ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the form that the persuasion takes. It reviews commercials as television texts that have developed particular techniques of persuasion in order to serve the economic needs of the industry. TV commercials present an ongoing discourse about objects and attempt to connect them to a range of meanings. The chapter explores eight broad categories of such meanings: luxury, leisure, and conspicuous consumption; individualism, the natural, folk culture and tradition; novelty and progress, sexuality and romance; alleviation of pain, fear/anxiety, and guilt, and utopia; and escape from dystopia. The list is not an exhaustive one and new persuasive styles will doubtlessly evolve in the future, but the majority of TV commercials rely on one or more of these persuasive devices: metaphor; utopian style; product differentiation and superiority; repetition and redundancy; extraordinary and excessive style: "televisuality" and counter television; graphics and animation; violating reality; reflexivity and intertextuality.
