Analysis of advertising

Advertising is everywhere in today’s world. You see it when you turn on the TV or the radio. You see it when you look at a magazine or a newspaper. When you walk outside, you see it on the side of a bus or on a building. Advertising is everywhere. It has become so much a part of Western society that, most of the time, we don’t even think about it anymore.

A good critical skill you should develop is the ability to analyse advertising. One assignment that you may be given is to find an advertisement and write an analytical essay discussing aspects of the advertisement, such as its intended audience and purpose.

The first thing you need to do is pick an advertisement. You’ll have to decide between the different types of advertising. Here are some of the types:

Print-media advertising,
TV and movie advertising,
radio advertising, and
Internet advertising.

Advertisements that contain a mix of information types are good to analyse - ones that contain some combination of text, pictures, sound, animation, and full video. As far as watching or listening to the ad is concerned, you can have Print and Internet advertisements sitting in front of you on paper or on your computer screen. TV or radio ads are a little more awkward - you have to keep playing them over and over again on a TV or stereo. A suitable advertisement will give you enough to talk about for whatever length of essay you’re required to write. Really simple, elegant advertisements, while they’re neat, might mean you struggle a bit to get close to the word limit for your essay.

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