> One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in stock".
I almost never see ads of type one - in fact, even finding that information is usually made accidentally or deliberately difficult.
Type 1 ads (if one relaxes the dry listing of specifications a bit) might be called "informational ads"; Type 2 ads might be called "aspirational ads".
The informational ads are often found in hobby magazines. Interests like woodworking, electronics, airplane flying, fishing, guns, gardening, cooking, crafts, etc. Many readers enjoy looking at those type of ads to learn about new and unknown products that are relevant to their passions.
The aspirational ads are the abstract visuals that really don't describe the product at all. They are meant to tap into the emotions. They deliberately avoid mentioning any concrete specifications. E.g. perfume ads where a model walks through the forest, or a Coca Cola bottle being drunk by a CGI animated polar bear, or Apple showing silhouettes dancing with white ear buds. Apple doesn't want to communicate the earbud's frequency response such as 60Hz to 18kHz -- that's too vulgar. So let's show happy people dancing instead. These type of ads are designed to prey on our feelings of inferiority and therefore, the advertised product promises to make us more beautiful and popular.
I agree with most of thing, but I also think it needs a little flavour as to "informational" vs "aspirational".
I agree with both of those, but would also classify the examples you gave below as the difference between "mass advertising" and "intent based advertising". TV ads vs AdWords essentially. One is to capture interest and change behaviours, the other is to sell to an audience who's already in the market for your product.
I call them German Ads. I used to live in the German speaking part of the world, and now and again I would see an ad that clumsily tried to persuade you by telling you about the product, what it was made of, and all that. And then a ridiculously lame attempt at showing a content housewife or something like that. Almost like the ad writer was trying to do a type 2 but was too honest.
Typically some ordinary household chemical.
I mean imagine a Coca-Cola ad where they talk to you about the fact that carbon dioxide is dissolved in the drink and it comes out of solution, giving you a tingling sensation. Versus what coke ads actually look like... snowy streets with trucks decorated for Christmas, a sense of warmth and expectation.
Drink Coke!
- Tastes good if you like sugar and caramel, much better than Pepsi
- Not the most unhealthy drink in moderation
- Carbonation that bites your tongue so you feel alive
- Our tax dollars subsidize the Georgia state government
You say that, but the very first thing I see is "Father’s Day Gifts Your Dad Will Love". Not "Recommended Gifts for Father's Day", or something similarly objective, just straight up manipulation like all the other adverts.
That's fair, the gift guides don't seem to be particularly useful; however, I've found the buying guides to be really useful, to the extent that I have developed muscle memory for "best X wirecutter" whenever I need to buy a thing I don't have strong opinions about / don't want to do a bunch of research for.
For instance "The Best Steak Knife Set" [1], lays out a couple of options and why you might pick them as well as their criteria and test methodology so you can figure out why you might want to pick something else.
Wire cutter is manipulation masked in honest reviews. I’ll say the unpopular because people are so hellbent on convincing themselves those reviews give a damn about products with no affiliate links. Oh “but they make recommendations for nonadfiliated products!” Yeah, what percentage of the whole is that? Mmmmmmmhmmmm.
Stuff like this is in a sense worse. Everyone knows ads are ads. But these are 'unbiased' reviews which are totally biased, requiring them to actually distort objective information where required.
If the product is big enough I'll skim reddit. Nothing like hearing the hard facts from a pissed off anonymous hivemind that isn't going to let anyone off the hook. Even the apple subreddit has been crucifying the company as they keep falling down the stairs with every keyboard half-fix they silently release (I think we are at 'gen 4' now).
On the other hand there's certainly attempts at manipulating content on sites like reddit too for advertising purposes. Though I don't know if there are good statistics on how prevalent it is
Your post had me thinking the consumer pharmaceutical ads for prescription medicines would fit but then no, they flunk all three of the elements you called out. The marketing just weirds me out -- I'm supposed to select chemotherapeutic agents peddled from a TV ad? One of a dozen patent autoimmune remedies? Prescription medicine ads deserve their own abusive category and are particularly abusive in that their costs are taxpayer-subsidized.
I don't know what you even do with that information. Are you supposed to ask your doctor to put you on medication? "Uhh, sir you don't even have that disease."
There is no reasonable argument that consumer ads for prescription medications should be allowed, and there are tons of reasonable arguments (including public health arguments) for why they should not be.
That they're allowed in the US at all is demonstration of caustic effects of high-dollar lobbying.
Prescription medications cannot be legally advertised in the UK, and this makes the ad space much quieter. All you get advertised is OTC painkillers and cold remedies.
I am, thankfully, pretty distant from things advertising these days, but one of the few things that stuck, and one of the first bits of advice is to move away from the factual type 1, to the vague aspirational type 2 on the grounds it works far better. I seem to remember one popular book picking on example type 1 ads from a newspaper or yellow pages and turning the boring lists of features into the hollow promises^W implications of type 2.
Which is essentially admitting it's very good manipulation so close to lying it should carry a warning or regulation.
It's the former type that's sometimes quite popular - like in the back of old computer or hobby magazines - precisely because it's handy for discovering new things.
TL;DR Type 2 is what marketers and advertisers do, type 1 is what a lawyer, gardener or software engineer might produce to sell their product.
Actually, ads on facebook are surprisingly beginning to look like this for me. I've found myself going from hating ads to finding them actually surprisingly interesting, and things I would have wanted to look at anyways (like, for example, interesting kickstarter ideas)
I almost never see ads of type one - in fact, even finding that information is usually made accidentally or deliberately difficult.