Comm 406

“Ads are a way for soulless companies to have personality and talk to their audience.”

First and foremost, the job of advertising is not to entertain its potential buyers, but to convince them that they are selling a product or idea that they want and have always wanted. Whether they do that through sympathy or action or mass appeal or entertainment and fun is up to the advertising company and its client. Advertisements, whether they be on billboards or on the radio or on the television, their primary goal is communicating with their target demographic. Sometimes the advertisement is wrong for its demographic and sometimes it is wrong for the company employing the advertising company.

For example, as depicted in Art & Copy, an advertisement that stressed family life for a bank, garnered so many new clients that the bank had to stop the ads from running and turn away clients. Too much success is one thing, but too little is another.

The providence of advertising ideas sometimes do not come from a mindset of entertainment. The Nike catchphrase that is so famous now: Just do it. was taken from a man in front of firing squad whose last words were “Let’s do it.” This shows how advertising companies are willing to skew anything to make their campaign work, so long as it has wide application and makes prospective buyers eager to buy.

The Got Milk? campaign is an example of an advertising campaign that did really well despite what many people thought. Something like milk that was not a brand-heavy product and to market something like that seemed impossible, and yet something that seemed so impossible became so famous – even today.

So although advertising companies’ main goal is not to entertain the public, many times the ultimate product of the campaign is entertaining. 

The Century of the Self

The Century of the Self was a great documentary that followed the role of Freud's research and findings in the age of advertising. He helped advertisers discover how to make people want things they did not need through stimuli and latent feelings and ideas based on instinctual drives in all of us.

One of the more interesting pieces I liked was the advertising campaign attempting to get women to smoke. The idea that an advertisement, something inane and ultimately meaningless, could convince women and men, for that matter, that women were capable of smoking cigarettes is incredible. Even though it was considered almost taboo for women to smoke at that time, this advertising campaign showed women if they smoked, they were more free and independent. Of course, that was not true, but by linking emotion and want to an object, they had created a fool proof idea that, unfortunately, worked. Edward Bernays was behind this and found that appealing to the emotional side of humanity is far more effective than appealing to the intelligent side.

In the early 1900's, the idea of women smoking was detestable and, frankly, gross. But with this ingenius ad campaign, suddenly it was okay. In fact, it was better than okay! Of course, the ad campaign wasn't the only reason. The women's fight for suffrage and equal rights as men further pushed the idea that if men can smoke, women can, too. The women portrayed in these ads were independent and strong, like Amelia Earhart, the pinnacles of the ideal free American woman.

Today, the idea that women should not smoke or should not be seen smoking is still a common one, particularly in countries where women do not hold high places in their societies, such as in Gaza where for a short time women were not allowed to smoke in public.