REALITY CHECKS IN AGAIN

• Commercials, like the cinema, are arduous to analyse. They represent complex cultural productions, both societal and personal. Indeed, in most cases, one doubts whether even the advertiser really comes to grips with the total implications of his or her work. And self-examination is not for the poor adman...Escape can be a solution however. Remember the recent commercial for a French internet provider whose (main) selling proposition was a dumb blonde in a bikini on the beach
  
  
• Tongue in cheek this one, but illustrating well the obstacles and traps awaiting agency creatives : too subtle, too cinephile, too arty, they lose audience. Too gross, they... So they go mainstream, that's where the clients are. Hey, throw in a pretty girl for good measure. As Kristina Kockova remarked in a recent ad presentation at IEP, sex/reproduction and survival /escape are the two of the three most elemental aspects of human existence
  
  
• Still today, in post-feminist 2008, at car shows or photography exhibitions, you will see attractive (young !) females adorning car bonnets or performing dances for a mainly male public, see KK above for the why. This elemental side to Life resonates in much TV advertising where adults are concerned (see ads for perfume, cars, clothes, beauty products...)
  
  
• Advertisers must focus in their commercials, independently of other professional factors, such as the client brief, contracts, costs, focus groups, the competition, techniques, programming etc. on the following :

1. the message of the narrative (or non-narrative option) - (what to say)
   
   
2. the massage of the message (how to interest, to flatter, to persuade the audience)
   
   
3. the visible elements of the message (what to show)
   
   
4. the audible elements (what to turn up and when)
   
   
5. the non-visible elements (what to hide)
   
   
6. the non-audible elements (what to turn off or down)
   
   
7. the abstract notions (what to suggest e.g. social class, aggression, smartness, cool...)
   
   
8. the hidden message (what is not said, but suggested, implied, what may be taboo)
   

A note on problems of analysis

• In order to understand ‘animated’ or cinematic advertisements or videos, these must be passed through the eye of the analytical needle. And this process is far from simple.
  
  
• The difficulty is easy to understand, for one must put into thoughts or words, themselves either too fuzzy or too static, a technological process - film or video* - apprehended through the complex sense of sight, of information and peri-information within a given socio-economic and cultural context.
  
  
• For the analyst, moving film must therefore be ‘reduced’ in some way to static words. For make no mistake about it, the way in which we understand a moving-image, fictional clip or message cannot be compared to the way we understand a photograph, the mother medium. Critic Susan Sontag, in her book ‘On Photography’ (1977), wrote that « photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. ». And (…) functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand.»
  
  
• It is true that today, photography is making a comeback, even in clips and videos, for the power of the static image in a moving flux can be signficant, 'arresting' we might say. Remember the popularity of the direct-developing Polaroids...
  
  
• The dimension of 'time being displaced' and not 'time standing still' as with a photograph, is essential to a grasp of what TV, cinema and in some cases, web advertising are all about. Indeed, to arrive at the delicious inner fruit of the advertisement, one must penetrate the outer layer, the thick skin of ancient cultural response and heritage.

* video is a different medium, though the responses of viewers resemble those of film ads

Happy New Year to all !

REALITY CHECK

Basic Factoids :

• TV commercials are just that – commercial ; they know that we know that. This explains the multiple levels at which ads are pitched and the presence of humour to ‘defuse the unsaid’ or 'non-dit' (taboos, for example). An example was a funny Spanish ad for an optician, which showed a man in serious need of glasses happily cleaning his teeth in the morning with a cream for piles, instead of toothpaste
  
  
• But the medium via which commercials are transmitted is more often than not a commercial operation in itself, which explains, amongst other things, their persistent ubiquity

• The verbs ‘to watch’ and ‘ to see’ do not have the same meaning : one cannot knit or read in front of TV, otherwise it is just radio. Doing something visual while in front of TV would be like smoking marihuana without inhaling…and look where that led. TV commercials are so placed in the programming schedule as to reach either a specific TV niche audience (the youth slot for Star Academy on French TV, the male, armchair sportsman slot (Eurosport, Turbo etc.), or the vast general public around prime-time programming, such as sporting events, popular series or the news.

• TV commercials, just like society as a whole, function according to social class factors, based on socio-economic reality. The Mercedes commercial will not aim at buyers of basic Opels

• There is no love-hate relationship towards commercials - they are just time-fillers so that people can feed the cat or put the kids to bed. People in France tend to appreciate advertising whilst remaining rather mistrustful and critical of possible abuse

• Members of the general public do not all possess the same gift for understanding a visual message : the young are more au fait visually and referentially-speaking, whereas the older are more cultured, more literary, more 'paper'. In terms of the five senses, some of us are more auditory, others rather olfactory. The plump, gustatory.
  
  
• However, the young tend to manipulate the new media with greater speed and skill than their elders, since they possess the codes to these since birth. Indeed, the new media seem pertinent to the young, even, sometimes, exclusive of all else
  
  
• Certain cosmopolitan groups in society, generally the young, whose networks are more highly-developed, see videos of advertising on YouTube for example, as a source of entertainment, even art, to be appreciated and then shared with friends via the web
  
  
• Apart from pop-ups, Flash and banners, newer forms of participatory, interactive and viral marketing are taking over on the Internet (as in Claudia Droc's recent in-class presentation on Sony, Cadburys and others)

(to be continued)

MORON ADVERTISING

We now have several definitions of the phenomenon of advertising in all its philosophical, socio-economic and psychological dimensions. We know that advertising has been a significant part of our economy and society for many centuries. Most have accepted the globally useful role played by the advertising industry in the consumer society, despite certain drawbacks. Others feel more than reticent about high-growth consumption as such, preferring reasoned development or low-growth scenarios.

