Truth in Advertising
This paper has been accepted for publication in an anthology edited by Michael Carroll, Epoche and Entertainment: Phenomenology and Pop Culture
As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world. The first four words uttered, "Let there be light," constitute its character. All nature is vibrant with its impulse. -- Bruce Barton1
The title of this paper might seem cleverly ironic. Our common knowledge is that advertising is at least a bit untrue; if All detergent really had the laundering omnipotence its name suggests, this fact would be well-known and the commercials would be unnecessary. This is an important and banal piece of cultural knowledge: advertising tells half-truths in order to portray a product or candidate in the best light. We accept its dissimulating, seductive methods, and "nobody in his right mind really believes an advertisement or a promotion piece."2
Furthermore, advertising does not seem to us significant as culture. Ads are the interruptions and fillers in the low-brow media of TV, radio, and mass-market magazines. This rates their cultural importance lower than the issue of People or the episode of "Friends" into which they are integrated. Advertising is less significant, and even less believable, than the main body of misinformation in these media.3
On the other hand, the annual advertising budget for AT&T is close to $1 billion.4 Each half-minute of commercial time on "Seinfeld" during the 1996-97 TV season cost $550,000.5 Advertising Age reported news of President Clinton's call for strict regulation of tobacco advertising with ad agencies' laments of losing $1.14 billion in ad revenue from the tobacco giants, and calls for legal challenges to the new rules.6 These figures point to the tremendous significance of ad campaigns, but do advertisers really spend these unimaginable sums for no other reason than to lie to us? Conversely, if advertising's job isn't to sell products for more than their worth by inflating their image in the public eye, what else does it do?
My aim here is to clarify advertising as a cultural artifact. In the first part, I will restate four approaches to the interpretation of advertising that make certain assumptions about its nature. Although these interpretations may have their strengths, the assumptions obscure other aspects. Without explicitly rejecting any of these, I will leave them all aside in developing a phenomenology of advertising in part two. On the basis of my phenomenological clarification, I will conclude that the meaning of advertisements is not informational (in the sense of presenting purported facts), though it depends heavily on an accrual of cultural information. In other words, advertising is a cultural artifact which has little to do with making true statements to persuade consumers to buy certain products. Advertising is most essentially an intersubjective practice upheld by a set of tacit agreements, that is, an element of the social construction of reality.
1. Non-phenomenological approaches
Criticism of adveritising is nothing new; it is, in fact, a minor cottage industry. Many critics complain that advertisements contain truth claims that are false, inflated, or so qualified as to be meaningless. For instance, no rules prohibit subjective or superlative claims about products. The claim that Chrysler makes the "best" cars available does not impose upon Chrysler Corporation any legal responsibility to defend the claim. Roughly speaking, the claim is legally meaningless. But "accurate"7 critics complain that such claims do imply that the products in question have certain qualities that would warrant the assertion. Legally, no such claim is made, but tacitly, superlative terms lead to the conclusion that the product is actually worthy of praise.8
This criticism of the accuracy of ads is attacked by "ideological" critics, who consider accurate criticism "naively liberal and missing the larger power and significance of advertising images."9 It is indeed doubtful that consumers faced with an ad claiming Chryslers are the best cars reconstruct the ad's meaning as a syllogism. According to ideological criticism, the more important truth in advertising is whose interests are served by its power.
These two critical approaches assume that advertising is an attempt to convince consumers to buy a product or a political ideology. How advertising functions as a medium is obscured by this focus on its aims. To follow these criticisms, the capacity of advertising to affect consumers must be presumed unproblematic. In this view, advertising is a direct, unambiguous transmission of information, images and truth claims with the sole end of persuading buyers that a product has good qualities.
On the contrary, according to Nicholas Samstag, the first purpose of an ad is to be read or seen, and the second purpose "is a secret."10 Interpreting advertising solely on the basis of the assumption that it is meant to sell something neglects the fact that the differences between the products are usually negligible:
"Every now and then, of course, some firm really gets the drop on its competitors and, for a while, information has its day. For a short period there was only one brand of stainless steel razor blades and it was important to know which one it was. For a time (only a short one) Oldsmobile had automatic shifting all to itself. But very soon everyone gets aboard and we are back where we were, seducing with the same body, exaggerating at the same rate and the devil take the hindmost; in this case, the customer.
