How advertising informs to our benefit

Advertisement has been with us for an extremely long time. It exists everywhere, in various forms, ranging from shopping and food to beauty products featuring "hot babes" smiling and saying "It works!" We watch them, and we learn from them. However, before the people who got "seduced" by the advertisement and decide "NO, I'm going to get the television NOW." they probably need to think how much do they really know about the product based on the advertisement.

It is very common to see advertisements featuring 1) Mouth-watering food that makes your jaw drop just by thinking of it. 2) Body centres or products that features models with astounding figures (whether its the face, the legs, the arms, the waists or the erhem chests) which will sometimes attract people to try it even though they all know that it won't work so easily. 3) Continuous blasts of "Mega-Sales" and offers which will always remind you that no matter how bad the economy was, is and will be, there will always be shops which are kind enough to bring the prices "down" for the customers' sake. So now the main question is: How true are these advertisements?

Firstly, there's the issue of truthfulness in the showing of advertisement. People with the correct mindset will know that the selling end will never lose money, otherwise there's no point selling them. Hence no matter how "magnificent" the prices may be, the selling end will always get some profit. The exception is that the economy is so bad that they would rather sell the things then letting the things "stone and rot" at their storage houses, or its the kind of strategic way of selling which mostly occurs in TV dramas in which by selling something at low prices, you can get more buyers and after that even if you raise the price the buyers will not mind as long as your product is good. And considering both "options", the economy crisis is less likely as you don't see Wallstreet crashes everyday. The second one is more likely but as based on a quote from a piece of IHC homework, "Singaporean managers do not dare to take risks." hence oh-so-sad.

Back to the point on truthfulness, people often get attracted to the colourful pictures and impossible sounding bargains from the advertisements, but no all times the advertisement shows the whole truth of the product. For example, a food-advertising advertisement will probably feature the food as a large serving, looks good, taste good, is nutritious and does not contain some chemicals that people will try to avoid. (e.g. MSG) Naturally, people are attracted. Who won't want to buy such good food that is literally overall goodness. However, as people do not know what the product really are, especially when the advertisement only talks about the positive side of the product, the end result is sometimes unhappy buyers because they believed they were "scammed" of their money. Usually the deluxe example will be food advertisement, in which the size is smaller than shown on TV, leading to some people who went all the way just to buy the food saying, "Its a scam".

From the buyer's point of view, I feel that the advertisement should be comepletely transparent to the viewers, as in all the terms-and-conditions and the dates and other information that I would want to know if I would like to buy the product. It is better for me to know the whole picture of the product before I buy it, its features, its weaknesses and the effect on me (if it is a consumable) and such will be of very important informations to me, compared to a 10 second advertisement featuring two hot babes smiling and saying, "It works".

However, from the product seller's point of view, it is nearly impossible for me to sell a product if I reveal everything about it, since other competitors will simply point to my product's weaknesses and claim that theirs is better, leading to my product being more difficult ot be sold.

Hence, I feel that advertisement itself is imperfect. No matter how it is changed, it will surely affect one side (whether it's the buyer or the seller). The only way is to completely abolish advertisement, but then in this world nowadays where there's even online advertisement, there's no way of "abolishing" it and by doing so affects both buyers and sellers. So for those customers who complained that they were "scammed" of their money, tough luck, face it. That's life.