Magazine Adverts Essay

"With reference to 2 or 3 colour magazine adverts, write an essay explaining methods of persuasion used in magazine adverts" Advertising is used to sell more of the product a company is trying to sell. It is used to encourage the people who see the advert to either purchase their product or service, or to create awareness of their product. Magazine advertising can be used in a manipulative way. It is less blunt, less obvious than TV adverts or billboards and uses more complex messages to get its message across of how good a product is. This is probably because the reader has longer to read and understand them than a TV advert or a billboard.

All magazine adverts seem to have the same basic structure: Eye-catching images colours or text, an informative or descriptive aim, a funny disturbing or puzzling image that is relevant to the magazine it is appearing in and a deeper meaning behind the actual advert itself. Magazine adverts tend to have deep meanings that are understood after reading their accompanying slogans or text. Mostly, the images are colourful and stand out well, because most people don't read magazine adverts. But, people do tend to "flick" through the pages. It is these people that the colourful, large, eye-catching images are aimed at.

Another important feature of magazine adverts are that they are nearly always relevant to the magazine that they are appearing in. For example, FHM (For Him Magazine) is a very popular male magazine so the adverts that you tend to find in there are mostly male orientated. These would be things that appeal to most males, e.g. Football, cars or aftershave are the most popular adverts found in there. This is because that the advertisers want to reach the biggest audience possible of potential customers. This inevitably maximises the companies selling opportunity. One would not expect to see an advert for tampons or bras in FHM because not many females read this magazine. It would be a waste of time and money advertising in there. One would be better placing these types of adverts in a mainly female orientated magazine such as "Cosmopolitan"

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The two adverts I'm going to be analysing are from "That's Life" magazine which generally is aimed at middle-aged women who enjoy to read stories and do puzzles. One of the adverts is from "UK On-Line" which is a company offering a computer course service. The second advert is from "The National Childcare Strategy", a government-based company who try to help people find the right childcare for their children.

The first advertisement is from "UK On-Line". It has a big picture of a woman holding her baby. The image of her holding the baby is shown on the computer screen. This is showing that either she has taken a picture of her and the baby and loaded it onto the computer or she is using a web cam and the image is being projected onto the screen. Either way, it is showing that even a woman with a baby who would normally be considered busy, would be able to use a computer after taking one of the companies computer courses. It is accompanied by a slogan that says: "How mum got Sidney to Sydney in thirty minutes". This is saying that she managed to get a picture of her son 'Sidney' to Sydney Australia after taking one of the company's computer courses.

Furthermore, under this it actually corrects the statement by saying that it actually only took half a second to send the picture but the half an hour was the time it took for the company to show the person how to do it. They use the phrase: "Give us half an hour, and we'll give you something to show for it." This in itself is a simple phrase and it is aimed to say that most middle-aged women who have a lot of time on their hands who are reading this advert, that just half an hour will enable them to be up-to-date with computers.

Many women, especially the more older ones, feel that with the need for knowledge of computers becoming more and more necessary these days, that a computing course or half an hour tutorial would be very beneficial to them. Above the picture is another woman; this is probably the relative in Australia who the woman with the baby is sending the picture to. The pun of words on 'Sydney' and 'Sidney' are very effective because people like puns and they tend to stick in the mind as they make you stop and think about its meaning and this makes it a very effective use of advertising.

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