After the age of specifications

Empathy, the writer says, is one of the necessary passages a person watching an advertisement has to go through; it is also what makes someone feel they must have the thing on the screen. Emotional advertising, in this reading, takes a further step. It is not only a rush to raise the will to buy, but a way of warming a brand’s image so that, when the product is needed, the person already wants that one. The age of insisting that ‘our product is this good,’ or that ‘the government’s project will do good, so please use it,’ is over, the notes say. Even in fifteen seconds, a viewer can now meet a film that lingers like a drama, and storytelling sits at the center.

Desire, in this telling, is not only reasoned; even after long thought, the moment of deciding to buy is often impulsive. Emotional ads, the writer thinks, lean on that instinct to put feeling first, even in a rational hour. In a short television spot they pour in a dense feeling, and they add value to a product people already know, aiming at emotional satisfaction and a more active interest in the brand. Family affection, love, friendship, and love for a pet are named as paths that can raise empathy and lead to a purchase. The seven feelings a person instinctively knows—joy, anger, sorrow, pleasure, love, hatred, and desire, as the notes list them—are, in this reading, a surprisingly strong way to raise the will to consume in a hard modern life.

A line about tiredness, and a bottle at exam time

If Korea has a first name in emotional advertising, the writer says, it is the Bacchus ads. Bacchus is also treated as the emblematic tonic in the country, and the fact that the name still holds, in this reading, shows a company image of always trying something new, already mixed into the ads themselves. One line is given in full: ‘no one in this world lives without tiredness.’ It strikes, the notes say, the fatigue everyone already feels, so that a viewer thinks ‘I am not the only one finding life hard,’ and feels comforted by someone unknown. That comfort from the text then begins to feel like comfort from the drink. That, the writer says, is the decisive moment when a brand’s image improves.

The writer buys a bottle of Bacchus at every exam, not only for the tonic, but in the hope that the ads’ small happiness might happen to the writer as well, and not the competing Vita 500. Ads that can move people of every age, the notes add, have helped the drink keep a steady affection; becoming a drink everyone already knows is, the writer says, very hard.

Students, soldiers, and a 1989 distinction the notes will not close

By the late 2000s, the notes say, the ads began to carry the stories of university students and new office workers who would bear a hard future: young people delighted to see their names in a film’s closing credits, and soldiers preparing, in a divided country, for a war that might come at any time. The stories are of people doing their best in places that often go unseen, and they were used, the writer says, to move feeling.

Coulson, in 1989, is said to have divided television ads into atmosphere ads and rational ads, and to have compared how people responded and whether they meant to buy. The notes do not treat one kind as the clear winner, but they add that, after the late 1980s, studies have found emotional ads more effective than rational ones for brand association and brand imaging. That finding stays in that research window, and is not rewritten as a later official verdict. The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student reading of emotional advertising, with the Bacchus line ‘no one in this world lives without tiredness,’ as the notes give it.
2. A late-2000s turn to students and soldiers, and the writer’s own habit of buying Bacchus, not Vita 500, at exam time.
3. Coulson (1989) and studies after the late 1980s on emotional and rational ads, left in that window.

Last updated: 14 November 2026