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Advertising Through Commercials
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Advertising Through Commercials
Numerous books and articles have been written about American commercial television and its programs, their quality or lack of it, their effects, symbols and power. Commercials take up about ten minutes of every 60 minutes during “prime-time” viewing ( roughly 20% of the broadcasting time). Every performance, except the sacred baseball match commentaries, is interrupted by commercials. Even the News is shown in parts.
Commercials range from witty, well made, and clever to those that are dull, boring, and dumb. Advertisers have learned that unless their commercials are amusing, viewers will either switch to another channel or use commercial “breaks” to get up and do something else. Many Americans, who pay no fee for either commercial or public TV, simply accept commercials as the price they have to pay if they choose to watch certain programs.
The money for the advertising, which is a fine art in the USA, is provided by the manufacturers of cars, soap, cigarettes, spaghetti, cosmetics, etc. Advertisements are often short plays with actors and minimoviemakers command of: famous actors and actresses. Commercials are declaimed in prose and recited in verse, sung by soloists and choirs, persuading, cajoling, threatening, warning and ordering people to buy X underwear or Y canned beans. Every performance, except the sacred baseball match commentaries, is interrupted to tell you that you will become reach and beautiful if you eat Z cheese or else you die young, poor and neglected. Once during a performance of King Lear, the tragedy flowed on in its majesty until at its climax King Lear broke loose in a ferocious malediction, condemning all his daughters for not drinking ‘Optimus’ orange juice for breakfast. Freedom of speech means: freedom of great commercial firms to pull down all the rest of the people to their own intellectual level. News is free; commercials are sacred.
“The best brains in our country go into salesmanship, -said one American. -. Any fool can make a thing. What takes real brains is to sell it when the customer has got one already and doesn’t want another. ” Advertising makes you feel that you really must have it. To do this a number a different effects are used:
- The snob effect. This tells you that the product is most exclusive and of course rather expensive. Only the very best people use it.
- The scientific effect. A serious-looking man with glasses and a white coat, possibly a doctor or a professor, tells you about the advantages of the product.
- The words-and-music effect. The name of the product is repeated over and over again, put into a rhyme and sung several times, in the hope that you won’t forget it. The sung rhyme is called a “jungle”.
- The ha-ha effect. The advertiser tries to make you laugh by showing people or cartoon figures in funny situations.
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- The VIP (Very Important Person) effect. Well-known people, like actors or football-players, are shown using the product.
- The super- modern effect. The advertiser tries to persuade you that his product is a new, sensational breakthrough.
- The go-go effect. This is suitable for the teenage market. It shows young people having a party, singing, laughing, having a wonderful time, and, of course, using the product.
Television and Children
What children watch on TV change the way they think about the world. There are excellent television programs for children. These programs include valuable lessons about good and bad things, and about positive and negative actions.
There are also terrible, upsetting programs on TV made with violence, sex, or horror as the main subject. Children who watch violence every day on TV begin to think that violence is normal. And one day, these children will become violent, too.
The effect of violent TV shows on children is an important issue in the United States. Most research (one study proved that the average American child will have watched 8, 000 murders on television by the age of twelve) has shown that watching violent TV shows often leads to more violent behavior of children.
How can violence on TV be reduced? One solution is for the government to regulate the content of television programming. However, this is not a popular solution. In general, Americans do not like government regulation. They do not like laws that tell them how to behave; instead, they prefer individual choice. Some people think that if you don’t want your children to watch violent TV shows, you should simply turn off the TV.
Some groups, particularly civil liberties groups (groups that try to protect the rights of American that are set forth in the US Constitution), say that government control of TV program content may be a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech..
In general, the television industry agrees with civil liberties groups. In addition, industry leaders fear that the ratings system will have an impact on the number of viewers watching certain shows. As a result, industry profits will be reduced. Television program writers feel that the ratings system will affect the creativity and content of their work. Pressured by the ratings system, they may produce shows that are less interesting, less entertaining, and less provocative.
So how can TV violence be controlled without the government censoring TV content? This is an issue that concerned parents, the television industry, the federal government, and civil liberties groups. The problem must be resolved.
Soap Operas and Teenagers
Soap operas are plays that originally were sponsored by soap advertisers, hence the name. They are called “operas” because they present highly emotional situations like European operas. Over the past few years, television soap operas have attracted a larger audience. Approximately thirty million people watch soap operas, 70 percent of them female.
