Essay, Paragraph or Speech on “Advertisements: Leading or Misleading” Complete Essay, Speech for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Advertisements: Leading or Misleading

Advertisement is the act of advertising. Advertising is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume more of a particular brand of product or service. Many advertisements are designed to generate increased consumption of products and services through the creation and reinforcement of “brand image” and “brand loyalty”. For these purposes, advertisements sometimes embed their persuasive message with factual information. Every major medium is used to deliver these messages, including television, radio, cinema, magazines, newspapers, video games, internet and billboards. Advertisement is often placed by an advertising agency on behalf of a company or organization.

Nowadays, advertisements are a part of everyday life. Fundamentally, advertisers have the power to promote positive or negative impact to the society. Since a consumer cannot do anything about misleading or negative advertisements such as showing negative emotions viz. fear, anxiety or guilt upon the consumer, giving wrong concept of product; bring violent content to children, and portraying women as sex objects, it essentially becomes governments’ responsibility to curb them.

As advertising and marketing efforts become increasingly ubiquitous in modern society, the industry has come under criticism of public-interest groups, watchdogs, and ad busters, which bring the truth to people, expose the advertising company and work to educate consumers about how they can register their concerns with advertisers and regulators. Is there any advantage of advertising? In many cases it is only disadvantage – an annoying hindrance in daily lives. It gets on nerves, distorts the truth, and adds to the cost of the product. For example, an advertiser may convince buyers to purchase their product by covert advertising or claiming its superiority. In reality, the product is not likely to be better than any other. Advertisers may also try to minimize information about or from consumer groups.

According to many sources, the past experience and state of mind of the person subjected to advertising may determine its impact. Over the past some years the science of marketing analytics and marketing effectiveness has been developed to determine the impact of marketing actions on consumers, sales, profit and market share, e.g. Marketing Mix Modeling, and direct response measurement.

Any negative information on a company or its products often results in pressures from the company to withdraw such information lines, threatening to cut their ads. This behaviour makes the editors of the media to re-think. The bigger the companies are, the bigger their relation becomes, maximizing control over a single piece of information.

Another indirect effect of advertising is to make the communication media to modify the medium to be a good place for communicating ads before anything else e.g. television, where broadcasters try to make the public stay for a long time in a mental state that encourages spectators not to switch the channel during advertisements. programmes that are low in mental stimulus, require light concentration and are varied are best for long sitting times.

There have been increasing efforts to protect the public interest by regulating the content and the influence of advertising e.g. ban on tobacco advertising on television, and the total ban on advertising of alcohol in cinema, television and other media in India. The tobacco industry is required by law to display warnings about the health hazards on their products.

All over, there is a vigorous debate on whether advertising to children should be regulated. In India, the need has been exacerbated by reports of fast food, junk food, cold drinks, cartoons’ etc. causing an epidemic of childhood obesity, and greater TV viewing time in children.

“See, Think, Then Act”