An Explorative Study On "Realistic Advertising" In China

The 2^nd half of 19^th Century was a new time for the West. The 2^nd Industrial Revolution and establishment of Capitalism made profound innovation in politics, economy, and social thought fields, and also induced appearance of Realism in Europe. At the angle of criticized Romanticism, the technique of Realism (real, objective, typical) was not only suited for heavy change of social culture then, but also one of two basic styles in literature and art afterward.Realistic Advertising (RA for short) is the combination of realistic technique and advertising. Realism in advertising is a new style that selects actual and typical character, scene, diction, props or real emotion from common life. Although its appearance is not as natural as Realism in Europe, it also bases on criticizing the Unrealistic Advertising (which based on Romanticism) in the past, and suits for change in some other relevant fields in China at the same time.Although Realism isn't main style in Chinese Advertising, it has obvious characters and better effect. Realism has been popular in some kinds of advertisement, such as Corporate Image and Public Service. Beside that, RA has helped some brands to build their unique equity, especially in FMCG. In the experiment about effect, RA also got better result vs. Unrealistic style. Above results further prove that RA is reasonable and valuable.This study explores RA in three aspects. First, it generalizes realistic techniques from books and thesises on Realism. Second, according to cross-studies about culture, literature, media, marketing and advertising itself, it finds reasons for RA appearance. Third, this paper also summarizes some using attributes of RA based on content analysis and effect test. "What" and "Why" are two important parts of this thesis, while "How" is just farther supplement to the former conclusions.