The first ad I looked at was a vintage ad from the 1950’s advetising a new tooth brush that would flex to allow you better access to all your teeth. The ad itself is fairly complex with large images and a significant amount of text. The same was true for a Coca-Cola ad and an ad for golf clubs. The advertisements were based around text which almost told a story about the product, and then included some sort of large image to capture the attention. When compared to their modern day advertisements, companies have chosen to move away from the heavy-text style, and move more towards catchy images and short catch phrases.
What one can assume about the target audiences from the early years of advertising, is that the audience had a much greater attention span, and would therefore, spend the time to read about each product carefully, so that they know as much about it as possible. Older advertisments also show that the target audiene didn’t require a catchy image in order to grab their attention. A lot of the images were fairly simple and not very exciting. If you look at today’s advetisement’s, you can see that companies are changing their strategies because the ads have dropped most, if not all of the text, in order to get their audience’s attention. As technology continues to improve and give us instant access to information, companies have to respond in the way they advertise. Most people aren’t going to sit down and read an advertisement that has 200 words worth of text in it. Instead, they only need to be able to recognize a trademark symbol of the company, so when they see it somewhere else, they’ll recognize it and potentially choose that product.
Advertising hasn’t appeared to change much over the years in terms of their strategy of relaying a unique benefit to the audience. An advertisement for Coke and a toothbrush both present a unique benefit: the toothbrush flexes to allow the consumer to get at hard-to-reach areas in their mouth, and Coke advertised their product as making you happy if you drink it with their “Open happiness” tag line. An advetisement for golf clubs from the 1950s and today both advertise the ability to hit the ball further and more accurately; a benefit not achievable with another company’s product.
The one place I see the greatest change is in the creativity of ads now compared to what they were back then. Today, advertisements are becoming fairly simple because they don’t have a lot of time to get their audiences’s attention. What was once reliant on text, has now become dominated by creative and unique images with a single catchy phrase. Advertisements today are all about visual recognition, and not as much about a potential consumer knowing everything there is to know about the product. Where a company may have once revealed everything about their product has now become a matter of simply getting a potential consumer’s attention long enough, so that in the future, they may recognize the product again and purchase it.
Ad URL's:
Old Ads
http://www.adclassix.com/a3/52drwesttoothbrush.html
http://www.adclassix.com/ads2/54spalding.htm
http://www.adclassix.com/ads/55cocacolasanta.htm
New Ads
http://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/prints/oral-b-toothbrush-overhead-dentists-339156/
http://www.golfdigest.com/golf-equipment/hot-list/2010-02/hotlist_drivers
http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/print/2009/1/coca_cola_straws.jpg
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