Perhaps the cause is that our affluent society supports too many choices to make simply informational advertising effective. We have so much money to spend that six or twenty brands can prosper in markets where there are only two or three basic differences possible in the product being offered... At any rate, caught without real differentiations to advertise (or blessed with differences they don't dare advertise), a great many advertisers just keep drawing their products longer and sleeker until they outrage every law of perspective or keep faking their TV commercials so obviously that even a feebleminded schoolboy could see through them or persist in describing their oversize art books or perfumes or resorts in phrases that sound like the ravings of those who eat hallucinogenic mushrooms."11
Samstag remarks that factual information is irrelevant to the success or meaning of an ad. What remains is the appeal of the ad itself, rather than the product it advertises. Marketing research on radio broadcasting in the 30s and 40s shows that consumers do not take advertising seriously as persuasive speech. They complained most often, not about false or misleading claims, but about commercials interrupting the programs with obnoxious music and announcements. What they wanted from advertising was what they wanted from radio in general: entertainment.12 Advertisers agreed, and so began 60 years of efforts to make commercials more enjoyable and entertaining.
Many commercials are displays of images unrelated to the product being sold. Advertisers spend a great deal of energy and money "branding" themselves -- that is, using advertising campaigns not to sell a product, but to associate the brand name with a certain lifestyle or sometimes other abstract images. Print and TV ads for bluejeans, perfumes, automobiles, computers, and nearly anything else one can think of, rely on no qualities of the product, indeed do not even name any. Instead, a great deal of them relate the brand to a certain cultural iconography. There are, for instance, innumerable representations of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean in ads attempting to make a "hip" or "cool" appeal; they incorporate by allusion the entire tragic mythology of these figures. Clearly, accurate and ideological criticism does not penetrate "branding" commercials. One could impose upon these ads a truth-uttering interpretation by once again presuming that the consumer reconstructs the ad as a sort of syllogism (to use a recent example): Since Steve McQueen wore khakis, and Steve McQueen was cool, anyone who wears khakis will be as cool as Steve McQueen.
It may be that advertisers rely on an expectation that consumers believe they will look like Steve McQueen in their khaki pants (although no explicit claim is made that Steve is wearing any particular brand of khaki pants); this view presumes that advertising works by tricking consumers into identifying with the cultural icons represented in the ads. Advertisers consider the iconographic "branding" approach more subtle and sophisticated than this, however: the aim of these campaigns is not directly to sell products but only to give the product an image.
A 'subliminal-message' interpretation of advertising arises from these more sophisticated techniques and from the work of Marshall McLuhan. On this view, advertising, indeed all media (especially electronic media), operate on a subconscious or pre-logical level.13 Instead of appealing to a reconstructed argument guiding the consumer to a conclusion (and purchase), advertising seduces14 through the id, the ego, the eyes and ears of the perceiver. Commcercials replay a Freudian drama of desires, traumas, and repressions, as a means to suggest their messages, or, in McLuhan's terms, "advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance" which has "sprung up as a service for the consumer who hardly knows what to think of his newly bought cars and swimming pools."15
While most interpretors in this vein consider commercials a kind of hypnosis putting the critical capacity of the consumer to sleep, McLuhan goes further, claiming that advertising forms consciousness and community:
"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors... When all production and all consumption are brought into a pre-established harmony with all desire and all effort, then advertising will have liquidated itself by its own success."16
McLuhan is optimistic that media will achieve this harmony and produce a human community incapable of conflict, since all of us would always be concerned to produce and consume in an equilibrium matched by the capacities of the global village. War and strife would be literally advertised out of existence.
Extending beyond McLuhan's subliminal, pre-conscious or consciousness-forming view of media and advertising, Jean Baudrillard dismisses all notions of media having either a beneficial or harmful effect through manipulation. Media cannot have such an enormous influence because there is nothing to contrapose to media; we lack "in opposition to it an authentic human nature, an authentic essence of the social, with its needs, its own will, its own values, its finalities."17 Instead, Baudrillard interprets media as a voyeuristic gaze of the masses, at themselves, through an excess of information. Advertising is indeed a seduction, but it is not the seduction of consumers by producers. It is the seduction of the masses themselves, the seduction of the seducers. In seducing ourselves, we the masses delegate "in a sovereign manner the faculty of choice to someone else by a sort of game of irresponsibility, of ironic challenge, of sovereign lack of will, of secret ruse."18 Thus advertising is the expression of the desire of the masses to have desire imposed. Ads allow us to evade the horrible necessity of choosing from among the indeterminate field of objects, by obliterating meaning and erecting a simulation in its place. Thus, instead of the oppression of deciding between functionally identical toothpastes, we are entertained by the unreality of brands, commit our loyalties to one or another, and stake a claim to a part in the mythological realm of post-consumer society. The masses can only protest by taking on the posture of inertia, by not responding to the seductive advances of advertising; yet this self-objectification cannot counteract advertising's continual progress.
