Get the Message? Part 1-Advertising Strategies

Advertising works. If it didn't, nobody would be doing it. And whether we realize it or not, those advertising messages are influencing how we spend our time, energy and money.

Advertising isn't necessarily a bad thing; advertising can even be helpful. It can inform us about new products and ideas, it can tell us how to save money, and it can help us become better-informed consumers.

Advertising isn't necessarily a good thing, either. Advertising can mislead us and confuse us. It can cause us to buy stuff we don't need to have, and spend our time and energy doing stuff we don't need to do. And that's just the legal advertising; we're not even talking about advertising that contravenes federal or state or provincial laws.

By the time you're my age, you may have already been exposed to a mind-numbing variety of advertising messages, in pretty much any medium you'd care to name. Advertising plays a huge role in our daily lives, and it's easy to become complacent about it. So although you may already be pretty cynical about most of the advertising that comes your way, it never hurts to take another look at advertising, and how and why it may be influencing your life.

I had my wake-up call the other day, when my nine-year-old told me what kind of toothpaste I should be buying. A particular brand "fights cavities better," he told me. A nine-year-old? Worried about cavities? Then he told me which grocery store sells the best steak. He doesn't even eat steak.

Although we had talked about advertising before, I realized that our conversations had mostly been limited to children's advertising for toys. We hadn't really covered other products, and he couldn't generalize what he had already learned. More importantly, I think, my son wanted to believe that a particular toothpaste would fight cavities better. He wanted to believe that a particular toothpaste would make his life better.

Who doesn't?

It's been a long, long time since I studied advertising copywriting, but I think the basics haven't changed too drastically. And here's what I was taught: "good" ads are written in ways that will appeal to people's basic self-interest.

We were taught that those self-interests included people's desire for Comfort (physical comfort and peace of mind) and Convenience (eliminate work, make work easier), Pleasure (fun and entertainment), and Love and Sex (self-explanatory, I think!). Fear and Loss was another biggie, which included ads targeted at people's fear of losing their possessions, their looks, etc. (Be careful with that one, we were taught: we don't want to scare folks too much.) There were several more categories we used in our class, but I think you get the idea.

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