The Role of Persuasion in Advertising

The ad industry made a collective cowardly decision to pretend that persuasion simply took place using rational, conscious means in the bright light of day. Nearly all really interesting advertising ideas have an element about them, which is not conventionally logical. There's some element of counterintuitive or apparently irrelevant behaviour involved in any great ad campaign. It can help agencies justify their more interesting work and therefore sell it more easily. I think marketing has slunk further and further down the value chain within large organisations. If you look at the new growing breed of advertisers, such as tech companies, finance companies, if you take anything from an insurance comparison website to selling home broadband to mobile phone networks, it can be a very