For Monday, April 20th: Blogging Chapter 13 (Advertising)

Chapter 13:

I enjoyed reading chapter thirteen on Advertising in our text as I learned about an area of business that I was not very familiar with. In particular, the concept of “brand image” when creators of advertisements add perspective and a twist to a brand name often referred to as “spin” first introduced by David Ogilvy in the 1950s. What the text doesn’t specifically mention is when developing a product’s brand image a company really needs to know and understand their target audience in order for the image to resonate with its consumers.

With the onset of the digital age and the fact that product companies are utilizing the Internet to reach their target consumers, I see “viral advertising” or as the text describes it as word-of-mouth testimonials as playing an important role in generating interest and exposure for products in the market place. What better publicity than consumers’ testimonials on blogs. So one question I have is have advertising agencies figured out how to track and measure the effects of “buzz advertising” in a campaign?

An interesting “factoid” that I found worth noting as it pertains to the CPG industry which I am in is that many retailers own their own factories for producing their own store’s brand a.k.a private label product. In particular the Kroger chain owns 41 factories that produce 4,300 store-brand products for its grocery shelves. (Vivian p. 331) As an aside, I think with our current economic situation private label brands will gain popularity.

“Advertising and the End of the World” film:

In this film, narrator Sut Jhally says advertisers’ main goal is to cut through the clutter and appeal to our emotions which as we know are within our limbic brains. The film uses many persuasive techniques to convey its messages one being repetition of ideas to strongly emphasize their position. Group dynamics such as “we” was also used by the narrator appealing to viewers as humans helped create the hole in the ozone layer and need to be part of the solution. In between discussion points the film used a production technique similar to the image of static on a television channel when a station isn’t broadcasting a picture. This noise and image tapped into my reptilian part of the triune brain used as a technique to keep the viewer focused. Many of the advertising clips shown in this film were focused on images vs. words thus further stating the epistemological shift that is part of our 21st century media culture.