Whenever I listen to AM radio I don't get bombarded same kind of commercials that television likes to bombard us with. Most AM commercials are nice. I think that AM commercials at least do what they are meant to. They inform us. They inform us about a danger about not doing something right. With television commercials advertisers try to imprint some kind of behavior on us and tell us that their product is better than every other product out there. But on AM radio there are a lot of safety messages that actually are informative, and, I find myself listening to them. But a majority of television commercials just show like stuff like people in a bar or a restaurant or it shows a random assortment of images without any real talk to try to tell you why the product is good. Rather they just show you a bunch of images to try to impress you that since they know a lot about how to make images go on a screen in an interesting pattern that the product they're selling must be good. I don't like this idea of advertising. Why do television advertisements have to be so evil, as opposed, to actually informing us like AM radio advertisements do? At least with AM radio advertisements if I don't even consider buying a product that a commercial is advertising I learn something new.

Television being a visual medium can rely on images to get a message across. I, too, wish that TV commercials would be more informative and less dramatic, but the truth is that people buy products for image as much as they do for quality. I'm told that Dusenberg, if not the first to use this technique, was the first to truly master it.

For example, do you know anyone who really needs an SUV? If yes, do you know more than five who do? How many people do you know who own SUVs ever do anything more adventurous than jump a curb to park when the parking lot if full or cross a ditch to get off the interstate during a traffic jam?

I would be willing to bet bus fare that somewhere near 95% of SUV owners would be better served and safer in a mini-van, but as we all know, mini-vans are not nearly so cool as an SUV.

Why are mini-vans not as cool as SUVs? Well, partly because SUVs look so damn rugged sitting atop a three hundred foot butte or with Mt. Everest in the background and because men with deep voices and three days growth of beard tell us that SUVs will turn Casper Milquetoast into Indiana Jones.

Image is what people want and images sell that better than anything.

[edit on 2008/7/6 by GradyPhilpott]