BUYER BEWARE

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BUYER BEWARE
Advertising Techniques and Social Repercussions
Sarah Carter, Nate Eberly, and Lindsay Garrard
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Advertisements are everywhere in our day-to-day
lives. We wake up to commercials on the morning
news, see ads in the newspaper, drive past
billboards and promotional signs, and try
relentlessly to avoid pop-ups and other
advertising on the internet. There is much more
to these advertisements than meets they eye. They
both mirror and reinforce pre-existing social
ideologies. Advertising agencies use cunning
techniques to persuade consumers to buy products
they may not have been interested in otherwise.
Emerging technologies will only strengthen their
influence on society new developments in
nanotechnology and the internet could allow
advertisers to target more specific
consumer-cohorts with more powerful subliminal
messages.
Advertising Inequality
See No Evil, Hear No Evil Subliminal Messages in
Advertising

• The human mind is easily manipulated. Sensory
  stimuli delivered below an individuals absolute
  threshold are not consciously perceived and can
  be used to convey a message subliminally. In
  advertising, these messages establish a
  connection or familiarity between the product and
  consumer, but are highly controversial.
• A CHECKERED HISTORY
• First Uses
• During WWII the military used subliminal teaching
  techniques and tachistoscopes to train soldiers
  to quickly identify enemy aircraft.
• During the Cold War, the American public gained
  knowledge that POWs in North Korea were being
  subliminally persuaded to switch sides and gained
  suspicion that commercial industries were
  unfairly manipulating consumers in the same way.
• The 1950s - American Fears Realized
• 1957 James Vicary subjected movie goers to
  subliminal messages that read Hungary? Eat
  Popcorn and Drink Coca-Cola. He claimed a 57
  increase in popcorn sales and his study subjected
  subliminal advertising to harsh public scrutiny.
• Radios soon marketed whisper ads, films
  introduced subliminal flash frames, and
  television stations were boycotted for suspected
  use of subliminal communication.
• Towards the end of the 1950s various attempts at
  state and federal legislation were made to make
  the use of subliminal techniques in the media
  illegal, but none passed.
• 1960-1975
• Vicary admitted to falsifying his results in
  1962.
• Subliminal messaging lost the focus of the public
  eye, but advertisers continued doing research and
  hid subliminal advertisements beneath the shadow
  of public ignorance.
• Concerns were sparked again when Wilson Bryan Key
  published his book in 1972 entitled Subliminal
  Seduction on the use of hidden sexual images in
  advertising.
• In 1974, the FCC claimed that subliminal
  messaging, effective or not, was not in the best
  interest of the public because it stifled freedom
  of choice through deception.

• Advertisers strive to capture the publics
  attention and link an image and a product in a
  way that will leave a lasting impression in the
  publics mind. Because they must accomplish both
  of these tasks in a very brief period of time,
  advertisers frequently utilize existing social
  stereotypes in their images and slogans.
• ADVERTISING AND RACE
• Advertisements both reflect and reinforce racial
  ideologies. Advertisers incorporate pre-existing
  racial stereotypes in their messages to depict a
  certain image or target a specific population.
  In turn, these racialized images help create and
  perpetuate the racial norms.
• After the abolition of slavery in the US, which
  forced black freed-people to construct a new
  African American identity and white Americans to
  make sense of blacks new role in society,
  advertisers used racialized images in commercial
  advertising to reinforce the black/white binary
  construction of race.
• AUNT JEMIMA
• 1890- The Aunt Jemima breakfast foods company
  began using the image of a Southern black mammy
  to promote its products.
• The earliest depictions of Aunt Jemima
  originated from the black-faced minstrel
  character and reflected the stereotypical
  characteristics of a black mammyshe was
  overweight, uneducated, wore a headscarf and was
  happy to assist Southern white women in any way
  possible (see fig 1).
• Today, the company still uses Aunt Jemima on its
  labels. However, her figure less resembles a
  mammyshe wears a white collared shirt, pearl
  earrings and has traded a headscarf for a dark
  perm (see fig 2).
• TRADE CARDS
• In the late 1870s and early 1880s advances in
  technology for reproducing pictures made possible
  one of the earliest forms of advertising trade
  cards.
• Trade cards combined visual images with
  advertising slogans.
• Most trade cards of the time depicted African
  Americans as subservient, poor and unskilled
  laborers. African American children appeared
  cute, comic and dirty. This imagery connoted
  that despite African Americans freedom, they
  would never fully integrate into whites
  superior culture.
• In 1875, a trade card advertisement for Pears
  Soap showed a clean-clothed white child washing
  the blackness off a wild-eyed African American
  child (see fig 3).

