Though pronouns of the first and second person are popular in advertisements, there are some differences in the use of these pronouns in the three kinds of advertisements. The first person we almost never occurs in daily consumer goods ads and technical equipment ads, whereas we is used in almost 80% the service ads in the corpus. The following are some examples.
What can we do for you?
So come on and join us as we celebrate MillenniaMania Singapore.
…, we help our neighbors find the best ways to give to their favorite charities
We’re stronger than ever.
…
There are two factors to explain the phenomenon. First, in daily consumer goods ads and technical equipment ads, a product is the focus of information. When the product needs to be mentioned, “it” is used, and in most cases, the brand name is used, even repeated to impress the readers. However, in service ads, service is actually the product. Since service is intangible, we can be regarded as the replacement of the service. Second, it is more necessary for service ads to create a friend-like atmosphere, because winning trust is the first thing service ads want to do.
3. Syntactical features
3.1 Similarities
The purpose of all advertising is to familiarize consumers with or remind them of the benefits of particular products in the hope of increasing sales, and the techniques used by advertisers do not vary markedly. An advertisement is often merely glimpsed in passing and so, to be effective, its message must be colorful, legible, understandable and memorable. The rules governing the language of advertising are similar. We have summarized the lexical features of English advertisements. If words are leaves of a tree, and sentences branches; the branches must also possess their similarities.
First, length of a sentence in advertising is usually short. A sentence in daily consumer goods ads has 10.3 words on average; in technical equipment ads, 11.8 words; in service ads, 12.3 words.
Second, as to sentence structure, simple sentences and elliptical sentences are often used in advertisements. Compared with complex sentences, simple sentences are more understandable and forceful. Elliptical sentences are actually incomplete in structure but complete in meaning. The adoption of elliptical sentences can spare more print space, and take less time for readers to finish reading. In addition, a group of sentence fragments may gain special advertising effectiveness. Let us compare the following two advertisements.
a. Baked. Drenched. Tested to the extreme. A Motorola cellular phone …
b. The Motorola cellular phone are baked and drenched to extreme.
Obviously, by using elliptical structure, sentence a is far more brief, eye-catching and forceful than sentence