Commercials and Advertising
I wrote this editorial a long time ago. I think it was for Grade 12 English. It's kinda funny.
An Editorial by Me
You see it every day, no matter where you go or what you do. Advertising can be a very good way of telling potential customers of new products and innovations for the good of the customer, but typically, in this day in age, it’s not. Advertising is simply a way to convince people that they need a product that they don’t need.
If you think of advertising as simply being television commercials, you’re wrong. Advertising is everywhere and almost everything could be considered some type of advertisement. If someone walks past you in a hallway wearing a shirt that has a logo on it, that’s advertising. If you are surfing the Net during your lunch break you’ll see many advertisements. If you see someone drinking a certain brand of water, that’s advertising.
Advertising allows people to find out about products that are available, true, but they also send messages. Messages are usually more obvious in television commercials, which you see a lot of in a typical day.
Commercials on television generally aren’t very realistic. Whether it be adorable talking animals or some woman who likes her shampoo a little too much, the advertisers will do anything to grab your attention for that minute or so and tell you anything they want.
They use certain techniques to get around the few rules that are in place when it comes to things like making false statements or exaggerating how much their product is better than the competition’s. Even doing something as simple as saying “only” before the price makes it sound cheaper and therefore you want to buy it because it’s “only two thousand dollars”. Another trick is that they simply leave out the fact that there is shipping and handling charges as well as PST and GST. Doing this makes the price look like less when they show it to you on the screen. It takes a clever consumer not to fall for these tricks of the trade.
Is advertising good or bad you ask? In my opinion advertising has too many disadvantages compared to its advantages to be considered good.
Infomercials are a very good example of just how devious advertisers can be. They hire a few of everyone’s beloved celebrities to get you to watch the infomercial and then they try to suck you in by doing things like breaking the price up over a certain number of payments to make it look cheaper, when really it isn’t. They even have the celebrities tell you how much they love the product, even though they probably don’t even own one. They also try to throw in “free” gifts if you call in during the given number of minutes so they’re trying to get you to make a spontaneous decision. Sneaky huh? Not to mention that they play infomercials at the times in the afternoon or early morning when there’s nothing better to watch.
So how do you keep from getting scammed into buying things you don’t really need? You just have to be careful and keep an eye out for things that may be a little to good to believe because they usually aren’t as good as they seemed when you saw it on television once they’re in your house and you can’t return it because their return policy won’t cover what happened to it when the delivery man dropped it just inside your door.
But hey don‘t get me wrong, commercials aren’t all bad. I mean, who doesn’t love that Blockbuster rabbit and guinea pig?
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