Like ball players with their bats, or librarians with their books, advertisers look to a versatile collection of contrivances for seducing an audience. Advertisers look to words and language as their way of capturing the attention, and hopefully the dollar of those who are exposed to it. The way the language is assembled and put together makes all the difference in how effective the advertisement will be. Infallible adjectives like luxurious and irresistible are used, in addition to ageless phrases like a lifetime of satisfaction or right at your fingertips. (Bayan 2006). Advertising is a medium that does a lot to shape our culture, many resources are spent in creating effective advertising, and its effects can be broad reaching within our societies. Throughout the decades, the language of commercialism has become increasingly loud, and the language of high culture has become increasingly quiet.
[...] This essay has examined the evolution of language in advertising, over a span of five decades, to highlight how the language has changed. We did so by looking at a collection of print advertisements that are promoting the airline industry. The first one dates back to the 1960s, and the rest are taken from each decade until the present day. From this it will be clear that there has been a fundamental change over the past five decades in the way that advertisers use language to advertise their products. [...]
[...] From this it will be clear that there has been a fundamental change over the past five decades in the way that advertisers use language to advertise their products. They used to rely heavily on language as a way to get their point across, but beginning in the late 1980s, advertisers began to combine effective language with pictures in an effort to create advertisements which could be quickly and easily consumed. Back in the early twentieth century, when advertising began to truly rear its head as an unavoidable facet of commercialism, it was possible to go for weeks without ever seeing an advertisement. [...]
[...] Twenty Ads that Shook the World: the Century's most Groundbreaking Advertising and how it Changed Us All. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. Advertisement Source List Note: All advertisements were taken from, and can be found at the photo collections archive at the Toronto Reference Library. The sources of these advertisements have been listed as possible Japan Air Lines advertisement, National Geographic, February American Airlines advertisement, Photo Archive Toronto Reference Library TWA Airlines advertisement, Photo Archive Toronto Reference Library Western Airines advertisement, Photo Archive Toronto Reference Library United Air Lines advertisement, Photo Archive Toronto Reference Library Japan Air Lines advertisement, Photo Archive Toronto Reference Library Japan Air Lines advertisement, The Atlantic, October British Airways advertisement, The [...]
[...] We have shown thus far that over the past five decades, the way that language has been used in advertising has changed remarkably. From the beginning, language played a vital role in advertisement as it was used at length to explain why people would benefit from choosing their service. However, as time progressed, advertisers realized that they needed to be more concise in their strategies as people were no longer going to pay attention to an advertisement if they could not extract the message from the second they lay their eyes on it. [...]
[...] When we look at the progression of advertising throughout the years, including the airline advertisements that we are using for reference for the purposes of this essay, we see how language has changed. It will be shown that in the first advertisement that we profile from the 1960s and even those in the 1970s, there is much emphasis placed on the verbal. Many advertisements have a lot of text on them, and they go in to much detail about the benefits of their product. [...]
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