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 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.

Implicit Message (Purpose)

Message: Implicit (Pest Control)

Technique: Allusion to Spiderman (Dominate Universal Feature)

Impact: Nostalgia (Link to childhood memories for adults)

Target Audience: Adults / Families/Kids

Medium: Print Ad

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.