Four Fallacies In Advertising

A popular technique in the advertising world is “doublespeak.” Lutz explains that “advertisers try to wrap their claims in language that sounds concrete, specific, and objective when in fact the language of advertising is anything but” (133). This type of language essentially states the obvious while sounding seemingly unique which is exploitative to the consumers. The use of rhetorical questions and sweet words that get the audience ready for the sales pitch are a part of “doublespeak.” In this strategy, the advertisers do not go into depth about the products and continue to make general claims that make consumers think that the product is special. Unfinished words, also a part of “doublespeak”, leaves it up to the audience to assume and finish

Magazines are popular in the United States; they can be found in stores, offices, and houses. They are popular for advertising. Television, news, radio, billboards and online websites are just a few forms of media that companies use to advertise their products or services. Companies use advertisements to influence the consumer to either buy or use their products and services. Advertisements are used to manipulate consumers in many ways.

In the essay Advertisements R Us, Melissa Rubin does a satisfactory job persuading readers who may not share the same view or analysis of the advertisement as her. Rubin does this by including plenty of historical context into her writing. This works by providing sound reasons and evidence to back up her analysis about what the ad was trying to do, which was to sell its product to the most profitable group of people

A fallacy is defined as a kind of error in reasoning. They can be persuasive and be created both unintentionally and intentionally in order to deceive others from the truth. Fallacies often indicate a false belief or cause of a false belief (dowden, 2006). An argument or situation commits a fallacy when the reasons offered do not support the conclusion. This defeats the purpose of the argument since its point is to give reason to support the conclusion. Fallacies affect the outcome of our everyday decision making process. There are three types of logical fallacies discussed in this paper along with the importance of utilizing critical thinking skills.

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.

Advertisements come in various shapes, sizes, and mediums, and as humans, we are constantly surrounded by them. Whether they are on TV, radio, or in a magazine, there is no way that we can escape them. They all have their target audience for whom the advertisers have specifically designed the ad. When a company produces a commercial, their main objective is to get their product to sell. This is a multibillion-dollar industry and the advertisers study all the ways that they can attract their audience’s attention. The producers of advertisements have many tactics and strategies they use when producing an ad to get consumers to buy their product. These include things such as rhetorical

Coming from commercials, newspapers, movies, and magazines, advertisements are one of the most prominent things that we get bombarded with on a daily basis. The problem with a lot of people including myself is that we fall victim to the manipulation of the advertising sharks and their devious tricks. In the article ‘Advertising’s 15 Basic Appeals’ by Jib Fowles, the author describes how advertisers will use 15 basic emotional appeals in order to get you to say ‘I want and need that!’ In National Geographic, a historical, anthropological, discovery-based magazine, advertisers focus their energy on the middle-aged, middle-class, educated audience, who want to improve not only their intellectual integrity, but also improve their families lives if the readers can help it. National Geographic advertisers can do this by appealing to the readers’ basic needs for achievement, nurture, and guidance.

Over the years, it is apparent that adverts in general have adapted their advertising language by employing extensive methods of persuasion, instead of focusing on their actual product or purpose.

In this era, the power of good advertising is more important than ever. This causes a big issue, the issue of morality in commercials. In the video “Chevy bed punctured! Deceptive commercial” by Youtube reviewer Big Truck Big RV , the speaker goes over many deceptive techniques used by car companies to make other companies products seem worse than their own.

Each day we are bombarded with advertisements from a plethora of corporations in every waking moment of our lives. Advertising agencies have become so advanced at what they do, that often times we may not even realize we are being advertised a product. This raises an interesting ethical dilemma over a certain type of advertising: persuasive advertising. Philosophers, economists, and business professionals have debated over whether or not persuasive advertising is an immoral violation of the autonomy of consumers. While not all forms of advertising are in and of themselves certainly immoral, persuasive advertising is particularly reprehensible due to the fact that not only does it manipulate our unconscious desires of which we are completely unaware in order to sell a product, but it also routinely leads us to act against our own best interest, thus overriding our autonomy.

In political races in the United States logical fallacies are a staple in political ads. The 2012 election was no exception to this convention, especially being true in an advertisement with ex-steel plant worker Joe Soptic, speaking in Obama-affiliated Political Action Committee Priorities. The advertisement included many logical fallacies to argue against the Romney campaign. Those include post hoc reasoning, ad hominem, and slippery slope.

According to Bassham et al. (2002), a logical fallacy is “an argument that contains a mistake in reasoning” (p. 140). There are two types of logical fallacies, fallacies of relevance, and fallacies of insufficient evidence. Fallacies of relevance happen when the premises are not logically relevant to the conclusion. Fallacies of insufficient evidence occur when the premises do not provide sufficient evidence to support the conclusion. Though there are several logical fallacies, four logical fallacies commonly found in advertising are amphiboly, appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, and non sequitur.

Our lives revolve around money. The value of a dollar does not buy much anymore; everything comes with a price tag. The media likes to entice people with catchy slogans, celebrities or any other setup just so they can obtain our money. Once they grasp our attention we realize most of these attention grabbers had no relation to their argument or what they are trying to sell. Thus the correct term for the types of misleading ads and television commercials is called informal fallacies. The purpose of an informal fallacy can be to enact reactions from the audience, used to discredit a person or lastly appeal to a certain outlook. They mainly lack the validity in order to prove their argument. The media provides us with many scenarios using different forms of informal fallacies. I will provide three notable examples of informal fallacies by explaining the type of fallacy and why the media used this fallacy.

There was a time when advertisement were made only to market and sell the products but now dramatic changes have taken place in this field (Shead and Dobson 01). Today companies not only want to sell their products but also aim to create emotional attachment with the customers for which they do emotional or subliminal advertising.

Advertising is a persuasive communication attempt to change or reinforce one’s prior attitude that is predictable of future behavior. We are not born with the attitudes for which we hold toward various things in our environment. Instead, we learn our feelings of favorability or unfavorability through information about the object through advertising or direct experience with the object, or some combination of the two. Furthermore, the main aim of advertising is to ‘persuade’ to consumer in order to generate new markets for production.