Advertising in the modern world (Школьные сочинения)

Advertising

“The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad”. This is a quote by Howard Luck Gossage, and, as I think, it illustrates one of the most focal concepts of advertising. It is the idea that nobody wants to see ads. But in the modern world, if you want your goods sold, then you have to start an advertisement campaign. So, how to make a good advertisement?

To begin with, no one will watch a dull ad (that is, any ad that is uninteresting to watch), unless you make them do that somehow (e.g. not showing content on a website until you finish watching an advert), so a good advertisement should attract potential watchers/readers.

As a matter of fact, such an effect is achievable: in fact, many pop music artists plug products of famous brands in their music videos (those can be clothes, electronics and even yoghurt). Episodes, where the brand shows up, are usually attention-grabbing, but people watch such ads as if it was a part of the song. Some brands actually endorse their products contacting with famous musicians in order to make some hype around it, and then they get loads of money. In contrast, there exist very annoying ads, e.g. any gambling website ad, that are really loud and low-quality. A good advertisement should have a memorable and original slogan in order to be efficient. Apart from that, it is not necessary to spend vast sum of money on your ad, because a creative idea is much more expensive than any amount of money.

One thing we can often see in any advert is image manipulation. Altering an image digitally gives a lot of advantages: out of a simple image you can make a piece of art. Moreover, by editing a picture, not only can you make it more appealing by, for instance, retouching it, but, as a result, you can make something that could be impossible to take a picture of (e.g. dogs in space, if this is what you want to run your ads with). The concept of editing images has a large impact on a lot of people. First of all, IT engineers now can have a new kind of job. Apart from that, because of edited images, we now have a lot of very appealing ads (as I think, the most effective ones are those, in which both nice editing and a recognizable logo are combined). But edited images and advertising in general have a huge impact on children.

Ads are a source of usually very “shiny” information, and children love everything pretty and shiny. Through ads they can obtain knowledge and they can be just entertained by it. Although so far we have been describing ads as a generally great idea, they can sometimes be as bad as destroying one’s mind. In other words, there is the other side of the coin: adverts can distort children’s view of the world. Many children see a lot of edited pictures of models on a daily basis (there are a lot of them on the TV advertising, for instance, some perfume commercial, and they do not even try to reach children in particular!), and it makes them think, that this is the way all people should look. Consequently, they expect themselves to look the same, but it never happens, and then they have a depression, they hate their appearance and become really shy. Besides, sometimes an edited photo of a product can be misleading. Let’s say, you want to start a witty advertising campaign for your cereals, and, as an advertising campaign manager, you decide that in every ad there should be a cartoon character promoting your product, but you don’t have offering models of cartoon characters in your plans. Thereupon, you are going to trick a lot of kids into thinking that they will get a toy if they buy your product (if they ask their parents to, to be exact). This is why both parents and the government should think of ways to prevent some impacts of an ad to a child. First thing I would suggest is to basically explaining to children (both at home and at school) that ads are not a real representation of life. Apart from that, at school there should be media literacy courses for kids, because it is a vital skill in a person’s life nowadays, and it’s better to obtain it earlier.

To summarize it all, I would like to say that making an advertisement is a hard craft, because not everyone is an ideas hamster. But there are principles, which can be easy to follow, and the main one, as I think, is that you shouldn’t force your client into reading/watching your ad, you should keep it simple and make your ad creative enough so that people themselves would want to watch it. One thing you should also use, if you want to make an efficient ad is image editing: it can make your ads as shiny as they had never been before. What you should remember is that every ad has an impact on a lot of different people, and children, in particular, so every ad should be done wisely, and you should always be honest with your clients in your ads.