Chapter 11: Advertising and Commerce Culture
First newspaper ads in colonial America in _______:
- 1704
External Regulation in early advertising:
- 1906 - *Food and Drug Administration* (Federal Food and Drug Act, 1906) - 1914: publishers formed the *Audit Bureau of Circulations* (ABC) which created a formal service that tracked newspaper readership, guaranteed accurate audience measures and ensured that papers would not overcharge ad agencies - 1914: government created the *Federal Trade Commission* to help monitor advertising abuses - 1950s: *National Association of Broadcasters* banned the use of subliminal ads
Self Regulation in early advertising:
- 1913: nonprofit *Better Business Bureau* created by publishers to keep tabs on deceptive advertising; tracked newspaper readership, guaranteed accurate audience measures, and ensured that papers would not overcharge ad agencies and their clients - American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA): established in 1917 — tried to minimize government oversight by urging ad agencies to refrain from making misleading product claims - Ad Council (post WWII) - creating PSAs since 1942
1850s - The Industrial Revolution:
- Advertising goes *national* with patent medicines, and consumer good, thank to railroads linking the East Coast to the Mississippi River Valley - Prior to revolution, 90% of Americans lived in isolated areas and produced most of their own tools, clothes, and food
Why advertisement strategies are still used today:
- Building and sustaining brand name recognition
Irritation advertising:
- Car salesmen - an advertising strategy that tries to create product-name recognition by being annoying or obnoxious.
Why was the Federal Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906?
- Many patent medicines made outrageous claims about what they could cure, leading to increased public cynicism. - As a result, advertisers began to police their ranks and develop industry codes to restore consumer confidence - Coca-Cola: trances of cocaine - Kelloggs claiming to cure digestive problems - Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup: contained morphine.
First full-service modern ad agency:
- N..W. Ayer & Son - 1869 Philadelphia - worked primarily for advertisers and product companies rather than for newspapers - agency helped create, write, produce, and place ads in selected newspapers and magazines - traditional payment structure at this time had the agency collecting a fee from its advertising client for each ad placed - the fee covered the price that each media outlet charged for placement of the ad, plus a 15% commission for the agency.
Channel One & National Dairy Council:
- Offered schools free video and satellite equipment in exchange for package of current events programming w/ two minutes of commercials - National Dairy Council and other organizations have also used schools to promote products, providing free filmstrips, posters, magazines, folders, and study guides adorned with corporate logos. Teachers, especially in underfunded districts, have usually been grateful for the support. - Early on, however, Channel One was viewed as a more intrusive threat, violating the implicit cultural border between an entertainment situation (watching commercial television) and a learning situation (going to school)
Famous person testimonial:
- Person lending their name & credibility to the brand - an advertising strategy that associates a product with the endorsement of a well-known person.
Interstitials:
- Pop up in new screen windows as a user clicks to a new Web page - advertisements that pop up in a screen window as a user attempts to access a new Web page.
Why manufacturers advertised in the early days - mid-1880s:
- Product Differentiation - Rise of the brand
First cereal company to register a trademark:
- Quaker Oats
Plain folks pitch:
- Simplicity - Walmart, Volkswagon, General Electric, Microsoft - an advertising strategy that associates a product with simplicity and the common person.
Product Placement:
- The purchase of spaces for particular goods to appear in a TV show, movie, or music video - When a brand makes a deal with a show to have their brand be displayed within the narrative - Main character only going to Starbucks to get coffee - By 2015, nearly sixteen minutes of each hour of prime-time network television carried commercials program promos, and public service announcements - an increase from thirteen minutes an hour in 1992
Advertising dates back to 3000 BCE Babylon with ________ & ______ ____________:
- Wood & stone carvings - town criers - messages on walls
Facebook advertising:
- You are the product
Subliminal Advertising:
- a 1950s term that refers to hidden or disguised print and visual messages that allegedly register on the subconscious, creating false needs and seducing people into buying products.
Account executives:
- a business executive who manages the interests of a particular client, typically in advertising
Slogan:
- a catchy phrase that attempts to promote or sell a product by capturing its essence in words.
Earned media:
- a category of promotional tactic based on a public relations or publicity model that gets customers talking about products or services - free advertising - convince online consumers to promote products on their own - when you mark that you "Like" it, you essentially give the organization a personal endorsement. Knowing you like the ad, your friends view it; as they pass it along, it gets more earned media and eventually becomes viral—an even greater advertising achievement.
