The Languages of Media – Advertising Techniques | Hacker News Reader

The Languages of Media – Advertising Techniques

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50 pointsyamrzou13 comments

Fun article. The Weasel Words technique is what I notice most in my day to day life. Here are two of my favorite examples:

1) Sales advertised as "Save up to x%"... This means the most you can possibly save is x%. Saving zero percent definitely is definitely a possibility! Hell, they could say a price increase is a savings of a negative precent.

2) On some diaper packaging it says "Guaranteed to prevent up to 100% of leaks!" I had to do a double take when I read that. Was it written as a joke? Because I had to laugh. A bare onesie with no diaper at all could make the same claim!

Good old Monkey’s Paw truth. Technically true, but substantially false.

It really should be fraud if you have to defend yourself in court by saying: “Well, technically…”.

A marketing can be useful if it is meant to inform. However, a marketing organization spending their time focus grouping a statement until the average listener comes to the wrong, overstated conclusion is the definition of deliberate deception meant to bewilder and confuse.

The standard we should demand is that marketing must deliberately aim to inform. They must focus group until the average listener comes to the correct or understated conclusion. A failure to do so (when expending serious marketing resources) should be counted as fraud.

We should demand marketing be held to moral standards higher than a Monkey’s Paw.

> Sales advertised as "Save up to x%"

Even better is when I see ads saying "Save up to x% or more" -- which literally means nothing.

These are all overt techniques. Subliminal techniques are still used if you are paying attention. For those that still consume traditional TV media you can sometimes spot these things. In 2021 I noticed yet another new car commercial running. After about the 2nd or 3rd instance of it I noticed a VERY short 1/2 second clip of a hand scooping chocolate ice cream out of a container between two jump shots of the car driving. I had never noticed that the first few times the commercial ran. I started deliberately watching this commercial each time and I only saw the version with the ice cream scoop once more, after that they changed the commercial so it no longer included this. Marketing groups pay close attention and will continue to make adjustments to ads after the campaign has started. You can sometimes notice ads changing through the campaign. Typically they seem to start changing the ad to be less polarizing if it's pushing some side-ideology auxiliary to the main product. And this is just good business, if you are trying to sell widgets you will sell fewer of them if your marketing campaign includes content that goes against the grain of half of the population. Unless your product strategy includes the ability to market the same product to the other half of the population of course (like having his and her's versions of a widget), then you can afford the consumer attrition on an individual widget.

You can also see a lot of co-branding of ideologies with commercial marketing campaigns and that's not an accident. There are very powerful international NGO's that are paid to market ideas rather than products and they specifically seek out partnerships with commercial businesses and their own marketing campaigns to sell products. They also partner with the media industry of course.

I’m very enthusiastic about the possibility that someone will shortly build an AI plugin that identifies use of propaganda and “advertising techniques” as I browse the web. A lot of this stuff flies under my radar and having a guide to help me out is something I would really value, for me and my children.

I should add I’ve checked out whether ChatGPT can do this, and discovered it can do a reasonable job - even back in the days of 3.5.

How did you use ChatGPT for this?

I gave it a piece of text from a Guardian op ed and asked it to identify the rhetorical devices used in the piece.

I suspect it would be possible to now create a GPT by uploading a file listing the various rhetorical/propaganda tricks deployed in media and then asking the GPT to analyse submitted text from that perspective.

At that point, you should ask yourself what is the function of news? The whole of information is editorial. Aside from technical information which is factual, even discussing 'kinds of' news is biased.

You could maybe aggregate biased news like "trump supporter did this" or "patriot did that" and it would just tell you "someone was shot in a place you never heard of".

I also love the mathematical tautologies.

(On a 14 oz container) Now with 40% more than 10 oz.

Or on a urinal 1 liter per flush urinal:

Uses just a quarter of the water as a gallon per flush urinal.

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