products.

In “Propaganda Techniques in Today 's Advertising” by Ann McClintock, the author discusses how Americans are being brainwashed by advertisements and the different techniques they use to catch our attention. Ads are simply everywhere we look, it is impossible to get through the day without seeing one. All advertising companies put tons of research into how consumers spend money or even vote. Once these companies finish their research, they create advertisements that appeal to the masses. The basic propaganda techniques that McClintock writes about are Name Calling, Glittering Generalities, Transfer, Testimonial, Plain Folks, Card Stacking, and Bandwagon. Each one of these propaganda techniques is used in specific ways by advertisers to sell their product or service to consumers. I have selected a political ad which uses the Glittering Generalities technique, a coffee ad that uses Transfer technique, a soda ad that uses the Testimonial technique, and a soup ad that uses the Name Calling technique.

Advertisements are a part of our everyday lives and we encounter thousands every day on television, in newspapers, on the radio, on the internet. Advertisements use three basic tricks to persuade the people as listed by Aristotle: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Ethos is an appeal to ethics, and it is used to convince the viewer of the credibility. Pathos is an appeal to emotion and is used to convince the viewer by creating an emotional response. Logos is an appeal to logic and is used to persuade the viewer by logic. An advertisement may use one, two or a combination of all three. They have the power to persuade us into buying things that we might or might not want. Not every advertisement aims at materialistic things. Some advertisements want to educate us on a persistent issue, some might want to raise awareness and even aid funding, some try to remind us of important events that might be taking place in our county. The advertising agencies try to be as creative as possible in order to grab utmost attention. But sometimes, in doing so, they end up hurting sentiments of a community of people. I will discuss one such advertisement in my journal below.

Over the last few decades, American culture has been forever changed by the huge amount of advertisement the people are subjected to. Advertising has become such an integral part of society, many people will choose whether or not they want to buy a product based only on their familiarity with it rather than the product’s price or effectiveness. Do to that fact, companies must provide the very best and most convincing advertisements as possible. Those companies have, in fact, done

People see up to 5,000 commercials a day (Johnson); additionally, a number of individuals feel that these advertisements are simply informative. Actually, they are choked full of fallacies which deviously influence peoples spending. Granted, advertisements are an important element in the business world and a thriving economy because of its information, it is manipulative due to the fact that it distorts a human’s view on a psychological level by embellishing, disregarding the entire truth, and appealing to an individual’s deepest desires.

This particular ad has many aspects to it that make it something that sticks out. The woman

This image is a Covergirl ad advertising nylon mascara, using Drew Barrymore as a spokesperson for this product. This ad appeared in a magazine and a similar one aired on television. This ad was made by Covergirl, a well-known makeup production company. They have chosen to make this is to sell their new nylon mascara. Covergirl is attempting to sell this mascara to women, unhappy with their mascara or false

Even when we’re blissfully unaware, we are being persuaded. In today’s media driven world, advertising is an almost constant presence. It is on television, in the films we watch, all over our social media accounts, and even plastered on the walls of locations that we visit every day. Advertising is meant to market a product or service to a consumer, utilizing mostly tactics of persuasion to do so. Because advertising is so continually present, companies must be more innovative than ever with their persuasive methods. Depending on the product or service, these methods vary but some of the popular ones include appealing to the internal attitudes of the consumer by using strategic and repetitive methods for the delivery of the message to appeal to the target audience. Virtually all industries do this, though a unique example of persuasion in advertising is found in the medical and health industries; the United States is one of the few countries that allows direct-to-consumer advertising for pharmaceuticals. The healthcare industry has always had the ability to advertise but with the new medical advertising, its budget for marketing has exploded as well.