Deceptive Nature Of Advertising Essay

A lot of critics have reacted to the deceptive nature of advertising. They have said that advertising implicitly and sometimes explicitly promise to improve people’s live by using or purchasing the sponsor’s products. According Jamieson and Campbell; this is refer to as “if ----- then” strategy: A beautiful young girl makes use of a product or let say a particular brand of lipstick in an advert, and after using it men start to follow her everywhere. With advertising such as this even without making its point explicit, it is able to successful pass across the message that when you make use of the brand of lipstick, you will become beautiful, and when you become beautiful after using the product, you will become attracted to men. The opposite of this strategy is called (if not= then not). The example of this strategy is when a product like pampers said in their campaign that caring mothers buy pampers, this means in essence that if you do not buy pampers you simply not care. An advertiser makes use of this kind of concept to deceive the public.

The Marxist economists (which first initiated the persuasive and manipulative function of advertising, as different from the concept of giving out information which was the case of the Babylonian barkers) viewed advertisement as a key component in the creation of demand that capitalism rely as its productive capacity surpass the provision of basic needs. In this regard as opined by Mandel, advertising is an essential institution to the very survival of the capitalist system, solving the growing difficulties of realization in late capitalism. According Stuart Ewen, advertising fulfilled double functions for capitalism and they include: creating demand for the unleased industrial capacity ind...

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...e alike. “The ultimate goal of propagandist is to change the way people act and leave them believing that those actions are voluntary, that the adopted behaviors and opinions underlying them are their own”. Advertising also performs the same function as propaganda in that it attracts our attention, change our attitudes, and command our behavior. Propagandist believe that the end justified the means therefore, it is not only right but necessary that half-truth and even out-right lies be used to convince people to abandon Ideas that are wrong and to adopt those favored by the propagandist. This is why recent political campaigns are now run in the same way as marketing campaign of goods. Marketing campaign, political campaign, and advertising are all gear towards one thing; persuasion, and this persuasion is achieved using whatever means, chief among them is lying.