Consumer Behavior & Commercial Offerings Decoding Media Ads Consumer Behavior & Commercial Offerings

What is Advertising? What is the purpose of Media Advertising? How does advertising influence human behavior? What kinds of messages are being conveyed in ads? Why do Ad’s target particular audiences? And; What are some techniques that Advertisers use?

Advertising or advertising is a form of marketing communication used to encourage, persuade, or manipulate an audience (viewers, readers or listeners; sometimes a specific group) to take or continue to take some action. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering

Decoding Print Advertisements

Advertisements There are 5 main components of Advertising: Purpose: The message, the subject and the effect the ad is meant to have on people (information, opinion, persuasion or instruction) Techniques: What methods are used to achieve the purpose; the dominate feature of the ad. Impact: The effect the advertisement had on the audience, its effectiveness in influencing them.

Ads Cont.’ Target Audience: Who is the advertisement aimed at and intended to influence? Medium: The way the message reaches its audience, and where the ad is found.

Explicit Message (Purpose) Explicit Message: When you evaluate a media text, you are using reading and thinking strategies to understand the messages. Some messages are very obvious (in your face!). These are what we call explicit messages

Implicit Message (Purpose) Implicit Messages: Some messages are less obvious because the producers of the media text have provided only clues… Take a second (or third or fourth…) look at the media that follows this slide. It’s a poster produced jointly by the government of British Columbia, the Lung Association and the Ministry of Health.

Target Audience: Adults / Families/Kids Technique: Allusion to Spiderman (Dominate Universal Feature) Medium: Print Ad Impact: Nostalgia (Link to childhood memories for adults) Message: Implicit (Pest Control)

Stereotyping / Bias The definition of a stereotype is any commonly known public belief about a certain social group or a type of individual. Stereotypes are often confused with prejudices, because, like prejudices, a stereotype is based on a prior assumption. Stereotypes are often created about people of specific cultures or races.

Common Stereotypes Men & Women Men are strong and do all the work. Men are the “backbone.” Women aren't as smart as a man. Women can’t do as good of a job as a man. Girls are not good at sports. Guys are messy and unclean. Men who spend too much time on the computer or read are geeks.