We have become increasingly surrounded by advertisements, with those seen on traditional TV channels and billboards now supplemented by paid advertising on social media, websites and within apps. But how effective is advertising at getting us to make purchases? There are certainly strong arguments for the effectiveness of advertising. Firstly, adverts related to special offers can be quite successful, especially if they are time-limited. For example, Black Friday offers for tech products often lead to people making expensive purchases they probably otherwise would not make, in part because they need to complete the purchase before a deadline. Secondly, targeted advertising on social media often as it is based on people’s browsing habits and interests. Many companies spend a lot of money on Facebook sponsored posts because of this. However, without targeting or special offers, a lot of advertising may be much less effective since people will see it as irrelevant or unimportant, meaning they will simply ignore it. Certainly on social media feeds, there are now so many adverts that many users just scroll past them unless they are very carefully crafted so as to immediately grab their attention. The situation is even worse on traditional TV channels, where frequent commercial breaks tend to be used as an excuse to check your phone or make a cup of tea. Overall, I feel that when people are given a strong incentive to buy, and when it is carefully crafted and targeted, advertising can be effective. But otherwise its effect on our buying decisions is limited because its sheer volume turns it into mere background noise.
Sample response & feedback
Advertising Power vs Consumer Indifference
Question
Some people say that advertising is extremely successful at persuading us to buy things. Other people think that advertising is so common that we no longer pay attention to it. Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.
Annotated response
10 correction notes
Overall assessment
Why this response received Band 8.0
The response gives a balanced discussion of both views and reaches a clear, qualified opinion. Black Friday offers, targeted advertising and ignored commercial breaks provide relevant support. The clearest opportunity for development is to explain more fully how matching adverts to existing interests influences purchases, beyond noting company spending. Language is flexible and largely precise, with a few references and sentence structures that could be made more direct.
IELTS criteria
How each score was decided
TR Task Response
8.0The response fully addresses both views and presents a clear, well-qualified opinion, with relevant and extended examples supporting each position.
CC Coherence and Cohesion
8.0Ideas progress logically from advertising incentives and targeting to saturation and a qualified conclusion. Cohesive devices guide the discussion clearly, although a few pronoun references could be more direct.
LR Lexical Resource
8.0Vocabulary is flexible and precise, featuring natural collocations such as 'time-limited', 'browsing habits' and 'background noise', with only rare minor imprecision.
GRA Grammatical Range and Accuracy
8.0A wide range of complex structures is used accurately, including conditional and relative clauses. The concluding sentence could be streamlined so that advertising is named before the pronoun referring to it.