Adding more to the pessimistic posts on the fundamentals of advertising, (see It's goanna change your life forever below) I was sitting with a creative director discussing a sign off line to an ad, I made the comment that maybe we are taking it a little too far, maybe a humbler sign off would be more suitable, now as people tended to do he started off his sentence with 'I see your point but...' the rest was basically a haze of words like 'Bigger-Wow' I lost him completely at 'life better'.
Back in Uni I took a course that more or less covered a section on the psychology and dynamics of persuasion. In a nut shell it mentioned two routes to persuasion, 'central' whereby you list the facts- this procedure used to persuade the more knowledgeable crowds, and the 'peripheral' which is basically the show u put on, call it delivery- a prime example was Hitler's methods of propaganda, imagery, music, symbolism etc. But the fate of both these techniques lay at the hands of one integral factor 'The source' of a message..., who they are, what they have to gain, their likeability, credibility etc....
This last point has been leading me into the thought that we tend to forget the context of our message, overrate our existing credibility, forget that this is indeed an ad (very much in the same category as all 'advertising', most of which if sh*t), we are speaking on behalf of a people that the consumer knows very well will tell you anything to take your money,. In spite of all this for some odd reason we assume that anything we say will not be approached with cynicism, we really do expect the consumer to interpret our message at face value. Maybe its sometimes better to say 'Hey it is indeed just another f*cking biscuit but it is a good one' instead of 'Reach paradise', 'Escape' or as Incognito mentioned ' so sweet you wont want to share'
Image courtesy of Organic frog