How influential are advertisements on purchasing habits? (<>..<>)

Just reading a few articles I’ve come across I saw a statistic that said "The average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements a day and watches three years' worth of television ads over the course of a lifetime." Where exactly these sort of polls are taken and the accuracy of them I don’t know, but nevertheless it's an obvious fact people watch a lot of television, and that does not need to be proven with statistics. In the form of tv commercials, radio jingles, billboards, posters, flyers, sales papers, and in print form in magazines. This does not stop at advertisements, there are all sorts of other tactics that are use to try and make people spend money.

I’ve written posts about subliminal messages in adverting before, but so far there never have been any studies that actually proved subliminal messages to be influential on people. The whole “pop corn and soda- let’s all go to the snack bar” bit was fabricated by a guy who owned a movie theater. He lied about the results of his study and later on admitted that he made the whole thing up. But hey, he sure did get a lot of attention, and that’s probably all he wanted. Anyway this post is not about subliminal messages, it’s about tricks companies use to get people to buy stuff.

Tricks in food advertisements- The food you see on television commercials often looks tasty, but if you actually tried the food it probably wouldn’t taste good. To keep the food looking good they sometimes spray it with hairspray to keep it fresh. Occasionally the lettuce seen in commercial is just plastic lettuce. Even in the ‘Got Milk?’ commercials where celebrities sported milk mustaches it was not real milk. They really made a sort of paste out of sour cream and milk to make it look better. I saw on a kids tv show once how sometimes in ice cream commercials the ice cream is not real. They make a mixture that is not ice cream, freeze it, and then mold it to make it look appealing. Sometimes when the person in the commercial has to eat the food they go with the real thing. Though you might not initially suspect a company of doing this, it would make sense that they want their product to look it’s best for advertising.

Do you think you are influenced by advertisements?

I’m sure I’ve been influenced to try new things that have been advertised. One recent thing I can remember is fruit roll ups where you can put them on your tongue and it leaves a temporary tattoo. LOL I had to see what that was all about, but apparently I must have had too much spit on my tongue so the smiley faced turned out more like a blob. I am not as influenced as some other people though. Think about those who see Nike shoes and must have that brand so they can be cool, the shoes were never just "cool" on their own, the Nike company worked at that image to influence people that the shoes were stylish. Another example of this is new cars, it’s extremely hard for me to imagine people actually like the new style of cars like the Chevy Avalanche (hideous), the Pontiac Aztek, the Honda Element, the Ford Focus, and so on. It’s no laughing matter, people were fooled into thinking these revolting hunks of plastic garbage were a good choice to waste their money on. True they should be responsible for their own purchases, but it's the people with enough sense here that are really the victims that have to see those ugly cars out on the road.

(<>..<>)Alien

I think I'll buy some more of those fruit rollups, they taste so good. Oh, and this post isn't completly a conspiracy theory, I just felt like posting it in this category.

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