Advertising, Baudrillard contends, is an expanding form of expression, one destined to become ubiquitous. All expressive activity will reach the form of advertising, "a simplified operational mode, vaguely seductive, vaguely consensual... in which all particular contents are annulled at the very moment when they can be transcribed into each other,..."19 Advertising is the destiny of culture -- absolute advertising, a point at which culture implodes, neither communicating nor informing, but only reaffirming itself while effacing the real and its tangible boundaries. The information it presents "devours communication and the social."20 Sociality is absorbed within it, and therefore the question of believing in advertising, or in the 'values' of the culture, is impossible to pose: the entire culture is an advertisement for itself.
McLuhan and Baudrillard assume that advertising has a powerful influence on viewers. On the basis of this assumption, they seek the effects of this power. Interpreting media and advertising as general social phenomena, they hypothesize a set of aims or a trajectory of advertising. In their ominous views, advertising is a social force independent of human interests and not the result of human practices. Advertising does not inform, it does more: it forms its audience.
2. Phenomenology of Advertising
Phenomenology requires interpretation to follow description; that is, all theoretical assumptions must be laid aside. This does not necessarily mean that theoretical approaches lead to incorrect interpretations. It could be the case that ads lie, that ads serve capital, that ads seduce subliminally or alter our perceptions; it may be true that commercials create desires or express desires the masses desire not to take responsibility for. Phenomenology asks instead what advertising is, what the experience of advertising means, beginning with a description of the phenomenon.
How can one delimit the field of phenomena proper to advertising? I will assume only that something which is presented with the meaning "an advertisement," is an advertisement. This does not mean that only such things are advertisements, nor that such things are only advertisements. Furthermore, advertising is a cultural artifact, an objective expression of social relationships. By taking actual advertisements as my examples, I hope to gain some essential insight into advertising. Imaginative variation (as well as the actual variety of ads themselves) will clarify the essential core of advertising, as a promotion of things. The meaning of "promotion" will be examined in the end.
It will be helpful, in identifying what is entailed in the social relationships involved in advertising, to sketch out the relevant elements of the phenomenology of the social world. Alfred Schutz orders forms of communication along a continuum from those which are most immediate to those which are most mediate, corresponding to forms of intersubjective relationship that are more and less authentic.21 The basic structural unit of sociality, according to Schutz (and echoed in different ways by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and Emmanuel Levinas), is the face-to-face or We-relationship. The face-to-face situation is one in which I and the Other share "a community of space and a community of time," in which I and the Other are co-present and maintain "an actual simultaneity with each other of two separate streams of consciousness."22 The Other is given to my experience (and I am given to the Other's experience) distinctly and directly as a person, as a "Thou" with "life and consciousness."23 In the We-relationship founded upon the face-to-face situation, I and the Other direct our consciousnesses towards each other, we intend an understanding of one another as living persons, and communicate with one another in a shared or common environment. Merleau-Ponty gives concreteness to this authentic experience of co-presence through the example of dialogue:
"Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thought which I had no idea I possessed, making me think too."24
On the other end of the spectrum, Schutz places inauthentic, indirect, mediated They-relationships, the relationships we have with "contemporaries." The difference between authentic and inauthentic relationships with others, according to Schutz, is simply a matter of direct vs. indirect, immediate vs. mediate, one in which the other is a co-present Thou, and one in which the other's existence is not directly apprehended at all.25 Furthermore, inauthentic relationships are "derivative" upon the authentic. All of the intimacy and understanding of the authentic We-relationship is missing in the They-relationship, and others are attended to only through abstract descriptions. Berger and Luckmann describe the They-relationship as the employment of "typificatory schemes" to classify others as, for example, "a consumer," "a television watcher," etc.26 The utter lack of empathy for the other which characterizes the They-relationship suggests antipathy to some. Merleau-Ponty considers the other outside of the co-presence of dialogue "a threat,"27 and Levinas claims that only within the They-relationship is murder possible.28 Yet, according to Schutz, even close relationships with friends are sometimes drained of their immediacy, and it is only by way of the derivative, taken-for-granted typifications of a They-relationship that we continue to understand or attend to a friend who is distant.29
Understanding other selves, whether authentically or inauthentically, entails interpreting behavior in terms of the motivation of acts. Schutz claims that there are two forms of act-motivation: the "in-order-to" motivation and the because motivation. The expectations an actor has, or the result the actor means to bring about through a set of particular actions, are in-order-to motivations; they are "projected in the future perfect tense."30 Having such a motivation requires the presumption of certain relationships within the world and between objects within it, relies on a phantasy of the projected aim, and hence is a non-genuine understanding of behavior. In contrast, the because motivation is the genuine explanation of the meaning of a deed. A because motivation is a comment on a lived experience, hence a past-tense experience; it is a way of explaining, in the pluperfect, why one did what one did. A because-motive can only be established after the act has taken place, and on the basis of the actual, lived experience of the act. Note that the in-order-to motive is quite independent of the because motive, and it is only the contemplation of the because motive, in the pluperfect tense, that can establish the genuine meaning-context of the action. That is to say, a because motive explains the act, while the in-order-to motive merely establishes the project.
