The Power Of Advertisement - Essay Example

The world of advertisement is truly magical. You have two to three seconds to tell your story and to tell it in such a way that it should make the target audience to shell out the money from their pocket and make a buy. Bill Bernbach has rightly said that “ Advertisement is not a science. It is persuasion. And persuasion is an art” [1]. This art has been used by advertisers and companies throughout the world to make people buy their product. Jib Fowles, through his essay “Advertisings Fifteen Basic Appeals” has given the information about the emotional appeals that advertisers use to make the consumer buy the products, and hence making us consumers smart enough not to become a prey to their gimmicks.

His effort is to make us aware of the visual gimmicks that are being used to make us believe in certain things that are not true. Fowles has done a great job by giving us examples of different advertisements and talking about the different emotional and subconscious drives they are trying to appeal to. The essay is sort of good as far as information goes, however, I personally think that it has missed the essence by not mentioning the word ‘mental association’ and by downplaying the importance of sex in the advertisements.

Let us understand one thing, right from the advertisements of bikes, shaving blades, medicines, cosmetics and laptops, sex plays a huge part. Maybe not directly, but certainly indirectly. If a medicine commercial says that it keeps you young, it certainly gives you an idea of biological pleasures of remaining young and sex is one of the pleasures. The Pepsi commercial can make a person to buy a cold drink not because he likes the cold drink but by ‘arousing’ him and mentally associating him with Michael Jackson [2].