Chapter 10 • Advertising

As YouTube’s reach has grown since the site’s launch in 2007, so has the potential for advertisers to reach a huge audience by placing ads in the streaming of videos. Here, YouTube CEO (chief operating officer) Susan Wojcicki speaks at YouTube Brandcast, which gives brands insight into reaching audiences on the video platform.

Taylor Hill/Getty Images

Key Idea: Advertisers have been successful in using a variety of tools to identify the needs of niche audiences and persuade those audiences to satisfy those needs by using their products. However, the use of these tools often leads to harmful consequences for individuals.

· Advertising Is Pervasive

· Advertising Strategies

o Traditional Strategy

o Digital Strategies

· Tools of Advertising

o Tools for Identifying Audiences

o Tools for Persuading Audiences

§ Search Engine Optimization

§ Recommender Systems

§ Ratings Services

§ Buying Funnel

· Becoming More Media Literate with Advertising

o Analyze Your Personal Needs

o Analyze Ads

o Look for Differences

o Evaluate the Ads

· Summary

· Further Reading

· Keeping Up to Date

· Exercises

“I hate ads. They are so annoying the way they interrupt television shows and all those pop-ups and banner ads on websites. I refuse to pay attention to any of them. I don’t contribute much to advertisers. They must hate me.”

“Not necessarily. Do you buy advertised products?”

“Like what?”

“Like when you go to the grocery store, you probably buy cereals, snacks, toothpaste. Do you buy well-known brands or the generic house brands?”

“I buy the well-known brands. And not because they are well known or because they are so heavily advertised.”

“Then why do you buy them?”

“They have higher quality.”

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody knows that.”

“If you read the labels carefully, you would see that the ingredients in the house brands are identical to the advertised brands. Also, the same governmental regulations that apply to advertised brands also apply to house brands, so house brands do not have impurities or harmful ingredients. And the house brands are almost always made in the same manufacturing plants as the advertised brands. Yet you pay a lot more for the advertised brands, because you are not just buying the product. You are also buying the advertising.”

“I still think the well-known brands are better.”

“Then I think that advertisers must love you!”

Let’s begin with a question: What are the products of advertising? Some of you might interpret products to mean the things we buy—clothes, pizzas, phones, and so on. Others might think that the products are the ads we see—after all, that is what the people in the industry create and show to us constantly. While both of these interpretations have some truth to them on the surface, both miss the point of the real nature of advertising. The most important product of advertising is you.

Advertisers have trained you and all members of the public to give them your time, your attention, and your money—even money you don’t have when you buy advertised products on credit. Advertisers have spent hundreds of billions of dollars over your lifetime to craft special messages that have put hundreds of thousands of images, jingles, ideas, and desires into your memory banks. They have done this with your permission and even your blessing. And they have even convinced you to pay them for conditioning you.

This chapter is organized to achieve four objectives. The first objective is to sensitize you to the pervasiveness of advertising. The second objective is to help you understand how advertising has changed with the rise of the digital media. The third objective is to help you recognize the advantages and disadvantages that advertisers subject you to when they use the tools of digital advertising. And the fourth objective is to get you started being more systematic in analyzing ad messages and evaluating the degree to which their appeals match your real needs.

ADVERTISING IS PERVASIVE

The United States is saturated with advertising. With about 4.3% of the world’s population, the United States absorbs almost half of the world’s advertising expenditures. We are submersed in a culture saturated with advertising messages (see Table 10.1), and the number of ads in our culture increases each year. In the 1970s, the average American was exposed to about 500 ads per day; by the early 2000s, that number had grown to 5,000 ads per day (Johnson, 2006). A decade later, with the proliferation of advertising on computers and mobile devices, that number had doubled to 10,000 ads per day (Saxon, 2018), which means that you are being exposed to more than 10 ads every minute of every hour that you are awake each and every day! Is this possible? To check the accuracy of this figure, try doing Exercise 10.1. This exercise may fatigue you after an hour or two (or perhaps even after several minutes). If fatigue happens quickly, then you will have absorbed the lesson of this exercise—you are constantly being exposed to many more ad messages than you were aware of.

Table 10.1

Each year, the amount of money spent on advertising grows dramatically. In 1900, about $500 million was spent on all forms of advertising in the United States. By 1940, it was $2 billion, so it took 40 years to multiply four times. In 1980, it was $60 billion, or a growth of 30 times in those 40 years. By 2018, it had grown to $220 billion per year (Statistica, 2018c). These numbers are so large that they are difficult to comprehend. Let’s break down the expenditures by number of people in the population. In 1940, the industry spent $16 on each person in this country; by 1980, it was $260; and now it is about $675 per person per year.

An advertiser who wants to introduce a new product nationally and break through the existing clutter to get consumers to realize that there is a new product on the market must now spend a minimum of $50 million in advertising to launch the product. Of course, all this new advertising adds even more to the clutter, making it even more expensive for the next product introduction. This growth in advertising expenditures, the number of ads, and the number of places where ads appear has been accelerating for the past few decades and likely will continue with no end in sight.

Why can we expect continued growth? Because we—the public—do not mind all this advertising. There are times when we might criticize certain ads, and sometimes we get upset when we watch television and have our shows repeatedly interrupted by commercial breaks. However, few Americans have a negative attitude about advertising—only about 15% of us.

Our criticisms are minor compared to our unthinking support of advertising. By unthinking support, I mean that most of us do not realize how much advertising exposure we experience every day and how it has shaped our attitudes and behaviors. We accept the saturation, and we allow our behavior to be shaped by it. I’ll present two examples of this point to help you understand how much you have been influenced by advertising.

