Advertising: Information or Manipulation?
Advertising: information or manipulation?
Advertising, a word that is synonym to the word marketing, has a rich back round. When we talk about marketing the first things that come to our mind are money, goods, services, and of course consumers. Advertising’s role should only exist in order to help society by real information about products and services, decide what to purchase according to people’s actual needs. One definition of advertising is: "Advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media."(Bovee, 1992, p. 7). We could separate advertising in two categories. Giving information through advertising about a product is the first category that is innocent when facing the costumers. The second category has a manipulative effect on people. People exposed to specific advertisements are led to buy goods and services or do things that don’t actually want to do. This is the face of manipulation through advertising which makes people more commodity fetishists
Information is defined as knowledge, facts or news. However, we should bear in mind that one person's information is another person's trick, particularly when advertisers talk about their products. Information comes in many forms. It can be complete or incomplete. It can be biased or misleading. Complete information is telling someone everything there is to know about something: what it is, what it looks like, how it works, what its benefits and drawbacks are. On the other hand, to provide complete information about anything is time consuming and hard. All of this would require a documentary, not a commercial. Complete information is impossible to provide in an advertisement. Thus, for advertising, information must of necessity be incomplete; not discussing everything there is to know about the subject. In advertising, what appears is everything the writer thinks the
Advertising, a word that is synonym to the word marketing, has a rich back round. When we talk about marketing the first things that come to our mind are money, goods, services, and of course consumers. Advertising’s role should only exist in order to help society by real information about products and services, decide what to purchase according to people’s actual needs. One definition of advertising is: "Advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media."(Bovee, 1992, p. 7). We could separate advertising in two categories. Giving information through advertising about a product is the first category that is innocent when facing the costumers. The second category has a manipulative effect on people. People exposed to specific advertisements are led to buy goods and services or do things that don’t actually want to do. This is the face of manipulation through advertising which makes people more commodity fetishists
Information is defined as knowledge, facts or news. However, we should bear in mind that one person's information is another person's trick, particularly when advertisers talk about their products. Information comes in many forms. It can be complete or incomplete. It can be biased or misleading. Complete information is telling someone everything there is to know about something: what it is, what it looks like, how it works, what its benefits and drawbacks are. On the other hand, to provide complete information about anything is time consuming and hard. All of this would require a documentary, not a commercial. Complete information is impossible to provide in an advertisement. Thus, for advertising, information must of necessity be incomplete; not discussing everything there is to know about the subject. In advertising, what appears is everything the writer thinks the
References: Cappo, J. (2003). Future of Advertising : New Media, New Clients, New Consumers in the Post-Television Age. McGraw-Hill Companies. Craggs, C. (1992). Media Education in the Primary School. Routledge. du Plessis, E. (2005). Advertised Mind : Ground-Breaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond To Advertising. Kogan Page Limited. Lumby, C. (2003). Remote Control : New Media, New Ethics. Cambridge University Press. Phillips, M. J. (1997). Ethics & Manipulation in Advertising : Answering a Flawed Indictment. Greenwood Publishing. Taflinger, R. F. (1996). A definition of advertising. http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~taflinge/addefine.html