ADS ON THE COUCH

On analysing commercials - Part 2

• As we said earlier, the chronos of the commercial (or the video) on the television screen and its referential, essentially narrative nature, render more complex the analytical process
  
  
• Another difficulty derives from the fact that in the past, cultures and civilisations were all largely oral in their communicational tradition. Until Gutenberg and the printing press in 15^th century Europe, only the clergy tended to be literate, with the result that the man in the cobbled street or on the sand dune had to rely on his memory and his oral skills to understand his environment and make a living within it
  
  
• Man subsequently became literate and learned to communicate via the written word, but the word does present certain limitations, for indeed many words would be necessary to properly explain all the subtle implications of many a 30-second commercial, the reason lying in the referential nature of the visual film medium. See Jean-Luc Godard's fragmenting battle with the narrative here. Of course, even more complex forms of communication exist...
  
  
• The 'proof' of communicational complexity : watch closely a conversation between two friends and notice the shades of meaning, of intonation, of body language, of facial expression, of linguistic options etc. inherent in human interaction. Now that is subtle stuff, for humans are complex, walking, talking A-V machines !
  
  
• If one were to FILM this above interaction, one would arrive at something approaching real video (remember 'The Blair Witch Project' ?), cinema and TV, the thing would then become 'analysable' as a media object
  
  
• The narrative then is the original form of oral communication of information, from the limited grunts of the cavemen to our newsreaders of 2009 on French TV. The narrative :
  
  - subjectivises
  - implicates
  - informs
  - describes
  - invents

• In times past, the narrative may have been propaganda or information on the state of affairs of the land. It may have been warnings, gossip, lies or commerce. The purpose was to impart relevant information to what became a network of villagers or nomads who disseminated the (sometimes oriented) information to each other in a subjective way, according to the interpretation of the listener and the emphasis or aim of the teller. Nowadays, guess who is the teller...
  
  
• One may object that recent social networking sites on Internet 2.0 now constitute a counter-weight to the 'industrial' power of mass communication and the mass media, so that the citi-not-very-zen can weigh on the form or content of information on these outlets.
  
  
• Influence, possibly, but, one fears, for a limited period of time, only so long as the citizen remains ahead in the ideas game. His two main advantages over the journalist or advertiser on the interactive web being his reactivity and and his creativity
  
  
• Multinationals and big media (Volvo, Ford, CNN, Yahoo, Le Monde...) are now busy exploiting the 'You-Tube syndrome' and viral marketing in order to tap for their ends the reactivity and creativity of committed internauts, not to mention their avidity...
  
  
• Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane' will help us recall that the media, in the USA of the 1940s, were already a source of real political power and influence. Think also Edward Bernays, Rupert Murdoch, Berlusconi, Bouygues...
  
  
• Consolidation and convergence in the above groups (remember the recent saga of 'The Wall St. Journal' ?) are the enemies of citizen initiatives, but citizens and political groups have begun to create wide, if loose, networks which may be effective in at times exerting pressure on the plans of the powerful

Fiction and narrative

• So, not only does the commercial insert itself in the general narrative tradition of the oral tale (I am telling you, I am showing you), it also uses the referential mode to emphasise and to re-inforce its message. For the advertiser knows that he is working in the realm of fiction, so his problem is to convince the viewer to re-act in real terms (to buy) to the injunction of his message, where his message is a ‘tale’ of fiction known to the viewer
  
  
• The advertiser knows that the the viewer knows that his message is fictional, which should constitute a disadvantage for him, except that that he also knows that the viewer accepts this state of affairs, to enter into what literary critics would call a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ towards the false tale being spun. The viewer is willing to listen, hoping the tale will be believable
  
  
• In other words, as with movies, the advertiser can use an actress to play the part of a housewife complaining about her washing powder and another to act out the role of the authoritative laboratory expert explaining why his or her brand is better (see 1950s G.B. ads here)
  
  
• The viewer knows that the manufacturer and the advertiser have hired the actor to repeat his or her lines on the box, but in a world swamped by advertising messages, it seems likely that the Western viewer will exhibit a certain reticence to 90% of these messages
  
  
• The advertiser is saying in effect in his commercial : "Pretend to believe me, even if this is all fake" !
  
  
• In other cases, of course, a significant slice of the TV-viewing 15-30 age group will ostensibly enjoy commercials for fun (You-tube trend), without believing them, indeed, mocking the poor taste or weak arguments of the adverts on show
  
  
• Ostensibly, perhaps, but they will buy the product in the end (the 'Apple' or 'I have a Sony Vaio' syndrome' ?) if only to appear cool or fashionable
  
  
• Although the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (WSD) functions equally at the cinema - thanks to Monty Python, we know those clopping horses’ hooves are done with coconut shells - as in literature before it, the situation is a little different from TV
  
  
• Better even, for when the cinema audience sees ads in a cinema theatre, he has already bought his ticket for the product (an audio-visual production), whereas the TV viewer in his home is exposed to a (sometimes random, in terms of focus) barrage of ads, the WSD functioning thus differently
  
  
• In France, much of the advertising on public stations has just been suppressed by the Sarkozy government (cf. Britain's BBC on this). Let us then suspend our suspension of disbelief !
  A suivre donc.