The first example illustrates our preference for advertised products. In supermarkets and drug stores, each product category has an unadvertised alternative on the shelves among all the advertised brands. The differences in ingredients of the unadvertised alternatives compared to the advertised brands is minuscule—they are often identical—because they are all manufactured by the same companies in the same factories. But although the advertised brands all cost more—often a lot more—than the unadvertised alternative, about 80% of all purchases are for the advertised brands across all product categories (Jones, 2004). Why are we willing to spend more on an advertised brand when we can buy the same thing for less money? The answer is that advertising has conditioned us to believe that the advertised brands are better and worth the extra expense to us. That is, when we purchase an advertised brand, we are not only buying the product ingredients, we are also buying the package of beliefs about the product. This is one clear indication about how advertising is successful.

Even though store brands and advertised brands are usually the same product in different boxes, 80% of consumers will opt for the more expensive advertised brand over store brand.

dowell/Getty Images

A second illustration of the influence of advertising can be seen in how much you voluntarily participate as an advertiser for all kinds of products. Look at the clothing you have on now. How many clothing logos are you displaying on your shirt, pants, shoes, hat, book bag, mobile devices, and so on? You are advertising those products everywhere you go by proudly displaying those logos. How much are those companies paying you to advertise for them? They pay you nothing, right? In fact, you are paying them! Had you bought the same piece of clothing without the prized logo, it would have cost you less money. Therefore, you have chosen to pay more for the privilege of wearing a particular brand and displaying its logo. This is a good deal for those manufacturers who have convinced you to work for them for free and to pay them for this privilege!

ADVERTISING STRATEGIES

Becoming a successful advertiser is a very challenging task because there is so much competition and because the cost of advertising is so high and continues to increase. Advertisers develop very sophisticated strategies to meet this challenge. The traditional strategy was developed and refined over the course of a century as new opportunities for advertising arose with the technological advances of the analog media. Then, starting in the 1990s with the rise of the digital media, advertisers were provided with a whole new set of tools to identify audiences and persuade them to buy their products and services.

Traditional Strategy

The traditional strategy used by advertisers for the past century is composed of four steps. First, advertisers begin with conducting a good deal of research to generate answers to a series of questions (see Table 10.2). When advertisers have found credible information to answer all of these questions, they organize this research into what is called a situational analysis in which they use the information they find to create marketing and advertising objectives. Marketing objectives are goals, such as Our advertising plan will increase our sales by 10% or from $10 million in sales last year to $11 million in sales this year.

Table 10.2

Second, advertisers develop a plan, which is their expert guess at what has the greatest chance of reaching their marketing objectives for the year. This plan includes details about the types of advertising messages they need to produce to persuade their target audiences to continue buying their product (and increase the amount they buy). This part of the plan is called a copy platform, which is a set of recommendations that producers of ads should follow. The copy platform contains details about the recommended tone (humorous or serious) of the ad, whether the ad presents a product spokesperson, whether the ad should tell a story or simply present facts, how much information should be included in the ad, and the key benefit of your product (on which you want to focus your campaign).

Third, advertisers execute their plan. They hire creative people (videographers, photographers, copywriters, etc.) to produce their ads. And they have media buyers negotiate with various media outlets (newspapers, magazines, television stations, etc.) to buy space and time in the media in order to show their ads to their target audiences enough times for the ads to be successful.

Fourth, advertisers test to see if the plan worked. After the ad campaign has run, advertisers look for indicators (typically sales figures) to tell them whether the campaign worked or not.

Digital Strategies

With the rise of the digital media over the past few decades, an alternative approach to campaign design has arisen. This alternative approach uses the special features that the digital media provide, so it is very different than the traditional method of designing campaign strategies. This new form has been called the inbound marketing method, in contrast to the outbound marketing method that has been used for the last century (see Table 10.3).

Table 10.3

Adapted from Scott (2013).

As you saw above, the outbound method has traditionally been used by advertisers to identify their target audiences and to persuade them to do things so that the company can achieve its goals for the year. They design a complete advertising campaign that integrates all the elements they believe—in their expert opinion—will work best in achieving the marketing goals for the next year.

In contrast to the outbound method, the inbound method is much newer and much more interactive. When advertisers use an inbound perspective, they commit to constantly monitoring their base of consumers to find out what they are thinking as new needs emerge. They design messages in the form of interactive experiences (e.g., blogging, emailing, and friending on social media sites) and design websites to capture the attention of consumers. When people demonstrate the initiative to access their website, advertisers begin interacting with those potential customers to take them step by step through a process that results in converting those people into loyal product users.

Thus, the inbound perspective on advertising is much more oriented toward continual interactions and trying to get consumers not only to buy the product but also to like the product so much they, in essence, work for the company for free by sending their own messages that transform the advertising procedure into a viral movement.

TOOLS OF ADVERTISING

Digital advertisers have many tools available to them that analog advertisers do not have. These digital tools give inbound advertisers many new ways to identify potential consumers as well as to persuade those people. In this section, I will show you what those tools are and how they work.

Notice that each of these tools has advantages and disadvantages. Advertisers try to convince people they are using the tools only in an advantageous way for consumers so that people are continually better off the more advertisers use these tools. While the use of these tools does help consumers in many ways, their use also increases the risk that people will experience negative effects.

