IELTS Speaking Part 3: Advertising
7 Part 3 discussion questions on advertising, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
What are the advantages of advertising?
Its most defensible function is simply information, telling people something exists and letting them weigh up their options. If a new clinic opens in your district or a phone launches with a battery that lasts two days, you only find out because somebody paid to tell you, and markets where buyers know their options tend to be more competitive and considerably cheaper. Without advertising the established name wins by default and newcomers can't get a hearing at all. The other advantage, which people notice far less, is that advertising funds an enormous amount of what we use for free. Search engines, social platforms, most news websites and free television are bankrolled by advertisers rather than subscribers, and although that model has real drawbacks, it does mean access doesn't hinge on income. Public health campaigns about smoking or seat belts run on exactly the same machinery.
Do you think the influence of advertising is good?
It depends entirely on what's being sold and to whom, so I'd say the influence is genuinely mixed. At its best, advertising informs a decision and even changes behaviour for the better, since the campaigns that made drink-driving socially unacceptable, or that persuaded people to get screened for cancer, deployed the same techniques as any commercial and saved lives in the process. Nobody objects to that brand of persuasion. What I do object to is advertising that works by manufacturing a problem so it can sell you the cure. A great deal of the beauty and fashion industry thrives on making people, especially teenage girls, dissatisfied with how they look, and advertising aimed at young children who can't yet recognise persuasion at all strikes me as indefensible. The technique itself is neutral; the intention behind it very often isn't. So my view hinges far less on advertising itself than on who's being persuaded of what.
Many advertisers like to use sports stars' endorsements. What are the reasons?
The core reason is that an athlete lends a product qualities the company could never credibly claim about itself. Elite sport is visibly about discipline, endurance and winning, so when a sprinter wears a particular shoe, the audience transfers those associations onto the object without anybody having to make an argument, and that's a shortcut straight past our scepticism towards advertising. A brand effectively buys a personality it would otherwise take decades to build from scratch. The second reason is reach combined with genuine emotional attachment. Major tournaments deliver audiences no ordinary campaign could ever buy, and fans don't feel remotely neutral about their team, having celebrated and suffered alongside these people for years. Advertising to somebody who already adores the face on the screen works far better than advertising to a total stranger, which is why the fees, however absurd they look, usually pay for themselves.
Which one is more effective, newspaper advertising or online advertising?
For most advertisers online wins outright, and the decisive reason is measurement. A newspaper can tell you roughly how many copies it sold, whereas an online campaign reveals who clicked, what they did next and precisely how much each sale cost, so a budget can be corrected within hours rather than after the season has already ended. Add precise targeting by city, age group or interest, and a small business can advertise sensibly on a budget that wouldn't stretch to a single newspaper page. Newspapers do retain one genuine advantage, which is credibility and a particular calibre of reader. An advertisement printed beside serious journalism inherits some of that authority, and it reaches older, wealthier readers who ignore online ads completely or block them outright. For a local pharmacy or a law firm targeting exactly that group, print can still outperform a banner ad. In other words, the medium matters far less than knowing precisely who you're trying to reach.
What do you think of online advertising?
I'm genuinely impressed by how well it can work when it's handled with any restraint at all. Because it's targeted, the advertising you encounter is often relevant, and I've discovered tools, courses and small local businesses I'd never have stumbled across otherwise, while for a company with a modest budget it's the only affordable way to reach exactly the right few thousand people. Compared with shouting at everybody indiscriminately, that's an improvement for both sides. My reservation concerns the price we pay for that precision. The targeting only works because an extraordinary amount of personal behaviour is tracked and traded, usually without anybody meaningfully consenting to it, and the industry has pushed volume so aggressively that pages are now buried under pop-ups and autoplaying video. That's why half the people I know run an ad blocker, which ultimately damages the advertisers themselves. Used sparingly it's the best advertising we've ever had, and used greedily it's the most irritating.
What do you think of celebrity endorsement?
Purely as a commercial tactic it's clearly effective, and I understand perfectly well why companies keep paying for it. A familiar face cuts through the noise in about half a second and borrows trust that a new brand hasn't yet earned, so a product with a well-liked actor attached starts several steps ahead of an identical one without. Attention is the scarce resource now, and celebrities offer a reliable way of buying it. Ethically, though, I'm distinctly uneasy about the whole arrangement, for a fairly simple reason. The audience is being invited to believe somebody genuinely uses and rates a product when in fact they've been paid handsomely to say so, and that's most troubling when it involves supplements, financial products or gambling aimed at very young followers. It also backfires spectacularly, because the moment that person is caught up in a scandal, the brand is dragged in with them. So it works, and I still wish companies leaned on it rather less than they do.
What factors should be taken into account while making advertisements?
Everything really starts with knowing precisely who you're addressing and where they'll encounter the message. The same pitch needs an entirely different treatment on a billboard glimpsed at fifty kilometres an hour than in a six-second clip before a video, and a campaign aimed at pensioners belongs somewhere quite different from one aimed at students. Most of the failed advertising I've seen stumbled at that stage rather than in the creative execution. The second consideration is honesty, including cultural sensitivity, because the damage from getting it wrong now travels faster than the campaign itself ever could. Exaggerated claims invite regulators and a wave of online ridicule, and an image or joke that lands perfectly well in one country can prove genuinely offensive in another. A campaign that's memorable for the wrong reasons costs far more than one nobody noticed. Getting the audience and the honesty right matters far more than how clever the concept looks on paper.
Reading a model answer is not the same as saying one. The sample above shows what a strong Part 3 answer sounds like. What it cannot tell you is how yours sounds — whether you hesitate, repeat the question back, or run out of things to say at forty seconds.
You can record an answer to this exact question and get it marked on fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and pronunciation — the same four criteria the examiner uses.
Common questions
How is Part 3 different from Part 1?
Part 1 is about you; Part 3 is about people in general. The questions move to society, causes and consequences, and the answers are expected to be longer and more developed — an opinion plus a reason plus an example, rather than two sentences.
What if I have no opinion on the question?
You are not marked on the opinion, so pick one and support it. Saying you have never thought about it and stopping there leaves the examiner nothing to assess.
How long does Part 3 last?
Four to five minutes. The topics develop out of your Part 2 card, so the discussion is usually connected to what you just described.
Model answers written and reviewed by The English All-in-One IELTS team. They are teaching models showing what each band looks like, not real candidate scripts.