These two forms of motivation are important in the interpretation of social behavior. Of key importance in a phenomenology of advertising is the motivation of persuading an audience. Schutz describes a similar situation:
"I may so project my action that I picture you as being moved to a certain kind of behavior as soon as you have grasped what I am doing. I am then picturing your interpretation of my action as the because-motive of your behavior. Suppose, for instance, that I ask you a question. My in-order-to motive is not merely that you understand the question but that I get an answer from you. Your answer is the reason why (the "for-the-sake-of-which") of my question."31
The questioner presumes that the question will be answered, and the precise nature of this presumption is that the question will be sufficient reason, a because-motive, for being answered. If the person responding takes up the gambit of the question, the question is accepted as a because-motive -- "his answer must be such that the questioner will accept it as a real reply to his question. The orientation of the answerer, therefore, reflects that of the questioner."32 The importance of this analysis of social behavior is that responding to others requires, in Schutz' terms, the adoption of the other's project as a genuine because-motivation. The response is due to, produced by, drawn from the respondent, by the project of the sender of a message.
Finally, the meaning-context of an act is established by the projection of the act. This means that the in-order-to motive of the projection sets forth the entire meaning-context, "for it gives unity to all the intentional Acts and all the actions involved in its performance."33 Sending a message, or asking a question as in the above example, is an act whose projection establishes the unity of meaning of all acts related to that project. An answer is an answer specific to the question asked, because the act of asking the question sets out the meaning-context in which the answer takes place. In other words, the in-order-to motive which founds the project of sending a message also establishes a unity of acts, a meaning-context, to which the response to that message inevitably must pertain. If you respond to the message I send you, your actions enter into the meaning-context, the unity of my project of communicating, and your response is due to (has its because-motive in the act of) my message.
Preliminarily, using these theoretical terms, we can say that (1) advertising has a promotional in-order-to motive, (2) that it is a form of communication that is based in an anonymous They-relationship (the advertisers are not co-present), and (3) that advertising sets up a meaning-context in which a response to advertising is meaningful on the basis of taking up the project of advertising.
(1) As a cultural product, ads are one of those "objective configurations of meaning which have been instituted... and which have a kind of anonymous life of their own."34 The anonymity of ads does not imply that advertisers seek in every case the most general audience. In fact, this is most often not the case: advertisements are directed towards demographic groups. Of course, the identity of a certain demographic group is determined through the anonymous means of statistics. An advertiser fixes on a number of people who are likely, according to the data collected, to have a certain income, education, etc., and who will be affected by certain appeals.
(2) From the Schutzian viewpoint, all of these analyses of the advertiser's market are inauthentic They-relationships. So advertisers appeal to audiences as typifications rather than as actual people, regardless of the narrowness of the group targeted by the ad.
(3) More obscure, perhaps, is the fact that the experience of advertising depends on a certain intersubjective understanding of the media. The media bear sets of assumptions or "taken-for-granted" characters. Television has a certain meaning in general for the viewers. At a very basic level, the images and the sounds are closely associated, so that an aspect of the meaning-context of television is the typical relation of visual and aural experience. In our typical, taken-for-granted interpretation, what appears is what makes the noise we hear. In quite another vein, television is constituted socially as not a "serious" or intellectually challenging medium.35 We watch, not because we are stimulated, excited or even well-entertained by TV, but because it is something that does not seem to require effort. The terms associated with watching TV -- "idiot box," "boob tube," "couch potatoes," "vegging out," etc. --�suggest, in accordance McLuhan, that TV is a form of hypnosis, a super-cool medium to which we are not prompted to react. The meaning-context of TV is a highly typified interpretation that is taken for granted by viewers. Armed with this set of assumptions, we watch the set and make sense of what appears.
Since the 60s, most national ad campaign money has been spent on television. In addition, TV ad campaigns have set the tone for national print and radio ads. The style, sensibilities and meaning-context of television have carried over to other media, and trickled down from national advertisers to local, small-budget campaigns. For these reasons, I will use TV commercials as my leading examples of advertising, but the results apply, in my view, to all advertising.
