AP synthesis essay

     Advertisements are omnipresent in our current society. Everywhere we see, whether it be magazines, newspapers, or even the internet, has some kind of advertisements. Because they are so closely tied to our lives, the influence that advertisements have on people is huge. Although advertisements do have some benefits, such as providing the public useful information and advices, their negative effects – alluring people to buy unhealthy products and manipulating the costumers – easily overweigh their benefits.
     Advertisements frequently make people buy unhealthy or even harmful products by giving the public positive images of such products. In particular, the widespread advertisements played a huge role in the success of cigarette during the 20th century. “From the birth of the cigarette industry, advertising was instrumental in creating a mass market and apportioning shares among brands.” (Shaw) Furthermore, even after people became increasingly aware of the potential harm that smoking cigarettes can bring, advertisements still enlarged the market for cigarettes by implementing carefully devised consumer research. The companies’ constant advertisement moreover promoted “the continued social acceptability of smoking and encouraged the incorrect belief that the majority of people smoke.”(Shaw) The public, because it was constantly exposed to cigarette commercials, came to consider cigarette as “household items” that is to be consumed in our daily lives and thus took smoking as “socially acceptable”. As such, advertisements promote the public’s consummation of harmful products by making people falsely believe that those products “universal”.
     Commercials can also be blamed for “manipulating” the consumers, for these commercials play a crucial role in forming an individual’s life-long shopping habits. Such influence of advertisements is especially big on teenagers who tend to get easily swayed by their environment. These teenagers, once they start buying the advertised brand of clothing or coffee, will continue to buy the same brand for their remaining lives. According to the studies conducted for Seventeen, “about 29 percent of adult women buy the brand of coffee they preferred as teenagers, and about 41 percent buy the same brand of mascara.”(Day) This statistics clearly show how advertisements are prone to manipulate the teenagers into buying specific products for their entire lives. Even those who claim to be uninfluenced by the advertisements are in fact vulnerable to ad’s attack, for the effects of advertisements work under human consciousness with “psychological hooks.”(Schrank) Thus, advertisements must be criticized for their “propaganda” in making people buy certain products by using unrecognizable persuasive techniques.
Despite such apparent disadvantages that ads bring, some people still promote the advertisements, saying that they give some valuable information to the public or promote altruistic behavior, such as donating blood after countering the Red Cross advertisement that encourages people to do so. (Red Cross) Some even claim that advertisements educate the public by informing them about “candidates running for office, and important issues such as the benefit of seatbelt use.” (Day) Nonetheless, how many percentages do such public campaign ads take up in this massive advertisement pool? Furthermore, a click on the Internet soon gives out the public all the information it needs – obviously including the candidates’ name and the importance of using seat belts. In fact, what we really need know not need to be informed using advertisements (Sesana), because we will look it up beforehand from other sources if it is that important. People’s claim that advertisement is necessary because it provides information is clearly invalid for these reasons.
     Nowadays, people are so immerged in the ocean of advertisements that they often fail to recognize the schemes that these advertisements play. Although some advertisements clearly have positive values, such as delivering people essential information and persuading people to do altruistic acts, the majority of the advertisements floating in our society focuses in manipulating the public to buy certain products by persuading people under the conscious level. Thus, advertisement is more of a mere propaganda than something that fosters prosperity.