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The 10 Most Powerful Words in Advertising
By Paul Suggett
Advertising Expert



Advertising has changed a lot of the decades, but certain words are as powerful today as they were so many years ago. In fact, the psychology department at Yale University studied many words in the English language and discovered the following to be the most powerful, especially when trying to sell or persuade. Here then are the 10 words you should always consider using in your campaigns; and if you've been paying close attention, you'll realize three of them are actually in the headline and subhead of this article. Oh, and there are a few words missing from this list that may surprise you. We'll get to that at the end.



The Advertising Power Words List, in Ascending Order:



10: NEW

We all want new, even if it's not really all that new in reality. We want the next new phone model (which is why lines for the latest iPhone (see Trends in Mobile) span the block, despite having very few upgrades). We want new cars, new clothes, new shoes, new tastes, new smells, and we're willing to pay for it. Personally, I think NEW should be higher up on the list. It's a very powerful word that you will see in advertisements and promotions on a daily, if not hourly, basis.



9: SAVE

Hands up if you don't want to save time or money. Exactly. Saving money is something that 99% of us want to do. Even the richest of the rich want deals, they just get them on more expensive purchases. If you can genuinely promise to save someone some money, you'd be foolish not to point this out. Of course, HOW you talk about it is just as important as what you're talking about. Do it wrong, and you will come across as either a pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap merchant, or untrustworthy. And as for saving time, well, time is money, which brings us right back to something we all want to save.



8: SAFETY (or SAFE)

A viscous N**i, played so well by Sir Laurence Olivier in the movie Marathon Man, asks over and over -...

The 10 Most Powerful Words in Advertising Advertising has changed a lot over the decades, but certain words are as powerful today as they were so many years ago. Here then are the 10 words...

Advertising: Trouble looms outdoor

THE fragile peace in the nation’s outdoor advertising space may soon be shattered.This is not unconnected with the clamour for an association of states outdoor regulatory agencies and the proposed outdoor exhibition by the Lagos State Advertising, Signage and Agency (LASAA).
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The state outdoor advertising regulatory agency has, of late, been in the vanguard of a formation of an association of state regulatory agencies that would be known as Outdoor Advertising Regulatory Association of Nigeria (OARAN), a move many stakeholders have described as inimical to the growth of that sub-sector.

While giving reasons for the proposed association, the Managing Director of LASAA, Mr George Noah, had explained that OARAN, when formed, would serve as a platform that ‘allows for idea sharing, protection of industry interest and a general collaboration for sustainability in the emerging world.

He argued that the association had become imperative since outdoor advertising regulatory bodies in the country, were faced with similar challenges, including the decline of out of home advertising spending due to competition from internet, radio and TV, adding that the proposed association would help promote sustainable economic growth in a vibrant outdoor advertising sector across the country.

Most of the state outdoor regulatory agencies are expected to be members of the proposed OARAN, when eventually launched.

Where lies the fate of OAAN?
Since mooting the idea, the question on the lips of stakeholders is where lies the fate of the Outdoor Advertisers’ Association of Nigeria (OAAN), the association saddled with the responsibility of regulating the practice of out-of-home advertising in the country. For instance, since coming on board in 2006, state outdoor regulatory agencies have constituted a major challenge for the association. While lending credence to this fact at its last Annual General Meeting held in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State,...

Advertising: Trouble looms outdoor THE fragile peace in the nation’s outdoor advertising space may soon be shattered.This is not unconnected with the clamour for an association of...

What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream
By Noam Chomsky
Z Magazine, October, 1997

Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I am interested in the whole intellectual culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media. It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare yesterday’s version to today’s version. There is a lot of evidence about what’s played up and what isn’t and the way things are structured.

My impression is the media aren’t very different from scholarship or from, say, journals of intellectual opinion—there are some extra constraints—but it’s not radically different. They interact, which is why people go up and back quite easily among them.

You look at the media, or at any institution you want to understand. You ask questions about its internal institutional structure. You want to know something about their setting in the broader society. How do they relate to other systems of power and authority? If you’re lucky, there is an internal record from leading people in the information system which tells you what they are up to (it is sort of a doctrinal system). That doesn’t mean the public relations handouts but what they say to each other about what they are up to. There is quite a lot of interesting documentation.

Those are three major sources of information about the nature of the media. You want to study them the way, say, a scientist would study some complex molecule or something. You take a look at the structure and then make some hypothesis based on the structure as to what the media product is likely to look like. Then you investigate the media product and see how well it conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in media analysis is this last part—trying to study carefully just what the media product is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature and structure of the media.

Well, what do you find? First of all, you find that there are different media which...

What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, by Noam Chomsky The Official Noam Chomsky Website.

Media as mirror to the world
To what extent do the media reflect the real state of the world? With the new technologies turning the world of journalism on its head and paving the way for the creation of massive media groups with global ambitions, the question is now more relevant than ever. Instantaneity and direct reportage have transformed the business of journalistic inquiry, and the profit imperative has replaced notions of civic responsibilities. But in many parts of the world - for instance Iran, Burkina Faso and Algeria - there exists another journalism that is more concerned with the values of truth and rigour.
by Ryszard Kapuscinski

In debates about the media these days too much attention is paid to technological problems, to the workings of the market, competition, innovations, the nature of the reading public, and not enough to the human aspects. I am not a media theoretician. I am a simple journalist, a writer who for more than 40 years has devoted himself to gathering and processing information (and also to consuming it).

My first observation has to do with the scale of the thing. To say, as is often said, that "the whole of humanity" live their lives by what the media do and say is an exaggeration. Even when events such as the opening of the Olympic games draw audiences of up to two billion worldwide, these still represent only one third of the population of the planet. Other large events (football world cups, wars, marriages and funerals of famous people) are widely broadcast on television but are watched by barely 10% or 20% of the human race. These are huge masses of people, but they are not the whole of humanity. Hundreds of millions of people have no contact with the media. In many parts of Africa, television, radio and even newspapers are non-existent. In Malawi there is only one newspaper; in Liberia there are two, fairly mediocre as it happens, but no television.

In many countries TV only broadcasts for two or three hours per day. And in...

Media as mirror to the world - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition To what extent do the media reflect the real state of the world? With the new technologies turning the world of journalism on its head and paving...