How advertising affects me

In this blogpost I will talk about how advertising has influenced and affected me. I believe that advertisements are more powerful than we think and that they affect all of us. When I reflect on how it influenced and affected me, I realize that it probably did more with my thinkings than I thought. The power of advertisements are different for me as a kid in comparison to now. Also, I feel like some advertisements influenced me more than others and that the purpose of some advertisements were different from each other.

So as I said, I think the influence of advertisements when I was a kid were stronger than they are now. I remember me watching TV shows during the day and seeing those amazing toys between the shows. I always had my favorite toys where I knew about, because of the advertisements. When I saw the toy enough times, I remember that I really began to wanting it. Then I asked my dad to buy it for me for my birthday or just in general. Most of the times, it worked. Nowadays, the advertisements between the TV shows are not that influential on me anymore. I see them in a way that companies are trying to manipulate me into buying their products. This way of looking at advertisements makes is easier to see it in a way that those messages are 'unimportant'.

Nevertheless, I sometimes see it happening that an advertisement works for me. I'm not sure about this, but I think this is because the personalized advertisements. This is in my experience still something new and I get advertisements on (for example) Facebook that I actually find really interesting and that I didn't know about before. One day, I was watching a youtube video and I got a personalized (I guess) advertisement before the video started. I recently made a website on Wordpress and I think this triggers my advertisement, because it showed me 'wix.com'. I didn't know about this platform and I directly checked it, because I wasn't too happy with Wordpress. From that moment I didn't use Wordpress anymore and I started to use Wix. The article talks about the 'commercialized gossip' and I think this applied with me in the case of Wix. When seeing the website, I was biased with the idea that the website was popular enough to be shown at Youtube and therefore I went to the website with already the idea that this was a platform where I could make my own 'amazing' website.

Advertising is a sort of “commercialized gossip,” a collection of stories that companies tell customers about their products in order to make them distinguishable from one another.

One think that I would like to mention about advertisements, that some are extremely interesting to me and I hope to see them more often in the future. The advertisements that I am talking about are the ones that are more deeper that just showing a girl that has white teeth. A good example of this sort of advertisement is the one from Axe with the quote: 'Make Love, Not War'. Those advertisements are giving me a good feeling that the companies are trying to use their big name for a greater good. I definitely notice that those kind of advertisements are helping them to strengthen their name instead of directly trying to sell you their product.