Chapter 8 Chapter Summaries

CHAPTER 8 SUMMARY

• Advertising is the practice of calling the public’s attention to something to induce them to buy products or services or otherwise change their opinions or behavior. By its very nature, advertising is designed to influence, persuade, or manipulate, and to an impressive degree it succeeds in doing so. Advertisers, however, are not necessarily obliged to adhere to standards of objectivity, fairness, or reliability, and thus the ads they create should be viewed through the lens of critical thinking.

How Advertising Works

• The success of advertising can be measured in money. Advertising in traditional media can cost a great deal, but companies are willing to pay the price because advertising works. Advertising online is especially powerful and pervasive. It has become the most precise, calibrated, targeted, and sneaky form of advertising in history.
• Our thinking about advertising should be guided by reasonable skepticism, which asks us to give up the habit of automatically accepting claims in the media and online. According to reasonable skepticism, we should not believe a claim unless there are legitimate reasons for doing so. And we generally do have good reasons to doubt advertising claims. After all, the purpose of advertising is to sell or promote something not to help consumers make informed, rational choices. Moreover, ads are known for making dubious or false claims, using fallacious arguments, and employing psychological tricks to manipulate consumer responses. Hasty generalizations, appeals to emotion, faulty analogies, and appeals to popularity are some of the fallacies and rhetorical ploys ads frequently use.

Internet Advertising

• Internet advertising began with simple banner ads, which over the years were followed by ads of increasing sophistication and effectiveness. Today, data scientists and computer programmers use statistics and linear algebra to optimize the impact of advertising and micro-target potential customers.
• Internet advertising can be divided into three types. Paid search ads are the ads that show up in search engine results. They appear near the top of search results not because they are accurate or reliable, but because someone pays to have them ranked highly. Social media ads appear on social media platforms and target specific audiences defined by people’s personal, demographic, and behavioral characteristics. Display ads are the billboards of the online world, appearing as static images, floating banners, sidebar ads, popups, background wallpaper, and autoplay or user-play videos. These ads are presented on websites related to the product or service being touted and may be targeted at specific demographic.
• Native advertising is paid advertising designed to imitate editorial or journalistic content. The effectiveness of native advertising depends on not looking like ads—or rather, looking like just another editorial feature. These ads persuade not by overt sales pitches but indirectly through informative and engaging stories, vignettes, and personal profiles. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines ensure that native ads are usually tagged as “Sponsored content,” “Promoted,” “Recommended for You,” or “Promoted Stories,” but critics complain that many people still have trouble distinguishing them from genuine editorial content.

Political Advertising

• Political advertising presents the biggest challenge to critical thinking, especially now that ads have gone digital and started micro-targeting us on social media feeds. And thanks to editing technology, lying and misleading through video is easier than it’s ever been. It is now possible not merely to put logical fallacies and rhetorical gimmicks to work in political videos, but to manipulate them to make someone look as if he or she is saying or doing something that is completely made up. Indeed, manipulated videos have become the go-to tactic for political smearing, propaganda, and hatchet jobs. These videos rely on techniques such as splicing together originally discontinuous footage and audio, doctoring footage, or presenting unaltered footage in a misleading light.

• The most influential, beguiling, and relentless political ads may be the ones on Facebook. These ads can micro-target millions of users based on their psychological and behavioral characteristics, hit those users again and again with tailored messages, and run the whole operation indefinitely and below the radar.