Critical Reasoning

To suit the needs of corporate clients, advertising agencies have successfully modified a strategy originally developed for political campaigns. This strategy aims to provide clients with free publicity and air time by designing an advertising campaign that is controversial, thus drawing prime-time media coverage and evoking public comment by officials.

The Statements above, if true, most seriously undermine which one of the following assertions?

(A) The usefulness of an advertising campaign is based solely on the degree to which the campaign's advertisements persuade their audiences.
(B) Only a small percentage of eligible voters admit to being influenced by advertising campaigns in deciding how to vote.
(C) Campaign managers have transformed political campaigns by making increasing use of strategies borrowed from corporate advertising campaigns.
(D) Corporations are typically more concerned with maintaining public recognition of the corporate name than with enhancing goodwill toward the corporation.
(E) Advertising agencies that specialize in campaigns for corporate clients are not usually chosen for political campaigns

Opinion: negitive advertisement to attract talk in public
Political parties do employ this often... controversial adv.

came down to two options D/A/C in 3.02minutes and D > C > A for me

IMO D

IMO: A
Thanks

I wavered between A and B.

Ultimately, I would choose A.

No real information on how voters were influenced by similar campaigns --> B eliminated.

C is the opposite of what is happening according to the statements --> C eliminated.

If corporations were concerned less with goodwill than with maintaining public recognition, then they should have no problem with controversial ad campaigns. Option D is not undermined at all by the statements because it says that corporations want to maintain their name rather than earn goodwill. Stirring up controversy is likely to do just that --> D eliminated.

I was stuck between E and A. The fact that ad agencies are able to adapt strategies between political and corporate campaigns suggests that there is some overlap between those who run corporate campaigns and those who run political campaigns. Ultimately I decided that there wasn't enough information to seriously undermine the premise that agencies specializing in corporate campaigns aren't usually chosen for political ones. There is just too much uncertainty in the wording - "not usually chosen" does not mean never, and so I could not conclude that this statement was incorrect or seriously undermined --> E eliminated.

This leaves A. The phrase "successfully modified" implies that the corporate campaigns were a success. This would mean that the strategy of stirring up controversy and building a name for the corporation worked, and that the campaign was useful based on publicity rather than on persuading audiences. I think that is enough evidence to seriously undermine the statement because of the phrasing "solely based on...". Clearly there are other ways in which ad campaigns can be useful.

A appears to be the best answer.

Interesting question. It's like a "reverse" weakener. We have to select the answer choice that the argument works against.

We know from the passage that ad agencies for corporate clients purposely make their ads controversial in order to draw more attention. So, the success of an ad campaign will have to do with how many people it draws not just the degree to which the ads persuade the audiences..choice [spoiler](A)[/spoiler] is correct.

(C) and (E) are opposite of what we want (at Kaplan we call these 180s and they are common wrong answer types in stn/wkn questions). For example, in (E), if we were to switch around "corporate clients" with "political campaigns" then it would be correct.

Since the argument was all about what corporate clients are doing, (B) is outside the scope as it deals only with political clients and voters. Likewise, "goodwill" in (D) is also outside the scope.