Adverts are very specifically placed according to target audience. You wouldn’t find an advert for cosmetic surgery in a fishing magazine, or something similar. They are placed in magazine’s where they will be effective, for example, adverts for make up will be very effective in a teenage magazine, and adverts for football equipment will be effective in a football magazine. Adverts on T.V are also placed at specific times and on specific channels. On the children’s channel toys and games are advertised, while on I.T.V at night the adverts will be more adult orientated, as the major amount of viewers at this time would be adults. The time adverts are on T.V. also depends on what they are selling. During the daytime adverts will be advertising nice clean things, while at night they begin to advertise sexual things and chat lines. Advertisers try to ‘out bid’ each other for time slots when their adverts can be shown. The prime time for adverts is in the middle of ‘Coronation Street’ or during a drama program, as most people are watching then. At these times adverts will cost the most to be displayed, while adverts shown at 3o’clock in the morning will be very cheap, as hardly anyone will be watching at this time.
Adverts aimed at younger children are very successful as they use ‘pester power’. In the theory of pester power, a child sees a product advertised on TV and desires the product, and bothers their parents until they have the desired product. Pester power can be very affective and is a well known theory.
Every product/place/person has an image. Paris is seen as expensive and romantic, this does not mean everything in Paris is romantic and expensive, this is just a stereotype. Many products produce their own stereotype through their adverts. Adverts decide how an image is seen. In the Dolmino advert everything is seen to be Italian. There are Italian settings, buildings, the music in the advert is stereotypical Italian music, the people are stereotypically Italian with their exaggerated ways of expressing themselves, their dark hair and olive skin, accents, and their typically Italian dress. All this is to make you believe the product is authentic Italian food, when in-fact the product was made in Holland. They want you to believe the product is made in Italy because Italy is associated with pasta, and the product is a pasta sauce, which will make the viewer of the advert believe the product is traditional and a prefect Italian sauce.
Old fashion images for food are good, while as for modern things such as cars only the latest technology will do. This is seen in the BMW adverts and Mercedes adverts. Their adverts use the latest music so it seems brand new; they have modern settings for their adverts. Their adverts make the cars seem desirable and make people wish to own them. The people in the adverts are always middle to upper class, young smartly dressed, clean, and have model like looks. Everything about them, the car, and the scenery is made to be perfect. Famous people aren’t used very often in adverts, as people believe they have been paid thousands of pounds and their opinion is fake. Ordinary people give the feeling that they have actually tried the product and their opinion is true, for example, Skoda® had a very bad image in the 80’s, and now in their adverts they are playing off their stereotype of their cars being bad, they are re-launching their product in order to give them a new image. People walk up to the Skoda® cars and look at them and then are in disbelief that they are Skoda’s®. This is attempting to say, our cars were bad, but look at them now, they are better. De Fleur’s Model of Media Effects proves this. The model is an attempt to explain what happens when people see an advert. After seeing the persuasive message a psychological process occurs of which the person is unaware of. The person then desires the product and wishes to have it, which is ‘changes in overt behaviour’.
Another image that has been changed is that of Lucozade. Lucozade used to be a drink for the ill, but now, due to advertising, it is seen as a sports drink. Adverts showed athletes drinking Lucozade and now the drink is associated with sports. At football matches lucozade is given to the players to drink at full time and half time as this is advertising for free. This is a good example that once an image in a product is changed, so does the audience.
Adverts make the products desirable and make people aspire to owning them. The adverts are set up market in life styles that people dream of, and when they buy the product, they believe they are buying into the lifestyle, for example, in the BMW adverts, the people that own them are middle-upper class people with model like looks, nice houses, well dressed, and when people buy a BMW they believe they are buying into this lifestyle.
Adverts create attitudes within the audience. Clean now isn’t just sparkly white. The Spray must contain germ-killing chemicals otherwise it isn’t good enough. This attitude was made by adverts. Sparkly white was good enough in the early 90’s but not now. Every cleaning advert also states its agents it has that kill the bacteria, and so people believe the more chemicals it contains the better. Products such as Flash® and Fairy® are responsible for this and are continually adding ‘new formulas’ to their products in order to keep people purchasing their product. The adverts show germs are being very harmful, and display them in the adverts as little gremlins that attack and harm children. Parents then buy the product to kill the germs, as they believe it will harm their child, all because of the adverts. What the people don’t realise is that the germs didn’t kill or harm children before they were discovered, so they wont know, but due to the advertisers, they have created the image that all bacteria is harmful. Wrinkles are a fact of life, everyone acquires them at some point in their life, but now, adverts have created attitudes, which make wrinkles seem terrible, and now people will go out of their way and buy anti-aging products just so they don’t have visible wrinkles.
Signs are a major part of advertising. Almost every company and product has a sign, and it is this that people recognise. The signs need to be easily seen and as soon as somebody sees the sign, they need to instantly know the product/company due to the short length of adverts. Some signs have nothing to do with the company/product, such as words. Chocolate doesn’t look like chocolate, doesn’t smell like it and in Italian is called Cioccolato, but still means the same thing. As long as everybody knew what you were talking about it would be ok. Words are only one example of signs. Company symbols are good examples. The BT symbol is a good example. It shows a man blowing a horn, which is irrelevant to the company or what they do, but when people see that sign they think BT, and what BT stands for. Flags are another good example of signs. The German flag doesn’t look anything like Germany, but when people see that flag, they know it is the German one.
Signs don’t always have to be directly related to the product, for example, if a food advert is set in Italy, Italy is the sign that the food is traditional, and well made, by the hands of authentic Italian women, even if it is made in England. The adverts create these stereotypes.
Products are re-launched all the time saying they contain 'new added formula' when really they are no different than the original one, but by re-launching the product, they keep the people who already buy the product are kept interested and new people who don't already buy the product are informed and may change to the new one.
The language in the adverts also changes. In specific magazines, such as computer magazines, the adverts use jargon, and this creates a semantic barrier, and if you are not into that subject you wont understand the language. Jargon is a specific type of language that needs understanding of the specific subject to be understood.
It is a known fact that advertising is successful; if it weren’t then major companies wouldn’t spend millions on it each year. The way people find out about products is through advertising, they desire the products due to the adverts, the adverts create images, and when these images are used out or out of date, the product is re-launched. Adverts are all around us; everywhere we look there are adverts, from T.V, to magazines, Internet, Leaflets, junk mail, billboards, and many, many other places. If you are consistently reminded about how good a product is, then you will be temped to buy it.
