Advertising and What All This Means

Talking about advertising really interests me. That may be because my mother works in advertising, but I don't think that's all of it. I think it may be simply because advertising is just really interesting in general. It's like a window into the American soul. This is true because you can tell, looking back through the years of advertising--how it was done, who was targeted--where America was as a country. All this is really interesting to me, especially when you consider it with Logos Pathos and Ethos.

I think it's funny, and also more than a little sad, in many ways, that while using Logos Pathos and Ethos as guidelines to sort of take apart these advertisements, we are basically saying that they cannot really be trying to do good. Sure they can do good, but if they don't advertise on a certain channel they're just trying to bump up their Ethos, and so on. I think that's probably because there seldom ever is a company that is actually trying to do good. Well, not quite. Everyone tries to do good, but only if the consumer can see it--It's like they're showing off for the attractive girl/boy in their class, and they're getting what they want. I think it's probably the most effective when they make you think you're doing good by buying their product. As Clint talked about with his (RED) Dell laptop. I've seen the commercials, and they don't really appeal to Logos at all, which is true for most commercials, these days, but I think that's important here. They want to make you think you're helping people by buying this product, but as Clint said, you're not really doing that much good. Whenever I hear an ad saying "For every item we sell we'll donate 10 cents to these dying people over here," I feel like these guys with money are holding these people without money hostage. They're basically saying--we have all this money, and we can give it to these people who need it, but only if you pay for this thing that you don't really need. And we'll make more money. And so on.