Now you see it, now you don't?

We have always admired advertising in its many forms, we even collect old ads and use them as inspiration. If your a true ad enthusiast like us, definitely check out this series by Jim Heimann. As much as we can admire the art and copy of some of the best ads throughout the years we also admire the bad, for example Camel's long running campaign of 9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camel over the other brands. Which you can take a look at here.

So what is advertising? By definition its a form of communication used to persuade an audience to buy a product or service, and in "layman's terms": Selling you s$#t you don't need.

How do advertisers do this? Well the most often used way is visual stimuli, followed by good copy, and that accounts for advertising in its many forms: billboards, print, tv, radio etc. Often times advertising may "enhance" how things look, sometimes even using subliminal messages. Take a look at the following examples and see how it targets the viewer and uses persuasion. Here are two great examples of how products are enhanced the first being the Dominos video above, and the second being the famous Dove Evolution video. Recently BMW has been getting some slack attention for a new video they released, which uses some subliminal messaging, check it out for yourself and read the article from fastcompany.

So in our opinion advertising as a whole is awesome, but as a marketing tool and a form of communication, consumers need to take advertising with a grain of salt; and don't be afraid to do your research so you don't get stuck with something like this!