Persuasion Techniques in the 21st Century Advertising

Abstract

Most people do not know that their buying decisions are influenced by the use of persuasion techniques in advertisements and commercials. This research can be seen as a small step in raising awareness of why and how persuasion is used in advertising in order to enable buyers to protect themselves from its effects and to make correct purchasing decisions without being too much influenced by advertising. For this purpose we have chosen to analyze a corpus of commercials and advertisements in order to identify similarities and differences between the persuasion techniques used in TV commercials and Facebook advertisements and to analyze the relation between the target audience and the techniques used in the selected advertisements in order to better understand how persuasion is used by advertisers. The results show that in TV commercials more complex and sophisticated combinations of persuasion techniques are used, while in Facebook advertisements a combination of maximum three persuasion techniques is used. Moreover, on Facebook, even if the same persuasion techniques as in the TV commercials are used for the same product, they are adapted to a specific age segment.