Commercials and Culture

This was one of the headlines for the New York Post from just before the Super Bowl: "More people watch Super Bowl for ads than game." According to a Nielson survey, 51% of people were planning to tune into the game so that they could see what was for sale. Ironically, it turns out that the ad getting the most buzz after the game was not one created for the $4 million, 30 second time slots. Instead, the most effective ad was this oreo cookie tweet that was thought up during the half hour blackout at the start of the third quarter.

Oreo's "war room" came up with the design and the concept in about ten minutes in an example of what is called "real time marketing." Because this is a course about culture and multi-modal composition, this seemed to me to be a perfect way to think of the changing landscape of new media that Michael Wesch examined in his video. Oreo manages to expand the traditional category of 'Super Bowl Ad' and uses a new media (Twitter) to broadcast a culturally and commercially powerful message. And they save four million dollars.

Now, as you saw from Randy Nichols' examples in this week's videos, the most effective commercials function by tapping into the culture that they are meant to reach or persuade. In other words, they are meant to address a particular kairos. This strategy has, of course, been going on for some time, which is in part the reason that I assigned Roland Barthes' essay on "Soap-Powders and Detergents." Barthes does a magnificent job of analyzing the rhetoric used to sell products such Lux, Persil, and Omo, all of which are used for similar purposes but with differing effects. Hopefully, you noticed the way that Barthes uncovers the psycho-analytical backing for the language employed to sell each product: chlorinated fluids "kill" and soap powders "separate" or "liberate," while the magic of Omo lies in its imagined depth and the luxurious nature of its foam. Barthes point is that each of these rhetorical strategies adapts to a particular culture or way of thinking. A tough guy in his garage would never use the luxurious foam of Ivory soap to wash the oil and grease from his hands; he needs something harsher, something stronger, like Ajax, named after an ancient Greek warrior. Of course the trick, which Barthes notes at the end of the essay, is that all of these 'types' of soap are made by the same company--"the Anglo-Dutch trust Unilever"--as so they are perfectly happy if you buy multiple soaps for multiple purposes.

This characteristic use of psychology to sway culture through advertisement originates earlier than Barthes and can be traced, appropriately enough, to Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1892 and incorporated his famous uncle's ideas on human psychology to revolutionize the advertising industry. In order to sell a product, Bernays didn't only try to reach a particular culture or segment of the population; instead he used psychology to change the culture itself. For example, when he wanted to push bacon (Was there ever a time when bacon needed a push? It seems to me that it sells itself!), he sold the idea of a hearty breakfast that we still see today in cereal commercials, which are "part of a complete breakfast."* This change became the standard way of doing things, to the point that the most famous advertisements changed the way their target cultures began to think about the world. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Santa Claus. If I ask you to imagine Santa Claus, you'll probably think of someone who looks like this:

What you may not know, however, is that this particular representation of Santa Claus was invented by a ad campaign for Coca-Cola in the 1930's. Before Coca-Cola, Santa was sometimes represented as thin or wearing a green coat rather than a red one, but the Coke campaign solidified the image of St. Nick as rotund and always in red.

*For more on Edward Bernays, check out the 2002 mini-series The Century of the Self directed by Adam Curtis.

After we moved to South Carolina, my wife and I noticed one subtle, but interesting change in a particular commercial that is linked, I think to the concept of kairos. Below is a commercial for a Citi credit card that plays fairly regularly in California:

Once we came to Clemson, however, my wife was somewhat offended by a small alteration that they made in the version that plays here. See if you can spot it.

She was unhappy that Citi would go through the trouble to remove and replace the woman's independent input regarding the couple's engagement. Instead of the intimation that their engagement was a joint decision--"we talked about getting a diamond" (which she refuses)--the couple are simply planning a vacation. What is it about the kairos that made Citi think this change was necessary? Perhaps it is taboo or considered inappropriate in the South for a woman to be involved in the planning of an engagement. Perhaps this would seem ungentlemanly, like not asking her father for her hand in marriage. If you have any theories, I'd love to hear them.

Returning to the ad mecca that is the Super Bowl, however, I wanted to share with you what I think is one of the most powerful and effective commercials of the past decade, Super Bowl or no. Produced by Google, this ad was broadcast in 2010, but I think it fits each of your situations particularly well, especially considering that it can be considered, like the Wesch video, a form of new media, digital composition, and a brilliant one at that. I'll post the commercial below, but I would love to hear your thoughts about how the commercial works using the terms kairos, logos, pathos, and ethos that you learned this week. In fact, if you can't find a suitable advertisement for you own blog posts, feel free to analyze this one. Oh, and be sure to have a tissue at the ready because you'll need it, unless you're one of those tough guys that uses Ajax.