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Arthur Asa Berger
Advertising
1
3000 words 14 pages.
Advertising is an integral part of every advanced country’s economy
and culture, but as statistics suggest, advertising plays an unusually important
role in the United States. Robert Coen, who is probably the leading authority
on advertising expenditures, estimates that in 2007 world-wide expenditures
for advertising were approximately 630 billion dollars. That same year
expenditures for advertising in the United States were about 280 billion
dollars. Subtracting the amount of money spent on advertising in the United
States from the world-wide expenditures you arrive at a figure of about 350
billion dollars spent for all advertising outside of the United States.
The table below shows the relationship between advertising
expenditures in the United States and other countries in 2007. There are
approximately 6.6 billion people in the world. When you subtract the
population of the United States, 300 million people, from this figure, you get
6.3 billion people outside of the United States who are exposed to 350 billion
dollars worth of advertising.
United States
Rest of World
Population
300 million
6.3 billion
Advertising
280 billion
350 billion
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Advertising
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These figures reflect the fact that people in the United States are exposed to
about twenty times as much advertising as people in other countries. A
considerable percentage of our exposure to advertising takes the form of
television commercials. A typical 30 minute television show in the United
States has seven minutes of commercials. Since the average person in the
United States watches four hours of television each day, that means they
watch close to an hour of commercials every day or around 365 hours of
commercials a year. To understand the significance of this figure, consider
that a typical course in a university involves 40 classroom hours. So when
Americans watch commercial television, their yearly “instruction” from
commercials is equivalent to taking nine university courses.
Statistics indicate that Americans spend the equivalent of nine years
of their life watching television and see two million commercials by the time
they reach 65 years of age. The average child in America sees 20,000
television commercials in a typical year. What these figures reveal is that
television viewers in the United States watch an enormous number of
television commercials. To these figures on television advertising we must
add other forms of advertising such as radio commercials, advertisements in
print media such as newspapers and magazines, billboards, advertisements on
the Internet, on cell phones, logos on T-shirts, labels on grocery products,
signs on storefronts, and advertisements of one kind or another on just about
any flat surface that is available.
Citizens of other countries don’t, as a rule, watch as much television
as people in the United States and aren’t exposed to as many commercials. In
many countries, there are also limits on the amount of time that can be
devoted to commercials.
Arthur Asa Berger
Advertising
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In 2008, American media usage, as reported by the United States
Census Bureau, reveals the following figures (projected):
Medium
Hours Per Year
Television (broadcast and cable)
1704
Radio
768
Newspapers
183
Internet
141
Out of Home Media
117
Consumer Magazines
114
Consumer Books
108
Video Games
90
Home Video
66
Total
3559
These statistics on media use, most of which carry advertising, explain why
Americans have an incredible amount of product knowledge—information
about the price and features of various products--even though many of them
may not know very much about history, literature, the arts and similar topics.
That is because they spend a great deal of their leisure time watching
television and being exposed to advertising, which, whatever else it may be, is
a form of persuasion.
The root of the word “advertising” is “advertere,” which means “to
turn ones attention toward.” Advertising can be defined as mass-mediated
communication that attempts to persuade people to purchase goods and
services sold by the company or entity paying for the advertising. Advertising
may inform us and it may entertain us, but its primary mission is to attract our
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Advertising
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attention, stimulate our desire for whatever is being advertised and finally,
and most importantly, to generate action—that is, to sell something to us.
Advertising agencies are media businesses that are hired by
companies with products and services they wish to sell. There are now huge
multi-agency advertising conglomerates that dominate the industry. The
typical agency is very bureaucratic, with many levels of administrators as well
as secretaries, accountants, time buyers, technical experts, marketing
departments, account executives, and—most importantly--creative
departments. It is the art directors and copy writers in the creative
departments of agencies who actually make the advertisements.
The advertising industry is very competitive and one in which there is
a great deal of pressure and little job security, because when agencies lose
large major accounts, they have to fire large numbers of people. The pay for
entry level people in agencies is generally low, while those with years of
experience are generally paid quite well. It is not unusual for creative
directors in large agencies to earn salaries of several hundred thousand dollars
a year plus bonuses and stock options.
Advertising uses a number of different techniques to persuade
consumers to purchase products and often exploits sexuality, showing images
of scantily clothed women, generally voluptuous with beautiful features, when
selling products that men and women typically purchase. The “sexploitation”
of women in advertising is a matter that many feminist critics have dealt with,
and so far with little success. Many advertisements, especially in glossy style
magazines, still exploit women’s bodies. Now advertisers exploit men as
well, in selling clothes, fragrances, and other lifestyle products. Some of
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Advertising
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advertisements for men’s fragrances and other male or unisex products have a
pronounced homo-erotic significance.
