US companies spend around $170 billion dollars on advertising yearly, so they seem to think it does.

Successful advertising uses a variety of tricks and techniques to influence the consumer.

They evoke positive memories and emotions that affect our behaviour over time and prompt us to buy something at a later date.

Marketing needs to reach the subconscious levels of the brain in order for it to work.

People don’t like to think that they’re easily influenced.

Humans instinctively look at something that someone else is looking at, so ads often include a model looking right at the main target or message.

It’s best to use happy faces in ads because we have mirror neurons that prompt us to mimic the expression of a person we’re looking at.

People find faces with dilated pupils more attractive.

Most major advertisers increase the pupil size of their models in Photoshop.

If you position your product toward a viewer’s dominant hand in an ad, it heightens to imagine product gives.

Researchers experimenting with images of cups, bowls and sandwiches encountered the greatest success when appealing to the right-hand side.

Colors have powerful associations in ads.

Brands choose the colors of their logos based on what they’re trying to convey.

Red connotes action, excitement, and youth. Green implies freshness, growth, and health. Blue shows trust, confidence, and security.

Ads often prime the consumer by naming a higher price beforehand so their price is not so bad in comparison.

To persuade the consumer that their product is superior, advertisers use techniques like the weasel claim.

It’s vague and ambiguous but sounds true enough that consumers believe the claim.

The unfinished claim which argues that the product is better or has more of something but does not finish the comparison.

The endorsement or testimonial where celebrity or authority claims to use the product when they often don’t.

In the 70s, Miller Lite commercials featured sports legends and celebrities and their beer sales increased from 7 million barrels to 31 million.

And the rhetorical question which demands a response in such a way that validates the products’ merits.

After the launch of Got Milk, sales of milk in California rose 7 percent in just one year.

So what do you think?

Got brainwashed?