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Once thought of as entertainment for lonely housewives, dull melodramas that featured depressed middle-aged characters engaged in long conversations over cups of coffee, the soaps have become popular with a new group of younger viewers. Millions of American teenagers are “hooked” on soap operas. “General Hospital” has been the number one soap for several years among teens – partly because its 3: 00 airtime means they can dash from school bus to the living room in time to tune in.
Just like many others teens, Christie Clark gets home at 3: 00 and turns on her TV set to one of her favorite soap operas “The Guiding Light”. During the one-hour show, she tapes “General Hospital” on her new video tape recorder, a birthday gift from her parents. She then watches another soap for a half an hour. At 4: 30 she plays a tape “As the World Turns” which her machine recorded while she was at school. After dinner with her family, Christie plays the “General Hospital” tape. At 8: 30, she calls her best friend Tina, to tell her all about the soaps Tina missed. Afterward, Christie does a few hours of mathematics, history, and psychology homework and goes to bed at 11: 00.
All the programs began to feature teenagers in important roles. Soon, the young characters became involved in the plot lines that make up the world of soaps. Next, they were involved with some every adult problems, among them pregnancy, drugs, and almost every possible aspect of sex and romance. How could teenager viewers resist such thrills? They couldn’t – and they didn’t.
The reason for the soaps’ success in winning the teen audience is clear: they offer escapist entertainment featuring young characters with which teens would like to identify theseves. The serials provide an escape from the routine of school, family life and homework. Christie Clark says, “When I’m bored, I come home from school and it’s fun to watch them”. The years from twelve to nineteen are ones of great questioning of identity. It’s also a time of communication breakdown with authority figures. Soap operas serve as model for situations teens might face. Some of them say that watching a soap character deal with a difficult situation has helped them work out problems in their own lives.
Studies among teens in the US Northeast have yielded some surprising conclusions. One is that teens who watch soaps tend to take fewer drugs than those who don’t. In the long run, soap operas with all the shortcomings uphold many traditional American values. Despite the scandals, the good guys always win in the end, and villains repent, die, or are banished to a prison or a mental hospital. Some phychiatrists think that soaps bridge the gap between generations. Grandparents and parents can watch the serials together and talk about difficult problems with their kids.
Based on “What it is like in the USA” by Natalia Tokareva and Victor Peppard.. 1. Read the texts and express your opinion on the context and ideas:
Products and Commercials
Take any commercial with a simple message, repeat it again and again, and the product, if it’s good, will sell, even if the spot is mindless and annoying. It’s fixing the name of the product in the consumer’s mind with a quick, catchy phrase that’s important.
The moral, delivered, is plain: “Ladies, who’ve learned - buy…” This is very much the rule for women’s portrayals in thirty-and sixty-second spots, which occur with alarming regularity during the daytime hours, when stations may sell up to sixteen commercial
The cumulative effects of commercials are awesome. An endless procession of commercials on the same theme, all showing women using household products in the home, raises very strong implications that women have no other interests except laundry, dishes, waxing floors, and fighting dirt in any form. Seeing a great many such advertisements in succession reinforces the traditional stereotype that women’s place is only in the home.
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Ask anybody in advertising why commercials still show a woman bumbling around in a fearful daze, and you’ll find always the same answer: “Because our research tells us it is so”. Agencies devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to find out who’s buying their client’s stuff and why. Marketing researchers dissect and analyze the buying habits, educational and income levels of every member of the family. They even know what we do with our leisure time, our. life-style data- activities, interests, and opinions. All these serves to get inside women’s heads in order to get inside their pocketbooks.
You are probably quite sure that commercials have absolutely no effect on you. Maybe they don’t. But a shaken agency copywriter told me the first word his child spoke was “McDonald’s”.
From “Literary Portraits»
On Advertisements
I am ready to bet that in your naivety you believe that advertising is the art of keeping certain brands permanently in due public eye. This is a misconception. Advertising - as I read somewhere - is the art of convincing people that they want certain things they do not want at all, of making them dissatisfied with everything they have; of making them thoroughly unhappy.
Advertisements in America are ubiquitous. They fill the newspapers and cover the walls; they are on picture- cards and in your daily post, on pamphlets and on match boxes. They are shouted through loud speakers And shown in the cinemas. They are flashed electrically and written on the sky by airplanes and whispered in front of your window while you sleep so that you should dream of toothpaste, shoe polishes and soap flakes.
What are the special ways of making people particularly unhappy?
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