Is Advertising Information or Manipulative?

      

      Advertising is a form of communication. An advertisement is the public medium that promotes a product, service or event or publicizing a job vacancy to the consumers. Usually, commercial advertisers often seek  for 'branding' associating a product name or image with certain qualities in minds of consumers or to generate increased consumption of their products or services . Advertisement has caught the consumer's attention in their daily life badly. For example, the Fair and Lovely advertisement where the actress was so beautiful and make us want to try the products and become pretty like the actress. Another example is Digi advertisement. In this ad, Yuna and Big Bang collaboration  manage to capture the society's attention especially teenagers'  since Kpop fever spread widely nowadays. However, is advertising information or manipulative?

    There are many types of advertising such as internet advertisement, newspaper advertisement, television advertisement and many others. In fact, billboards, posters, fliers, and other print media are advertisement that are visible almost everywhere. First of all advertisement is informative because in the advertisement, the information given is in details. The details  including  materials use, how to use the products and the product's producer. These info are important for consumer to read and make a right choice. Advertisement also helps a lot in giving info about an event, concert or an agency to the society.

    Furthermore, advertisement raises the awareness about particular products among consumers. Advertising of any issue or products would let the consumers acknowledge about their product. In that way, there will be wide variety of choices in the industry. That is why many people like to watch and read advertisement since they find it very informative and helpful.  Through advertisement, the sales of the products is increase since advertisement helps to make the product look brand and popular. For example Coke, Pepsi, KFC, Adidas and many others.

  

     On the other hand, advertising can also be manipulative. If we see all advertisement around us, the words used are very persuasive. These persuasive words are very effective in creating good and convincing images. people are easily fell into the 'traps' of the advertisers. Without considering other criteria, they believed at the tagline or information given because advertising are manipulative to consumer.

    Moreover, the advertisement only announce the advantages side of the products. A new study finds that the best strategy for advertisers trying to persuade a skeptical audience is to leave out facts and focus more on emotional ads. On the flip side, it found that those who are less skeptical are more persuaded by more information-based ads ( 55 Interesting Facts About Advertisement, 2013) . The info given is not definitely true because the advertisers only want to highlight the benefits of their products. Even if they include the disadvantages, they probably will not emphasise them much to make sure that the viewers do not pay much attention on that. Plus, with the help of high technology, the advertisers able to manipulate the viewers since the advertisement looks nice and very beneficial.

  

   As for conclusion, advertising give people all sorts of info. However, they all cannot be trusted hundred per cent. Here, I want stand my point that advertising is manipulative rather than giving information to the viewers.