Seductively Speaking

Seductively Speaking

Advertisements are reflections of the society in which they are produced. In fact, throughout the last century, the persuasive methods of advertisements and the prestige of name brand products have increasingly controlled Americans' purchasing decisions. Americans have become increasingly preoccupied with "keeping up with the Jones'," per se. With Americans continually trying to keep up with the latest fashions and the newest technological advances, our society's values are deteriorating and becoming more centered around vanity and reputation. Advertisements seem to have infiltrated every aspect of society from arts and culture, to sports and fashion. Regardless of your location, whether it be driving down the freeway, or watching television in your home, there will always be an advertisement trying to persuade you to think a certain way or to purchase a certain product. There are messages within some advertisements that are purely for entertainment value. Nevertheless, the majority of advertisement messages are not that simple and often have a hidden agenda. Advertisements do not exist merely to fulfill an entertainment objective but to influence society's desires. American society needs to recognize that they are allowing advertisers to invade their homes and minds. Without realizing it, consumers are continually being caught up in the strategic ways advertisers entice them. Advertisements do not merely 'inform' us or solely reflect society, but reflect our desires; although they also create desire, and a lifestyle- thus forming (not merely influencing) the economic market of today.

We are so accustomed to having advertisements everywhere we look, that we have allowed them to integrate into our lives. This gives the advertisers a greater ability to influence our decisions that, in turn, has allowed advertisements to generate large portions of economic growth. Not only do they influence economic growth, but also have a significant say in dictating norms, values, lifestyles and consumer trends. This is because advertisements inform and dictate social relations, telling individuals what they must buy to become fashionable, popular, and successful, thereby inducing them to buy particular products to reach these goals. However after reading the article "How Advertising Informs to Our Benefit," there is a far more conservative view of how advertisements succeed.

John Calfee, the author of the article, believes that advertisements are merely tools for communicating information and forming economic markets. He speculates that American society credits advertisements as being a very useful informational tool. However, advertising also seeks to persuade its consumers, a premise, with which Calfee agrees, but he believes that the American society is fully aware of the persuasive function of advertising. Calfee's stance is that advertisements are great ways to obtain product information. Therefore he believes the only way consumers the will buy a certain product is if the product "rests upon some academic credentials" (182). Then again his opinion does not coincide with the way advertisements are developed. For instance, when you drive down the highway and see numerous billboards trying to quickly persuade you to buy a product or go eat at a particular restaurant, these advertisements are not using any type of academic reasoning in their message. Persuasive methods in advertising are not usually based on academic credentialing, but on the foundation of how well the advertisement can reach consumers on a personal level. When you see a television advertisement asking you to donate money to the starving children of Somalia, they do not present any academic reasoning as to why you should donate. They lure you in and take your money by appealing to your sense of sympathy. The advertisers assume that by showing helpless, starving children to our well-off society, our emotions will take over and our wallets will come out- and it works! That type of advertising focuses on our emotions not our intellects. In many cases emotions are used as shortcuts to the persuasive methods of advertisements.

Another example of persuasive methods is presented in the text "How Advertising Informs To Our Benefit." There, advertisers created a more personalized type of persuasion, is when the National Cancer Institute (hereafter referred to as NCI) was trying to convey to the consumers in the 1980's, a new way to decrease multiple forms of cancers. Unfortunately, at that time, the NCI advertisements failed to reach any of the consumers they were trying to target. What they did not realize is that within the complex societies of today, advertisers cannot merely describe what the consumer is lacking or desires, but must to provide seemingly legitimate solutions to fix the consumer's need. More specifically, the NCI was trying to convey to consumers that a high fiber diet would aide in the prevention of many cancers. As the consumers listened to these countless NCI claims, there was no evidence that consumer's were buying any more food with a high fiber content than before. The reason why there was not an increase in high fiber consumption was that the NCI did not give any specific solutions to the problem; therefore the consumer's did not take action. After witnessing the lack of response to the NCI's claims, the Kellogg Company soon took advantage of the situation, and offered their cereal as a food with high fiber content. NCI began to re-run the advertisements with the claim that Kellogg cereal could help decrease the chances of getting cancer. Since the NCI offered a solution to their previous claim, the American society adopted the solution presented and increasingly began to buy Kellogg cereal.

Where the NCI found it necessary to identify a solution for consumers, other advertisers find that a personal approach works just as well to get their message across. There are multiple ways to reach consumers on a personal level, another being the use of limited words. Calfee, however, believes that the idea behind using limited words within an advertisement is solely to cut costs. His assumption is partially true, however there is more to this technique than mere cost cutting. Every advertiser would like to save money, but this is not the primary reason why limited words are used in most advertisements. One of the primary reasons is because it allows the consumer to interpret the advertisement in their own way. By doing this, consumers are able to develop their own perspective of the advertisement, which subconsciously also develops their personal desire for that product. Katherine McCoy, however, infers that persuasion itself creates the consumer's personalized desire, not the advertisement, as discussed