Innledning
Advertising has existed for as long as human civilisation has been around and has had great importance throughout history, both in famous and infamous ways.
Today advertising is more prevalent than ever with the invention of radio, television and lately the Internet. Throughout a regular day one might see tens or hundreds of different adverts; is this impacting people negatively?
Advertising has been historically misused by corporations to lie about their products, why is that? And what can we as consumers do about it?
Advertising before the newspaper was mostly limited to shouting. Most people in the old days were illiterate and could not read, thus town criers were quite popular to use for shouting out public announcements and news.
Some of the wealthier merchants could employ town criers to advertise their goods at markets. At large, town criers filled the roles that would later be replaced by mass media.
Utdrag
Another instance of advertisers lying about their products and causing considerable harm is the tobacco industry in the latter half of the 20th century.
In the early 1950s there were published numerous studies hinting at a strong link between heavy smoking and lung cancer, which urged tobacco companies to do something to save their image.
In 1953 American Tobacco and 5 other major tobacco producers in the US met with Hill and Knowlton consulting company to issue adverts that would persuade the public to regain confidence in smoking.
They quickly realised that making their own research to combat the new scientific findings would be most effective to convince people, and thus they established the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, later known as the Tobacco Institute.
This new industry funded research succeeded in calming the public attitudes towards smoking and was even cited by the companies that funded the research in their advertising for why tobacco is good for the consumer.
In 1954 the advertisement “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” was published in over 400 different newspapers in the United States, reaching millions of people.
The advert was designed to sow doubt in the scientific findings linking tobacco with cancer, and that it did.
The Tobacco Institute decided to go even further and started lobbying politicians in their favour, as well as continuing their aggressive campaign to discredit studies linking tobacco with cancer.
Only after numerous litigations and growing public attitudes against smoking did the US government in 1998 act in regulating the tobacco industry, where the marketing practices they had been engaging in were forbidden.
This however has not stopped the tobacco industry from lobbying US politicians, something they still do today.
Although these corporations have the common goal of persuading consumers to think their products are safe, they still compete for which brand the consumer should buy.
There are many ways in which advertisers compete for the consumer’s attention, and there are many ways in which this can be done.
Nudity is an all-time classic when it comes to advertising. Being used in as early as 1871, it has stuck around since.
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