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Think about TV ads. Analyze. Ask questions. |
Consider these ideas for your own compositions. |
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A LATER RESPONSE SET UP?
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IS
A LATER RESPONSE SET UP?
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"Soft sell" ads, without an urgency appeal, as commonly seen in long-term ad campaigns for standard products, do seek a specific later response for consumers to buy products. Some ads, however, do not seek, explicitly or implicitly, for consumers to respond by buying products. For example, many large corporations (ADM, Cargil, TRW, Dow, Altria, Union Carbide, Dupont, United Technologies, General Dynamics) budget tens of millions of dollars on such "image building" ads, often described by a variety of terms: corporate advertising, institutional advertising, PR, public relations, and goodwill advertising. Such ads are primarily meant to make the public "feel good" about these large corporations (e.g. oil, chemical, space, and weapons industries); to create a favorable climate of public opinion; to reduce public demand for laws, government regulations or corporate taxes; or to counter the negative images of "polluters," "monopolies," "middlemen," "war profiteers," or "merchants of death." Multiple goals are common in such corporate image ads which may seek simultaneously to encourage consumer awareness of their subsidiaries, to build employee morale in-house, and to gain stockholder support. Political and legal problems (IRS tax write-offs) occur on the borderlines between corporate "image ads," "issue ads," and "advocacy ads": between ad money spent seeking favorable public opinion, and that seeking public political support for a particular candidate, and those seeking support for certain corporate policies or plans (e.g. new weapons systems, offshore oil drilling). People who live in the Washington D.C. viewing area are likely to see more of these ads on TV than in other areas. Sunday morning talk-shows (and PBS television and NPR radio "sponsors") are filled with such corporate image ads. Eight "magic" words: Currently,* the verbs used in American political campaigns are extremely important because a "loophole" in the law was created when the Supreme Court ruled that "issue ads" run by political parties, corporations, and unions are not subject to federal election campaign spending limits if they did not use words of express advocacy (i.e., use words such as "vote for," "elect," "cast your ballot for," "Smith for Congress," "vote against," "defeat," or "reject"). For more about this important controversy, see: Issue Ads. * [In the 2000 campaign, $500 million was spent on such issue ads. On December 10, 2003, the Supreme Court closed that legal loophole, but said they were "under no illusion" that politicians would stop seeking another way: "Money, like water, always finds an outlet."]
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Expository writers should be aware of some of the interesting arguments about the "information" they produce. Exposition, as information-transfer, seems to be so pure and simple, "factual," in comparison to persuasion in which we recognize that the persuader has a bias and a purpose, to get a response. Yet, some analysts believe that all communication is essentially persuasion, that the writer seeks the audience's assent or acceptance of the information as fitting into an existing worldview. Education, in this view, consists of information which fits into the accepted beliefs and myths of a society. Thus, such information goes unregarded as "propaganda," while opposing views, held by other groups is seen as such. When we hear the term "propaganda,"
we usually think either of the fist-shaking, name-calling, agitation,
"command propaganda," or of the insidious indoctrination
within other groups. Command propaganda, as used here, means any organized persuasion which seeks an immediate response: for example, most advertising, and most political campaign pleas that we "vote." Conditioning propaganda, as used here, means any organized persuasion which seeks to create or shape public opinion, assumptions, beliefs, attitudes, myths, and worldviews on a long-term basis as the necessary climate, atmosphere, or prelude for some future response. Analysts dealing with social and political propaganda
have used a variety of terms to discuss concepts related to such
subtle long-term conditioning: In commercial persuasion, include all the various
"public relations" and "image advertising"
terms. Borderlines between information and persuasion
do indeed get murky. |
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| | Welcome | Purpose | Audience | Limits | Structure | Attention | Confidence | Explicit | Implicit | Response| Omission | |
