(UNESP - 2013 - 1a fase)Analyze an advertisementPe

(UNESP - 2013 - 1a fase)

Analyze an advertisement
Peter Sells
Sierra Gonzalez
Not all advertisements make perfect sense. Not all of them
promote or imply acceptance of social values that everyone
would agree are what we should hope for, in an enlightened
and civilized society. Some advertisements appear to degrade
our images of ourselves, our language, and appear to move
the emphasis of interaction in our society to (even more)
consumerism. There may even be a dark, seamy, or seedy
side to advertising. This is hardly surprising, as our society is
indeed a consumer society, and it is highly capitalistic in the
simplest sense. There is no doubt that advertising promotes a
consumer culture, and helps create and perpetuate the ideology
that creates the apparent need for the products it markets.
For our purposes here, none of this matters. Our task is to
analyze advertisements, and to see if we can understand how
they do what they do. We will leave the task of how we interpret
our findings in the larger social, moral and cultural contexts
for another occasion.
It is often said that advertising is irrational, and,
again, that may well be true. But this is where the crossover
between information and persuasion becomes important; an
advertisement does not have to be factually informative (but it
cannot be factually misleading).
In a discussion of what kind of benefit an advertisement
might offer to a consumer, Jim Aitchison (1999) provides the
following quote from Gary Goldsmith of Lowe & Partners, New
York. It sums up perfectly what it is that one should look for in
an advertisement. The question posed is “Is advertising more
powerful if it offers a rational benefit?” Here is Goldsmith’s
answer: “I don’t think you need to offer a rational benefit.
I think you need to offer a benefit that a rational person can
understand.”
(www.stanford.edu. Adaptado.)

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