There are a variety of rhetorical techniques used by advertisers to
persuade viewers of commercials to purchase products. Some commercials
scare people while others are humorous and amuse them. Advertisers were
afraid of using humor for many years, because they thought that humor
somehow devalued their products. In recent years, however, advertisers been
more positive about humor because they believe humorous ads make people
feel good and those good feelings have a halo effect that can be used by
companies to sell their products and services.
Some advertisements use heroes, authority figures, and celebrities,
hoping to use their status and fame to convince people to consume things. A
French literary theorist, René Girard, argues that what we desire often imitates
the desire of those we admire. In his book, A Theater of Envy: William
Shakespeare, Girard claims that what he calls “mimetic desire” explains not
only the behavior of characters in Shakespeare’s plays but also consumer
behavior. In effect, Girard suggests, people purchase things to imitate the
desire of others, especially movie stars, celebrities and sports heroes they
admire.
Some advertisements use rhetorical techniques such as contrast and
comparison or list positive attributes of products, and base their arguments for
purchasing these products on logic and rationality. Some advertising
promises success and the good life, holding out the likelihood of making a
great deal of money and being able to afford to buy whatever one wants.
Advertisements for products such as soft drinks and hamburgers are often
based upon the notion of rewarding oneself (“You deserve a break today,”
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Advertising
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from McDonald’s) or of being part of a community of young and attractive
people (“We are the world,” for Coca-Cola.).
And some commercials are confusing postmodern ones that don’t
seem to make sense. As Jack Solomon writes in his book Signs of Our
Times: The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life, “In Calvin Klein’s postmodern
campaign for Obsession perfume, it’s virtually impossible to tell just what is
going on. A tormented woman seems to be torn between a young boy and an
older man—or does the young boy represent a flashback to the older man’s
youth?” A number of postmodern advertisements puzzle us in an attempt to
get us to think about and remember the product being advertised.
We can look upon television commercials, the most powerful form of
advertising, as mini-dramas—sometimes only lasting fifteen seconds long, but
generally thirty seconds and sometimes a minute or more in length. The cost
of a typical 30-second commercial made by an advertising agency is now
around $400,000. A 30-second “Got Milk” commercial made a few years ago
cost $363,000. These figures were provided by an executive in the
advertising agency that made the commercials.
$281,000
Television Production
$45,000
Television Editing and Post-Production
$6,000
Music
$1,000
Sound Effects, Narration
$11,000
Talent Fees (Actors, Extras, Voice-Overs)
$1,000
Legal Clearances
$1,000
Shipping
$16,000
Agency Travel, Casting, Callbacks, etc.
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Advertising
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Most 30-second commercials actually cost more than this to produce. This
figure doesn’t cover the time purchased on networks and local television
stations to broadcast commercials, which can amount to many millions of
dollars.
According to Norbert Wiley, a sociologist from the University of
Illinois, one of the aims of advertising is to achieve “a willing suspension of
disbelief” in people. This phrase comes from the nineteenth century literary
critic and writer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was describing what happens
when people see dramas. They identify with the characters in the drama and
willingly suspend their disbelief in the artificial nature of what they are
observing. Wiley’s argument is that “easing customers into an aesthetic
suspension of disbelief makes it more possible to manipulate them into buying
something.” (“Suspension of Disbelief as a Bridge between Media and
Consumption,” unpublished paper, 1998, p.8.) Advertisers all face the
problem of clutter and of people’s resistance to being manipulated or being
told to do something; the notion that advertising helps generate the suspension
of disbelief, or of resistance to being sold products, helps us understand better
how advertising works.
This suspension of disbelief is often aided by the aesthetic qualities of
advertisements. The actors and actresses who are shown in commercials
often use extreme facial expressions and body language as they gaze at us,
pleading with us to purchase this or that brand of hamburger, medicine, soap
powder, or whatever it is they are selling. Through the use of techniques and
special effects such as dissolves, fadeouts, quick cutting, sound effects, music,
and camera movements such as extreme close ups, the creators of
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Advertising
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commercials are often able to generate powerful emotional responses in
viewers.
In his book, Spots: The Popular Art of Television Commercials,
Bruce Kurtz, describes “Quick Cuts,” a television commercial created by Dan
Nichols for McDonald’s that had “65 different scenes in 60 seconds.”
(1977:94). One seven-second segment of this commercial had fourteen
different scenes and what is interesting, Kurtz adds, is that viewers were able
to perceive all of these scenes, even if they appeared faster than he could
count them when he first saw the commercial.
What this quick cutting does, Kurtz explains is generate a sense of
excitement in viewers. He writes, “Because of the sense of urgency and of
presentness which the spots communicate, the viewer actually experiences the
exciting lifestyle Nichols depicts rather than passively observing events which
occur to someone else.” What Nichols does with this quick-cutting is to
create feelings of excitement and pleasure in viewers of the commercial,
which become connected in their minds with eating at McDonald’s. These
commercials portray an appealing lifestyle that is associated with McDonald’s
restaurants, which leads viewers to eat at McDonald’s to obtain the
gratifications they desire.
