Synthesis Essay Advertising

Billboards, infomercials, neon signs, posters. The average person is surrounded by advertisement all throughout the day and all throughout his or her life. Also, advertising has evolved to transcend its physical medium into a sleeker, newer digital one making it nearly impossible to avoid them. Many criticize advertising believing it to be nothing more than mindless propaganda that infiltrates and plagues our lives and our society. While it does have both positive and negative effects, there are still a plethora of benefits that outweigh the disadvantages. Advertisement fosters free trade and promotes prosperity by stimulating a competitive, well-rounded economy and being able to transform society with meaningful messages and visuals. Critics assert that advertisement is just a cruel game of tricking gullible consumers into wasting their money on cheap goods, but the opposite is true. Advertising, at its most basic form “is teaching, pure and simple,” and it generates a connection between companies and their constituents (Source

Notably, cigarette advertising became increasingly more prominent by the end of the twentieth century and had an increasing demand for these silent killers (Source B). Although this may be true, critics should take into account how the anti-cigarette ads are more potent compared to the pro-cigarette ones. Commercials and advertisements that show the adverse “hush-hush” side effects of smoking appeal to pathos by evoking intense emotions of fear and anguish when seeing someone with a hole in their throat or worse, dead. As a result of these ads, the percent of adults in America who smoke has dropped from 40% in the 1960’s to 17% as of 2016. Advertisement is only as powerful as its audience and as the audience’s interests change, so will the types of