Реферат: Advertising and popular culture

Introduction

Every weeknight when I turn on the TV to watch CSI I mute the ads.I see SUV ads, Vonage ads, Pepsi and whatever other stuff they're trying tosell me.

When I check my email (I have a Gmail account), I usually have 1or 2 new spam in my inbox, and about 120 new spams in my spambox. At the end ofthe month, my spambox auto-deletes all spam over a month old. I currently haveover 4000 spams in there. I check any new spams as spam and then go about mybusiness of answering emails/hatemail.

Then I read an interesting statistic: Advertising profits haveslumped during the last three years in the United States. That doesn't meanthat advertising companies are going bankrupt (although some of them mighteventually), what it means is that companies that are advertising don't seem tobe making as many sales.

For example, if the Widget Company spends $100 million on a newadvertising campaign and usually makes about $500 million in profits, whatshappened is that instead of making $500 M, they are only making $400 M instead.

Obviously people aren't selling Widgets, but the principle is thesame. Companies seem to be going into an «advertising backslide»,almost as if we were in a depression.

Except we're not in a depression. True, the US economy did SHRINK 0.5% during 2005, but that’s not a depression. It’s a minor bump on theeconomic radar.

These days you see advertising EVERYWHERE. We use Google Adsensein order to make sure the Lilith Gallery Network makes a profit and can affordto pay for its server/etc. Admittedly we also fall into this trap of usingadvertising in order to pay the bills, and we can admit to it without beinghypocritical.

But what about the rest of the world? Advertising really isseemingly everywhere. Dentist offices often get free magazine subscriptionsbecause the advertising in the magazine is a good way of selling products toconsumers that might not see it otherwise. It also advertises the magazineitself simply by «being there».

During the whole history the aim of advertising is to inform andto convince, hasn’t changed. Advertisement which we know now is a modernphenomenon with its roots in deep past. One of the greatest events of thehistory of advertisement was the invention of demountable fonts by JohannGutenberg in 1440. His invention gave life to the new carrier of advertisement:printed posters, leaflets and newspaper announcements.

Albert Lasker, the father of modern advertisement, told thatadvertisement is “a printed kind of trade”. But this definition was givenbefore the invention of radio and TV.

Advertising is a transfer of information, usually paid and has thecharacteristic of persuasion, about production, service or ideas by famousadvertiser with the help of different carriers.

Advertising occupies a major place in American society. Linked tothe bedrock principles that shaped American nation – free speech, competitionand individual choice – it has served the public since colonial times as asource of vital information about their open, market-based economy.

Advertising is a positive force in our free society. Protected bythe First Amendment, it informs the public, promotes competition, fuelseconomic growth, creates jobs and fosters a wide array of media choices forconsumers.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: “Congressshall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech or of the press…” In a longseries of cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has conclusively extended thisprotection to “commercial speech.” As a result, advertising of lawful productsand services, conducted in a non-misleading way, is fully protected by the U.S.Constitution.

According to a landmark study conducted by the highly regardedconsulting firm Global Insights under the direction of a Nobel Laureate inEconomics, advertising is a remarkably powerful economic force. Nationally, itgenerates over $5 trillion in economic activity, or approximately 20 percent of U.S. total economic activity. Sales of products and services stimulated byadvertising support 21 million jobs, or 15 percent of the total jobs in thecountry. In addition, another Nobel Laureate in economics, George Stigler, alsohas noted that advertising is a critical force in fostering economic efficiencyand competition throughout the US economy.

Advertising enables consumers to enjoy a vast array of mediachoices. Commercial television and radio are available to the public at nocost, thanks to advertising. In addition, advertising revenues providesubstantial support for most print publications, large portions of the Internetand cable, giving people access to immense information and entertainmentcontent at little cost. This support helps democratize access to information.The public, wherever they are located geographically and regardless of theirincome level, have more information available to them than at any other time inhistory.

Advertising informs consumers about product choices available inthe marketplace. Increasingly, it also educates them about issues that affecttheir lives. Recognizing the power of advertising to educate, the industryannually voluntarily devotes multi-billions of dollars worth of creative andmedia resources to high-visibility public service campaigns.

