Advertisments

Advertisements are everywhere nowadays. You can hardly watch a show on the television without coming across at least five or more of them, you can hardly go anywhere without seeing a couple of billboards along the roadside. Advertisements promoting company X's products because their product is extremely useful for doing task Y, and is more effective than a typical market brand Z by a factor of k times. Advertisements which depict a group of models caressing a car, a rather blatant way of making it look more appealing that it really is. In such an competitive market, advertisements play a crucial role in forming the success of a product. The question is: to what extent would a company bend the truth to ensure success of their product? Would they even break it?
The answer, I feel, to this, would be that companies, the legally operating ones at least, never tell lies. In fact, it is illegal to produce false advertising (false in the sense of marketing a false trade description, e.g. a product has to meet certain conditions before it can be called 'cake'; you can't just take a jar of peanut butter and write 'Cake' all over it and then try to sell it as such). They do, however, manipulate it in rather cunning ways.
Suppose you were the manager of a cigarette company? What would you do? Tell consumers that the product may cause lung cancer, heart attacks, death? That would be ridiculous. One possible method of advertising cigarettes would be to associate cigarrettes with celebrities, famous icons, which can influence people into thinking that smoking is something desirable, to encourage the sales of cigarettes (Advertising of cigarettes in Singapore is strictly controlled, though). It can be very hard to differenciate what is best and what is not when everything seems to be in some sort of grey area.
How do they get into those grey areas then? The key to all of it is spin. As long as you apply enough of it, anything can seem believable. It doesn't matter if your argument doesn't convince your opponents, as long as it convinces your customers. As Nick Naylor in Thank You For Smoking eloquently puts it, “they're the ones I'm after”. As long as the product appeals to the customers, it does not really matter what the critics say.
Companies want the viewers of their advertisements to remember them. Advertisments need to have something new, unique, or special to say about their products, something to catch the viewer's eye, or it would be just be “another” product. Recall the Gatsby advertisements? Of course you do. Despite making little sense as far as I can tell, we still remember the brand name because of its rather quirky, if I may put it as such, advertisements. Companies have to find some way to make its product sound and look nice, and appear to have something new to sell to customers. If all fails, throw in some half-dressed models, cross your fingers, and hope it all turns out well.
Despite all their obvious biases towards the product being marketed, advertisments still remain as one of the major sources of information when we are finding out about new products. All I can say is, go and find out for yourself.