Advertising 2
Advertising 2The main purpose of advertising is to sell a certain product of send a message to a certain group of people. Advertisements can be found anywhere from billboards on the highway to banners on the Internet. Some advertisements try to sell a certain product and make people aware of their presence. Other advertisements are there to deliver a certain message to the people. As Judith Williamson says "Advertisements are one of the most important cultural factors moulding and reflecting our life today. They are ubiquitous, an inevitable part of everyone's lives: even if you do not read a newspaper or watch television, the images posted over our urban surroundings are inescapable. Pervading all the media, but limited to none, advertising forms a vast superstructure with an apparently autonomous existence and an immense influence."(11) Television commercials and magazine advertisements tend to focus toward the people most likely to watch that television program or read that magazine. For example, if people are watching a soccer game then the commercials in between will most likely have to do with soccer. In magazines the advertisements are related to the theme of the magazine, in computer magazines there will be advertisements on computer hardware and software, and in beauty magazines there will be advertisements on make-up and beauty supplies. In other words, as Judith Williamson mentions, "Advertisements are selling us something else
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besides consumer goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves."(13) Most advertisements have an eye catching picture or phrase that will keep the attention of the viewer long enough to deliver them the message.
The advertisement that I have chosen to research on is a COVER GIRL advertisement that I found in a magazine called YM that stands for "young and modern" and is directed toward teenage girls. This advertisement has its COVER GIRL brand name as the headline. Even David Ogilvy recommends this: "I advise you to include the brand name in your headline. If you don't, 80 per cent of readers (who don't read your body copy) will never know what product you are advertising."(73) They assume that the viewer of this advertisement knows this brand name since it is very popular. The headline plays a key role in an advertisement for it is usually the first thing the viewer sees when they first glance upon the advertisement and the viewer usually decides whether they are interested in the product/message or not. It is not smart to have an advertisement without a headline. As David Ogilvy states, "Since headlines, more than anything else, decide the success or failure of an advertisement, the silliest thing of all is to run an ad without any headline at all- 'a headless wonder'."(74)
Following the headline in this advertisement is a statement which reads "THE LOOK WITH COVER GIRL MAKE UP:...
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