The image above is from an old ad by Coca-Cola that was meticulously tailored to give you the thought "Man, I could really go for a coke." It has everything in it, a pretty woman, summer attire that implies it's a hot day, the coke bottle, the coke logo, and a simple "Yes" in the top right corner that works in many levels on accepting a coke into your life. Ads like these have grown stronger in the couple decades, making their way from posters and newspapers, to animated billboards and ads in our mobile games. Ads are also found in our big blockbuster movies, with main characters drinking a coke, or a giant monster throwing a coke supply truck at our favorite super hero. They've successfully infiltrated and heavily populated our day-to-day encounters. As I mentioned before, The persuaders is a few years over a decade old, but not much has changed, in fact, things in the persuasion industry have rapidly evolved.
Emotions and recognizable, familiar logos are a big part of advertising that seemed to be a timeless success. This was heavily hit on during the documentary, and for good reason. It just works! Looking at this McDonald's ad may give many of us a sense of hunger, a memory of eating their with family, or the catchy jingle that Justin Timberlake was paid millions of dollars to sing. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Anyways, ads are overwhelmingly present these days, and The Persuaders does an excellent job at doing an in-depth analyses on how ad companies help products rise above the rest, and how some products fail due to poor marketing. The documentary used the Song air service ad campaign to show us how things can go wrong during an ad campaign. This air service was too vague with it's product and too artsy with their ads to grab a consumer base to keep the company afloat. I never even heard of Song before watching this film! Shows are little they made an impact in the market.
The documentary taught me a lot about the "persuasion industry", as well as made me more aware of the ads that are thrown at me everyday online. From now on, I'm going to start dissecting ads to see what they're trying to go for (in my own interpretation of course) and see if the ad successfully made me interested in the product. I wonder if networked brain augmentations ever get created, would companies start sending ads straight to our dreams? I think there was a Futurama episode about that...
