Persuasion in Advertising

Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis PART 2 Persuasion in Advertising ebruary 7, 2010, Super Bowl XLIV Sunday: 106.5 million people watched the average minute of the game in which the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts. It was “the most watched TV program ever.”1 That honor had long been held by the final episode of M*A*S*H, watched by 106 million more than twenty-five years ear- F2 lier. Not surprisingly CBS CEO Les Moonves was elated. “For anyone who wants to write that broadcasting is dead, 106 million people watched this program,” he crowed. “You can’t find that anywhere else.”3 Yet we are purportedly in the “post-television age.”4 At a moment in time when “the death of the thirty-second spot” is almost a foregone con- clusion, some thirty-four brands, including the U.S. Census (amid some controversy), made the decision that paying an average of $2.7 million for a thirty-second spot was a sound strategy.5 Brands purchased sixty-seven ads for a total of thirty-six minutes of advertising time. Accord- ing to the executive vice president and director of strategic planning at McCann Erickson, the Super Bowl is “less about the relevance of a message but more about the entertainment quo- tient. [Marketers] aren’t selling a product; they are creating brand buzz.”6 Another advertiser agreed. “It’s never about the Super Bowl ad itself. It’s the best online buzz for the buck.”7 Live polling to determine the most popular commercial took place on a number of sites; winners varied. Near the top of most lists, however, was a Snickers ad starring 88-year-old actress Betty White and Abe Vigoda, an actor perhaps most well-known for his portrayal of Sal Tessio in The Godfather. After White’s Super Bowl “performance,” some 500,000 Facebook users petitioned Saturday Night Live requesting that White host the program; she did on May 8, 2010, garnering the highest overnight ratings the program had achieved in over a year.8 In fall 2010, White become a costar in a situation comedy, Hot in Cleveland. Such is celebrity culture in the United States. What about the effectiveness of those Super Bowl spots? Ad agency chief Linda Kaplan Thayer noted that in the absence of real watercoolers around which to gather information about “how they’d done,” advertisers go to their “digital watercoolers.”9 Prior to the game, a writer in USA Today wrote: This will be the Super Bowl where everyone measures everything to see if they got their money’s worth. Advertisers will count tweets. They’ll count the number of folks who visit their Facebook pages. They’ll count visits to the brand. They’ll measure the “buzz” fac- tor online—seeking a running tab on how often their company or their Super Bowl ad gets mentioned.10 Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 116 PART TWO Persuasion in Advertising In two separate surveys among Twitter users, Doritos, which had two ads, finished first. Nielsen Buzz Metrics found one Doritos spot to be the “most buzzed about” during and after the game. Reflecting on these winners, an Advertising Age writer began his column with a warning: “Be afraid Madison Avenue. Be very afraid.” Why? Because both spots had been created by consumers in a Crash the Super Bowl contest sponsored by Frito Lay (PepsiCo). Something else to reflect upon: Advertising Age reported that the creative directors of the Super Bowl ads were “overwhelmingly white.” Joelle De Jesus, creator of the winning Doritos spot, was the only mi- nority creative director for any spots airing on the Bowl.11 And remember, he is a consumer. And what if you happened to miss the broadcast? Don’t worry, the commercials are available online, on your cell phone, or on other handheld mobile devices. And who knows—they may still be counting visits. Granted, the Super Bowl is not typical network fare; it is both a football and an advertising extravaganza. But let’s think about this event and see what we can learn about advertising. First, we recognize that advertising is an economic power in the United States and globally. Total advertising expenditures in the United States are expected to reach $133 billion in 2010.12 These expenditures alone stand as testimonial to the value of advertising as a strategic marketing tool. Amid trade-press discussions about return on investment, metrics, tracking studies, and so on, it is easy to lose track of advertising as anything other than a marketing tool. Yet, in a book about the development of modern American advertising, Daniel Pope points out: “For advertising to play a large part in market strategy, consumers had to be willing to accept this kind of self-interested persuasion as a tolerable substitute or complement to more objective product information.”13 That is, in order for advertising to work as a business tool, it has to “fit” into the culture. It has to work as a vehicle of social communication. One look at the Super Bowl—live polling of commercial popular- ity, pregame and postgame buzz about advertising, podcasts, consumer-generated advertising, and of course, Super Bowl parties where people gather to watch the game and the advertising—and there can be no question. Advertising is indeed a part of our culture, a part of our everyday lives. Some contemporary scholars, while in no way suggesting that advertising fails to provide information or has no influence on consumer choices, invite us to examine what they view to be advertising’s more critical role, that of social communication. Rick Pollay speaks of what he calls the unintended social consequences of advertising, the “social by-products of exhortations to ‘buy products.’”14 Canadian scholars Leiss, Kline, Jhally, and Botterill suggest: Advertising is not just a business expenditure undertaken in the hope of moving some merchan- dise off the store shelves, but it is rather an integral part of modern cultures. The least important aspect of advertising’s significance for modern society is its role in influencing specific consumer choices—whether wise or unwise—about purchasing products. advertising’s transmittal of details about product characteristics is a trivial sidelight.15 Building on these scholars’ observations, we glimpse fertile ground for ethical debate. It is from this perspective of advertising as a vehicle of social communication that most critical questioning occurs. Historically, the dialogue underlying advertising controversies has been stated overly sim- plistically in terms of the mirror/shaper debate. Advertisers and their advocates view advertising as a mirror, passively reflecting society. By contrast, critics are likely to view advertising somewhat less benignly as a shaper—a powerful, selective reinforcer of social values. “So,” you might ask, “which is it?” After an intensive study of the social content of advertising in the 1920s and 1930s seeking the answer to that question, historian Roland Marchand concluded: I regret to say that I have not resolved these dilemmas. I cannot prove conclusively that the Amer- ican people absorbed the values and ideas of the ads, nor that consumers wielded the power to Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis PART TWO Persuasion in Advertising 117 ensure that the ads would mirror their lives. In fact, as advertisers quickly perceived, people did not usually want ads to reflect themselves, their immediate social relationships, or their broader society exactly. They wanted not a true mirror but a Zerrspiegel, a distorting mirror that would en- hance certain images. Even the term Zerrspiegel, denoting a fun-house mirror, fails to suggest fully the scope of advertising distortions of reality. Such a mirror distorts the shapes of the objects it reflects, but it nevertheless provides some image of everything within its field of vision. Advertis- ing’s mirror not only distorted, it also selected. Some social realities hardly appeared at all.16 Perhaps then it is best said that advertising both defines and is defined by culture. As we approach the topic of ethical decision making, it is valuable to pause and reflect on the ideological web in which the institution of advertising—its processes, practices, practitioners, cre- ations, and audiences—is grounded. Chief among the components of this web are these realities: • We live in a democratic political system. Citizens participating in public life elect their government officials. As citizens we possess basic human rights and freedoms, among them, those provided in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Media scholar James W. Carey articulated those rights this way: [The First Amendment] says that the government can’t tell you how to worship. It says that if you have something to say you can say it. If you want to, you can write it down and publish it. If you want to talk about it with others, you can assemble. And if you have a grievance, you can let your government know about it, and nobody can stop you.17 As citizens, we must exercise those rights peaceably and with respect for the law. Democracy, then, is frequently described in terms of freedom, fairness, and choice. • We live in a capitalist economic system in which there is no imposed central plan. Instead, individuals and firms decide what to do based on their own best interests. Profit is the dif- ference between what a product costs to provide and what the producer gets back in return, and it is this return that drives the system forward. Thus, when we say “that corporation is only in it for the money,” we do well to recognize the principles of our economic system.

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