Levi's Jeans for Women
Levi's has been advertising Jeans for Women with a series of animated TV commercials. Because viewers rely on the typical presentation of elements on television, the highly stylized and sketchy figure has the sense of a depiction of a woman. This "woman" is composed of a roughly outlined triangle for a "torso" (the apex representing the waist, the hypoteneuse the shoulders), a roughly outlined oval as a featureless "head," and two long blue daubs extending from their junction at the apex of the triangle -- "legs," or more specifically, "jeans."36 Along with the visual elements is a soundtrack of an assured-sounding female humming. The commcercial's artsy style is striking; if one accepts the suggestion that it represents a female form, the movements of the figure are alarming. As the animation sequence unfolds, the "woman" stretches, leaps, runs, zips around the screen, shoves aside apparent obstacles of considerable weight and size. "She" moves well beyond human limits of flexibility, speed and strength. At the end of the 15 or 30 seconds, the "Levi's" logo and the name Jeans for Women appear on the screen for the first time.
Once again relying on the socially constructed meaning of TV ads, the presentation of the logo indicates an association of the brand with the rest of the content of the ad. In other words, the appearance of the logo and slogan refers the figure's movements to the brand "Levi's." Two facts are implied: that the figure is a woman, and that "she" is wearing Levi's. Yet the ad does not assert that these facts are true -- on the contrary, they are patently not the case. All that is presented are "her" extraordinary movements and the logo at the end; the meaning-context of the medium allows the constitution of the intelligibility of the ad. Female humming and a set of shapes vaguely acceptable as a human form = a woman; blue daubs as "legs" = jeans. Since we can establish a more or less coherent meaning for the animation, the movements of the figure take on their senses as "flying," "jumping," "pushing something heavy," etc., in a way that is reminiscent of a human being, but beyond human capacity.
The connection of these superhuman images with Levi's is rather obscure, not just because it is only indicated by the inclusion of the logo at the very end of the ad, but also because nothing about the ad makes a claim that Levi's have anything to do with the transcendence of the "woman." Nor does the ad present a persuasion to buy anything. The advertiser does not make explicit an in-order-to persuading motive which would help the viewer constitute the ad's meaning. The viewer of the Levi's ad does not rely on the explicit expression of its posited aim to make sense of the ad, because this pre-posited meaning is taken for granted already, in the meaning-context of watching TV. Thus the ads themselves need not present the meaning of persuading the audience. Since viewers interpret the ad according to the typical meaning-context, the persuading-sense of the ad is constituted by the viewer. It does not express its attempt to sell, and to that extent, the ad does not attempt to sell. The case of the Levi's ad is somewhat extreme in the tenuousness of the connection of the ad's content to the persuading motive of the company. All that appears is the company logo, at the very end of the ad. The logo indicates the company, the slogan states the name of the product; we do the rest of the work of constituting the meaning of the commercial. In this way we understand what advertisers want, and do not require to be told. No one needs to see a particular ad to tell what it is for; the particular ad simply indicates the object about which we already understand that we are supposed to be persuaded. In short, as we constitute the ad's persuasive sense, it is we who assume the burden of persuading, not the advertisment or the advertiser. Nothing actually presented or expressed in the Levi's Jeans for Women ad makes a persuasive case for the product. This meaning is left implicit, and it is the viewer who does the actual persuading.
(This aspect of the experience of advertising may explain the early complaints of radio listeners. Since the commercials are obviously broadcast in order to influence the audience, "hard sells" are always overkill. Listeners grudgingly accepted the presence of ads and the motives driving them, conceded to the broadcast of advertising as a way of funding radio programs, but wished advertisers would entertain more and interrupt less.)
Polaroid
The second example, which I shall describe without referring each element to the general meaning-context permitting its intelligibility,37 is for a Polaroid instant camera. This ad was cited by Advertising Age as one of the best of 1996.
There is a shot of an overturned trash can and garbage strewn on a kitchen floor. A woman scolds her dog, while a cat struts in the background. She leaves, and the cat jumps up onto a countertop adjacent to the trash can. The dog looks on, with apparent anxiety, as the cat leaps onto the can and upsets it to begin rummaging through the garbage. Cut to a shot from the dog's perspective, a shot which jumps from the cat to a cleaver, to a rolling pin, and finally to a camera. At the end of the ad, the woman re-enters, a quick cut to the trash can shows the garbage across the floor again. Cut to the dog, with photos in its mouth, offering them to the woman's hand. Photos of the cat on top of the pile of garbage appear, and the woman's voice is heard, saying "Oh dear," in response to the fact that the photos show that the cat, not the dog, is the culprit.
Advertising Age published a review of this commcercial, along with the results of a survey of sample viewers.38 100% of the viewers called the ad "excellent." 31% found it humorous, 27% creative. 86% retained the dog or the cat. Strangely, only 6% retained that the product was an instant camera, and a matching 6% retained that the camera was "easy to use." The "excellence" of the ad evidently does not consist in its presenting an unequivocal claim that Polaroid makes easy-to-use instant cameras. To conclude that the advertisement sells the product seems premature at best. Yet as an advertisement, it has the social meaning of a promotion which attempts to influence the behavior or attitudes of the audience.