Tools for Identifying Audiences

Advertisers now continually monitor the activities of as many people as possible in order to identify emerging needs so that they can position their products as the best way to meet those needs. They can buy much of these data from large marketing firms who sell information about a wide range of activities of all people who earn and spend money. These databases include details about all purchases made by everyone who uses credit cards, debit cards, checking accounts, and store cards. These details include the cost of each product bought, how often each product is bought, and whether people used coupons or discounts. It also includes information about where people go (using the GPS on their mobile devices and vehicles) and how much time they spend at each place, the clubs and organizations to which they belong, who they call on their phones and how long each call is, who they email, all their postings on SNSs, all their internet searches, and which internet sites are visited and for how long. These data give marketers a complete and detailed picture of how each individual spends their time and money.

Advertisers also create websites for their companies and products so they can monitor who visits the website, how often they visit, and how they navigate their way through the site by clicking on videos and buttons. This monitoring gives advertisers insights about which elements on their sites are most attractive and which elements people avoid. Digital advertisers regard social media as an especially good place to monitor conversations and to mine for data on emerging needs as well as a way of creating brand-loyal customers. The Content Marketing Institute says that 89% of advertised brands are now using social media, with Facebook being the dominant platform (used by 85% of all brands) followed by blogs (75%) and emailed newsletters (75%; Tuten & Solomon, 2018).

Because these data—called metrics—are so important to advertisers, digital platforms have monetized their services to charge for them. For example, Anderson (2012) explains that digital technology has allowed for platforms to charge advertisers by actual performance. While traditional advertising charges clients by audience size, digital advertising charges clients by how often prospective customers perform some action of interest to the advertiser, such as clicking on a button on a website.

While performance pricing is a great new tool for advertisers, it also has a downside. Anderson (2012) explains that pay-per-click advertising “generates the incentive for fraudulent clicking (sometimes through vast networks of ‘zombie’ computers taken over by viruses, and whose owners are unaware of their computers’ actions) in order to generate revenues on false presences” (p. 364).

Advertisers know that people use search engines in order to get information about all kinds of products and services. Because these searchers are expressing an interest in particular products, they are regarded as potential consumers. Therefore, digital advertisers continually monitor how people navigate the internet to get information on their products and eventually make decisions about whether to buy those products or not. These advertisers use what they learn to position their product more effectively on the internet by designing a website that is easy to navigate, providing links to their website from other sites, and using the right keywords to get potential customers to their site.

Advertisers also monitor postings on SNSs so they can identify emerging needs. They examine interactions among friends to look for things that people complain about and use this information to identify potential customers.

Marketers also monitor ratings services, which are websites where consumers can post comments expressing what they think about products and services. Some of these sites are run by the companies that manufacture particular products so that they can monitor consumer reactions to their brands. There are also more general ratings services (such as Yelp, Foursquare, and Angie’s List) that solicit product reactions on a wide range of brands that they do not manufacture or sell. Digital advertisers regard ratings services as a valuable source of information about what people like about their product and how their products can be improved to increase their value to consumers.

Tools for Persuading Audiences

The digital media provide advertisers with tools that go beyond simply monitoring what people do and give those advertisers the ability to interact with those people in a persuasive process. Thus, advertisers can now subtly maneuver people step by step in directions that will help them achieve their marketing goals. In this section, I will focus your attention on four of these tools: search engine optimization, recommender systems, ratings services, and the buying funnel.

Search Engine Optimization

As I discussed above, advertisers frequently monitor how people use search engines to get information on products they intend to buy. But advertisers can do more than passively monitor this activity; advertisers can actively influence how people conduct their internet searches. Digital advertisers use what they learn about how people use keywords to guide their searches to change and refine the keywords they attach to their sites so as to attract more visitors and attract visitors away from the websites of their competitors. This process is called search engine optimization (SEO).

Some search engines allow advertisers to buy ads that run next to a search’s hit list. For example, in 2000, Google began running small, textual advertisements alongside their search results. Also, search engines allow advertisers to buy placement in searches; that is, the more money advertisers pay to a search engine, the higher ranked that advertiser’s products will appear in a hit list when people engage in a search for that product. Carr (2010) explains that Google changed its original search algorithm, which was based only on keywords, to also include advertiser-bought placement.

Rather than selling advertising space for a set price, they (Google) decided to auction the space off. It wasn’t an original idea—another search engine, GoTo, was already auctioning ads—but Google gave it a new spin. Whereas GoTo ranked its searches according to the size of the advertisers’ bids—the higher the bid, the more prominent the ad—Google in 2002 added a second criterion. An ad’s placement would be determined not only by the amount of the bid but by the frequency with which people actually clicked on the ad. That innovation ensured that Google’s ads would remain, as the company put it, ‘relevant’ to the topics of searches. Junk ads would automatically be screened from the system. If searchers didn’t find an ad relevant, they wouldn’t click on it, and it would eventually disappear from Google’s site. The auction system, named AdWords, had another very important result: by tying ad placement to clicks, it increased click-through rates substantially. The more often people clicked on an ad, the more frequently and prominently the ad would appear on search result pages, bringing even more clicks. Since advertisers paid Google by the click, the company’s revenues soared. (Carr, 2020)

By the end of the decade, Google was generating over $22 billion a year, almost all from advertising.

