Comp I
Advertisement Analysis
Advertisements come in various shapes, sizes, and mediums, and as humans, we are constantly surrounded by them. Whether they are on TV, radio, or in a magazine, there is no way that we can escape them. They all have their target audience for whom the advertisers have specifically designed the ad. When a company produces a commercial, their main objective is to get their product to sell. This is a multibillion-dollar industry and the advertisers study all the ways that they can attract their audience’s attention. The producers of advertisements have many tactics and strategies they use when producing an ad to get consumers to buy their product. These include things such as rhetorical appeals, logical fallacies, and “the male gaze.”
The function of marketing is to either increase the number of customers or increase the rate of use among current customers. The number of customers can be increased by converting customers from competing brands, developing loyalty to the brand among current customers, or expanding the total market for the product class. “The more ads they make, the more they in turn have to make in order to get our attention, it’s led to a vicious circle of clutter” (PBS Frontline: The Persuaders). Advertising is a battle of which company can fill up the most empty wall space. Consequently, cities turn into a mass chaos of posters and billboards. Subway tunnels have now been turned into moving pictures, to produce almost a “commercial” if you will. The buses themselves have been turned into moving billboards. Nowadays the thirty-minute block for a television show is about 15 minutes worth of advertisements and 15 minutes of the actual show. Along with that, many people are actually being paid to be an advertisement, whether it be standing out in front of a building with a sign, or putting a company decal on their car. Advertisements, likewise, cannot be escaped. However, often advertisers have to be
Cited: Bordo, Susan. “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body”. Writing Analytically with Reading. 2nd ed. EDS. Rossenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. Boston: Wadsworth, 2012. 821-843. Print. Keitel, Victoria. “Old Spice Analysis.” Personal.PSU. n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012 Rushkoff, Douglas. “The Persuaders.” PBS Frontline. 9 Nov. 2004. Web. 11 Nov. 2012