Advertisement Comparison

Advertising is the chief profitable industry in the United States today. Billboards, signs, magazines, newspapers, radios, televisions, and computers are just some of the places where advertisements are found. At the heart of any one company's advertising campaign is the consumer. The consumer has complete control of their own money and can choose to buy any product or service they desire. Advertising does not control the consumers on what they buy. It only informs them on what they can buy. This is known as consumer sovereignty. It is the responsibility of the company to develop an advertising campaign that generates a demand for their product or service. A company usually promotes a product or service by means of appealing to a particular group in society. For example, an advertisement's target audience could be men between the ages of 25 and 40 or children between the ages of 5 and 10. There are basic needs that all of us, as humans, share and the advertisement agencies incorporate them into their ads. The most dominant needs include sex, affiliation, nurture, guidance, aggression, achievement, dominance, prominence, and attention. An advertisement can appeal to one or more of these needs through the use of colors, words, expressions, and statures illustrated in the ad. A comparison of two advertisements for the same product, but different brand names, will allow one to better understand how a company uses different human needs to sell their product. Two coffee ads, one for Cafй Vienna and one for Millstone, will be compared to determine the dominant strategy that each uses to create a desire to buy. The ad for Cafй Vienna coffee uses the need for guidance to appeal to middle age coffee drinkers. In contrast, the need for achievement is what attracts middle age coffee drinkers to Millstone brand coffee.

The colors observed in the coffee ads are supportive of the individual needs they appeal to. The Cafй Vienna ad has a color fade effect to it. It starts with dark black and deep orange and fades to a light yellow almost white in the center. This supports the need for guidance because the use of color gives the person reading it a sense that they are being lead towards the light at the end of a tunnel. On the other hand, the bright reds, blues, whites, and yellows found in the Millstone ad support the need for achievement. These colors represent happy and cheerful feelings. When a person makes an attempt at something and is successful he or she is most likely to be pleased and in high spirits.

The words and expressions used in the ads are also supportive of the needs they appeal to. "Drift purposely through life.", the phrase used in the Cafй Vienna ad, makes it obvious that drinking this brand of coffee with help lead the consumer with a purpose through life. The need for guidance is again proven to be the dominant strategy in this advertisement. Underneath the picture in the Millstone coffee ad it says "Design enthusiast Paige Davis lights up a room with our foglifter blend". This sentence maintains the need for achievement in the ad because it appears to the reader that by drinking their coffee you could be as successful as Paige Davis, the designer. "Taste What's Out There.", another phrase used in the Millstone ad also supports the need for achievement. This is because accomplishment comes with experience. So if you taste a little bit of everything that's out there then you have received the experience for success.

Lastly, the images depicted in the advertisements support the needs they appeal to. The Cafй Vienna ad includes a picture of two people in a canoe, on a still lake, paddling off towards the sunset and surrounding mountains. Ahead in their path is a shallow area where some grass is protruding from the lake bottom. The faces of the two people in the canoe are not visible. All the reader can