Communication Paper about how to make an Advertisement more effective

Advertisements are everywhere in our life. When we walk on the streets, we can see the posters on the wall, on the bus, and on the every window of the stores. When we are back home, we are still influenced by the advertisements. When we watched the TV shows or drama on TV, there are Ads inserted in. When we paly games, there will be poped-up advertisements that may introduce other games. When we do some search on computer, there may be side-ads on the same pages. Advertisements are everywhere which not only promote people to buy, but also try to influence people’s decision and action. For instance, the opinion ads that are sent by the nonprofit orgnazations or the government tried to inform people about current situations or warn people not to harm or not to be harmed. Advertisement makes an positive and effective influence to the public when the ads interest the people, or make similarity among the target or appeals to negative emotions.

Before an ads is made, analysing audience is always the most essential step.

The ads “it’s not you it’s me” is about breaking up with plastic and dating the new recycled materials. This piece is shoot by UN environment programme, which is an united nation organization that help to make environment better internationally by implementing rules. As a result, the audience of this Advertisements are all the people that around the world who need to protect the earth together. Particularly the young generation are the one who need to watch this Advertisement because they are the one who can make the change and lead the way.

The Ads uses Storytelling to make the whole piece intresting for audience to watch. The first step for an Ads to be effective is always attracting the audience. The whole ads is a story begun with a girl sitting in the coffee shop is breakiing up with her “boyfriend”. Then, the girl start to tell about the reason why she choose to break up with her boyfriend. As the story continued, the audience get to knew her boyfriend is “plastic”, as what he did is so bad that hurt the surrounding. And at the end, the girl starts her new life with her new boyfriend(recycled materials) who is nice from all of the aspects. According to the book, direct sharing facts is always less attractive than the storytelling. It is because, storytelling is more humerous and appeals to audience’s emotion.

Appealing to audience’s negative emotions is another important tactic that help to advocate the info. An ads usually choose to audience’s postive emotion when they tries to sell goods. The audience will tend to buy the goods when they have good feeling like amusement after they see the ads. For instance, a child who see an ads in which a boy gets an candy and laugh happily wants to buy the candy too. However, appealing to audiece’s negative emotion also have effective influence. On the contrast, appealing to audience’s negative emotion is trying to make the audience to have unpleasant feeling like “guiltiness” or “sadness” so that the audience would not to do the same thing. Another way is the “fear appeal”, since “threaten is a basic human need”. In this Advertisment, director uses the fear appeal, which follows four elements: severity, susceptibiity, response effect and self-efficacy. Firstly, he makes the audience to see the consequences of using plastics by showing toxic home, polluted water and suffocated consequence. Secondly, the Advertisement makes people to feel that the same consequence applied to them as well, which indicates susceptibility. The environment is for everyone, so the negative effect by using the plastics affect everybody’s life. In addition, the Advertisement give response effect which means there are specific acting that would remove the threats. By using recycled materials like resuable bag and vacuum bottle rather than plastic ones , the environment wouldn’t be polluted. Those actions are easy for everyone to achieve which indicates the last element of self-efficacy. People can do it as they all have the confidence and ability to achieve the goal.

Other than the above two tactics, seeking similarities with audience is another effective tactic. In this Advertisement, the audience is worldwild, there seems not to be much of common factors. However, the common ground for this ads is that all of the international people are still using plastic, which is the similatiry and the reason this advertisement is made. Two elements should be considered for the similarity. One is the demographics, which refers to the “quantifiable characteristics of a large group”.In this ads, even though the whole story is told by this woman maybe from the America breaking up with the plastic, but at the end of the Ads, there are child from China, Muslim woman with Hijab, and old grandpa from Europe are all breaking up with their mate “Plastic”. Those people represents all of the age, ethic, and reginal groups, trying to “seek a common ground” with all of the people in the world. Psychological quanlity of an audience is another element that need to be analysis to make similarity, which includes attitudes, values, lifestyles, behaviors, and interests. Before watching this ads, the audience all use plastics a lot, as they may all use plastics for food containers, for dining usage, for shopping bags. The lifetyle of using plastics is similar among the audience, and so this ads is applied to them and tell them there’s a much more healthier way to change the lifestyle.