Spam:
- a computer term referring to unsolicited e-mail
Values and Lifestyles (VALS):
- a market-research strategy that divides consumers into types and measures psychological factors, including how consumers think and feel about products and how they achieve (or do not achieve) the lifestyles to which they aspire - assumes that not every product suits every consumer and encourages advertisers to vary their sales slants to find market niches - provide advertisers with details about which consumers are most likely to buy which products. - Questionnaires - Psychological factors to divide consumers into types - Market Niches - Consumer motivations: Ideals, Achievements & Self-Expression
Association principle:
- a persuasive technique that associates a product with some cultural value or image that has a positive connotation but may have little connection to the actual product - *Positive Cultural Value:* Car ads - driving in landscape , Sign language culture for random brand, LGBTQ issues - *Green Marketing aka Greenwashing:* Environmental things, associated with goods and services that aren't always environmentally friendly, "real," or "natural", Marlboro began as a fashionable women's cigarette, Marlboro associated its product with nature, or displaying an image of a lone cowboy roping a calf, building a fence, or riding over a snow-covered landscape. - ex.) visual symbols of American patriotism in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in an attempt to associate products and companies with national pride.
War Advertising Council:
- a voluntary group of agencies and advertisers that organized war bond sales, blood donor drives, and the rationing of scarce goods.
Myth analysis:
- according to this strategy, ads are narratives with stories to tell and social conflicts to resolve - "myths" help us define people, organizations, and social norms - 1. Ads incorporate myths in mini-story form, featuring characters, settings, and plots. - 2. Most stories in ads involve conflicts, pitting one set of characters or social values against another. - 3. Such conflicts are negotiated or resolved by the end of the ad, usually by applying or purchasing a product. In advertising, the product and those who use it often emerge as the heroes of the story - ex.) many SUV ads ask us to imagine ourselves driving out into the raw, untamed wilderness, to a quiet, natural place that only, say, a Jeep can reach. The audience implicitly understands that the SUV can somehow, almost magically, take us out of our fast-paced, freeway-wrapped urban world, plagued with long commutes, traffic jams, and automobile exhaust. This implied conflict between the natural world and the manufactured world is apparently resolved by the image of the SUV in a natural setting.
Mid 1800s - magazines began to carry ______:
- ads - before, they wanted to distinguish themselves from newspapers by having no ads
Puffery:
- ads featuring hyperbole and exaggeration
Prescription drugs and advertising:
- ads have made household names of prescription drugs such as Nexium, Claritin, Paxil, and Viagra. The ads are also very effective: - One survey found that nearly one in three adults has talked to a doctor, and one in eight has received a prescription in response to seeing an ad for a prescription drug.
The high price of many contemporary products results from _____________ costs:
- advertising
Snob-appeal Approach:
- an advertising strategy that attempts to convince consumers that using a product will enable them to maintain or elevate their social station - jewelry, perfume, clothing, and luxury automobiles - ex.) the pricey bottled water brand Fiji ran ads in Esquire and other national magazines that said, "The label says Fiji because it's not bottled in Cleveland"—a jab intended to favorably compare the water bottled in the South Pacific to the drinking water of an industrial city in Ohio
Hidden-fear appeal:
- an advertising strategy that plays on a sense of insecurity, trying to persuade consumers that only a specific product can offer relief - Sense of insecurity, anxiety - Organic foods, aging products - Deodorant, mouthwash, and shampoo ads frequently invoke anxiety, pointing out that only a specific product could relieve embarrassing personal hygiene problems and restore a person to social acceptability.
Bandwagon effect:
- an advertising strategy that uses exaggerated claims that everyone is using a particular product to encourage consumers to not be left behind - FOMO, "America's favorite," "the best"
Commercial speech:
- any print or broadcast expression for which a fee is charged to the organization or individual buying time or space in the mass media - Whereas freedom of speech refers to the right to express thoughts, beliefs, and opinions in the abstract marketplace of ideas, commercial speech is about the right to circulate goods, services, and images in the concrete marketplace of products. - Progressive, GEICO
Market Research:
- assesses the behaviors and attitudes of consumers toward particular products long before an ads are created - everything from possible names for a new product to the size of the copy for a print ad. Researchers also test new ideas and products with consumers to get feedback before developing final ad strategies. - Design + Ideas + Polls
Facebook's "sponsored stories":
- companies, including Amazon, "pay Facebook to generate ... automated ads" when a user clicks on the "Like" button for a Facebook participating brand partner or "references [the partner] in some other way." Sponsors and product companies like this service because they save money, since "no creative work is involved." - However, in 2012, this practice resulted in Facebook's settling a state of California class action suit out of court. The lead plaintiff in the case, a costume designer from Seattle, innocently clicked the "Like" button for an online language course offered by Rosetta Stone. Then several months later, according to the Times, "she showed up in an ad for Rosetta Stone on her friends' Facebook pages." Part of the case involved her resentment about not consenting to be used in an ad or receiving any compensation
Ad Council:
- continues to produce pro bono public service announcements (PSAs) on a wide range of topics, including literacy, homelessness, drug addiction, smoking, and AIDS education - Smokey the Bear
Influencers:
- controversy whether influencers had to disclose if they were getting paid to promote a product - in 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released new guidelines that require bloggers to disclose when an advertiser is compensating them to discuss a product. - In 2010, a similar controversy erupted when the FTC revealed that celebrities were being paid to tweet about their "favorite" products.
