No where is hype more prevalent, and indeed necessary, than in junk mail. The very fact that hype is so prevalent says a lot about the reader of junk mail. It implies that they have a short attention span and are unconcerned and unconvinced by details: they are emotionally driven. However, much of it can probably be attributed to the desensitization against the effects of junk mail. Even the pictures they show have a lot to say about what they imply their audience is like.

Perhaps the single most distinguishing quality of hype in junk mail is the typesetting. It's designed to catch the eye. The words are usually big, huge in fact, telling you who they are and what they're selling. Anything that can be grasped

It is interesting to note that the assumption they make is that their audience is white and upper-middle class, or at least want to be. However, if this isn't the case, they have another ad on the flip side which depicts a Hispanic mother and her child together very happily. Of course, this ad is written in Spanish. It certainly was nice of The Gas Company to be politically correct yet still segregate their audience based on race. They may justify this by claiming that they're only attempting to serve the language needs of their Spanish-speaking audience, but the implications that American activities exclusively involve white people are still clear.

Hype seems necessary in junk mail because junk mail is so notoriously ignored. In a shopping mall, for example, the shoppers are seeking commodities, and that is their purpose for going. They want to find something that they will enjoy consuming. The shopper and the seller are in it together. All the seller has to do is make the package look appealing and the shopper will be curious about it (qtd. in Maasik 46). But in junk mail, the sender knows that no one wants to read their sales pitch, and that, in fact, most of their mail goes straight into the trash can without much more than a glance. Therefore, junk mail must sell itself in that one, vital glance.

>From all of the things you can pick out from a piece of junk mail, all the pictures, all the underlying assumptions that went into crafting the ad, one thing you usually won't find is valuable, detailed information. Although they present it in such a way as to seem informative, the ads are based more on hype than on information. Hype is the basis for all emotionally-driven advertising, and it can be found in the slew of junk mail you receive at your home each day.

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Do Americans have such a short attention span that advertisers are required to resort to such hype? That's what everything about the junk mail seems to imply. If any of us had the patience to read carefully through every ad, we would certainly be more informed consumers, and we would happily dish over money for something that we truly need. But these ads seem to be telling us a different story, that we are unconvinced by mere information. We need to have emotional appeal in ads we see before we'll spend money. This implies that the "virtual consumer" of these ads are emotional people, rather than logical people. Therefore, emotional appeal in ads stimulate consumption. If they didn't, the advertisers wouldn't be investing so much money in creating it.

king about the summer and your family. That was the point of the pictures and the hype. They were even nice enough to provide you with ideas for how to enjoy your gas usage!

More so than the language used, the pictures are what give such impressions. One picture depicts a couple smiling at each other in a playf

Some common words found in the essay are:
, Gas Company, SummerSaver Program, junk mail, save money, confined fine print, fine print, catch eye, enjoy gas, confined fine, piece junk mail, effects junk mail, emotional appeal ads, junk mail implies, hype prevalent, emotional appeal, piece junk, upper-middle class,
Approximate Word count = 1974
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)