Name: Influence & Persuasion: Crash Course Media Literacy #6
Uploaded: 2022-06-25T02:17:39.000Z
Duration: 9 min 51 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Let's play a little game of “name that tune.”

I'm going to start singing a tune, and I want you see if you can finish it without me.

What about, “I am stuck on Band Aid Brand....”

Did you hear that in the little kids' voice? That's a cute one.

OK last one: “Gimme a break, gimme a break.”

If you didn't finish at least one of those on your own, I'd be shocked.

These little songs advertisers use in commercials are called jingles, and you know these popular ones because they were written specifically to get stuck in your head.

Catchy tunes are just one technique advertisers use to get you to remember them and, hopefully, buy their stuff.

For years psychologists and sociologists have studied why humans buy things, and brands use that research to hack our brains and open our wallets.

By applying the skills we've learned so far, we can protect ourselves from buying yet another fancy frappuccino off the not-so-secret secret menu.

Today we're going to un-hack your brain on advertising.

First things first: let's define advertising and its close cousins, public relations and propaganda.

An advertisement is a public notice promoting a product, event, or service.

Advertising is the art of creating those.

Sometimes brands create ads themselves, and sometimes they hire companies to do it for them.

Public relations, or PR, is something different.

PR is the management of the relationship between the public (that's you) and a brand.

PR tells the public what the brand is up to and tries to make the brand look as good as possible.

They're the people who write the apology when someone makes a mistake or build the hype around the latest iPhone release.

Finally, propaganda is information distributed with the direct purpose of promoting a certain point of view.

This info is often misleading or biased, and propaganda is usually used to promote specific political viewpoints.

These definitions may seem tidy, but the differences between these fields can be really hard to distinguish out in the real world, especially online.

Don't worry, we'll talk a lot more about propaganda later in the course.

Last time on Crash Course Media Literacy, we learned that all media is constructed.

Creators make choices each step of the way, from their work's purpose and focus to the point of view they use to tell their story.

Advertisements work the same way, from the split-second ad you swipe through before watching your friends' stories

to elaborate movie trailers that get as much hype as the movie itself.

On top of that, ads are created using a century's worth of market research: experiments carried out to discover what makes us want to buy things.

Advertisers use that knowledge to tap into our desires, often exploiting our most basic needs –

not only the food and shelter kind, but the love and belonging kind, too.

One of the pioneers of this somewhat sinister art was Edward Bernays.

“The human being—male or female—is a herd animal.

Man is fearful of solitude...He is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence.”

That's from his 1923 book Crystallizing Public Opinion, which became a classic in the public relations field.

It detailed how humans can be persuaded to change their habits if it will help them to follow the crowd.

What was that one trend that everyone had to follow, or you totally felt left out?

Friendship bracelets, the latest pair of Jordans, a fidget spinner, one of those little electronic keychain pets – seriously what was the deal with those things?

Chances are you or your friends bought them because everyone else had one – you wanted to fit in.

Advertisements love to play on this need, and that's how trends and fads happen in the first place.

In the 1940's, psychologist Abraham Maslow added another piece to this puzzle.

He identified a hierarchy of needs he said all humans had.

At the base, the foundation, all humans need food and water, shelter, and sleep.

Just above that, they need to feel safe, too.

Then comes the need for love and feeling like you belong somewhere.

After that, we need to feel accomplished, like we matter.

At the tippy top of the pyramid is the need to fulfill our destiny, to be our best selves.

Now all of these needs, combined with our natural desire to follow the crowd, are like little buttons on our hearts and brains.

Advertisements press different combinations of buttons in hopes that we'll respond the right way.

The sales pitch of most modern ads is that product X will satisfy your need for Y.

For example, security systems promise one of our most basic instincts: safety.

We want to be safe, so we buy alarms to keep out the bad guys.

And Slim Jims? They promise food – of a sort.

But some products claim to satisfy multiple needs higher up on that pyramid.

Let's head into the Thought Bubble to take a closer look.

It features L'Oreal's iconic slogan “Because you're worth it.”

They've used this slogan more or less since 1971.

In this ad, it's used with the claim that this dye is the most expensive in the country.

Usually, that's not a great way to sell a lot of anything.

But the slogan “because you're worth it” presses a lot of our human need buttons.

For starters, any advertisement for hair dye implies that natural hair color is boring.

So, for other people to like us, to stick with the herd, our hair has to be a different, better color.

But still a pretty normal, human-y color, so we don't stick out from the herd.

That's the button for feeling loved and like we belong.

But there's also that need for accomplishment, like we matter. We're worth it.

The ad is saying, you're hot. You're the best. You deserve this product.

You deserve the most expensive dye, even though it's luxury. Nay, BECAUSE it's luxury.

Not only is this ad an appeal to stick with the herd, to blend in with beauty norms, but it's also an appeal to individualism.

It's an appeal to that middle of the pyramid and the tippy top, the desire to become our best selves and rise above the rest of the herd.

If you've ever screamed TREAT YOSELF while splurging on a pair of designer shoes after a long day, you've fallen into this ad trap.

Once an advertiser knows which “need button” to press, they need to persuade you that it will work.

Turns out that there are a few things that really persuade us.

The first is authority: if we think the person talking is an expert, we're likely to believe them.

Like in those “5 out of 5 dentists recommend” toothpaste commercials.

The next is likeability: if we like them, are friends with them, or trust them, we're also likely to listen.

That's why brands use extremely popular and respected celebrities, like, say, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, to sell watches or perfume.

Same with consistency: if what's being said vibes with what we already believe, we'll probably go along with it.

If everything you've ever heard about this new true crime podcast says its great and thrilling and awesome,

you probably wouldn't believe your coworker's negative review of it.

If there's a consensus around something, if it's popular, we are easily swayed to think it's good, too.

And if we think it's a scarce resource and we could have a piece of it, it's even more attractive.

So, if everyone else had an iPhone and you didn't, you'd probably really want one.

And if a limited edition version came out that was signed by Beyonce you'd want that one even more.

Advertisers often use these persuasive qualities in benign ways to get us to buy one brand of chocolate over another or something.

But they can also be used against us by being baked into false claims.

They're not lying, exactly, but making claims based on poor or misleading logic.

One popular type of fallacy in advertising is an appeal to emotions.