Department store ads criticism:
- criticized for undermining small shops and businesses, where shopkeepers personally served customers - because these stores purchased merchandise in large quantities, they could generally sell the same products for less.
Early advertising's influence on the size of newspaper copy:
- demand for newspaper advertising by product - companies and retail stores significantly changed the ratio of copy at most newspapers --- mid 1880s: only 25-30% of newspaper was advertising --- early 1900s: more than half the space in daily papers was advertising
Newspaper ad revenue continue to ________:
- drop
Most people are not ________ persuaded by advertising. Over the years, studies have suggested that between ____ and ____% of new consumer products typically fail because they are not embraced by the buying public:
- easily - 75-90%
Female Consumers:
- emphasized stereotyped appeals to women, believing that simple ads with emotional and even irrational content worked best. - Thus, early ad copy featured personal tales of "heroic" cleaning products and household appliances - The intention was to help female consumers feel good about defeating life's problems — an advertising strategy that endured throughout much of the twentieth century
Alternative Voices:
- ex.) Truth.com - against tobacco use - shows realities of tobacco
Alcohol and advertising:
- geared towards young audience (and college students) and minority audience - ex.) Budweiser frogs (which croak "Budweis-errrr"), has been accused of using cartoonlike animal characters to appeal to young viewers - ex.) marketing high-end liquors to African American and Hispanic male populations. In a recent marketing campaign, Hennessy targeted young African American men with ads featuring hip-hop star Nas and sponsored events in Times Square and at the Governors Ball and Coachella music festivals. Hennessy also sponsored VIP parties with Latino deejays and hip-hop acts in Miami and Houston. - the images and slogans in alcohol ads often associate the products with power, romance, sexual prowess, or athletic skill, when in reality its the exact opposite
Storyboard:
- in advertising for TV, a blueprint or roughly drawn comic-strip version of a proposed advertisement
Mega-Agencies:
- large ad firms that formed by merging several agencies and that maintain regional offices worldwide - big, international, global enterprises with local offices around the world - provide a full range of services, from advertising and public relations to operating their own in-house radio and TV production studios. - seems as a threat to the independence of smaller firms, which are slowly being bought out
Eating Disorders and advertising:
- long-standing trend in advertising is the association of certain products with ultra-thin female models, promoting a style of "attractiveness" that girls and women are invited to emulate. - Some forms of fashion and cosmetics advertising actually pander to individuals' insecurities and low self-esteem by promising the ideal body - Such advertising suggests standards of style and behavior that may be not only unattainable but also harmful, leading to eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia and an increase in cosmetic surgeries. - Obesity: Corn syrup-laden soft drinks, fast food, and processed food are the staples of media ads and are major contributors to the nationwide weight problem. More troubling is that because an obese nation is good for business (creating a multibillion-dollar market for diet products, exercise equipment, and self-help books)
By the end of the 1800s, patent _________ and ____________ stores accounted for half of the revenues taken in by ad agencies:
- medicines - department
MTV promoted:
- particular visual aesthetic—rapid edits, creative camera angles, compressed narratives, and staged performances - brands started including hit songs to keep viewers from not changing the channel
Banner ads:
- printlike display ads that load across the top or side of a Web page
Disassociation corollary:
- response to corporate mergers and public skepticism toward impersonal and large companies
FTC and false claims:
- rules require scientific evidence to back up those claims -"the best," "preferred by four out of five doctors" - Klondike Lite ice cream bar—"the 93% fat-free dessert with chocolate-flavored coating." The bars were indeed 93% fat-free—but only after the chocolate coating was removed - When the FTC discovers deceptive ads, it usually requires advertisers to change them or remove them from circulation. The FTC can also impose monetary civil penalties for companies, and it occasionally requires an advertiser to run spots to correct the deceptive
Viral Marketing:
- short videos or other content that marketers hope will quickly gain widespread attention as users share it with friends online or by word of mouth (for digital media) - Usually a short video - Tells a story - Involves emotions - Surprise - Coca-Cola Happiness Machine
Paid search advertising:
- sites such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing morphed over time into advertising companies, selling sponsored links associated with search terms and distributing online ads to affiliated Web pages
Boutique-Agencies:
- small ad firms that devote their talents to only a handful of select clients - offered more personal services - By the 1980s, large agencies had bought up many of the boutiques. Nevertheless, these boutiques continue to operate as fairly autonomous subsidiaries within multinational corporate structures.
