Pros and Cons to Advertisement

For this blog I decided to read an article that points out the pros and cons of advertisement and then to decide for myself whether or not I think advertisement has a positive or negative impact on our society.  This article was taken off of schoolnet.org and was written by Ms. Khin Aye Cho, a tenth grade teacher from Myanmar.  She states an interesting viewpoint about why advertising is as successful as it is today.  To her, it is because advertisements offer more than just the information about that product.  I also, completely agree.  If advertisements only offered information about their product, no one would even care, and in addition to that lack of passion, people would get bored really fast, which would mean that the company wasted a lot of money on something they thought would advertise their product successfully.  In fact, nowadays, some ads get so involved in a story line that the viewer doesn't even know what is being advertised and become very confused when, at the end of the ad, the company name pops up and it turns out that what was in the advertisement has nothing to do with the company.  I don't think this is very good because instead of making people interested in the product, they are left confused.  She goes on to point out the pros of advertisement.  She says that the advertisement of goods helps to increase the amount of goods sold which allow companies to sell their products at reasonable prices.  In addition to this, she points out that advertisement helps pay for a lot of things that some may take for granted.  For example, she says that advertisement plays a big part in funding public transportation.  If you think about it, the only thing you ever see on the side of public buses or light rails is advertisement.  If these advertisers didn't pay the public transportation companies for these ads, public transportation might be much more expensive or maybe not exist at all.  After pointing out these arguments in favor of advertisement, she points out the cons.  The bad things she points out about advertisement mainly have to do with the negative emotional impact that they have on the viewers and consumers.  She says that advertisements give us a false emotions or feelings that make us buy things that we don't need, and make us think that by buying these things we will become the best of whatever we want to be.  For example, a wife buying a cleaning product because in the commercial the woman was portrayed as the best mom or wife ever because that cleaning product allowed her to keep her house clean and clean up any mess you can think of.  When it comes to my opinion, I think that generally speaking, advertisement is useful to both consumers and to companies because they improve our standard of living and sometimes provide you with what you actually needed.