What do commercial advertisements mean? What are the functions?

Cultural function and its cultural responsibility, so as to make better use of it and make it play an active role in the construction of social spiritual civilization.

Commercial advertisements contain rich cultural connotations. The information that advertisements convey to people about goods, services, enterprises, economy, science and technology, and culture is originally a reflection of the material culture and spiritual culture created by human beings. The advertising subject adopts the strategy of cultural attack, using the power of culture to call on the audience, injecting cultural content into advertisements and adding cultural connotation to advertisements. Therefore, we can see that modern commercial advertising not only introduces all kinds of goods and services, explains the characteristics, functions and functions of the advertised goods, and promises benefits to consumers, but also spreads various cultural awareness, displays diverse cultural landscapes, introduces the fashion of developed countries, and explains the relationship between the advertised goods and culture. These contents add cultural added value and cultural attraction to the advertising products. Therefore, commercial advertising has become a social and cultural phenomenon, showing the dual colors of commercial utility and social culture, with dual functions of economy and culture. It is no longer a simple promotion tool, and you can sell anything you want.

Advertising culture not only represents certain material culture and behavior culture, but also belongs to conceptual culture and spiritual culture. Today, there is no difference and homogeneity in commodities, and the market competition is extremely fierce. The influence of advertising culture is often greater than the competitiveness of advertising products themselves. If the audience agrees with the advertising culture, then they may accept the goods or services advertised and become consumers of goods and users of services. For example, many audiences will buy leisure goods only after they recognize and accept leisure culture. Therefore, advertisers regard culture as a big card in market competition and carry out cultural packaging on commodities and their brands. Advertising creators put forward the idea that creativity follows culture and create under the guidance of this idea.

American Marlboro cigarette advertising is to stimulate consumers' interest in advertising products through western culture (that is, manly culture) characterized by vilen, steeds and cowboys. Chinese Confucian family wine advertisements also use traditional family culture and wine culture to attract people's attention to this product. On the occasion of Valentine's Day and Christmas in the west, merchants make a large number of advertisements to introduce western festivals and customs and their cultural significance, show exotic and colorful cultural scenes, and induce consumers to follow the world cultural trend. Therefore, Western festivals such as Valentine's Day and Christmas are almost as important as the three traditional festivals in our city, especially favored by the younger generation. It can be seen that the cultural content in advertisements, especially values and lifestyles, whether traditional or modern, positive or negative, will penetrate into life after dissemination and have an impact on the audience's thoughts and behaviors. Repeating advertisements, enhancing the audio-visual impact of advertisements through technical and artistic means, and setting topics to create sensational effects can make them more penetrating and influential.

As pointed out in a United Nations report entitled "One World, Many Voices", advertising, as a form of communication, has been criticized for influencing people's feelings, simplifying people's reality into a fixed framework, and using people's desire and intensive persuasion skills to achieve manipulation. This book criticizes advertisements for abusing culture to manipulate audiences. Today's consumers are basically used to choosing products with advertisements and choosing the culture represented by the products. Consumers' purchase is often the practice of cultural choice. Some of these choices are rational, while others blindly follow the crowd, but they all show that commercial advertisements have improved people's material life and behavior, infiltrated people's hearts, impacted people's cultural psychology and influenced people's ideology.

If commercial advertising is regarded as a communication symbol, then advertising includes two aspects: meaning symbol and cultural symbol. The former is explicit and clearly conveys the economic information that advertisers want to convey, while the latter is usually implicit and is a means or carrier to explain the meaning code. While analyzing and accepting the meaning code, the audience is also consciously or unconsciously interpreting the cultural code in the communication symbols. Therefore, it can be said that advertising is not only a bridge connecting production and consumption, but also an intermediary of culture. Advertising and audience not only constitute a value relationship, but also a cultural relationship. Although the culture in advertising is a kind of added value, the function of cultural communication is non-explicit, and the influence of a single advertisement seems to be very limited, but the total amount of advertisements is huge, the communication speed is fast and the scope is wide, which is full of our life time and space. Everyone in the city is exposed to at least dozens of advertisements every day, and this information is constantly superimposed over time, so it is not difficult to imagine how much social influence advertisements have! Advertising culture plays a cultural role in the long and repeated communication process, affecting people's spirit and social ideology.

The influence of advertising culture is far-reaching and cannot be underestimated. First of all, it affects the audience's cultural psychology and changes people's cultural concepts and values. Advertising's propaganda of cultural awareness and values, whether it is a direct appeal or an indirect expression with the help of images, will cause mental fluctuation and impact the original ideas as long as the audience interprets and accepts it. Under the constant impact, some concepts are changing. For example, in recent years, advertisements vigorously promote the concepts of modern western consumer culture, such as timely consumption, advanced consumption, personalized consumption, high consumption and their materialized forms, and enter people's minds through people's audio-visual windows. People's pent-up desire for consumption was aroused, and their enthusiasm for consumption suddenly rose. In addition, with the rapid and stable development of social productive forces as a guarantee, the concept of advocating frugality and hard work and simplicity inherited by China people for thousands of years began to waver, and new three years, old three years and patchwork three years appeared. Many people regard high consumption as their material life goal, and even some college students say that when they have strong economic ability, international brand-name goods are the first choice for consumption. In a survey report on college students' brand consumption view, international advertising analysis said that this brand choice is related to the high quality and novel style of some foreign brands, but it is mainly the result of advertising. Ten years ago, foreign companies began to infiltrate the brand image of China consumers. A large number of advertisements and the cooperation of various communication channels make people unconsciously accept foreign brands and the life they represent.

