Exploratory Essay

1346 Words3 Pages

Advertising is a massive industry. Companies pay billions of dollars annually to promote themselves or their products. Advertisements can come in abstract forms, like billboards, park benches and public transit, or they can be more traditional, like print ads, online ads, or television commercials. Despite the fact many people think TV commercials are annoying and often opt to avoid to them, I found in my exploratory essay that advertisers purposely craft commercials in a manner that helps reduce avoidance and increase memorability. As such, I plan to argue that TV commercials are the best form of advertising because they a further reach, have an audio component, and are more memorable. The sources that I have found will help me assemble a …show more content…

These audio components allow the advertisers to extract certain moods and feelings solely based on what sounds they include in their commercials. While doing research for my exploratory essay, I found two sources that will help support this point. The first source is a study by Professors Steve Oakes and Adrian North in which they tested how different music genres changed how people viewed a commercial by playing the same commercial with different background music to two separate test groups. Oakes and North found that at the end of the study each group used different adjectives to describe the commercial (Oakes). This source will help my argumentative essay because it shows that advertisers can change the music in their commercials, and the audience can have a completely different reaction to the same commercial. This source will also help my essay because Oakes and North are respectively professors at the University of Liverpool and Curtain University, so this adds ethos to my argument. The second source I have is also a study. It was done by Park et. al. In their study, Park et. al figured out how music in commercials affected the audiences’ attitudes. Parks et. al had five different groups listen to various commercials and fill out a questionnaire. They concluded background music in commercials form “highly involved consumers’ attitudes towards advertising, …show more content…

The first source to support this claim is an article from Forbes Magazine titled “To Keep a Consumer Brand Top of Mind, Consider Old-School Advertising.” In this article by Guy Brusselmans, Kenji Govaers and Matthew Meacham, compare four different types of advertisements. They analyzed online banner ads, online video ads, TV commercials and storefronts, and compared the cost of each advertising medium to the rate at which customers remembered the advertisements. Brusselmans et. al concluded that recollected reach, the percentage of total population reached who recall a campaign, of commercials are higher than the recollected reach of the other three advertisement types (Brusselmans). This source helps my argument because it provides quantitative data that reveals how ads seen on TV are the remembered better than others. This means companies have a better chance of their product being remembered if it appears in a commercial. My second source I will use for this point is an article titled “13 Ways Advertisers Persuade you to Buy” by Paul Suggett. In his article, Suggett reveals thirteen things that advertisers include in their commercials to get consumers to buy the product being advertised. Two of the items on his list that consists of memory are making the audience laugh and humanizing things and animals (Suggett). This

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