IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card # 205
Describe an advertisement which you found very persuasive.
You should say:
- what product or service it was advertising
- when you watched it
- where you watched it
and explain why you think this advertisement was very persuasive.
[You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make some notes to help you if you wish.]
Model Answer:
Nice and persuasive advertisements are rather few and far between, but I have seen some of them, and today I would like to discuss one here.
I saw this advertisement at the house of my younger sister about a year ago. I was visiting her place on the eve of “Mother’s Day”. I didn’t really have much to do at her house except accompany her two very naughty “children”, whom I happen to love so dearly, watching Disney cartoons. I tried to convince them to let me watch some other TV channels that showed other programmes like news and sports, but my requests fell on “deaf ears” as if I didn’t at all exist to them!
So, I also started to watch a cartoon with them and pretended I was also enjoying them. Then suddenly, a “textual” advertisement was displayed on the TV screen – a “textual” advertisement as in a series of texts was being displayed, one after another, that said, “If you are reading this textual message on your TV, you are probably watching too many cartoons for long hours and you haven’t probably told your mother how much you love her”. Apparently, it was an advertising campaign that was aired to signify Mother’s Day, and when the advertisement was over, I noticed that my dear nephew and niece were staring at each other as if they were trying to make sense of what they had just seen on TV. Little later, they both stopped watching TV and became serious about their behaviour.
Needless to say, it was one of the very few persuasive advertisements I have ever seen, mainly because it tried to bring out the natural loving bond between a mother and her children in a very simplistic manner, and it worked like a magic as the children stopped watching cartoon until they told their mother how much they loved her! It was very persuasive also because it had no flashy image, no musical sound, and no motion picture; rather all it had was only some “simple words”–words that could convince two children to watch their favourite TV shows!