The Powerful Language of Advertising

Abstract or Introduction

Have you ever wondered why advertisements arouse your desire for a seemingly unique and innovative product in a way which makes you necessarily buy it, just to realize later that you actually have no use for it and had better saved the money for something more utilitarian and functional? The effect of advertising can be subsumed under the acronym ‘AIDA’, which stands for attention, interest, desire, and action, a phase model of advertising effect. According to this model, the arousal of attention, interest, and desire culminates in the successful buying of the product being advertized. In this vein, advertising makes use of several advertising techniques, among them the most powerful manipulative means – language – as the title of Dwight Bolinger’s book Language: The Loaded Weapon (1980) suggests. The language of advertising is a powerful, highly elaborate, and in its creation time-consuming product, which manifests itself in three major linguistic areas, namely vocabulary, syntax, and rhetorical figures.