But Dows Advertising Work?

By Author: FIRELEAVES
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By the time the 1999 graduating class of college students had finished senior finals, the typical student had seen an average of half a million commercials. What this generation finds persuasive differs from that which moves its parents. The 18-to-25-year-old market differs from the older markets, advertisers argue. Psycho demographic research reveals that the old hard sell doesn't work with those reared on television. Accordingly, in an ad for Pepsi featuring performer Michael Jackson, the word Pepsi was never spoken by the star.

The appeals that do work are discernibly different as well. Because surveys show this group to be more preoccupied with making money, more Tag Heuer Replica willing to take risks, and more eager to venture into starting businesses, a Pepsi ad showed a young person establishing his own vending operation on a beach.

The generation rose on television and attuned to the fast-paced visuals and music of MTV expects rapid cuts and edits in ads. Peter Kim of the Walter Thompson advertising agency believes that this ...
... younger generation's attention span is decreasing while its ability to grasp many bits of information simultaneously is increasing.

Still, in this generation as in others, ads seldom create needs. Instead, they guide our selection from among competing products. As Michael Schudson argues in Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion, those selections often are not based on legitimate differences among products. From the essential comparability of competing products and from advertisers' need to differentiate one from the other come marketplaces full of claims that are less than fully informative. Nonetheless, advertising not only cannot save a bad product; it can also hurry its demise. When a product fails to deliver on its advertisers' promises, customers do not purchase it a second time.

In this chapter we have examined some of the ways advertisers use claims and evidence to persuade us to purchase one product rather than another. This persuasive end is particularly difficult to attain when, as is often the Cartier Replica Watches case, the advertisers' product differs little if at all from several others on the market. In addition, advertisers operate in extremely limited time and space. Many of the complaints registered against advertising arise from these limitations. Unless checked by regulation, advertisers tend to tell us what is good but not what is bad about their products, relying on our willingness to invest messages with meaning to induce us to hear stronger claims than those actually being made.

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