First "ad agency" in US:
- started by Volney Palmer - 1841 in Boston - for a 25% commission from newspaper publishers Palmer sold space to advertisers
Demographics:
- statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within it - Gender, class, race, etc.
With ads creating and maintaining brand-name recognition, retail stores had to _______ ______ __________ __________:
- stock the desired brand
Tobacco and advertising:
- targets young groups with ads of cartoon with hip clothes and sunglasses - Eve and Virginia Slims cigarettes associated their products with women's liberation, equality, and slim fashion models.
World War II rejuvenated advertising:
- the federal government bought large quantities of advertising space to promote U.S. involvement in a war - These purchases helped offset a decline in traditional advertising, as many industries had turned their attention and production facilities to the war effort
Space brokers:
- the first American advertising companies individuals who purchased space in newspapers and sold it to various merchants - paid upfront - Brokers usually received discounts of 15 to 30 percent but sold the space to advertisers at the going rate
Media buyers:
- the individuals who choose and purchase the types of media that are best suited to carry a client's ads and reach the targeted audience - ex.) household products like Crest toothpaste and Pampers diapers are viewed primarily by women. To reach male viewers, media buyers encourage beer advertisers to spend their ad budgets on cable and network sports programming, evening talk radio, or sports magazines.
Data Mining:
- the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone - ex.) when an ESPN.com contest requires you to fill out a survey to be eligible to win sports tickets, or when washingtonpost.com requires that you create an account for free access to the site, marketers use that information to build a profile about you. The cookies they attach to your profile allow them to track your activities on a certain site. They can also add to your profile by tracking what you search for and even by mining your profiles and data on social networking sites. Agencies can also add online and retail sales data (what you bought and where) to user profiles to create an unprecedented database, largely without your knowledge.
Saturation Advertising:
- the strategy of inundating a variety of print and visual media with ads aimed at target audiences. - Excessive repetition - Miller Lite - "Tastes Great, Less Filling" - 1973 - 1991. - helped light beer overcome a potential image of being viewed as watered-down beer unworthy of "real" men
Psychographics (Focus groups):
- the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research - Attitudes, interests, beliefs and motivations
Political advertising:
- the use of ad techniques to promote a candidate's image and persuade the public to adopt a particular viewpoint - TV managers began selling thirty-second spots to political campaigns, just as they sold time to product advertisers. - In 2008, Barack Obama also ran a half-hour infomercial; and in the 2012 presidential race, both major candidates and various political organizations supporting them ran many online infomercials that were much longer than the standard thirty- to sixty-second TV spot. - Although broadcasters use the public's airwaves, they have long opposed providing free time for political campaigns and issues, since political advertising is big business for television stations.
Action for Children's Television (ACT):
- worked to limit advertising aimed at children - kids are viewed as "consumer trainees" - ACT fought particularly hard to curb program-length commercials: thirty-minute cartoon programs (such as G.I. Joe, My Little Pony and Friends, The Care Bear Family, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe) developed for television syndication primarily to promote a line of toys. - This commercial tradition continued with programs such as Pokémon and SpongeBob SquarePants. - parent groups have worried about the heavy promotion of sugar-coated cereals and similar products during children's programs.
Social changes in Advertising:
1.) influenced the transition from a *producer-directed* to a *consumer-driven* society. By stimulating demand for new products, advertising helped manufacturers create new markets and recover product start-up costs quickly 2.) promoted *technological advances* by showing how new machines — such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and cars — could improve daily life 3.) encouraged *economic growth* by increasing sales. To meet the demand generated by ads, manufacturers produced greater quantities, which reduced their costs per unit, although they did not always pass these savings along to consumers.
