Advertisements

I am ready to bet that in your naïveté you believe that advertising is the art of convincing people of the remarkable qualities of your wares; of persuading them to prefer your product to any other mark; and of keeping certain brands permanently in the public eye.

This is a misconception. Advertising – as I read somewhere – is the art of convincing people that they want certain things they do not want at all; of making them dissatisfied with everything they have of making them thoroughly unhappy.

Advertisements in America are ubiquitous. They fill the newspapers and cover the walls, they are on menu cards and in your daily post, on pamphlets and on match boxes, they are shouted through loud speakers and shown in the cinemas, flashed electrically and written on the sky by airplanes and whispered in front of your window while you sleep so that you should dream of toothpaste, shoe polishes and soap flakes.

Leaving the problem of commercials – i.e. the spoken and sung radio advertisements – for the moment, I find that there are five main ways of making people particularly unhappy.

(1). REPETITION.

If you hear these five letters: L.S.M.F.T. for the first time in your life, you remain cool and unimpressed. L.S.M.F.T. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. And what then you say. It is not funny, it is not witty, in fact, and it is simple, silly and flat. Then you try to find the President's latest speech in the newspapers, but you cannot find it. You find these five letters instead: L.S.M.F.T. You travel on the subway and try to think of a killing reply to an important and annoying letter you have received but you cannot think of anything, because wherever you look you see only five letters: L.S.M.F.T. You take a walk in a dark street in comparative solitude, thinking of your beloved, and suddenly a neon advertisement flashes into your eyes: L.S.M.F.T. You want to write a poem on the uselessness and vanity of worldly pleasures but you only write down fifty times: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.

1. Найдите в тексте английские эквиваленты для следующих слово-сочетаний:

готов заключить пари, реклама – искусство, качество товаров, искусство убеждения людей, заставить людей думать, вездесущая реклама, реклама в песнях, относительное одиночество.

2. Переведите следующие словосочетания:

Think of beloved, to stay unimpressed, wherever you look, advertisement flashed, uselessness and vanity, to shout through loud speakers.

3. Ответьте на следующие вопросы к тексту:

1) What is advertising?

2) What does it mean to keep some wares in public eye?

3) Why does the author call the advertising to be ubiquitous?

4) What is called a misconception?

5) What is a repetition in advert?