Advertisement in connection to laws of mental processes.
The effect of advertising on the individual and society has been influenced and promoted by many different psychological aspects. There are many ways to sell products, but psychological knowledge of mental laws is crucial in succeeding with advertising. Accordingly, behavioral insights based on psychology are used to attract attention. In addition, mental persuasion is necessary to succeed in advertising in today’s society. The advertisement industry uses psychological knowledge of mental laws and aspects, such as attention, sub-consciousness, and automatic reactions of the mind.
To begin, advertising companies by knowing the process of human attention, achieve great result in persuading people to purchase their products. Attention, by definition, is often referred as the focus of consciousness. Attention makes the process attended to more clear and distinct in consciousness. Therefore, when people are focused properly, the advertised objects appear to be more clear, distinct, and sharp-cut. In the same way, things of which we are merely conscious tend to be less indistinct, whereas objects we are attending to, are well-defined. For example, the information we receive through commercial, is based on enhanced look of the product, and that product is given to us in unique and distinctive way, so it catches our attention. Commercial industry is very well aware of the mechanic, which rules the process of human attention, and uses its laws to gain maximum profit from advertising, resulting in increased sale. Accordingly, there are few psychic rules, which describe how to achieve desired focus on the product. For instance, attention aids memory. If advertised product has not been attended to, it is very soon forgotten. For example commercial of new sport BMW, could not be remembered at all by somebody who does not care about fast cars. Later recognition of such car, which is an essential part of the memory process, is impossible in this case. If the object is mentally attended to, it is much more likely to be mentally recognized and recalled in the future. Another characteristic of human attention states that attended object becomes more intense. For instance if a person likes Nike shoes, a running athlete would be more appealing than a passive one. Generally, motion in commercial is more effective, to both product and attention spans. In addition, the advertised running sport shoes must to dwell on sensation at a time, otherwise our focus is lost and effect of advertisement is spoiled. When consumer attention is concentrated on one of the two sensations, the other one is displaced from consciousness for a moment and it is to appear subsequently. For example, “Thus, to use the stock example of the books, the surgeon would sometimes see the blood flow from the arm of the patient whom he was bleeding, before he saw the instrument penetrate the skin. Similarly the smith may see the sparks fly, before he sees the hammer smite the iron” (Adams 84). Advertising industry knows of these mental tricks and takes advantage of psychological knowledge in process of persuading potential buyers. In addition to characteristics of human attention, there are aspects of visual and sound perception. Consumers are more likely to be targeted visually by commercials, because over eighty percent of human perception is through vision. Obviously, advertising specialists are very well aware of these facts and try to get our attention by visual advertising. On the other hand, there are so many advertising newspapers, TV channels, and visual commercial billboards that given commercial needs attention and focus power in order to succeed. “To limit ourselves to visual appeals, we see the immense quantity of reading matter in magazines, newspapers, bulletins, letters, and so forth, with which all advertising must compete; and within the field of advertising itself the huge bulk of matter with which any single advertisement must compete. In order not to be completely buried in this visual hubbub an advertisement must have attention getting power” (Poffenberger 148). For instance, when reading newspaper or magazine no one is able to memorize all the advertisement, only the best ones would catch the reader attention. Furthermore, reader’s eyes are drawn by optically designed advertisement to hold focus on carefully prepared commercials. ”In attending one does not push himself along, or prod himself, but is drawn along by forces primarily outside of himself. This is true in spite of the fact that in so-called voluntary attention one seems to be exerting himself to attend. The orator, the salesman, the teacher, or the advertiser, therefore, has in his control the external forces which constitute the ‘drawers’ or ‘attractors’ of human attention, and may use them to gain his ends once he understands their power” (Poffenberger 148). In addition, advertisers use many other techniques to attract and hold the attention of targeted consumer audience. For example, music in stores helps some people to combine their attention on favorite music with potentially ‘favorite’ product on the shelf. Furthermore, the strategy to acquire people interest in terms of focus on a product could be through humor or straightforward presentation of product features and consumer benefits. In summary, commercial industry is very well aware and informed of mental laws ruling attention and advertisers find the way to control people attention. To continue, visual images and sounds effects affect sub-consciousness and create a fake need to purchase advertised product. People find themselves purchasing goods they never really wish to acquire. Marketing-experts are forcing consumers to commit non-conscious choices. Driven by the need of fulfillment people tend to purchase goods. In addition, this need of fulfillment