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2 Lexical Features
2.1 Classification of advertising and its audience
Generally speaking, advertisements can be divided into two types: public relation ads and commercial ads. The former tries to advocate reputation for a social group, whose purpose is to leave a favorable impression upon the potential audience. The latter leads to the act of purchasing the products or using the recommended service. Commercial ads are much more presented through mass media for the reason that manufacturers and companies are willing to spend a large sum of money to make a certain product known or to boost the image of a certain brand. In some cases, competitors, like Coca-cola and Perpsi, even spare no expense to launch advertising campaigns to win over the market share. Commercial advertising can also be divided according to the target audience into two groups: consumer advertising and business advertising. Most of the ads in the mass media are consumer advertisements. They are typically directed at consumers. By contrast, business advertising tends to be concentrated in specialized business publications, professional journals, trade shows targeting at a certain group of people involved in some business. Since consumer advertising is most accessible to common people, the present study on will focus on consumer advertising. The classification of advertising is clearly shown in the following graph:
Graph 1 Classification of advertisements
英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】 Public ads Daily consumer goods ads
Advertising Consumer ads Technical equipment ads
Commercial ads
Business ads Service ads
The bold parts show the scope of advertisements we study. Daily consumer goods are necessities of daily life, such as food, detergent, hygiene, etc. Technical equipment is technical toys and electric equipment such as camera, vehicle, hi-fi, etc. Service covers bank, insurance, fund, etc.
Actually, advertising works effectively some of the time and doesn’t work other times. The single crucial reason that advertising does not work is that in specific instances the information it conveys never reaches the consumer at all, or is judged by the consumer to be either redundant, meaningless, or irrelevant. For example, a motorbike advertisement will probably be invisible to housewives on the lookout for new cutlery. Social status and individual interest decide that consumer goods ads are mainly targeting at women while technical equipment ads are largely aiming at men. The amount of shared knowledge between the advertiser and the audience together with the thinking habit of the audience directly influences the advertising language. Since products and audience change in every advertisement in order to achieve high advertising effectiveness, language used differs in different types of ad
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