Recommender Systems

Some digital platforms offer so many choices that users can become overwhelmed. For example, Amazon.com offers over 600 million products for sale. To help users navigate their way through all these choices, digital platforms typically use recommender systems. These are algorithms that search engines use to narrow down the number of hits they present to users as a result of their search. Search engines use the information they have collected from users (in their past searches) and have bought from marketing firms as a way of narrowing the results down from perhaps millions of hits to a much smaller number of hits that the search engine believes will be of most interest to the searcher. Jian and Mackie-Mason (2012) explain,

A recommender system recommends items to best suit an individual’s tastes, while relying on a data set of opinions contributed by users. Typical recommendation systems employ some form of collaborative filtering: a technology that automatically predicts the preference of a user based on many others’ tastes. (p. 401)

Advertisers prefer it when search engines use recommender systems because their website is more likely to appear high on a search hit list when the searcher is likely to be a prospective consumer. Thus, when searchers click on an advertiser’s website, the searchers are more likely to find that website a valuable source of the information they were seeking. This then increases the advertiser’s website stickiness, which is the website’s ability to keep users on the website longer and make it harder for them to leave. Hindman (2018) explains,

Sites live or die based upon their stickiness—their ability to attract readers, to make those readers stay longer when they visit, and to convince them to return again once they leave. Even slight differences in site stickiness compound quickly and rapidly, [creating] enormous differences in audience. (p. 48)

He continues, “Recommendation systems are one of the most powerful tools available for sites to keep and grow their traffic, and those who cannot deploy them are at a profound competitive disadvantage” (p. 48).

Compare & Contrast Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Recommender Systems

Compare: SEOs and recommender systems are the same in the following ways:

· Both are digital tools that advertisers use to influence individuals in a persuasive process.

· Both use data they gather from users to narrow choices so that users’ internet experiences are more efficient.

Contrast: SEOs and recommender systems are different in the following ways:

· SEO is focused on making searches for information more efficient whereas recommender systems are focused on making searches for particular products on retailer websites more efficient.

· SEO is a process advertisers use to refine the keywords that identify their websites so they can drive more traffic to their websites whereas recommender systems are focused on narrowing down the number of choices presented to consumers who are already on their websites and searching for particular products.

Some recommender systems have gotten so sophisticated that search engines claim they can guess what you want before you even express it.

Recently Amazon was awarded a patent for what it calls “anticipatory shipping.” Essentially Amazon wants to start shipping you a package before you officially click “buy.” The retailer would predict what you want before you actually buy it by relying on—what else?—digital data. Factors such as previous orders, product searches, historical purchasing behavior, demographics, and wish lists among any number of other categories of data, could help inform algorithms designed to predict your next purchase before you actually make that purchase. (Dubravac, 2015, pp. 111–112)

Ratings Services

Ratings services are not simply a valuable source of information about what consumers think about all kinds of products and services; ratings services have also been used as a tool to create positive attitudes about products. That is, digital advertisers often pay people to post positive reviews of their products so that when other people read the reviews, those products have higher (more positive) ratings than they would have had without the paid postings.

Buying Funnel

Digital advertisers use what they learn from their observations to make continual adjustments as they interact with their prospective customers and guide them through what they call the buying funnel. The buying funnel refers to the way digital advertisers attempt to pull prospective customers through a step-by-step process to give them information about their product, shape their attitudes, and stimulate their behavior to then buy the product. Tuten and Solomon (2018) say the buying funnel has five stages: increasing awareness of brands and products, influencing desire, encouraging trial, facilitating purchase, and reinforcing brand loyalty. In working through these stages, advertisers rely on several newly developed tools: online personalization, social media influencers, and electronic word of mouth. Notice that the buying funnel does not conclude with purchasing the product. Digital advertisers want more; that is, they also want to continue interacting with customers to get them to avoid buyer’s remorse, continue to buy the product, and even tell their friends about how great the product is (Tuten & Solomon, 2018).

By monitoring how people conduct internet searches for products in a particular category, advertisers can examine how people change their keywords as they develop an interest in a product. Advertisers watch what keywords people use at the top of the funnel; that is, the keywords consumers use when they are not aware of a particular product. These keywords are very general and refer to typical needs. Advertisers then monitor how the keywords change as people move through the funnel so they can incorporate those changes in keywords into their messages at various levels of the funnel to increase the chances that potential consumers will move further through the funnel from the wide mouth at the top of the funnel all the way to the narrow bottom where the product purchases are made.

The buying funnel is a procedure that begins when advertisers interact with people as soon as they demonstrate any kind of interest in a product (e.g., searching for the product online, conversing about the product on an SNS, visiting the company’s website). Through continual interactions, advertisers try to move people step by step through this buying funnel by providing them with additional information, answering their questions, shaping their attitudes, and stimulating a desire to try the product. This buying funnel procedure, however, does not end with the product purchase. Advertisers continue to interact with buyers to reinforce their buying behavior by making them feel good about their purchase so that they will avoid buyers’ remorse and continue to buy the product. Finally, advertisers try to condition their buyers to act as advocates for the product when those buyers interact with their friends on SNSs and in real life. Thus, the inbound perspective on advertising is much more oriented toward generating continual interactions with consumers and trying to get them to not only buy the product but also to like the product so much that those consumers in essence work for the company for free by sending their own messages that transform the advertising campaign into a viral movement.

As advertisers guide prospective consumers through a buying funnel, they rely on personalization, which is when they use the data they have collected about an individual to interact with them in a much more intimate manner, as a friend would. Because the digital media make it possible for advertisers to assemble a huge amount of data on individuals by tracking their internet searches of all kinds as well as the concerns they express on social media sites and other digital platforms, they acquire a great many personal details about each individual. This puts advertisers in a position to craft a special appeal for each unique person.

Advertisers in the United States, challenged to gain the attention of target consumers in an increasingly fragmented media environment, invested $40.1 billion in personalized digital advertising in the first half of 2017—the highest level of spending on record and a 23% increase over the same time period in 2016 (Sruoginis, 2017). Likewise, the level of personalization possible in message targeting has increased exponentially. An expanding clickstream of data based on thousands of website users’ interactions (collected both overtly and covertly) has enhanced advertisers’ efforts to tailor ads to individual consumers based on an increasing amount of data.

