Analysing advertising

Introduction

To understand why advertising works it is important to first understand how it works. This section gives a brief insight into common strategies and approaches advertising agencies employ when promoting products or services and how and why they are successful. Knowing this allows us to understand why a campaign may be run across certain media, appear only in certain locations, be attached to certain programmes or events, or certain times.

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The format of advertising

Most advertising takes the same form: a bold, attention grabbing slogan or image, a verbal or written statement about the benefits of the product and a logo or product shot to reinforce the message. This triumvirate of elements, often not even consciously ingested leaves us with an impression of the product, its status, target market and benefits.

Targeting

It is impossible to devise an advert that appeals to everyone, so most advertising campaigns are targeted at a specific demographic: a group of people of similar age, gender, income, personality, interests or ethnicity for example - and tailored to their tastes.

When looking at adverts it is informative to consider first who the campaign is aimed at, the kind or consumer being targeted. For example, are they young, high earning, early adopting technophiles or older, less affluent, cautious technophobes?

The product

Next you must take into account exactly what is being advertised, what features and key benefits are being highlighted and why this would help sell the product.

In many markets competitor products are very similar to each other in price, quality and features and it is only the marketing that differentiates them from each other.

The angle

Once an advertiser has identified a target market, they need to decide how to appeal to it. Adverts can take a positive or negative approach tapping into subconscious desires and fears - buy this and good things will happen to you, fail to buy this and good things will not happen to you but bad things might.

There are a number of different ways of appealing to consumers that academics studying advertising have identified as being common to us all including:

This is not an exhaustive list, and any of these appeals can be combined or subverted. With these universal appeals in mind, copywriters can construct adverts to play on the consumers desire to be considered successful, desirable, to regress to their childhood and so on, thus creating a need and therefore desire for a product.

Language

The language of advertising is one of persuasion - an attention grabbing headline, usually followed by a subtle hard sell. Advertisers often use terms which are known as 'calls to action', words which make people exposed to advertising feel that they need to do something. Commonly used phrases include terms like: hurry, for a limited time, revolutionary and now. Adverts usually address the consumer directly and actively: Hurry, you must buy this now. There is more on the language of advertising in this article about slogans.

Images

One of the most important parts of any advert that has a visual element is the imagery. Everything from the lighting, to the placement of objects, the body language displayed and the camera angle is designed to draw the viewer to certain conclusion.

Putting it all together

Once all these things are taken into account, any ad can be decoded to a certain extent, and the true motives of the advertiser revealed. If we know a product is being advertised during commercial breaks on skateboarding programmes and uses lots of imagery of beautiful women being attainable to average young men it is easy to see that it is being aimed at teenage boys.

There is an interesting example of the decoding of advertising here, using an extract from Judith Williamson's seminal, Decoding Advertisements.

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