The Evolution of Advertising and its Impact in the Modern Day

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.

The main purpose of commercials and advertisements is to persuade the viewer to purchase the product that is advertised, but not all commercials are successful in this endeavor. Companies, such as Budweiser and Kleenex, appeal to the viewers’ ethos, logos, and pathos in order to influence them to buy the advertised product(s). In order to appeal to each of the categories, companies use different tactics to catch viewers’ attention. The use of ethos, logos, and pathos can make or break an advertisement based on how it is being used.

“The Language of Advertising” written by Charles A. O’Neill is an excerpt arguing as well as supporting popular criticisms against the advertising language by William Lutz, and other known criticisms of advertising. The concept of advertising is not something that has only been popular over the recent decades, but has been used as far back as the World Wars. The use of propaganda attracted thousands of eyes to the War, and without knowing it, created what we call today as typical advertising. After WWII many people with good reason, were concerned over the topic of scientific success, due to the recent usage of the Nuclear Bomb by the United States. Many giant American corporations started creating new materials, fabrics, vaccines and machines (the most important being plastic), thus creating a new wave of marketing. Now this process never stopped and has not stopped all throughout the past decades, our own, and the ones to come. But as newer, bigger and better products or services are created nobody really understands the power of how they marketed or advertised. Well “how does advertising work? Why is it so powerful? Why does it raise such concern? What case can be made for and against the advertising business?” (O’Neill 369). For you to understand the concept of advertising, Charles O’Neill makes it clear that you must first understand that it’s not about truth, virtue, or positive social values, but money. The most popular “tool” that advertisement creators use is that

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.

According to American historian Daniel J. Boorstin, “We read advertisements to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready—even eager—to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it.” We live in the age of advertisement and competition, where each advert tries to act like a magnet and pull you toward its product and permit you to do specific actions. Advertisers use logos, ethos, and pathos as special advertising techniques to help them achieve their task, which is to grab your attention. They are concerned with giving you what you want so that they gain money in return. Yet they will also attempt to make you believe that whatever they are representing is not just something

The world Is like one big marketing ploy. Advertisements are everywhere from subtle movie appearances to billboards and everything in between. Advertisers continue to find more ways to push their products with the hopes that the next method will prove more successful than its forerunner. The articles “Illusions Are Forever” by Jay Chiat and “Champagne Taste, Beer Budget” by Delia Cleveland illustrate the result of successful advertising and how it works. Quite a few of these seldom fail to prove fruitful .The most effective forms of advertising are high-end product placement and celebrity endorsement.

Advertising is an ever-present form of propaganda in our lives. Four common techniques are often observed in the advertising we see and hear every day. One technique, the testimonial, involves a well-known person appearing on behalf of a product being sold. The assumption is that if we like Cher and admire her looks, we will buy the product that she endorses. Another common technique, the bandwagon, makes us want to be “one of the gang”. This uses phrases like “everybody’s switching to..” and “all across America people are discovering…”. The plainfolks propaganda technique is especially popular now. We see and hear regular consumers talk about their experiences using certain brand of coffee, headache remedy, or phone company. A final technique,

In the article “ How Advertising Informs to Our Benefits”, writer John E Calfee, argues about the benefits that advertisement provides to our society. He says advertisement is a great tool for communicating information and shaping markets today. However, he also argues on the point that advertisement can sometimes be misleading, and that it leaves out the important information.

The aim of advertising commercials is to win the interest of different groups in the society. Art Markman who has a PhD and is a professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas writes in his publication “What Does Advertising Do” that the most powerful effect of advertising is to create a good feeling about a product by surrounding it with other things that consumers like (1). The commercial tries to convince the people that its consumption has been embraced

Advertisements are a huge part of our everyday lives. We see different types of ads everywhere we look; while watching television, listening to the radio, riding on the bus and even walking around your school campus. It seems like the whole world is being flooded by advertisements.

Since advertising must create new demand, it must also continually produce unsatisfied costumers. Those customers are more likely to look for products to fulfill their happiness, even though they do not reach that point. Mander writes that “the goal of all advertising is discontent,…an internal scarcity of contentment.” Advertising plays on our fears, insecurities, and anxieties, always reminding us that our lives could be better only if we buy this or that. The purpose is to make us slaves of commercials, and as slaves, do as they please. This is the reason for its existences,

Advertising has had a major impact on society. Some may be considered positive and some negative. Take a look around, advertisements are placed everywhere, television commercials, billboards, newspapers, and even on the sides of buses. Advertising is the basic form of marketing and trading throughout the world. Today’s society knows it as marketers trying to influence or persuade consumers into buying something. It also serves as a medium for services and businesses. There are many advertising strategies, but television commercials will always remain the number one strategy. Think about it, how much television is watched a day, probably a lot. What better way to advertise a product or service? Advertising has a positive effect on our economy. It does not only influence and persuade consumers, but it also benefits them in many ways. It also benefits manufacturers and their company, and the world as a whole.

Advertising has always been an important part of our society. The history of advertising can be traced to pre-modern history when it served an important purpose by allowing sellers to effectively compete with other merchants for the attention of clients in Ancient Egypt. From 1704 when the first newspaper advertisement was announced, it gradually grows into a major force in American society based primarily on newspapers and magazines (Ad Age Advertising Century, 1999). It not only helps to raise the target demographics’ awareness of issues, but also educate consumers with the benefits of the product. However, advertising cannot target a particular person before the emerging of World Wide Web.

     However, with every positive side comes a negative, and advertising is no different. Advertising has been blamed for a great variety of negative social impacts. One of the major criticisms received by advertising is that it forces people to buy things they don’t really need, often projecting negative emotions such as fear, anxiety of guilt upon the consumer (Engel). It is claimed that advertising plays with our basic human emotions and takes advantage of them, using them as merely another technique to sell goods or services.

But first, we should give a useful definition of advertising. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica (2015), advertising are ‘‘the techniques and practices used to bring products, services, opinions, or causes to public notice for the purpose of persuading the public to respond in a certain way toward what is advertised’’. Meanwhile, Belch and Belch (2009, p.18) describe advertising as ‘‘any paid form of impersonal communication about an organization, product, service or idea by an identified sponsor’’.