Another way that digital advertisers can help their prospective consumers through a buying funnel is to hire social media influencers. These are ordinary people who have developed a large following by frequently posting their opinions online. These people generally present themselves as having expertise in a specific area, such as fashion, beauty, lifestyle, healthy living, travel, food, and so on. Digital advertisers invest in selected influencers to create and/or promote their branded content to both the influencers’ own followers and to the brands’ targeted consumers. Influencer-produced branded content is considered to have more organic, authentic, and direct contact with potential consumers than brand-generated ads (Talavera, 2015). A recent Twitter study suggested that consumers may accord social media influencers a similar level of trust as they hold for their friends (Swant, 2016).

Kylie Jenner was the face of Adidas’ Falcon collection ad campaign—an example of how advertisers use celebrity appearances to promote their products by association with a popular star. Do celebrity partnerships affect your opinion of a product?

Erik Voake/Getty Images

The popularity of influencer marketing has been growing exponentially. As of 2018, 39% of marketers had plans to increase their budget for influencer marketing, and 19% of marketers intended to spend more than $100,000 per campaign (Bevilacqua & Del Giudice, 2018). These influencers are typically well paid, with the range running from a low of about $200 for nano-influencers (someone with about 10,000 followers) up to about $500,000 for a celebrity Instagram post. However, digital advertisers are becoming more careful to check the accuracy of the number of followers that influencers claim to have. For example, it has been found that a person can buy 1,000 YouTube followers for about $49, and the cost of buying fake followers on Facebook and Instagram is even less (“A Bubble Bursts for Instagram’s Elite,” 2019).

The buying funnel also relies on electronic word of mouth (eWOM), which refers to any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions over the internet. Social media websites, especially Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter have been found to be especially useful in getting ordinary people to spread information and attitudes about products.

Word of mouth has always been a valuable marketing tool. For centuries, people have been asking for the opinions of their peers and family members when shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. Now with the digital media so widespread, word of mouth has gone electronic; thousands and even millions of people can be exposed to particular postings about products. The emergence of SNSs and microblogs has greatly increased the ability of consumers to come together in groups of friends or strangers to discuss brands, share updates, offer advice, and relive experiences. Digital technologies have revolutionized the way consumers search for products and services, seek reviews from current and past consumers, and eventually decide whether or not to make a purchase. As a result, eWOM has now become an essential component of the consumer decision-making journey (Moran et al., 2014).

Brands use eWOM to leverage their fan and follower connections in order to attract new customers (LaPointe, 2012). One way in which this leverage manifests itself is in terms of brand-initiated eWOM (Trusov et al., 2009). On SNSs, this activity consists of brands incentivizing their fans to spread advertiser-created messages by using their personal networks of friends. For example, Tesco, a British multinational grocery and general merchandise retailer ran a “Share & Earn scheme,” in which the retailer’s Facebook fans earned loyalty card points for sharing products with their friends online.

Generally, eWOM is viewed by users as entertainment and as a way to build friendships with others. This technique has been found to be especially persuasive when the senders are perceived as being competent and their messages are regarded as credible (Moran & Muzellec, 2017).

BECOMING MORE MEDIA LITERATE WITH ADVERTISING

In our everyday lives, we can do things to avoid news messages and even entertainment messages, but we cannot avoid advertising messages. Advertising messages are too pervasive and too constant for anyone to be able to avoid them. With the digital tools now available to advertisers, we are all being influenced by marketers in many ways beyond exposure to their ad messages. Marketers are shaping the way we conduct searches for information; the way we surf the internet; and the way we process information from SNSs, ratings services, and online retailers. In their constant quest to convince us that their products and services satisfy our needs, they are fragmenting the population into a wide array of niche audiences. Each niche audience gets treated in a special way; that is, the people that marketers regard to be in one niche audience experience specific results from their online searches, are shown a different set of products and services, are offered different deals and pricing, and are treated with a different kind of interaction than are people in other niche audiences.

The central problem with advertising now is one of control. The persuasive nature of advertising has always been oriented toward influencing how we think about our desires and what actions we take to satisfy those desires. Now advertisers have been expanding the power of their influence by using digital tools to monitor all our activities and to subtly exert an even more powerful degree of influence over us. Unless we are aware of how they use their techniques to shape the information we get, how we think about it, and what we do about it, then we are unable to reduce advertisers’ influence because that influence occurs without our conscious awareness.

During unconscious exposure, advertisers can plant their messages into our subconscious, where the information from those ads gradually shapes our definitions for attractiveness, sex appeal, relationships, cleanliness, health, success, hunger, body shape, problems, and happiness. For example, we might have the radio on in the car as we concentrate on driving, and when ads come on, we do not pay much attention. Later, we find ourselves humming a jingle or a word phrase occurs to us or we pass by a store and remember that there is a sale going on there. These flashes of sounds, words, and ideas emerge from our subconscious, where they had been put by ads that we did not pay attention to. Over time, all those images, sounds, and ideas build patterns in our subconscious and profoundly shape the way we think about ourselves and the world.

To increase your media literacy about advertising, you need to construct a good knowledge structure about advertising (see Table 10.4) and use that knowledge structure periodically to check that the advertising aimed at you helps you satisfy your own needs more than the goals of the advertisers. To guide you in this task, I will present four steps in this section. Each step comes with an exercise to help you apply this information.

Analyze Your Personal Needs

The more you are aware of your needs, the more you can use advertising to control your life. If you are not aware of your needs, the constant flood of advertising messages will create and shape your needs—often without you knowing it. Stop reading this chapter now and go to Exercise 10.2.