What the survey reveals is that the heart of the ad is the dog and the cat. The dog's behavior is especially fascinating. The ad depicts the dog reacting to a scolding for a crime it did not commit and feeling the desire to avenge this injustice. The dog understands the abstract ideas of right and wrong. Furthermore, it understands the use of human tools in the creative way depicted. Not only does the dog know that a cleaver can cut, but is also aware of the cultural cliche of the rolling pin as a domestic weapon. Even more amazing, the dog decides upon vengeance, not the mere infliction of harm to the cat. The dog presumes that presenting evidence of its innocence will help its case, so the farfetched implication that the dog could use the camera is the least of its accomplishments! Taken literally, the story told in the ad is ludicrous.
Advertisements and Social Meaning
The common knowledge or social assumption that advertisements are selling devices hides the more important significance of ads -- that aside from selling, they get themselves seen, heard, and read. If ads sell products (which is frequently not in any way intended by the advertiser), it is not necessarily on the basis of any qualities of the products. When those qualities are named, the claims made for the products are usually inflated, distorted, or composed of meaningless distinctions. But the Levi's and Polaroid ads I've described contain practically no information about the products. Levi's and Polaroid are no less motivated by the urge to sell products, and that is the ultimate aim of their efforts as corporations. In these cases, advertising's content is not about the products, but about the advertisers themselves. In a recent column in Advertising Age, Bob Garfield writes:
"In so many categories these days, advertising is called upon not merely to highlight the brand's value but to be the brand's value. In the imagery of the Marlboro man, in the attitude of Pepsi commercials, in the ethic of "Just Do It" resides not just brand information and brand personality but also brand meaning. The advertising is, in fact, part and parcel of the brand. It is itself a brand benefit."39
Advertising connects a brand to a certain corporate image. This image is a "brand benefit," that is, a reason to prefer one brand over another. In Schutzian terms, brand benefit is a because motive for the consumer's purchase. I buy Marlboro cigarettes because I take up the image of the Marlboro man; I buy Pepsi because I am postured in a certain attitude. The in-order-to motive of advertising is to present the consumer with a because motive to behave or believe in a certain way. In other words, advertising relies on the viewer's act of constituting the meaning of the ad (and assuming the in-order-to motive of advertising in general, i.e., to promote things) to associate the thing promoted with a set of images or ideals which provide a reason to prefer the thing promoted (a post-hoc because motive).
All of this takes place through the anonymous They-relationship of mass media. Advertisements present information about the consumer as a typification, and associate the product or brand with this stereotype. Ads present the consumer with an image of himself or herself, or in other words tell consumers who the advertisers think we think we are. Furthermore, the stereotypes are necessary to constituting the meaning of the ads in the first place. Levi's advertises Jeans for Women with a schematic, cartoon superhero, surpassing human bounds, as well as the already-surpassed bounds of sexism (in the limited sense of restricting the activities of women to what we used to call 'traditional roles'). The ads do not claim that the jeans enable this transcendence, but only associate the jeans with it. Unless one already takes for granted the typification of a certain "young, strong, and assured woman," the Levi's ad is totally unitelligible. The "liberated woman" typification is required both to make sense of the images and sounds actually presented in the ad, and to make sense of the appeal of the ad (its motivation structure). The demographic target is a typified group who identify themselves with the ideal of womanhood portrayed, and it is this typified ideal which makes possible the meaningful constitution of the commercial's images. The womanhood ideal must be recognized to render the ad intelligible; if the ideal is accpeted as an ideal, the ad's persuasive message emerges. The ad both depends upon and promotes a stereotyped notion, at a constitutional level of experience. The viewer does not deliberately assent to the stereotyped ideal promoted by the ad. Instead, in seeking to constitute the intelligibility of the ad, the viewer must adopt the typified ideal. Actually to have seen the commercial means that the viewer has already taken up the motivation of the advertisement. Merely by viewing, one is persuaded of at least the interpretive validity of the images which promote the product or brand.
Likewise, the Polaroid ad is absurd without the background typification of anthropomorphized cats and dogs. Pet owners imbue their animals with human traits and motivations. These cultural meanings of pets are played upon in the ad, to render it intelligible. The story told in the commercial requires the assumption of this way of typifiying pets to a fantastic degree. The viewer also takes up, in the act of making sense of the images presented in the ad, the value of pets as entertaining companions. Moreover, the viewer must adopt a set of beliefs about justice and fair play, without which it would appear meaningless for the dog to take a photo of the cat (instead of attacking it with a weapon).
