Advertisements and psychomanipulation

A short article about psychomanipulation used in modern society. A free-to-use article.

To start off, I am obliged to say that I'm not an expert in advertising, yet kind of interested in manipulation. The techniques and examples written below are gathered from various sites in the Internet and also provided by my friends, who tested them. I cannot already say that these techniques will certainly work – one could take my essay as an inspiration how to promote his company. That's the best approach. I hope that this small analysis will be good enough for people who want to make ads on their own. It's not that tough, after all.

For our purposes, let us be concerned with older date ads. Why so? The rules applied to ads from present are more or less the same, but you would better understand older ads.

Let me be clear. Look at this. It's a Budweiser beer advertisement, so you can easily recognize this product. Without doubts, beer is one of the more selling-out wares. You're familiar with it and then we can go in-depth. Look at it again. What do you feel looking at this? Perhaps the advert is not as efficient as it was supposed to be – this is a vintage ad. There are not so many differences between ads from present and older as the main rules remain the same, only styles do change, from time to time. Consider why is so on this ad? How would you present the same situation using other methods?
You should know that this is not a real situation at all. This, what you're seeing is just a pair of actors with props arranged. Everything is put especially to make you buy nothing but this kind of beer. Take a look at the actors. The man is wearing a yellow shirt of good quality. So is doing the woman. Notice that both are clean and chic. The woman has pink varnished nails and is reaching her hand for beer. Both are smiling. The teeth of woman's are peculiar for ads: These are very white. Her hair-cut is done very well and she's looking in right direction with a bright smile. So is doing the man.
The background is sunny, which suggests summer. Suppose these two are a pair who are having a grill party(the grill is depicted at the bottom of the picture). The cake which is being taken by the hand of – presumably the barman – look delicious and moist. The cake is located between a fresh corn, cup of wine and chips. All looks fresh, good quality and pleasantly new. Now let us think a little about it. The pair depicted looks like some ordinary people. This trick is used for understandable aims – one watching the ad has to identify himself with the people. These are average people and the advert was done for masses. Imagine how would the ad look if the cake wasn't so moist or there were not fresh products put on the table? Advertisements have their own symbolism which is self-explanatory.
For example, background. If it wasn't shiny, the world presented within wouldn't be so tempting. One of the ad's properties is to attract you to it; make you familiar, assure you're safe. The thing most encountered in ads is that makers want to convince you that if you buy the product, you're stylish like people depicted.
Notice that the pair is looking in the same direction – it's the bar where meals and drinks are served. Additionally, the woman is reaching her hand for beer and her mouth is open – a sign that she want to drink it, not speaking about the man, who is already drinking the beer with a slight smile on his face. The smile of man's says that he takes pleasure from drinking. This is the beer for him; he's totally convinced for its quality. The beer can, which is almost at the picture's center indicates that this it the beer, without doubts.
And there's also an inscription on the bottom of the picture: “GOODNESS KNOWS...”, which says about beer's ingredients. And that's why the beer is put between these fresh products. It's to prove that the ingredients are as fresh as these in the picture. The advert makers are very keen on their product – no wonder that the Bud is the one of the most selling-out beers in U.S.

As you may easily see, every advertisement's quality is not tough to explain. It's the key to read adverts and think why things are made so and not other way. Thus you can make ads yourself without real advert studio. Look at ads made by some well-recognized companies and think copy some techniques. That way you may notice some trends and styles liked by customers in the matter, making you more trend-conscious, so better prepared to face the problems of yours. There's something about modern adverts: In more and more cases, they don't try to advertise their qualities, rather to promote some specific lifestyle connected to this brand of products. Producers nowadays try to make their adverts more smart and tasty; that resulted in doing ads connected to art. This although applies to most recognized companies(like Nike); small and medium size companies still do their job using technique described above.

Author: Jacek Pająk