Successful advertising often has its profound cultural connotation of the times and is a mirror of the progressive culture of the times. Starting with some advertising examples, this paper makes a preliminary discussion on the background culture reflected by some advertisements.
First, the display of popular culture.
Advertising itself is a popular culture. Advertising must be created under the cultural background of keeping up with fashion in order to win the recognition of consumers. Therefore, advertising is the stage of popular culture. For example, advertisements using celebrity effect and authority effect show the characteristics of contemporary culture. Many businesses often use the influence of celebrities in the eyes of consumers to establish a good image of goods or brands. Procter & Gamble's "Shufujia" soap and "Pan Ting" nutritional shampoo were recommended to consumers by Chinese Medical Association and Swiss Vitamin Institute respectively, which quickly made the products popular. The success of these advertisements is undoubtedly borrowed from the worship of celebrities and the trust in authority of contemporary people. Other performances are: unconventional material pursuit and self-improvement personality display. For example, the newspaper advertisement screen of Nanjing Tianwei wireless paging station published the head of a very smart young man, and there was a shadow of the head. Advertising words make us suddenly realize, "since you have higher goals, why should you care about others saying that your vision is too high?" This advertisement finds a connection point in the pursuit of consumers' personality, which embodies the strong self-esteem and self-confidence of young people who are full of vigor and dare not be mediocre. For another example, the advertising slogan of P&G Rejoice Shampoo is "Best performance, naturally popular all over the country", which makes full use of "appreciation" to improve consumers' expectations of goods, which reflects that people want to show their advantages in front of the public and gain their recognition and appreciation. And it's very cola-"young people don't fail, it's very cola, showing themselves"; Sprite-"I am me, crystal clear" and other beverage advertisements represent the psychological tendency of contemporary young people to highlight their individuality and personal style. Second, the collision between regional culture and mixed culture.
In addition to the mainstream pop culture mentioned above, advertisements also reflect the specific culture of a certain region. Every region has its own culture, including way of thinking, way of life, value orientation and aesthetic consciousness. Many advertisements take this as their creative background, which reflects cultural differences. Such as "Goldlion tie, a man's world" advertisement. "Goldlion", formerly known as Golden Lion, has made some efforts in advertising, but the sales of ties are still not good. It turns out that the readers of "lions" and "losers" in Hong Kong are almost the same, which is contrary to the unique "good intentions" mentality of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao people. Since Geely's good name "Goldlion" came into being, advertisements have caused consumers' psychological activities to point selectively, and "Goldlion" has become famous all over the world. "Youngor" brand from the initial "youth" to "Beilun Port" won the national gold medal in clothing, but its popularity is not high. Only after it was renamed "Younger Youth" did younger people sing all the way. The reason is that the name "Youngor" accords with people's psychology, and everyone wants to have the vigor of young people.
Of course, the advertising industry is a cross-generational and cross-ethnic cultural integration. For example, the propaganda slogan of HVM American Health Army series of advanced supplements in the United States is "A year's plan lies in spring", which adopts China idioms; For example, the advertising slogan "Wearing underwear outside didn't start with Madonna" jumped from the clothes of contemporary sexy actresses to the clothes of Swan Lake ballerinas more than 100 years ago, jumping freely between ancient and modern times, reflecting various cultural mixed messages of "making foreign things serve China, making the past serve the present". Third, the deduction of advanced culture.
Advertising shows people an advanced cultural image. This advanced cultural image always shows people a new world from the perspective of content, and it is a new world that can be obtained through purchase. Such as "Nestle" coffee. People in China have the habit of drinking tea and seldom drink coffee, but "Nestle" coffee dared to come in and succeeded in one fell swoop. One of the reasons lies in the phrase "delicious" and its advertising image: drinking "Nestle" coffee can lead to a high-grade and high-grade life. This is the advanced culture brought by Nestle Coffee. This advanced culture uses the "relationship between the picture and the background" to highlight the things to be publicized from a visual perspective, and at the same time, with the help of mass media such as photography and movies, it gives people a feeling of being there, which is often mistaken by consumers for being there.
Of course, we can't ignore that the advertising culture is getting worse and worse under the temptation of selling interests. First of all, advertising is a kind of consumption information, and only in repeated intensive communication can we establish an identity relationship with the audience. In order to achieve the goal, advertisers will use all effective means to spare no effort to show the advertisement within the attention of the audience, which will inevitably exaggerate and expand the original content of the advertising information, and even confuse and interfere with the audience's acceptance, use and value judgment of the advertisement with false information. Secondly, in order to cater to the "taste" of a certain kind of people, advertising communication has to destroy the value connotation of advertising itself and reduce it to a kitsch fashion to lure social values closer to kitsch.
In short, in today's explosion of advertising information, advertising is becoming an indispensable part of people's cultural life. With the continuous improvement of people's humanistic quality, advertisements showing cultural charm will have more and more profound cultural connotations, and there will be more cultural connotations waiting for us to explore.