Essence of advertising

Torben Vestergaard and Kim Schroeder 1985. The Language of Advertising. Blackwell, Oxford UK and Cambridge USA. 182 p.

p.4 For advertising to make sense at all, at least a segment of the population must live above subsistence level; and the very moment this situation occurs it also becomes necessary for the producers of materially “unnecessary” goods to do something to make people want to acquire their commodities. However, advertising is not just any sales promoting activity – door-to-door salesmanship is not, for instance, and this points to the second precondition for advertising: the existence of a (relatively) mass market and media through which it can be reached.

The great breakthrough for advertising only came in the late nineteenth century. Technology and mass-production techniques were now sufficiently developed for more firms to be able to turn out products of roughly the same quality and at roughly the same price. This was accompanied by overproduction and underdemand which meant that the market had to be stimulated, so advertising technique changed from proclamation to persuasion. At the same time literacy had spread to ever larger segments of the population.

p.8 Commodities in a fully developed capitalist system are not the surplus products of individual producers. Rather, they are produced on a mass basis in factories in order to be sold to an anonymous market. The owner of the factory has made certain capital outlays on machinery, raw materials and workers’ wages. When the commodity is sold, he has to get these outlays back plus a profit for reinvestment and private consumption. No one will want to buy a product unless it seems to be of use value to him, but since the seller’s only interest in his commodity is selling it, he will be satisfied as long as the commodity appears to be of use value. The more attractive the product appears, the more people will want to buy it, and the shorter will be the lag between the time when the product leaves the factory and the time when the product is sold. This.. has led to an aestheticization of commodities. This aestheticization may be inherent in the product itself in the form of design (cars, for instance), smell (washing-up liquid), or colouring (beverages) – strictily irrelevant to the material use of the product; it may appear in close connection with the product (the specially shaped bottles of beverages), or completely detached from the product, in advertising. Not only does advertising help make products appear as aestheticaly pleasing as possible, the advert becomes an aesthetic object in itself.

p.14 Advertising is verbal/non-verbal, public, one-way communication.

p.15 In the case of advertising, the addresser is the advertiser, and the addressee is the reader, the meaning transmitted is about the product (more specifically, an attempt to make the reader buy the product), the code (in the case of press advertising) is language and some sort of visual code, the channel consists of printed publications, and the context will include such features as the reader’s total situation (does he have the product already?) can he afford it?), the publication in which the advertisement appears, and last but not least the knowledge that the text is an advert.

p.49 The ultimate aim of all advertising is to sell the commodity, but in order to achieve this there are a few obstacles which the adman has to overcome. First of all, prospective buyers are likely to be reading the newspaper or magazine not because of its advertising material but because of its editorial material; moreover, round about half of the publication is likely to consist of adverts, all of them competing for the reader’s attention. The first task of the adman, then, is to make sure that his advert is noticed. Once the reader’s attention has been caught, the advert should also hold his attention and it should convince him that the subject of this particular advert is of interest to him. Furthermore, the advert has to convince the reader that the commodity will satisfy some need – or create a need which he has not felt before. Finally, it is not enough that the prospective customer should come to feel a need for the product in general; the advert must convince him that the particular brand advertised has some qualities which will make it superior t other similar brands. In addition, the ideal brand should be constructed in such a way that as much as possible of its message will get across even to the reader who merely notices it but decides not to read it.

Lund (1947: 83) summarizes the task of the adman as being to:

1. attract attention;
2. arouse interest;
3. stimulate desire;
4. create conviction;
5. get action.

p.65 To create real conviction in a product’s superiority to competitors, an advertiser needs a “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP), but, at our technological level, it is very rare for a product to boast a quality which is totally missing in competing products. For this reason the USPs which we are most likely to come across are essentially aesthetic, such as the fact that a soap is transparent.

p.66 Even if an advertiser cannot claim that his product is unique, he can always describe how painstakingly the quality of each item has been checked. It is far more difficult to claim an advantage over competitors in the question of price. But it is possible to say pretty much the same thing in different words… anyone can claim that his product is “better value for money”.

p.121 It is absolutely essential to be in contact with the reader’s consciousness, first in order to catch their attention, and secondly to dispose them favourably towards the product advertised. Advertisers therefore have to please the readers, never disturb or offend them; and because adverts are under this obligation to reflect the attitudes, hopes and dreams of their readers as closely as possible.

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