Advertising culture not only changes people's concept of consumption culture, but also affects the value system of the whole society, including life values, moral values, economic values, knowledge values, aesthetic values, natural values and so on. International advertising has done a questionnaire survey on the value orientation of heroes in the eyes of ordinary people. The survey results show that respondents in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing have higher awareness and correct recognition rate of famous brands and stars than advanced figures. Respondents' spiritual space has been occupied by famous brands and stars, among which famous brands are the most. Cognitive ranking reflects the changes of people's value orientation and values today. This change is related to advertising. In analyzing the reasons for the change, this report points out that the promotion of famous brands and stars is very strategic and can pay attention to the audience's demand for information. As long as well-known brands and stars still have publicity value, publicity will continue to bring continuous memory stimulation to cognitive audiences, and people will consciously or unconsciously show great concern for them. This survey report powerfully proves the function of advertising culture and its influence on values with figures, reminding us that we must never ignore the power of advertising culture in building contemporary culture and establishing a new and correct value system.

Secondly, provide modern life information and guide people to change their lifestyles. Commercial advertisements show the ever-changing changes in the commodity world, convey the information that changes people's material life, vividly describe a brand-new modern lifestyle, and provide reference for people to change their lifestyle. High-grade commodities that can provide material conditions for people to change their way of life and civilized lifestyles that meet the needs of human nature are not only attractive to the audience, but also have the role of demonstration and guidance. People follow the pace of social progress, imitate the examples in advertisements and other media, and constantly change their material and spiritual lives. This change is not a change of old things, but a change of way. For example, since the reform and opening-up, China's family life style has changed from self-sufficiency to commodities, from material to culture, from singleness to pluralism, and from tradition to openness. In many aspects, it no longer sticks to tradition, but pursues high standards of civilization and science.

Rural areas refer to cities, and cities refer to developed countries in western society, which not only retain the national regional characteristics, but also show the trend of modernization and internationalization. Although the change of our lifestyle today must be based on the development of social productive forces and social security system, the information about modern lifestyle provided by mass media, especially advertisements, has indeed broadened people's horizons and opened their closed hearts. Today, people are shopping with advertisements, and it has become a reality to arrange their lives by watching advertisements. Advertising is not only the messenger and salesman of life, but also the mentor of life, holding dazzling novelty goods and telling people how to live. Although people sometimes hate his chatter and may ignore his advertising products, they are finally induced by his lifestyle and can't get rid of the manipulation of advertisements.

Advertising also shows great functions in the process of social and cultural inheritance and cultural integration. Culture has the nature of movement, spreads vertically and horizontally, collides with different cultures and is always in a state of change. The movement of culture has its internal motivation and also depends on the help of external forces. As an external force, advertising plays a significant role in boosting because of its large volume and wide spread. When advertising implements cultural offensive strategy, on the one hand, it promotes traditional culture according to people's national cultural complex and promotes the spread of traditional culture; On the other hand, it also promotes western culture and promotes the exchange and integration of multiculturalism. In 1950s, Japanese businessmen advertised for chocolate to introduce Valentine's Day in the west and introduced this western holiday custom to Japan. In recent years, some merchants in China have also transplanted western folk culture to the mainland through various advertisements. Due to the continuous promotion of advertisements and the constant superposition of information, people's contact with western cultures has increased, and psychological barriers have been gradually eliminated, thus shortening the running-in time of Chinese and western cultures and accelerating the integration speed. Of course, cultural change and cultural integration are carried out under the background of world economic integration and cultural integration, and there are many political, economic, cultural and social reasons and motives, but advertising does play a role in promoting cultural exchange and integration. For example, businesses use advertisements to hype Valentine's Day and Christmas.

These two festivals and the culture they represent were quickly accepted by our people. On Valentine's Day, the sales of flowers and gifts rose sharply. On Christmas Eve, millions of people from the northern provincial capital poured into the streets to participate in the celebrations held by merchants.

As for April Fool's Day, merchants think that they can't use it to promote sales and get more profits, so they don't publicize it coldly. People know little about April Fool's Day. Although commercial advertisements spread traditional culture and western culture only for the purpose of commercial utility, neither merchants nor advertisers consciously understand the communication function of advertisements and the social benefits they bring from the cultural level or political height, there is no doubt that commercial advertisements have become one of the channels of cultural communication in the modern world and an important driving force for cultural change.