Through the reading of the article sentence by sentence, I have know more knowledge about advertisement.
The word consumerland appears in the first paragraph confuses me I do not know how to understand it, by looking up the dictionary, the word consumerland is an amusing term used to describe the consumer society, and the phrase “inhabitants of consumerland” refers to the consumers. Dumb is a new word to me, it has the similar meaning with stupid.
The following paragraph reveals us the fact that a well-designed advertising campaign has dramatic effects to consumers. I am interested in the sentence “below the level of conscious awareness”, for my part, it means in the condition you do not mind it. The last phrase puzzles me is “all but”, by looking it up in some reference books, it means “all except” in the sentence.
I agree with the view that a person unaware of advertising’ influence on him is precisely the one most vulnerable to the AdMan’ attack. Because they think they are immunity to advertising and be defenseless to the harmless nonsense advertising claims. The word “attack” here means “a vigorous attempt to persuade consumers to buy their products”. And the word “vulnerable” is not often to see, it always use with to, and the phrase means a place, thing, or idea that is vulnerable is easy to attack or criticize.
Then I read paragraph four, in the sentence “a few of these claims are downright lies”, here these is a pronoun means advertising claims, and downright means complete, and the word falsehood means a statement that is untrue.
Paragraph five tells us the reason why there are sorts of false information in the advertising. Because the parity products have almost the same quality, so the advertising is devoted to parity product to create the illusion of superiority.
Paragraph six quotes many actual examples to explain the word “better” and “best” which used in parity claims. I do not what does the word Alice-in-WONDERLAND means, then I ask some reference books for help, actually the word stems from a book named 《Alice in wonderland》, and it means absurd in nowadays. The sentence “something other than competing brands “means something that is not in that product category.
Paragraph seven reveals us the second rule to judge whether a product is superiority or not, if an ad avoids mentioning a product’s advantage over the competition, you can greatly suspect it is not superior. And the expression “the competition” is used to refer to goods that a rival company is selling. I believe the opinion given by author.
Paragraph eight lists six basic techniques how to create necessary illusion of superiority.
