Advertising Through Time - Essay Example

Advertising Through Time While many advertisements seem to be offering a fun and scenic break in our magazine reading, they are, in reality, making every effort to get consumers to buy into their product through the careful display of image and text. This has been the case since the earliest use of printed images to encourage business. Coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, advertising began in full force for a number of products. Ads became more and more sophisticated both as the result of increasing science and psychology and in response to a changing public. Although consumers today are much more aware of the various tricks and appeals that are made in advertising on a logical level as compared to their pre-WWII counterparts, advertisers have discovered that there are various emotional appeals that can be made that insinuate themselves below our rational thought process to appeal to the inner animal within. Advertisements prior to World War II can be seen to contain a certain element of innocence and naiveté within the public as compared to those created in more contemporary times, yet ads created in both time periods have proven effective in making compelling appeals. The differences in appeals yet continued effectiveness of advertisements created in the beginning decades of the 20th century as compared to contemporary advertisements are best illustrated by looking at specific examples in the skin care industry. Early advertisements for skin care products such as Synol Soap (1915) base much of their consumer appeal on the same basic appeals as advertisements today, but did so in a much more blatant way. According to Jib Fowles (1998), there are 15 basic appeals that advertisers use to grab consumers’ attention and encourage them to purchase a particular product. Although this list wasn’t put together until relatively recently, the appeals were apparently intuitively understood early in the 1900s as evidenced in a 1915 Synol Soap ad. This ad makes a blatant attempt to appeal to consumers’ need for affiliation and guidance. According to Fowles, “the need to associate with others is widely invoked in advertising and is probably the most prevalent appeal. All sorts of goods and services are sold by linking them to our unfulfilled desires to be in good company” (1998). In the Synol ad, this affiliation is promised through the assurance that the ad is sharing information known by “the modern woman” (emphasis added), immediately assuming the reader of the ad is among those who consider themselves modern (read ‘young’). The stronger appeal, however, is in the ads promise to provide sage guidance. Fowles says, “We may be loath to admit it, but the child lingers on inside every adult” (1998) and we willingly agree to belief in the father or mother figure, the claim to tradition or the suggestion of authority. As a part of the lengthy text of the ad, the Synol presentation includes instruction on how the soap is to be used (as a skin cleanser, shampoo, household and disinfectant), how often it should be used and the health benefits it offers. This final piece of information is backed up with the authority of “thousands of physicians and nurses [who] are recommending Synol Soap to their friends and patients” (Synol, 1915). Although the ad apparently makes a successful appeal to its contemporary audience using appeals that remain strong today, today’s audience would find it distasteful and inelegant. This effect on an audience of the 21st would begin with its immediate eye appeal. What can be seen of the drawn young woman in the ad is her face, carefully and subtly shaded with color to give her realism, the lower part of one slender white arm covered slightly by a teasing piece of fallen hair, parts of both hands and a mass of wavy brown hair falling all around her from a cap of white suds. The only other visual elements in the ad are the hint of a sink with faucet, the pale yellow bottle of product itself and a mass of text filling the entire bottom half of the ad space. This space is defined by a red and yellow checked border with the name of the company, Johnson and Johnson, centered at the top. To today’s audience, the suggestion of sex appeal that doubtless existed for the audience of 1915 is completely lost in time. The graphics, as fine examples of the art of the time nevertheless fail to impress the sophisticated audience of computer-aided perfection and vividly colored commercial inks. Finally, the great volume of text and the preachy nature with which the information is delivered begins to ring alarm bells in the heads of the 21st century audience jaded by ambiguous claims for expertise or affiliation. It is not longer enough to be authoritative, ads must provide greater weight. It is not enough to offer affiliation, the audience must first understand whom, specifically, it is being encouraged to affiliate with. To understand how consumer appeals have gone underground, so to speak, by overwhelming with image and being subtle with text, another multi-purpose product, Nivea Sun-Kissed Firming Moisturizer. Like the Synol Soap ad, this ad appeals to its audience’s need for affiliation while also offering guidance, but it does so by appealing to the emotions through image rather than the intellect through words. Rather than allowing the image to decorate the text, this ad allows the text to decorate the image. For example, the words “touch for scent” are oriented to make a small circle around the bronze tip of the woman’s shoulder. This brings attention to her flirty attitude and the appealing bronze color and encourages more of the reader’s senses to become involved with the ad. Instead of promising affiliation with the actors in the ad, the text indicates that use of the product with cause others to be “drawn” to the user which has already been proven in the compulsive urge of most people to sniff when instructed at scent patches inserted in magazines. Affiliation is also suggested in the interaction observed between the two people in the ad as well as in the concept that “7 out of 10 women love the sun-kissed fragrance,” meaning the user would be affiliated with a majority of women. Guidance is provided in encouragement to use lotion on the skin as a means of keeping it fresh and moisturized, therefore healthy, while its gradual build-up of a tan-like tint is intended to encourage women to stay out of the sun. The implied message is that the company is concerned enough to try to keep women from getting skin cancer. As is suggested in the above discussion regarding the basic appeals of the ad, which match those used in the 1915 ad, most of these appeals are made through images rather than words. The overall color scheme of the advertisement is a general golden brown. The golden aspect is highlighted by a blurry trail of random lights in the background that suggests they are in some kind of fancy location, but this could be anywhere. The foreground of the advertisement shows a mid-20s woman in a playful pose and dressed in a casually fashionable skirt and shirt. Her dark hair is free and loose and her clothing depicts a casual summer feel as well, giving her an air of health and relaxation. She is positioned to the left side of the image and her body faces out as if she was just on her way somewhere else. But her head is tilted back in toward the center of the image as she playfully peeks over her shoulder at the man who is pictured somewhat behind and to the right of her. The man in the picture seems completely focused on this woman and seems to represent the upper middle class set in his pristinely white yet still casual white button-down shirt and black pants. The only other image on the page is the product itself, ‘floating’ on the picture plane and standing out as the brightest, clearest point on the page with the exception of areas highlighted by white text. This product is stamped with what appears to be some sort of official certificate. While the intense gaze between the man and woman suggest fulfillment of the need for affiliation, the color of the ad combined with the time of day depicted (it is night in the ad as demonstrated by the electric lights in the background) suggest the guidance provided to the audience. The official stamp that actually promises 7 of 10 women prefer the fragrance nevertheless provides the sense of authority that the modern audience is seeking while the text is kept to a minimum, forcing the mind to resort to emotional rather than logical responses. While the ads of the early 1900s appear to a modern audience to be quaint and unsophisticated, the ads of the early 2000s can be said to be equally unsophisticated. Looking back at the ads of yesteryear reveals an almost aggressive appeal to logic and instruction. The text dominates the space and makes bold claims, assuming the public will believe them. Today’s audience sees the manipulations as if they were marked with highlighter pens and resents and avoids them. Today’s ads veer away from the heavy-handed text approach and instead rely upon the emotional appeal of images to make the same appeals. However, careful analysis reveals that they are every bit as heavy-handed when viewed from the proper perspective. Works Cited Fowles, Jib. “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals.” Common Culture: Reading and Writing about American Pouplar Culture. Michael Petracca & Madeleine Sorapure (Ed.). Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1998. Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman. Ohio: Ohio State University, 2002. Nivea. (Advertisement). In Style Magazine. July 2008. Synol Soap. (Advertisement). (1915). Available August 13, 2008 Read More