The Onion's MagnaSoles: Advertisement Analysis

“Make your marketing so useful people would pay for it”(Baer). Marketers use wild variations of strategies to appeal to their consumers, which materializes ridicule among marketing companies. Commercialized businesses accommodate useful tactics to appeal to their audience. In a mock press conference, MagnaSoles, “magical” shoe inserts, are analyzed humorously. In their humorous press release to the public, The Onion perceives the marketing industry in a satirical way by explaining their purpose of effectively using the rhetorical devices ethos, logos, and pathos.

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

The Onion’s satirical press release of the new, exciting “MagnaSoles” revealed the ploys and tactics of how products are advertised to a consumer population. Exposing the fallacy and manipulative power of ads, it uses a satirical tone throughout the article through inflated diction, absurd reasoning, coupled with false testimonies and counterfeit professions to discredit

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

Do you have sore feet and feel like there is nothing that can stop or prevent your foot pain? MagnaSoles are new shoe inserts for people just like you who have sore feet! Did you fall for these tactics? Companies use these marketing tactics everyday to convince people just like you to buy their product. In The Onion’s press release, the author demonstrates the use of the rhetorical triangle, bold diction and syntax, and vivid imagery to explain how Americans fall for marketing tactics companies use.

Advertisements are an extremely prominent part of American society. Very few places exist that an individual can go without being exposed to some form of ad. From product placement to billboards, advertisements exist in nearly every facet of life. Marion Nestle discusses what she considers to be one of the more heinous forms of advertisement in her essay, “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate.” Nestle uses several persuasive techniques to convince her audience of the evils of supermarkets. Her use of emotionally charged phrases paired with her more logical assertions help to drive her point home while her clear bias and lack of supportive source detract from her overall argument

The Onion’s satirical article uses several satirical elements in order to sell their brand new, revolutionary product: Magnasoles shoe inserts. Using Magnasoles as an example, The Onion imitates the way to which major companies attract and convince gullible customers to purchase their products. By using a sarcastic tone throughout, it opens the reader to the tactics that companies will use in order to gain customers. The passage also can be seen as appealing to authority by using “doctors” who have recommended the product and fake scientific jargon. Together, these devices combined with the authors use of fictional ethos and logos fool consumers into falling play into marketing ploys.

The article released from The Onion, establishes satire through the use of humor and mockery in order to reveal the reality of the process of products being marketed to consumers. The Onion achieves this satire by demonstrating how products such as MagnaSoles can lure in gullible consumers through the outrageous claims that their product is described to do.

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.

Throughout history things have changed in society, especially in the past fifty years. Society has allowed the creators to either cater to the consumers wants or to do as they please. By allowing the creators to have this power, the society that is known today has both people pleasers and people that like to be in control. Newspapers have went from trying to cater to their audience to choosing to provide the information the way that they believe will attract more views. Cell phone creators were able to change how contacting someone over the phone from only a specific place into being able to do so at anytime and anywhere. Newspaper creators of The Onion take a different approach than the makers of cell phones on how they attract their consumers but they have both changed to adhere to the time period.

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

In fact, “from 1997 to 2007, these procedures, overall, rose 457% to almost 12 million per year and an increase of 114% in actual surgeries, such as breast implants and liposuction”(Hodgson), all as a result of the influence of the advertising environment. Yet despite these statistics, many people feel exempt from the influence of advertising, this is because “only 8% of an ad’s message is received by the conscious mind, the rest is worked and reworked deep within the recesses of the brain”(Kilbourne). This working and reworking of the ad’s subliminal message of the brain is exponentially increased by the amount of ad’s the average American is exposed to every day. On average, Americans are exposed to over three thousand advertisements per day and will have been spent two years of their lives watching advertisements on the Internet and television by the time they die. This two hundred and fifty billion dollar per year industry that we call advertising profits from the appeasement of its consumers but at the cost of the consumers mental state. The cost of this environment, however, goes much further than just the environment itself, and extends rather into the direct objectification and dehumanization of women.