- 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 :
- the message of the narrative (or non-narrative option) - (what to say)
- the massage of the message (how to interest, to flatter, to persuade the audience)
- the visible elements of the message (what to show)
- the audible elements (what to turn up and when)
- the non-visible elements (what to hide)
- the non-audible elements (what to turn off or down)
- the abstract notions (what to suggest e.g. social class, aggression, smartness, cool...)
- 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 !
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