Advertising plays upon cultural information that has been established as a general structure social of reality. The intersubjectively constructed meaning of the medium of an ad -- that is, the socially pervading meaning of media -- is fundamental to the constitution of the ad. A whole set of expectations establishes where one is likely to encounter ads and what one does when faced with an ad. Persuasion is an essential element of the meaning-context of advertising, a meaning that viewers bring to the experience of advertising in order to constitute the sense of particular ads. Particular ads connect individual products and brands to the general sense of advertising as a means of promotion.
This sense of advertising clarifies both assertorial and vague ads, those that purport that a certain product is good, and those that give an image to the brand. Advertising is in every way bound up with a certain truth-claim; but unlike verifiable truth-claims in reference to the factual performance of a product, the true utterances advertisements make are references to goodness. All advertising asserts that the thing being promoted is good. But this goodness has nothing to do with the product's or brand's qualities. A good product is a means to some desirable end; a good brand is one that refers abstractly to desirable ends or images. The goodness is presumed in the meaning-context, so all the advertiser needs to do to promote the product is to name it. The Levi's ad promotes (or gives a good name to) the ideal of liberated, strong womanhood which viewers use to meaningfully interpret the ad. Its images of female transcendence are given a promotional pitch, as it were, in the eyes and ears of the viewer. The Polaroid ad refers to the goodness of pets, of a cultural anthropomorphization of pets, and of an ideal of justice. Less abstract ads have the same structure. As Samstag pointed out, the differences in products are few; the purpose of advertising is to connect one brand more intimately with good ends. All detergent does not advertise an objectively demonstrable superiority over other brands, but celebrates the goodness of clean clothes and refers All to this good end.
If one responds by rejecting the ad's message, one is nevertheless rejecting it in terms it establishes. The deliberate, critical rejection of the ad's message is founded upon an act which has already promoted that message. Reacting in any way would appear on this basis to achieve the aim of advertising. Accurate critics attack measureable truth-claims. This is inept since truth-claims are not the locus of the promotional sense. Whether all the claims made were true or false, the ad would already have promoted the product or brand. Ideological criticism fails for the same reason -- the constituted, promotional sense of advertising founds the act of considering of the social conditions of labor and the role of advertising and consumerism to appease the masses.
McLuhan's optimistic view of advertising's power to form a harmonious global community has no phenomenological warrant. Advertising is anonymous, and has no way to approach individuals as individuals or to form the We-relationships at the heart of communities. The content of advertising is the set of promotional ideals developed in accordance with inauthentic, typified conceptions of people and the good. This set of typifications may be endlessly recalculated, demographic research and marketing surveys infinitely conducted, yet there is simply no way for this naive approach to establish intimacy, empathy, and authentic intersubjectivity. The equilibrium of production and consumption McLuhan foresees could only be struck on the basis of understanding persons as sets of statistics. Advertising may indeed tend toward the levelling of desires and available goods, and it decidedly appears that advertising can do nothing other than promote typified goods to typified viewers. But such a social form is not a community.
Baudrillard's interpretation more closely fits the phenomenology developed here, except that Baudrillard too extends beyond the warrant of phenomenological clarification, by speculating that media destroys meaning and sets up a relation to the audience that would not rely on the audience's act of constituting meaning. Baudrillard ambiguously claims that the masses are responsible for the state of media, and that media has already set up conditions which make this responsibility impossible. But his diagnosis of mass media as absolute advertising fits the present interpretation, insofar as anyone who is part of the audience of advertising cannot avoid complicity with the promotional motivation of advertising (and even someone who avoids mass media as entirely as possible still has contact with members of a society who bring the social meaning-context of advertising to bear in all relationships). As our culture deepens its commitment to media technology, it broadens the range of operations of mass media. This commitment also lends legitimation to the techniques of media. In a sense, to be an American is to take part in American mass media, to adopt the meaning-context of media, to engage in the promotion-motive of advertising, and seduce ourselves.
Baudrillard does not explain how what makes this mediated self-seduction possible. As a result, his analysis is a dead-end: there is evidently nothing that can be done to change the situation. According to the phenomenology of Schutz, Berger and Luckmann (and, it seems to me, also of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas), advertising, as a form of communication, is inauthentic. But inauthentic social relationships, they all agree, are derivative of authentic We-relationships. Media relations -- which are the central form of intersubjectivity in mass society -- do appear to correspond to the inauthentic mode or the They-relationship. If inauthentic intersubjectivity is presumed to be derivative of authentic intersubjectivity, then it would have to be the case that in our face-to-face relations we agree to submit ourselves and one another to the seductions of advertising (and the alienation of media). Furthermore, media and advertising would be intelligible through interpretive schemas we negotiate with one another. Does this mean that inauthentic communication, and the interpretation and understanding of inauthentic communication, depends upon a set of authentic arrangements which establish its legitimacy? What direct, immediate face-to-face relationship sets out the terms for the typified interpretive schemas viewers use to understand advertisements?
