It is not too much to say that, nowadays, everything is filled with advertisement all over the world. Advertisement has become something that we can easily find in our everyday lives, from those found in various media, or advertisement through offline media, to direct advertisements. At times it is provocative, and at other times it is directly appealing, and still at other times it throws out something to think about to the audiences. As such, advertisement is an art in which you try to catch the attention of people and encourage them to purchase a specific product or service. Among the myriad of advertisements in the world, why do only some catch our hearts? We all want to become a person who, gets away from a repetitive life and who can draw others’ attention just like appealing advertisements. Let’s find out what aspects of advertising draw the attention of people and make them to behave in a way the advertisements have designed.

a) The Art of persuasion, what is advertisement?The word ‘advertising’ derives from the Latin word ‘advertere’, meaning ‘to be facing toward’ or to ‘divert one’s attention’. To put it simply, we call advertising an act of intelligent activities that includes any action that enterprises use to promote services, products, or policies to individual or organizations. There are various ways to define the word as there are various types of advertisements. However, according to the official definition of the American Marketing Association, advertisement is “any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods and services by an identified sponsor.”

b) History of advertising in KoreaAdvertising is not a new phenomenon only found in modern times. Although it could have been difficult to deliver messages to targeted audiences in the Goryeo or Joseon Dynasties, the means of advertising were also in place at those times. However due to the lack of research on this subject, there is just not much things known about advertising in those eras yet. The main reason for the rapid development of advertising in Korea is the wide distribution of newspapers. The first modern advertisements appeared on the 15th to 16th pages of the first issues of newspapers and magazines in 1886. Ads started to appear regularly from that time on. In 1968, the status of the Korean advertisement was introduced to the world outside of Korea and various changes developed the advertising industry such as color printing of newspapers, holding seminars on advertisement, and taking part in world advertisement awards. Since then, as the Korean economy has been growing, the advertising industry of Korea also has seen development in terms of both quality and quantity. As the advertising industry entered into an era where the focus of advertising activities has moved to advertising agencies, advertising has established itself as a factor that would decide the success of a product or service offering

c) Colorful marketing, strategy of advertising1) Humorous Advertising: Obviously humorous ads are one of the most commonly used techniques in advert1ising and sometimes they entail controversy. Meanwhile it is recognized as an effective technique, there are arguments that this effects is not huge. They were used on products that are usually inexpensive and that don’t require detailed information when being promoted. Relatively expensive and high involvement products were thought not to be placed in ads using humor techniques in times past. However, now, it’s frequently used with a highly involved product and research result announcements have proved that humor ads are effective regardless of the products involvements. Ads are not the only source to obtain information about the product any longer. 2) Mere exposure advertising: consumers are more likely to purchase products without an intention when they are viewed daily and are familiar. That is to say, advertising through frequent repetition is more successful in making people buy certain products than whether it is relatively cheaper or highly involved. Placing familiar background music on TV ads and radios is one example of using a mere exposure technique. Familiar music gives products a favorable impression and this is proved by actual occurrence research results. When comparing groups shown the same advertisement with difference in frequency in music, the group exposed more to the music showed higher preference for the ad. 3) Comparative advertising: it refers to an advertisement in which a particular product, or service, specifically mentions a competitor by name for the express purpose of showing why the competitor is inferior to the product by naming it. It is also called as ‘knocking copy’. This technique can be confused with parody advertisements where a fictional product is being advertised for the purpose of poking fun at a particular advertisement. One reason why these advertisements are recommended is that they allow an ad to provide more information to the consumer by allowing them to compare among two brands and in macroscopic way, competition between two brands can also promote for better product value. But there also exists research that shows that comparative advertising does not have any effect on consumers or that at worse it can degrade a product’s value. It may likely act to raise a competitors’ brand awareness.

d)Distinctive ads surely stand out“An educated person reads one tree of books per years. Switch to an e-book”. This is advertisement for an E-book player from Sony. It sends the message concerning the logging of tress to produce a paper used in paper books. “For difficult little people” The above picture is advertising a rubber pacifier from Playtex. It represents babies difficult to handle by covering the babies’ bodies with tattoos creating an atmosphere of fear. Its message is that the product can help control even babies that are difficult to handle.

e)Merit of advertisement The purpose of advertisement is to sell a product or service. We can expect that the positive attitude of consumers towards a brand would be affected by placing or exposing a product or brand intentionally. Advertisements mainly use visual media and this can instill a positive brand image into the minds of prospective consumers. For example, in some forms of indirect advertisement that are used most extensively, it is possible to expose products in comparatively a natural manner in the background of the character or as a part of props because of the characteristics of the composition of TV dramas where it is possible to setup artificially divergent situation focused on the subject.. The above continuous attribute means that, by ensuring consistency and sustainability, it would be possible to increase the accumulated effect on the brand image and the probability that increased effect will naturally lead to purchases of the product being increased. In other words, there is a positive aspect in advertisement where sellers can promote their product or services and consumers can take advantage of getting information on sales and services and thus, can make best choices from multiple options of between the selections open to them.

f)Unwanted parts of advertising As we have seen above, until the first half of the twentieth century the main-stream media used for advertisement were print media, in the mid twentieth century the media base was expanded to include radio, TV, and sound ads. With the advent of mass media that produce and distribute ads on products services, the advertisement market has shown explosive growth. Today, we see thousands of ads everyday and that advertising specialists keep producing brilliant ads to meet our wants and expectations. This is an era when not only traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, and sign boards, but also anything that draws eyes including buses, marts, parking lots, and even paper cups can be a means of advertising. However, now everything has reached its saturation point and materials for creative advertising are depleting. As a result of this, people have come to not even look towards many ads. What resulted from this is the proliferation of advertisements that are more than being creative, humorous, or beautiful advertisement with inspirations, but even grotesque and even unpleasant, providing provocations for audiences. Even though advertisement has been successful in revealing the hidden wants of consumers and making them respond to them, what advertisement can do is just to the point where it succeeds to make consumers interested in the brand or product that a company wants to sell, mobilizing every the clever ideas at its disposals. As hype proliferates, advertisement is now only stimulating a fantasy and is often not able to convey concrete information and messages on products and services to us. Notwithstanding how clever are the means that advertisement might mobilize, it is only when the quality of the product is excellent that the product sells better. However, there is a problem for sellers and sponsors of advertisement who are more focused on a strategy to gather the attentions of customers but are not giving attention to the provision of better quality products.

Advertising has become a part of our everyday life. No matter if we want to be or not, we will be incessantly exposed to advertisement in the society with capitalistic economy. CAH’s hope is that we will be able to move forward in a direction where we get new insights and innovative products, not just overlook them when we are exposed to varying and creative ideas in advertisements. As it takes an immense amount of labor and creativity to give birth to a creative ad, CAH hopes that advertising will develop to a point where it can help move people and let them reflect on themselves and the needs of the society they are living in.

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