Technically speaking, the matter of associating excitement and
pleasure with McDonald’s is a rhetorical device known as metonymy.
Metonymy and metaphor are two of the main rhetorical devices used in
advertising. Metonymy works by association and metaphor works by
analogy. Both can be expressed pictorially as well as verbally. For example,
using a Rolls Royce automobile in a commercial for mustard uses the link in
Arthur Asa Berger
Advertising
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our minds of this automobile with wealth and perhaps with attributes such as
sophistication and good taste.
Metaphor is a device that uses analogies and forms of the verb “to
be.” Thus an advertisement for Fidji perfume shows a fuzzy photograph of a
nude woman and has the following metaphor for copy “Woman is an island.”
We must realize that metaphors have logical implications so accepting the
notion that “woman is an island” leads to certain attitudes towards women.
Metaphor and metonymy are very efficient because they take advantage of
information that viewers of the advertisements already have in their minds.
Television commercials and other forms of advertising can have
powerful effects upon individuals and large numbers of people. Corporations
do not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns unless
they are effective in the long run and lead to increased sales. Advertising
agencies often say they help “grow” companies. What this means is that they
help increase sales of products and services sold by these companies. When
advertising campaigns fail, the companies fire the advertising agency
responsible for the campaign hires a different agency.
Although many people consider advertising to be little more than a
nuisance and do what they can to avoid television commercials and other
forms of advertising, the fact is that it is one of the most important institutions
in modern societies. Critics of advertising argue that it fosters materialism
and privatism, by directing our attention away from socially beneficial public
investments to private consumption. Marxist critics maintain that if the
manifest function of advertising is to sell goods, the latent function is to
justify and support the capitalist political system that brings all these goods to
people. Our lust for goods is, they argue, a function of the alienation that
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Advertising
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affects everyone in bourgeois capitalist societies and advertising is the most
important engine that helps generate that lust.
Ethicists criticize advertising for manipulating people and for
advertising some products—such as cigarettes, when cigarette advertising was
allowed—that are harmful and dangerous. Advertisers often used celebrities
to sell cigarettes, providing role models for young people to imitate. Ethicists
ask whether people who work in advertising agencies should use their skills
and abilities to sell harmful and, in the case of cigarette advertising
carcinogenic products. Ethicists argue that not only is it unethical to make
advertisements for such products, but asking writers and artists to do so
creates personal ethical dilemmas for them.
Given the amount of binge drinking in America, there is a
considerable amount of controversy about beer advertisements. They are
often aimed at teenagers and may play a role in generating this serious social
problem. There are also many criticisms of advertisements for food products
and fast foods directed at young children. While the advertising industry is
not directly responsible for the large numbers of obese children and adults in
America and other countries as well, the advertisements for these products
must be implicated in the growth of this medical epidemic.
There is probably no area where advertising is more important than in
politics in the United States. During American political campaigns,
politicians and interest groups collectively spend hundreds of millions of
dollars on advertising, mostly on television commercials. Advertising, by
playing an important role in political campaigns, helps shape our political
order.
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Advertising
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Ironically, when advertising agencies testify before Congressional
committees, they often argue that they cannot shape human behavior and have
a relatively minor role in the decision-making of consumers. But when they
talk with companies who wish to hire them, the advertising agencies claim
that they can sell large numbers of people just about anything. It may be true
that advertising agencies cannot convince this or that individual to purchase a
particular product, but collectively, if we look at the effects of advertising, we
can see that these agencies are able to have a considerable impact on people.
There are numerous scholarly journals, web sites, and hundreds of books on
the social and cultural impact of advertising. Google lists 512,000,000 sites
under “advertising” and Amazon.com has 250,000 books on the subject.
On the positive side, countries with well developed advertising tend
to be dynamic, democratic, and economically successful. So it may be that
advertising, for better and for worse, is the price we play for our modern
lifestyles. Advertising also has been used for many pro-social purposes, such
as attacking racism and anti-Semitism, so it can be a powerful force for good.
Critics of advertising often suggest that something should be done to
regulate it in various ways. They argue, for example, that government should
prevent young children, who are gullible and easily manipulated, from being
exposed to advertising on their television programs and advertising should be
prevented from selling certain kinds of products, such as cigarettes and
prescription drugs, if the consequences of doing so are harmful. Many people
are ambivalent about advertising, admiring its aesthetic qualities and yet
feeling negative about its intrusive nature. Advertising remains a subject of
considerable controversy and an industry that plays a significant role—for
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Advertising
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better or worse—in shaping the economies, the cultures, the political order,
and the lifestyles of people everywhere.
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Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the
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New York: Free Press.
Berger, Arthur Asa. 2007.
Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American
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Advertising
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Advertising
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