supposedly sustained by acquiring advertised objects was precisely developed in us or another words we are trained. Most of this process occurs on sub-conscious level on our psyche, at early stage of life. As kids, humans are trained, than as adults humans are ready to purchase whatever they are deluded to acquire. People do not know what they buy or why, ‘they just shop till they drop’. Besides, advertised brands products are more expensive on average than regular items, so in fact advertisement receivers are paying the cost of advertisement just by choosing them more likely over other “regular’ items. In addition, advertisers know our needs and wants. All, they have to do, to succeed, is to deliver the carefully constructed promise that the product will satisfy us. Furthermore, human sub-consciousness is manipulated when it is injected with information and pictures of objects with enhanced look; always new and improved products according to commercials. For example, because the electronic images seen on the television screen look real, the mind is fooled, unless viewers constantly remind themselves that they are not real, which spoils the viewing experience. Viewers are fooled into living mentally and emotionally in a world with no place, no time limits, or in another words people are in hyper-reality whose origins are obscured and hidden. In this world people sit transfixed by what is essentially an electronic box emanating colored lights, at the cost of living in the reality around them, face to face with other people. Conscious and sub-conscious tricks of advertisers find their marks in our psyche and help to increase the sale of products. With the exposure to repetitive commercials, we like more the observed company’s logos, shapes and names. “In a series of clever social psychological experiments, Zajonc demonstrated that people prefer familiar objects. Zajonc presented abstract shapes to observers very quickly—at near subliminal presentation speeds. Over numerous trials, some shapes were repeated and others were not, but so many shapes were shown that participants did not recall seeing the ‘familiar ‘objects. Therefore, there was no conscious processing of these shapes being familiar. Nevertheless, if observers had been exposed to them previously, their ratings of how much they liked these shapes were greater than their ratings of totally novel shapes” (Rosenberg 111). With the knowledge of mental laws in terms of sub-consciousness, the advertisement industry seems to be powerful in terms of penetrating human psyche. In a result, commercial world creates a society of people detached from their own real world and society, which is easily manipulated. Finally, knowledge of automatic reactions of the mind is widely used in commercial’s industry. Marketing companies use the powerful psychological processes to strengthen automaticity in consumer behavior. Human brain works like a machine and by learning its reactions advertisers try to program the whole society. “Most consumer behavior is automatic. In general, people do not realize how much they consume or how they have come to rely on consumption as a means of recreation or temporary fulfillment, because they examine neither their actions nor the underlying needs that are temporarily satiated by buying things. Advertising, in particular, uses nonconscious processes to make us want to consume by capitalizing on our tendency to be automatic rather than mindful buyers, by using the mere exposure principle, and by conditioning us”(Rosenberg 110). So, commercial’s specialist studied us and they know human brain mechanics and consumer behavior, our needs and wants. Commercial world is constantly in process of programming society, the whole nation and effect is global. For example, McDonalds’ is very successful around the globe in selling food that is neither good nor healthy, but they perfectly used the knowledge of automatic consumer behavior. Accordingly, this marketing success proves how strong invasion of marketing techniques is in our psyche. “My argument is that much of modern American consumer behavior consists of automatic and unexamined actions. What and how much we consume stems more from unconscious choices than from mindful deliberation” (Rosenberg 107). The question arises how can we prevail and stop advertising getting into our psyche. Rosenberg believes that by becoming mindful we can defeat marketing tricks. “Mindfulness can be viewed as an ongoing process of expanding one's awareness to include stimuli that might otherwise be filtered out or not attended to, of becoming aware of the kinds of biases to which one's mind might typically be vulnerable, and of maintaining a nonjudgmental stance toward what arises in one's own mind (including emotions as well as sensations provided from one's own body and the outside world)” (Rosenberg 108). It seems that mindfulness is the only antidote for commercials, but soon advertisers might defeat us using even more complex techniques like 3D TV’s. If we consider human beings, as machines, there will be always way to program us, and make us buy ‘stuff’.
In summary, marketing and advertising dwell on mindless process of the brain and persuade society to purchase products. Using sophisticated psychological techniques companies become proficient in manipulating humans. However, by being aware of commercial tricks people can prevail and stop mindless purchasing.

Works Cited
Adams, Henry Foster, University of Michigan, MI, US. Advertising and its mental laws. pp.82-122, pp.123-152. New York: MacMillan Co, 1916
Poffenberger, Albert T. Psychology in advertising. pp. 146-173. New York: McGraw-Hill Book company, 1925
Rosenberg, Erika L, Tim Kasser, and Allen Kanner. The Struggle for a good life in a materialistic world. pp. 107-125. Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association, 2004