In my view, there is no way for social phenomenology to answer these questions or to comprehend the phenomena of media and advertising adequately on the basis of the presumed binary opposition of authentic and inauthentic intersubjectivity. Advertising shows, I believe, the need for a phenomenology of media and intersubjectivity without the presumption that there are authentic and inauthentic relationships. When advertising overtakes understanding -- that is, when understanding advertising requires submission to the typifications and motivations of advertising -- we witness a social relation in which media(ted) intersubjectivity informs face-to-face relationships. When media(ted) intersubjectivity legitimates typifications, it sets the terms of all social relations.
Footnotes
1. Barton was a founder of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, Inc. Quoted in Caples, p. 65.
2. Samstag, p. 97.
3. The mistrust of news media, for instance, is well-documented. In News and the Culture of Lying, Paul H. Weaver cites a Neilsen study showing that the public lost confidence in the press and TV in general at rates of 22% and 36%, respectively, from the period 1973-1983 (pp. 19ff). Where the deceitfulness of media is not backed up with statistically verifiable facts, it is argued that "the news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, myth-making, and self-interest." (Vandewicken, p. 144.) In order to sell papers or increase ratings, the news media must find or invent crises, the focus on which prevents the media from seeing 'what's really going on.'
4. Advertising Age, August 26, 1996, p. 3.
5. Advertising Age, September 16, 1996, p. 1.
6. Advertising Age, August 26, 1996, p. 1.
7. McAllister, Matthew P., p. 152.
8. See Preston, Ivan L., pp. 3ff.
9. McAllister, p. 152.
10. Samstag, p. 26.
11. Samstag, p. 90f
12. There is a considerable and fascinating literature on radio broadcasting from this period, taking up the 'problems' of improving the entertainment and advertising on radio. In Time for Reason -- About Radio, Lyman Bryson presents the results of a survey of radio listeners which showed that 64% either liked or didn't mind the commercials. In the transcript of a radio interview with Atherton W. Huber, who was Chairman of the Benton & Bowles, Inc. advertising firm, Bryson and Huber read and address the complaints of radio listeners about ads. Especially irritating, it seems, were "singing commcercials." But Huber asserts his belief that "unless consumners like products and repeat their purchases, no amount of advertising will keep them alive." (p. 107) A study published in 1946 shows that the most frequent and severe complaint about commercials was that they were noisy and distracting (0.70 on a scale o 0 to 1), followed by boring and repetitious (0.52) and ads in poor taste (0.52); far down the list was the strong claims made by advertisers (0.35). See Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and Kendall, Patricia L., p. 72.
13. See McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, p. 218: "any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists."
14. Note that this is exactly what Samstag claims is the goal of advertising.
15. McLuhan, "Preface" to Key, Bryan Wilson, Subliminal Seduction, pp. vii, xi.
16. McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 227.
17. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, p. 209.
18. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, p. 216.
19. Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation, p. 87
20. Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation, p. 80.
21. Schutz, Alfred, p. 180.
22. Schutz, 163.
23. Schutz, 164.
24. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, p. 354.
25. Schutz, p. 181
26. Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas, p. 31.
27. Merleau-Ponty, p. 355.
28. See Levinas, Emmanuel, pp. 86f.
29. Schutz, p. 179-180.
30. Schutz, p. 88.
31. Schutz, p. 159-160.
32. Schutz, p. 161
33. Schutz, p. 75-6
34. Schutz, p. 181.
35. Advertising Age's Website features a "History of TV Advertising" which quotes a New York Times Magazine article of 1966: "TV is not an art form or a cultural channel; it is an advertising medium... it seems a bit churlish and unAmerican of people who watch television to complain that their shows are lousy. They are not supposed to be any good. They are supposed to make money."
36. The blue daubs are the only solid colored elements of the "woman," who would appear to have the overlong, emaciated figure of a Barbie. The "head" and the personality of the "woman" are totally effaced, or given simply as blanks. "She" has no race, no age, no eyes. Obviously, the commercial presents rich possibilities for feminist critique, which is not my concern here.
37. This ad is presented through an overwhelming number of quick shots, probably more than 60 in the 30-second ad. It is unclear to a casual viewer what exactly is presented, and what is filled-in, in the constitution of the sense of the ad; fully untangling the constitution of the ad would require significantly more space.
38. Advertising Age, August 26, 1996, p. 16.
39. "Steel wool dino roars a powerful message," Advertising Age Sep. 16, 1996.
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