How did you do on Part I? Were you able to come up with a long list of needs or could you think only of one or two? Was it easy or hard to rank order your needs? Then in Part II, were you surprised by how many products you have brought into your home? Were you surprised about how many were well-advertised brands?

Table 10.4

Now ask yourself, “How aware am I of my needs?” Make a comparison of your rank-ordered list from Part I with how you spend your money and time as indicated in the inventories in Part II. Is your primary need (Part I) reflected in the inventories of your possessions and time (Part II)? For example, let’s say your number-one need was health. Did the inventory of your closet reveal more clothes for health-producing/maintaining activities than any other type of clothes? Did your inventory of your kitchen reveal an absence of highly advertised, high-caloric, high-fat, high-sugar, high-sodium snacks? Did your inventory of your bathroom reveal more products for sore muscles or more for beauty? Is your toothpaste a decay preventer or a tooth whitener? Did the inventory of your time reveal that you are very active or mostly passive?

If your self-reported needs (Part I) closely matched your inventories (Part II), then congratulations! You are aware of your needs and know how to spend your resources to satisfy them. But if there are discrepancies between your self-reported needs and where you spend your money and time, then you have a faulty sense of your needs. You might be telling yourself that your needs are A, B, and C, when your real needs are X, Y, and Z. You are satisfying your real needs even though you are not aware of what they really are. More typically, discrepancies exist because you are not able to satisfy your needs; that is, you are very aware of what your needs are. But when you go to the store, you end up buying lots of things that really do not address those needs; you hope they will because you want to believe the puffery in the ads. However, the will to believe is not enough. As time goes by, you become frustrated that you cannot fulfill your major needs, although it seems like you are doing what society (as channeled by advertisements) is telling you to do.

Ads for prescription drugs can convince people that they require additional treatment.

iStock.com/erdikocak

One of the biggest dangers concerning the manipulation of our natural needs is with prescription drugs. The number of ads for prescription drugs on television grows each year until, in 2008, the average person was exposed to 16 hours of ads for prescription drugs per year, which is more time than they spent with their primary care doctors. These ads mislead the public by inflating their claims and by burying their risks in “a sea of unintelligible tiny print” (Foreman, 2009, p. E5). A content analysis of these ads found that while most ads (82%) made some factual claims and some rational arguments (86%) for product use, almost all of these ads (95%) used an emotional appeal. Many of the ads urged people to use their drug in order to achieve social approval (78%) and to regain control over some aspect of their lives (85%; Frosch et al., 2007). These ads lead people to diagnose themselves and pressure their physicians to prescribe the drugs they see advertised so they can achieve the wonderful life the drugs depict.

Analyze Ads

The next step is to analyze some ads. Of course, there are too many ads in your environment to analyze them all. Make this step manageable by making a list of the advertised products you buy most often (i.e., your regular grocery store purchases) or the product purchases that are most important (cars, mobile devices, designer clothing, vacations). The find some ads for those products and analyze them (Exercise 10.3). While conducting your analyses, think most about how the advertiser constructed the campaign strategy and copy platform. Can you identify elements in those ads that would give you a good idea about what the copy platform was?

Are those ads simply giving you information to make you aware of the products or are they reinforcing existing beliefs and behaviors? Most people think that ads are designed to convince people to buy the product. Very little of the advertising we see has this intention. Many ads, especially those for new products, are intending only to establish our awareness that the product exists. Some ads are designed to create an emotion in us and link that emotion with the product. Some ads are designed to inoculate us against the claims of competitors so that when we see an ad for one of their competitors, we will not come under its influence. But the most prevalent intention of ads is reinforcement. Most ads are aimed at target groups of people who already use the product. Thus, the advertisement is designed to remind those customers that the product still exists and that it is a good one. People usually remember ads for products they already buy, so most of the effect of advertising is the reinforcement of existing attitudes and behaviors. Thus, reinforcement is the powerful effect of advertising. Most ads are designed to make people feel good about the products they already have bought so that they will buy them again.

Look for Differences

Remember that search engines use algorithms that attempt to personalize your searches. You can test this by doing Exercise 10.4. When you do this exercise, make sure each person uses their own internet-connected device (such as your laptop computer or smartphone), because some of the information that the search engine might be using to personalize searches is stored in cookies on your device’s hard drive. When you and the other person enter the same keyword into the same search engine, you both should get identical results—if the search was driven exclusively by the keyword. When you see differences in the results of the searches (number of hits, which hits are displayed first), then something else is active in the search algorithm, and that something else is the information the search engine has collected about you as an individual.

Recommender systems also use information they have collected about you. Do the second part of Exercise 10.4 to test this. If you see few differences in the results of searches for products on websites of online retailers, then you can conclude that those retailers regard you and the other person (who is doing the exercise with you) as being in the same marketing niche. But if you see many differences, then ask yourself several questions: “How are we being treated differently? Am I being shown different products than the other person? Am I being shown different prices for the same products? Am I being shown better-quality products? Am I being offered different promotional deals (coupons, sales, two-for-one, etc.)?”

Evaluate the Ads

The final step is to compare your personal needs to what the ads are telling you. This requires an evaluation of the ads; that is, you are making value judgments about how well the advertisers understand your real needs and how well they present their products as the best way of satisfying those needs (Exercise 10.5).

If you found a close match between your personal needs and the advertising appeals for the products you buy, then you can conclude that advertising is exerting a positive influence in your life. That is, advertisers have identified your actual needs and are helping you satisfy them. In contrast, if you find that advertisers are trying to make you believe you have needs that you really don’t have, then you need to think about what you can do to prevent them from eventually convincing you that these false needs are real.

