The statement ‘Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better’ is true. An advertisement is a glamorous package wrapped around a piece of goods, whether nice or bad.
I believe ‘advertising is the modern substitute for argument’ because of its debatable nature. Advertising uses different means such as posters, music, anime or mascot to promote commodities, and tries its best to convince customers that the piece of goods in the advertisement is the best of the best. Advertising is all about sales. A high sales volume is what makes an advertisement successful, and therefore sales determine the credibility of an advertising company. Because of this, advertising becomes a competition. Companies use advertisements to enhance their own reputation and criticize others’ shortcomings. For example, in the baby powder formula industry, a handful of production giants are having an aggressive competition for new customers. Each promotes its great variety of brain-enhancing components on the one hand and argues that other products are not good enough on the other hand. All advertisements for baby formula powder nowadays have this particular pattern. Companies are using advertising as a tool to argue for their products. The prize for the winner is of course the piles of money. In the modern money-power-driven society, advertisements that convince people that a product is the best buy gets customers and brings in annual profits for a company. I am not just talking about the baby formula powder industry, but the slimming industry, food industry and even the political field are using the same tactics. This is why I believe ‘advertising is the modern substitute for argument’.
There is no other description better than ‘its function is to make the worse appear the better’ to explain the working principle of advertising. Everything looks better with advertising.
As I have mentioned before, an advertisement is a glamorous package. Advertising is the decoration ornaments for a withered Christmas tree. No matter how deadly the tree looks, the sparkling ornaments bring it to life again. Do not believe the ‘claimed fact’ that advertising is just to promote the pros that already exist, and that nothing is being made up or exaggerated, because this really is a claim only. I believe ‘only fabricated or exaggerated facts can make the advertisement glow’ is a tacit agreement in the advertising industry. Everything bigger looks better. Take house cleansing products as an example. There are quite a number of temporary stalls out there selling house cleansing products. The salesmen are a human advertisement. They use a lot of positive adjectives to describe the effect and they sing their products’ praises all the time. A lot of housewives will be attracted to the stalls by their promotion skills. Many of the housewives will buy the products but then realize the cleansing effect is not as good as what the salesmen told them. Again, everything looks better with advertisements.
Does advertising make the worse appear the better? I think so. Coca cola never has a spectacular taste; basically all the tastes inside a coke are harmful chemicals, but in the advertisement, all the polar bears, tongues and eye balls try real hard to rave about it and suddenly you have a craving for one can. Amazing, right? That is the psychological magic spell in advertising. The function of advertising of course is to make the worse appear the better to trap us, customers.
With all the evidence in society, I cannot agree more with the statement made by the philosopher George Santayana. And as a result of this, we should be vigilant and not be easily swayed by the advertising gimmicks.