Sunday, April 15, 2012
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This week one of the concepts that I found interesting was how to evaluate advertisements. When I read this section I didn't expect to find so many different tactics in approaching this concept. To my surprise, I came to realize that a lot of ads give faulty and week arguments. Many are missing key facts or statistics that misrepresent the advertisement being given. This generally means that not all the premises are given for the argument at hand. Some advertisements use scare tactics, which pry on fear,emotions, shame, and insecurities to get their point across. Other advertisements use fallacies of popular appeal which pry on what everyone likes. Other ads pry on fallacies of questionable causes by making something look more wonderful than what it really is. There are many fallacies that can be used to misrepresent advertisements. Before we draw any conclusions from ads presented to us we need to understand all the premises that are given and hidden so that we do not make faulty assumption by something that is commercialized to us.
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Advertising is used to make us want something so the company can make money. I have also noticed from personal experience that often times the advertisement is filled with untruthful information to make the product sound more appealing and better than it is. In one of my classes last semester we learned that some key terms in advertising food products such as, fat free, low sodium, and zero calories do not actually mean what they say. There is just a limit to the amount of the certain thing for it to be considered the term. After learning this I defiantly do my research before buying stuff.
ReplyDeleteI have also noticed that advertisements are full of deceiving statements. Though is is illegal to flat out lie in an advertisement, marketers have found ways around it by using vague phrases that appeal to consumers. For example when an old house is being advertised the advertisement will say the house is "historical" or has "character" instead of saying it is an old house. Also, when an advertisement says something is "up to 70% off" the consumer may actually get no discount on the object being sold. So when we, as consumers, are being bombarded with advertisements every day we must question what is being sold to us and make smart well researched decisions.
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