From the
second we start our day until we lay back down at the end of the night, we are
exposed to a countless number of advertisements. There are the blatant, obvious
attempts to attract your business, like the giant billboards you see on your
way to work, or the thirty second prerequisite to your YouTube video, but there
are some, however, that are more subtle, almost unnoticeable; like your
favorite actress pictured with a coke in her hand on your morning sitcom. After
increasing my awareness to the advertisements around me for a 24 hour period, I
learned a great deal about the commercial aspect of society that on average, I
choose to ignore. While all ads have the same goal in mind (to get you to buy
their product) they don’t all do this in the same way. By paying attention to the
media around me, I was able to determine just how advertisers were attempting
to manipulate me into ultimately choosing their product.
Advertising
is used in almost all areas of media, but the one that comes to mind the most
with the average American citizen is T.V. The average American watches eight
hours of T.V a day, and commercials on average play every four minutes; so in
short, that’s a lot of ads. Of course, T.V. isn’t the only advertising outlet,
but I’ve learned through this ad diary that without those commercials, ads
become much sneakier and harder to point out. I watch maybe two hours of T.V. a
week, and it just so happened that neither of those hours came into play during
this 24 hour observation. As a result,
the bulk of m advertisement exposure comes from Facebook, Google, billboards,
and thanks to the Hunger Games premiere last night, Carmike Movie Theatre. By
becoming more aware and purposefully taking notice of advertisements, instead
of ignoring them like I usually do, I was able to determine the strategies
different media outlets use. “Reason why” and image ads were among the most
common. The most obvious “reason why” ad I came across was for Google+ and
interrupted my Pandora Radio. Its main motive was to convince me that everyone
that is anyone, that has more than two friends, is using Google+ to organize
their extremely busy and enjoyable social lives, and if I didn’t have it, I
would be forever out of the loop, and long story short: a friendless loser. A
memorable image ad based its strategy off of one of the biggest human
attractions: sex. Verizon used a sexy, ethnically mysterious woman to showcase
their newest phone and catch the attention of both their male and female
viewers. They killed two birds with one stone by showing the men that if they
buy this phone, they’ll attract similar sexy women, while at the same time,
suggesting to the women that if they buy the phone, they’ll look like a sexy
phone model: win-win.
Overall,
even without the influence of advertising’s biggest mogul—television—I was
still unable to escape the commercial nature of our society. Advertisements
have become second nature to me, as familiar as seeing a Kutztown squirrel in a
trashcan or that permanent Lancaster County farm smell that is always there,
but I no longer notice. Advertising has
become a way of life, but when will be too much? Yes, that thirty second
interruption of my favorite Train radio station was annoying, but advertisers
aren’t stopping at that. They’re everywhere; tracking you on the internet and
setting up campaigns in local elementary schools. While being able to ignore the constant smell
of manure can be considered a blessing, do we really want our children growing
up in a world where they are constantly bombarded by products begging for their
attention? This is a question I have a feeling we’ll be able to answer first-hand
soon enough, whether we want to or not.