These four exercises are designed to stimulate you to think more carefully about things that you have likely not been noticing or have been taking for granted. By working through these exercises, you are using the information I presented earlier in this chapter. Increasing your media literacy requires more than simply knowing more things; it also requires you to use these increases in your knowledge to appreciate the extent to which the media are subtly and constantly exerting an influence on you. And most importantly, as you use this information in your everyday lives, you will be increasing the control you have over that influence and bending that influence in a way that starts to benefit you at least as much as it has been benefiting advertisers.

SUMMARY

We live in a culture that is saturated with advertising messages. In order to become more media literate and protect ourselves from the pervasive influence of this saturation, we need to understand more about how advertisers design and execute their ad campaigns. Even more importantly, we need to understand the digital tools that advertisers are using to shape our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. And perhaps most importantly, we need to reduce their influence enough so that we can understand what our real needs are for products and services rather than uncritically accepting what advertisers tell us our needs should be.

Further Reading

Block, M. P., & Schultz, D. E. (2009). Media generations: Media allocation in a consumer-controlled marketplace. Worthington: Prosper Press. (128 pages total)

This book presents findings from SIMM (Simultaneous Media Usage), which is a marketing study of 170,000 responses to media usage and consumer behavior over a six-year period. This is one illustration of how much data marketers are continually gathering and how those data form the basis for advertising campaigns that are effective.

Fennis, B. M., & Stroebe, W. (2010). The psychology of advertising. New York: Psychology Press. (331 pages, including glossary and indexes)

Written by two European psychology professors, this book describes what the research in cognitive psychology and social psychology tell us so far about how humans process advertising messages and are affected by them, particularly their memory, attitudes, and behaviors. The authors present a very well organized and detailed presentation of theories and research findings from within the field of psychology.

Geddes, B. (2014). Advanced Google AdWorks (3rd ed.). New York: Wiley. (657 pages, including index)

The author is an internet marketing consultant who has developed many procedures for Google to use in advertising. The book is composed of 17 chapters of practical information, sometimes very technical, which is useful for those readers who want to apply the ideas in their own ad campaigns.

Lindstrom, M. (2016). Small data: The tiny clues that uncover huge trends. New York: St. Martin’s Press. (245 pages, including endnotes and index)

The author is a business consultant who uses close observations of people and details of cultures to uncover people’s hidden beliefs, desires, and emotions. He sells these insights to large corporations that are looking to satisfy previously unknown consumer needs.

Scott, D. M. (2013). The new rules of marketing & PR (4th ed.). Hoboken: Wiley. (439 pages, including index)

Written by a marketing consultant, this book offers a great deal of practical information about the professions of advertising and public relations, which have been changing due to the opportunities offered by the internet.

Keeping Up to Date

· Advertising industry periodicals

o Ad Age (http://adage.com)

o Ad Week (http://www.adweek.com)

· Professional organizations

o American Association of Advertising Agencies (http://www.aaaa.org)

o Interactive Advertising Bureau (http://www.iab.net)

o Magazine Publishers of America (http://www.magazine.org)

o News Media Alliance (https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/)

o Radio Advertising Bureau (http://www.rab.com)

o Television Bureau of Advertising (http://www.tvb.org)

· Consumer and Educational Associations Concerned with Advertising

o Ad Council (http://www.adcouncil.org)

o American Advertising Federation (http://www.aaf.org)

o Better Business Bureau (http://www.bbb.org)

· Scholarly journals that publish research examining the content and effects of advertising messages presented in the mass media, particularly newspapers, magazines, television, and on websites.

o Journal of Advertising

o Journal of Advertising Research

o Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media

o Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

EXERCISE 10.1

INCREASING YOUR AWARENESS OF THE AMOUNT OF ADVERTISING IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT

Purpose: This exercise is designed to test how much advertising you are exposed to on a daily basis. For one day, carry around a sheet of paper in your pocket and write down every time you are exposed to an advertising message.

1. Mobile devices and computers: Check screens for banner ads, pop-ups, and ads in the margins. For each app, look for logos or appeals to try new features on the app; those are advertising messages.

2. Television: Count how many times your program is interrupted. Each interruption is a commercial pod. Count the number of individual commercials in each pod. Don’t forget to count ads for the show you are watching, for other upcoming shows, and for the channel.

Look for ads in the form of product placement in the programs themselves. For example, if a family is eating breakfast, can you see product brand names for cereal, juice, and so on? If characters are on the highway, can you see brand logos of cars and names of products on billboards or signs on buildings and businesses?

3. Print: If you read magazines and newspapers on paper, count the number of individual ads as you are flipping through the pages. About 80% of the revenue of newspapers and magazines comes from advertising. So, if your issue of a magazine cost $3, would you be willing to pay $15 to support a magazine without any advertising?

4. Pay attention to your unmediated world:

o Do you see people walking around with brand names on their clothing?

o Notice the brand name logos on products all around you.

o Count the ads on signs that announce upcoming events.

o Look for names on buildings and other structures that alert you to the presence of businesses that produce and sell you products and services.

o Listen for sounds that are designed to capture your attention and remind you of particular products.

o Listen to people talking about brands and products.

EXERCISE 10.2

PERSONAL NEEDS INVENTORY

PART I

Take out a sheet of paper and write down your needs.

1. Begin by simply listing all your needs as they pop into your head.

2. Once you have a list, organize the elements into categories. Group similar needs together. For example, you might have several social needs (e.g., make more friends, become more popular), health needs (lose weight, exercise more, etc.), career needs, family needs, school needs, and so forth.