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• A BREIF HISTORY
• Very soon after the introduction of the World
  Wide Web, Internet advertising originated since
  it came with countless advantages. A commercial
  online service called Prodigy was the first to
  experiment with online advertising in 1990.
  Online advertising hurt rather than benefited
  another company that followed Prodigy, Canter and
  Siegel, because they used what came to be known
  as spam. Wired magazine then launched HotWired, a
  Web property with an advertising business model
  they created the banner ad because they feared
  their original dimensions would receive backlash.
  It signed on with ATT and launched its site in
  1994. After their success, other sites were quick
  to accept advertising.
• INTERACTIVITY
• The internet is the only medium that the user can
  directly engage in. They can interact with the
  product, test it, and even buy it all within a
  few clicks.
• With some ads, users can complete the process
  without ever leaving the advertisement
• Games, contests and videos
• 2. TARGETABILITY
• Advertisers have the ability to target specific
  audiences through context and content, site
  registration (providing personal information),
  cookies and database mining, profiling and
  personalization/customization, collaborative
  filtering.
• Ad management solutions help advertisers group
  target audiences by company, age, gender, race,
  SIC codes, geographic location, browser, computer
  platform, and even the and time of activity.
• Search engines, like Google AdWords, can generate
  ads (smart ads based on certain keywords.
• 3. TRACKING
• Computer servers can record IP number of a
  computer, computer platform (Mac, PC, etc.),
  browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.), date
  and time of request, what was requested, and
  referring URL.

Online Advertising

I AM HONEST. I WONT STEAL. STEALING IS
DISHONEST. - A threshold message played at over
1000 stores in the United States

• In the mid-1960s African Americans protested the
  lack of Black figures in advertising and
  advertisers use of stereotyped images.
  However, some contemporary advertisements are
  still blatantly racist (see fig. 10)
• Today, most advertising companies strive to be
  much more egalitarian in their depictions of
  race. Many critics believe this multicultural
  approach ignore the very real racial inequalities
  in American society.

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IMAGE SOURCES 1. http//www.subliminalsex.com/1.
2-Benson-4.5webO.jpg 2. http//davidwpeacockthefir
st.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/little_mermaid_ver2
2.jpg 3. www.gawker.com/assets/resources/2008/06/A
J2.jpeg 4. http//www.onewomanmarketing.com/wp-co
ntent/uploads/2009/06/090613-popcorn.jpg 5.
http//static.howstuffworks.com/gif/web-advertisin
g-mapquest-ad.gif 6. http//kaufmann-mercantile.co
m/body-soap/ 7. http//www.auntjemima.com/aj_histo
ry/ 8. Bullock, August. The Secret Sales Pitch.
San Jose, CA Norwich, 2004. Pages 209, 211 9.
http//www.informationarchitects.jp/wp-content/upl
oads/2007/03/413996918_faac24130f.jpg 10.
http//www.adsavvy.org/25-most-racist-advertisemen
ts-and-commercials/
AND IN THE FUTURE? The possibilities for the
future of Internet advertising are endless, but
currently it seems as though increased
integration with other advertising media, namely
television, is likely in the near future.
Personalization will probably also become more
target-specific and coincide more exactly with
the consumers preferences.
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