Argument: How Advertising has Changed and its Current Social Implications

Advertising has changed in its culture, largely due to the switch from informational to a more expressive conceptual way to communicate with consumers. This switch has offered the audience less cognition about products and more sensory orientated heuristics about positions and branding of companies. Previous to the 1970s consumers were exposed to informative ads that helped them make decisions by exploring the positives of products and the negatives of competitors. Post seventies, informational ads were not as effective, as consumers were becoming more aware of deception in the government due to the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam war, they then associated that deception with media and advertising, forcing advertisers to change tactics. With change of the types of ads came emotion and heuristically approached messages. This style of advertising carried through the nineties and into the two-thousands, with the introduction of the Internet, mediums mixed, video became easily available with interaction, this changed the strict lines between informational and emotional advertising. The internet allows for users to experience traditional informative advertising in many different forms, while encouraging interaction with consumers by click-through sites and links. The internet encourages a gateway in which consumers can go beyond the depth of the emotional and contextual advertisement to dive into a world of information and rhetoric. These gateways include banner ads, pop up ads, text messaging advertisements, and online video ads. Each of these methods of advertisements offer a different way for a consumer to become more involved in the marketing process.
The foremost aim of this project is to develop a framework for an analysis of new media advertising that focuses on its current implications and its switch from a pure contextual aspect to hybrid between informational and conceptual as a way to persuade consumers. This assessment will perform analyses of this form of new media advertising and how this bridge between types of informational and emotional advertising has changed the way consumers make decisions about products and services.

In attempt to convey proper meaning to readers, we would like to define terms and provide examples to help clarify any confusion.

Informational Advertising: This type of advertising exhibits a more central processing route which induces cognitive evaluation of the aspects in the advertisements. Many ads of this type are longer in length, or in the case of print advertising, use a lot more text including facts, diagrams, or anything used to elaborate a message.

Example of Informational Advertising:
Print Magazine: Mac World



Emotional/Conceptual Advertising: This type of advertising uses a peripheral route to process, heuristics and symbols aid in the comprehension of the message of this appeal. Rather than prompting the consumer to process information about a product and evaluate it, these ads offer attitudes and emotions to make quick assessments of the mood and persuasive message of ads.

Example of Emotional/Conceptual Advertising:
Print Magazine: Mac World