3. After you have your categories, rank order your groups. Which set of needs is most important to you? What set is second, and so on? Now put this paper aside and go on to Part II.

PART II

1. Go through your clothes closet.

· How many changes of clothes (outfits) do you have? How many pairs of shoes? If you have one or two changes of clothes, you are operating at a functional level; that is, you are satisfied with protecting your body from the elements and being modest. If you have many sets of clothes, group them according to your needs; that is, which are your social clothes, your business clothes, your exercise clothes, and so on?

· Which set of clothes contains the greatest number of outfits? Why? Do you have the most clothes in an area that is the same as what you designated as your highest-ranked need area in Part I?

2. Go through your kitchen cabinets and pantry.

· How many prepared foods (in boxes, cans, and bags) do you have compared to natural foods (milk, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, etc.)?

· What proportion of those products are advertised brands, and what proportion are unadvertised or generic?

3. Check your bathroom.

· How many health and beauty products do you have?

· How many of those products are for basic health needs, and how many are image enhancers?

· What proportion of those products are advertised brands, and what proportion are unadvertised or generic?

4. Think about how you spend your time.

· How much time do you take getting washed, groomed, and dressed each day?

· How much time do you spend eating and snacking (and how many times do you eat each day)?

· What do you do with your leisure time—are you active in satisfying your needs, or are you passively sitting in front of the television or listening to music, being told by others what your needs should be?

EXERCISE 10.3

ANALYZING ADVERTISING MESSAGES

Find ads for the products you buy the most (regular purchases in supermarkets).

Look at several print ads from magazines and newspapers. Watch several ads on television. Use this set of ads in the following tasks.

1. What is the main product claim of the ad (reason for buying the product)?

2. Is the claim presented explicitly or implicitly (you have to infer it)?

3. What is the intention of the ad (awareness, positive emotion, change in attitude, inoculation, reinforcement, buying product)?

4. Is the ad more emotional or rational? If emotional, which emotion was evoked? Why this emotion? If rational, how much information was presented? Were the right facts presented?

5. Did the ad use a product spokesperson? If so, why was this person chosen?

6. What was the message strategy of the ad?

7. What is the tone of the ad (humorous vs. serious; hard sell vs. soft sell)?

8. Look beyond the surface of the ad and the particular product; that is, think beyond how the ad is trying to get you to use a particular product. Can you see some underlying values that the ad is teaching? What is the ad saying about the nature of problems and how advertised products can solve those problems? What is the ad telling you about what it means to be healthy, attractive, and successful? Have those lessons become your internalized values?

EXERCISE 10.4

LOOK FOR DIFFERENCES

CHECK SEARCH ENGINES

1. Select a person you know who will agree to do some internet searches with you. Try to find a person who is very different from you and therefore would not be a member of the same advertising niche audience as you are. For example, perhaps you have an uncle who likes golf, plain pants, and cigars—all things you do not like.

2. Make three lists of keywords that you will use in an internet search.

· One list should be about half a dozen things that you like the most; these are things that really define who you are and that have outward manifestations exhibited by the products and services you buy.

· The second list should be about half a dozen things that the other person likes the most.

· The third list should be about things that most people like (e.g., clean air, music) or very general concepts that do not elicit strong differences of opinion (e.g., orange, the moon). Be creative!

3. Sit next to the other person while you each get on the same search engine (such as Google) and enter the same keyword to conduct a search. You conduct your search on your device, and the other person conducts their search on their device. (Do not use the same device.)

4. Notice how many hits you get on the search and which sites are listed on the first screen of results. Also notice whether there are ads for products and services appearing in the margins of the page. Do you notice any differences between your screen and the screen of the other person?

5. Continue through your three lists of keywords.

· Do you see differences on each search?

· Can you see a pattern developing across all the searches?

6. Try Steps 3 through 5 with a different search engine.

· Do you see differences on each search?

· Can you see a pattern developing across all the searches?

· Can you see a pattern across the two search engines?

CHECK FOR RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS

1. Select a person who has a history of buying a lot of products from one online retailer, such as Amazon.com.

2. Make two lists of products.

· One list should be about half a dozen things that you frequently buy on Amazon.

· The second list should be about half a dozen products that the other person frequently buys on Amazon.

3. Sit next to the other person while you each get on Amazon.com and each search for the same product from one of the lists. You conduct your search on your device, and the other person conducts their search on their device.

4. Notice which brands (and prices) are displayed first. Do you notice any differences between your screen and the screen of the other person?

5. Continue through your two lists of products.

· Do you see differences on each search?

· Can you see a pattern developing across all the searches?

6. Try Steps 3 through 5 with a different online retailer.

· Do you see differences on each search?

· Can you see a pattern developing across all the searches?

· Can you see a pattern across the two search engines?

EXERCISE 10.5

EVALUATING ADVERTISING MESSAGES

Find some ads for products that you typically use and evaluate those ads by asking yourself the following questions:

1. Which ads evoked the strongest emotions in you? What were those emotions? Explain how the ad triggered those particular emotions.

2. Which ads were the best from an aesthetic point of view? Is there something about the writing, directing, editing, lighting, set design, costuming, or music/sound effects that you found of particular high quality? If so, explain what led you to appreciate that element so much.

3. Which ads were most upsetting from a moral perspective? What ethical considerations were raised?

4. Overall, which of the ads were most persuasive to you? Why?

5. Overall, which of the ads recognized your existing needs the best? Did these ads present the best reasons for why the product would satisfy your needs?

6. Which ads were most exploitive and tried to convince you of false needs?