During the Applied Linguistics Symposium, I followed a colloquium, or ‘scientific discussion,’ by researchers from Turku University dealing with advertising rhetoric. In his opening presentation, Ville Virsu illustrated how important the word “authentic” is in commercials. Authenticity is expressed by telling about raw materials, manufacture, history, birth place and the product’s “naturalness”. Paradoxically, authenticity is a selling point for travel agencies, which are focused on mass tourism. Laura Puromies has examined sauna stoves: in the 1950s, marketers emphasized internationality; in the 1960s, technology; in the 70s, relaxation; in the 80s, humor; in the 90s, atmosphere; and around 2000… authenticity. Maiju Kannisto said in her presentation that the MTV3 channel sells programs to advertisers with adjectives like new, efficient, and affordable; new can refer to recent, innovative or inexperienced. Two presentations examined social media as an advertising channel: Maria Eronen-Valli introduced Starbucks’ way of crowdsourcing, and Lotta Lehti analyzed Kesko’s attempted Twitter campaign, in which nearly all the contributions were from Kesko’s own staff. The research project is still in its early stages, but it’s already made explicit the rhetoric and the background mechanisms of advertising.