alainlatour.com

Also pub­lished at Medium Magazine. Again, I’ve included the whole text in addi­tion to the link.

SOMEWHERE IN THE WORLD, A BOY WILL OGLE AT A PAIR OF ADIDAS SNEAKERS, A GROWN MAN AT AN iPHONE, A GIRL AT AN ARMANI DRESS, AND THEY WILL ALL WISH THEY HAD IT.

They won’t do it because Adidas is bet­ter than Nike, or an iPhone bet­ter than a BlackBerry, or an Armani dress bet­ter than a Hugo Boss dress.They’ll do it because adver­tis­ing per­suaded them that that spe­cific prod­uct would make them cool.

Many an Apple fan (a group that I belong to) would likely dis­agree. They would point to a Mac’s ease of use and to its abil­ity to work with­out crashes. And they would be right, in my opin­ion. Still, there’s no deny­ing that Apple has mar­keted itself as a cool brand, although a cool fac­tor, objec­tively speak­ing, should carry lit­tle weight in decid­ing which com­puter to buy­—or, for that mat­ter, which sneakers.

Be cool
Advertisers love the cool fac­tor. It’s hard to define and easy to exploit, which comes in handy when pro­mot­ing the sub­jec­tive qual­i­ties of a prod­uct instead of its objec­tive qual­i­ties. All objects (and all prod­ucts) have a sym­bolic value and a func­tional value. Advertising used to be about the func­tional value, that is, about the con­crete rea­sons why you should buy a spe­cific prod­uct. Over the years, how­ever, the empha­sis switched to pro­vid­ing prod­ucts with sym­bolic con­no­ta­tions. The rea­son is that sym­bolic con­no­ta­tions help sell prod­ucts, whose truly rel­e­vant fea­tures are almost indis­tin­guish­able from one another. Advertiers do this by cre­at­ing a sub­jec­tive dif­fer­ence in your mind between a prod­uct and the competitors’.

Let’s take cars for exam­ple. They all have four wheels and work fairly well at trans­port­ing peo­ple from point A to point B. Yet how many of us would hes­i­tate to pro­claim a BMW a bet­ter car than a Toyota? More impor­tantly, how many of us would choose to buy a BMW over a Toyota, if money was no object? The answer is, I sus­pect, a num­ber far lower than those would acknowl­edge that a cooler and faster car doesn’t equal a mechan­i­cally bet­ter one.

This is partly why many ads try to sell expen­sive products—products that are not really essen­tial for us. Wristwatches, for instance, are con­ve­nient, but not really essen­tial, espe­cially today, when dig­i­tal clocks wink at us from com­put­ers screens and microwaves and cell phones and sub­way dis­plays. Yet many peo­ple pay thou­sands of dol­lars for a Rolex, even though a $50 dig­i­tal Timex is actu­ally more accu­rate than any Swiss-certified chronome­ter. In their mind, the cool fac­tor jus­ti­fies the high cost of the Rolex (although in this case “exclu­sive” is prob­a­bly a bet­ter word than “cool.”) In fact, the Rolex’s high cost has become one of the main rea­sons why it’s cool or exclu­sive to own one.

Nowhere is this phe­nom­e­non more promi­nent than in the fash­ion world. Consumers lav­ish on brands just because a celebrity wears them (or is paid to say they do) or because they have been per­suaded that that brand will make them cool (think of the lit­tle green crocodile).

Run for cover

We are being bom­barded with ads. In 2006, US $391 bil­lion was spent world­wide on adver­tis­ing. The indus­try may be suf­fer­ing, what with declines in TV-viewing and news­pa­per sales, but it is also fight­ing back, embrac­ing the Internet, which it ini­tially saw as its enemy, and study­ing mar­ket seg­ments more closely than ever.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that adver­tis­ing is inher­ently evil. In fact, it has allowed many prod­ucts to come to us for free—from radio sta­tions and web appli­ca­tions to iPhone apps such as Shazam. This very mag­a­zine would not have hap­pened if it weren’t for the ads you’ve flipped through. And now that adver­tis­ing in the media is com­pro­mised, many news­pa­pers, includ­ing the ven­er­a­ble New York Times, will likely have to charge read­ers for online access. Ironically, some of them will no doubt be the same ones who had down­loaded browser exten­sions to dis­able ads.

Some experts doubt that adver­tis­ing will sur­vive in the long run, when con­sumers will get most, if not all, of their enter­tain­ment from the Internet. That is beyond the scope of this arti­cle. One thing is clear: while mass adver­tise­ment may fade, there will always some­one try­ing to per­suade
to buy some­thing. This is how they do it.

HOW ADVERTISERS LURE US

Implications
Advertises do a lot imply­ing. Implying things rather than out­right stat­ing them allows adver­tis­ers to make peo­ple believe their prod­uct is cool, or bet­ter, or health­ier, or faster with­out actu­ally say­ing so. More impor­tantly, it allows them to do so with­out vio­lat­ing reg­u­la­tions for mak­ing unsub­stan­ti­ated claims.

One of the most effec­tive ways to cre­ate an impli­ca­tion is by jux­ta­pos­ing phrases, like “Get a good night’s sleep. Get [insert sleep­ing pill name] night­time.” Another (trick­ier) way relies on pre­sent­ing the same infor­ma­tion in another way. For exam­ple, stud­ies show that for prod­ucts with a fairly large amount of an ingre­di­ent per­ceived to be unhealthy, peo­ple think the whole prod­uct is health­ier when the good ingre­di­ent is adver­tised first (“75% fat free” rather than “25% fat”). Thus the ad implies that the prod­uct is healthy with­out actu­ally say­ing so.

Advertisers also use bare com­par­a­tives, for exam­ple, “sham­poo X gives you shinier hair.” But shinier than what? And how much shinier?

Non-facts, selec­tive facts and min­i­mal facts

Advertises care­fully choose which fea­tures to pro­mote. They may say a car is fast, but neglect to men­tion it uses more gas. They could also say a blender has 15 speeds—but is that bet­ter than just three?

As for non-facts these are state­ments that sound good and imply a cer­tain qual­ity but are com­pletely unver­i­fi­able, such as “time­less appeal.”

Word Play

This is often an easy puz­zle. Solving it gives the audi­ence a sense of accom­plish­ment. Other times it’s sim­ply a rhyme, which makes the ad eas­ier to remember.

John Kuraoka, a free­lance adver­tis­ing copy­writer, argues, “If your head­line can be used for a dif­fer­ent prod­uct, but it is still clever, then it is prob­a­bly word play.” By that token, “Some explor­ers insisted on the best nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems,” an ad used by a Swiss watch com­pany, would qual­ify as word play. It could refer to a nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem (what­ever that is) or to the watch they are adver­tis­ing. Another exam­ple: a nail pol­ish “Puts beau­ti­ful nails at your fingertips?”

Yet another trick is to use words with lux­u­ri­ous con­no­ta­tions. “Suite” for room, “gen­er­ous” for “large,” “appointed” for “decorated.”

Associations

In a lux­ury watch ad, con­no­ta­tional mean­ing was tweaked to make read­ers asso­ciate the watch with lux­ury: “Satin-finished screws” (do they mean shiny?), “finely worked cham­pagne dial,” “dia­mond treated applied indexes,” “deploy­ante buckle.” Simpler words might have been cho­sen, but they would not have made the prod­uct seem as lux­u­ri­ous or exclusive.