Advertising is Everywhere
Advertising is everywhere. It’s in what you read, what you watch, what you eat, and what you wear. They're in the sky. They're on the ground. They're in the water.
Our economy thrives on you buying more and more, even though you don’t need it. And oh yeah, you're in debt. The goal of advertising is simple: get you to buy a product. To make you say, yes, I want this. I need this. Life will be better with this retro Cowbell. But a Mason jar too—that is adorable. This is the mug that won’t fall over. Watch this. It fell. It fell.
We wanted to learn how advertisers capture our attention and get us to buy stuff we don’t even really need. So, we turned to Jonas Sachs, an advertising executive and co-founder of Free Range Studios, to explain a few ways brands get into our heads.
Ads Tell Us Who We Are
How do ads tell us who we are or give us who we should be?
We see 3,500 of them a day, and the majority of them basically tell us, you suck, and if you don’t buy this product, you’re not going to be rich enough, hard enough, or hot enough.
So, we walk around being told 3,500 times a day how insufficient and lame we are.
Memorable Ads
Are there any ads that have stuck out in your mind?
The number one most shared advertisement on YouTube of all time is that Dove Real Beauty Sketches ad. They make the real beauty sketches all about how women are so much more beautiful than they think they are through this stunt of the police artist who’s sketching them.
Tell me about your hair.
They make a picture of what they think they look like versus what a stranger thinks.
People are saying, Listen, they’re reaching hundreds of millions of people with a positive message. People want to share it because they say, “Oh, those are my values. That’s my idea.”
And then you start buying the soap because you share those values.
Emotional Appeal in Ads
So, this is one of those classic shock-therapy ads: parenthood is hard, drinking Coke is easy.
You need to speak to people on the level of identity. You need to speak to people on the level of emotion. There are millions of people who are going to sit there and be like, Yeah, my truth. That’s it. It’s totally me. Coke.
Influencers and Identity
Why use Beckham?
Advertisements tell you not that this product does this thing. It’s that people like this use this product. If you want to be like these kinds of people, use this product, and you’re instantly one of them.
We all want heroes in our lives, and we want to know how to be more like those heroes. Watching sports and movies that these guys are in doesn’t necessarily tell us how to be more like them, but products tell us how to be.
FOMO in Advertising
Are you up for whatever? Don’t answer. Grab a Bud Light and show it. Try new things. Make new friends.
It’s all crafted around creating a gap. You don’t have enough. You don’t have what’s.
It’s not necessarily even that audiences are sitting at home and saying, Oh man, I need to spend more time in the club. They’re saying, everybody else is in the club, and why aren’t you there?
So advertising is just a constant fear of missing out.
There’s a huge amount of that.
A Reflection on Advertisers
Wow, advertisers are like crappy friends. They make us feel needy, ugly, and uncool, but we keep them around anyway.
This is a beautiful moment. Sure, could use a Coke.
Source: AJ+. (2015, December 15). How Commercials Get Us To Buy Crap We Don’t Need [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urny4oFBbto