Be that as it may, since WWII and more particularly since the advent of the 1980s digital revolution coupled with the multiplication of media outlets, the resources and financial might of this informational tool have grown to such an extent that citizen, student and intellectual must now urgently examine where they stand today regarding the ugly face of the industry and its increasingly unacceptable practices throughout the capitalist world, in terms of ethics, ecology and culture.

While advertising remains a useful activity, surely people in the West can see the damage caused by the excessive volume and invasive practices of advertising, to the extent that it has come to resemble criminal practice, especially on the Internet. People's personal details are routinely hacked, stolen and sold to unscrupulous companies, while others robot-spam mail accounts by the million. Adware pop-ups and pop-unders proliferate on the web to such an extent that they will slow down or block all use of a computer. The web experience can indeed elicit a sobering reflexion on the role that advertising plays in our lives today and this cannot be an intelligent, citizen-friendly or even consumer-friendly role for the persuasion industry.

Again, huge billboards contaminate a countryside drive and destroy many town approaches. An unthinking Americanisation of minds has dragged architecture and town planning down to a new low in terms of urban architecture and street furniture. No one complains. Have the French, for example (note that this is written from France), taken leave of their senses and abandoned their superior taste ? The architectural uglification of many newer suburbs, outer town areas and especially major roadsides and motorways has become a national embarassment. It is no excuse to say that the situation in the USA or Australia, for example, is just as bad or worse.

Work and reflexion must be carried out on the surplus of volume and the increasingly dangerous ubiquity of advertising in our societies. As with the recent financial and banking crisis, there is a definite need for serious regulation of the industry by governments and in the near future, by international bodies. Otherwise, tomorrow will become a brave, new, moronic world...

At the moment however, we must examine the reason why advertising permeates to such an extent the collective unconscious throughout the 'developed' world. Aside from the obvious macro-historical, economic and ideological reasons which have been examined elsewhere, it seems urgent to understand why the micro-effects of the advertising message do in fact function. This aspect has been less examined.

In brief, advertising's power is derived from :

A. (pre-existent)

• human gregariousness (desire to communicate with others)
• human behaviour (egotism, ignorance, greed...)

B. (macro)

• historical, linguistic and cultural references (the national framework)
  
• accepted dominant ideology (at present, American, the global framework)
• capitalistic motivation (profit first)
  
• industrial clout (as lobby and economic locomotive)

C. (micro)

• exploitation of language, symbols and images to an end
  
• exploitation of basic human urges (survival, sex, community)
• exploitation of technology to hide/show messages
• high volume of dissemination (propaganda)
  
• lack of intelligent dissidence in society (conformism)

Can more be added to this list ? Let me know if so. More soon.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ADVERTISING ?

One might tend to think that this question is not worth addressing, for the answer seems so obvious.

Why, advertising is simply the commercials , billboards and print ads we hear and see every day. The messages sewn onto clothing and footware, the ads in magazines, the banners towed by planes at summer beaches, the ‘advertorials’ in magazines, the banners and pop-ups or unders on websites, the ads integrated into street furniture like bus-stops, public toilets, buses, or in the tube on the walls and in the trains, the free newspapers relying on advertising, the product names stamped industrially on cars, motorbikes, stereos and TV sets, the ‘free’ gifts distributed at fairs or in the street, the samples in packets, the coupons in supermarkets, the sponsorship of yacht races, cricket matches or art exhibitions, the station identification on radio and TV, the fliers distributed at traffic lights, the junk mail in our letter-boxes and our e-mails, the product placement in movies (007 movies especially), the testimonials of stars, the T-shirts, the buttons, baseball caps, bumper-stickers, complimentary watches or umbrellas, journalists’ plugs on talk-shows or even during news bulletins, comic-strip references, cinema ads which have replaced the second feature, free game tickets – you name it, we in the West are on the receiving end of a humongous mass of promotional, sales and marketing gunk much more frequently and in more places than one can imagine ! What about supermarket trollies ? Been there. Inside toilets ? Done that. Our visible skin ? Been tried in Britain and the U.S.A on students. In kids’ schoolbooks ? Old hat already in the States. So far, only sleep, which represents approximately 30% of our lives, has escaped the clutches of advertisers, doubtless causing much counting of sheep and frustration for marketing men, poor things. However, they might just find a solution in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’…why not just make it cool to somatose us all ? Here are a few interesting quotes from Huxley’s 1932 satirical work (soma= some sort of mescalin) :

• ‘I wish I had my soma !’ (Lenina, a character) ‘The holiday it gave was perfect…greedily she clamoured for even larger, ever more frequent doses.'
  
  
• 'Every soma holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity.’ ‘What you need is a gramme of soma.'
  
  
• 'Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today ‘ (Lenina)
  
  
• ‘Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry…’
  
  
• ‘ I love new clothes, I love new clothes, I love…’ ; ‘Ending is better than mending.’
  
  
• ‘In [Orwell’s] ‘1984’, the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain ; in ‘Brave New World’ by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.’ (soma tablets, legalizing of sexual freedom, orgies, abolition of the family). (A. Huxley’s later work, ‘Brave New World Revisited’, 1958)

More coming soon.