you need Product-Centered
The older, more traditional view of advertising stressed the concept of praising the product: "the product as hero." Car makers, for example, might emphasize the "Quality" or "Utility" or "Efficiency" or "Beauty" of their cars. At best, such ads inform the public about the product's merits. At worst, such ads can make false claims.But, most commonly, product-centered advertising is usually puffery, that is, the kind of "sellers talk" which uses superlatives, vague generalities, and one-sided praise. Laws usually allow such puffery because reasonable buyers should expect it from sellers.

12 general categories cover nearly everything which can be claimed about the intrinsic merits of a product. Browse these screens. Before you click, try to guess 5 or 10 words and images commonly used in each category.

Quality
Efficiency
Stability
Utility
Quantity
Scarcity
Reliability
Rapidity
Beauty
Novelty
Simplicity
Safety

These are the predictable claims of product-centered ads and the words are appropriate to certain categories and products. For example, if an ad is going to make a claim about a car, it's not going to use words such as "tasty" or "delicious"; but, it will use words in such categories as speed, economy, reliability, and safety.

"That's obvious," you say. Yes. You know this. With any topic, there's an "appropriate thesaurus" or a "limited universe" of words and images. But, most people know this vaguely and randomly.

The more aware you are, the more systematically you can anticipate and identify these predictable categories and words, the better analyst you will become.

Three claims (Quality, Quantity, Beauty) are so common that they are almost generic claims applied to all products and services. When people talk about "glittering generalities" or of "puffery," they usually are talking about this cluster of claims.

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