Vast, affordable media options enrich our society and underpin acore American value: the democratization of knowledge and information.Advertising plays a critical role in fostering this abundance of information,as it provides the financial foundation for the immense number of media and Webservices available to U.S. consumers.

Commercial broadcasting, both radio and television, is supportedsolely by revenues from the sale of advertising time and space. Other types of media,including the Internet, newspapers, magazines and large segments of cabletelevision rely heavily on advertising for a major portion of their revenues.Indeed, without advertising dollars, many of today’s media outlets would notexist, and the cost of those that survived would be substantially higher forthe consumer.

Advertising revenue has helped lead to a tremendous proliferationof media choices. For example, television viewers in the early 1950’s and 60’scould watch only three broadcast networks. Today, viewers can choose frommultiple broadcast networks, hundreds of cable channels and direct broadcastsatellite programming.

The advertising-supported business model has also fueled theexplosive growth of the Internet, creating a low barrier-to entry for animmense number of entrepreneurial online businesses. According to research firmcomScore, more than 200 million Americans age 15 or older use search engineseach month. These consumers are going to the Internet to access – at no cost –all types of content: from news and health, to sports and entertainment, to joblistings and travel recommendations. The most popular Internet search engines,news outlets, entertainment portals, photo and video sharing services andsocial networking sites all give consumers free access to vast content andonline experiences thanks to their advertising revenues.

The online media has developed at an extraordinary pace. It took38 years for radio to reach 50 million Americans; network television took 13years and cable television took 10 years. It took only about three years forthe Internet to reach 50 million users in the U.S.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), there was$23.4 billion spent on advertising and paid search on the Internet in 2008. Toput this in perspective, the Internet today is a bigger advertising medium thanradio, outdoor advertising and about the same as consumer magazines.(www.iab.net).

However, policymakers need to refrain from imposing undue restrictionsthat would limit the effectiveness of interactive advertising, therebydiminishing the flow of ad dollars into this promising new media channel.

The economic health of most of American media, including theonline marketplace, rests primarily on the strong financial foundation providedby advertising.

You see that modern economy, especially advertising, as a part ofmodern economy not only in the USA, is much connected with pop culture: TV,Internet, literature, art and etc. This phenomenon is very interesting. Theproblem of advertising is very important for economics because you need ads forpromoting your production, especially if you only start your own business.Everybody knows that ad is connected with the culture: TV, magazines,newspapers, radio, even films an so on.

So in my work I’ll try to study the problem of affectingadvertising on pop culture in America. At first we’ll learn the definitions ofadvertisement and pop culture.

Advertising

Advertising is a formof communication intended to persuade its viewers, readers or listeners to takesome action. It usually includes the name of a product or service and how thatproduct or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade potential customersto purchase or to consume that particular brand. Modern advertising developedwith the rise of mass production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[1]

Commercial advertisers often seek to generate increasedconsumption of their products or services through branding, which involves therepetition of an image or product name in an effort to associate relatedqualities with the brand in the minds of consumers. Different types of mediacan be used to deliver these messages, including traditional media such asnewspapers, magazines, television, radio, outdoor or direct mail. Advertisingmay be placed by an advertising agency on behalf of a company or otherorganization.

Organizations that spend money on advertising promoting itemsother than a consumer product or service include political parties, interestgroups, religious organizations and governmental agencies. Nonprofitorganizations may rely on free modes of persuasion, such as a public serviceannouncement.

Money spent on advertising has declined in recent years. In 2007,spending on advertising was estimated at more than $150 billion in the United States[2] and $385 billion worldwide,[3] and the latter to exceed $450billion by 2010.

History

Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters.Commercial messages and political campaign displays have been found in theruins of Pompeii and ancient Arabia. Lost and found advertising on papyrus wascommon in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Wall or rock painting for commercialadvertising is another manifestation of an ancient advertising form, which ispresent to this day in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. Thetradition of wall painting can be traced back to Indian rock art paintings thatdate back to 4000 BC.[4]History tells us that Out-of-home advertising and billboards are the oldestforms of advertising.

As the towns and cities of the Middle Ages began to grow, and thegeneral populace was unable to read, signs that today would say cobbler,miller, tailor or blacksmith would use an image associated with their tradesuch as a boot, a suit, a hat, a clock, a diamond, a horse shoe, a candle oreven a bag of flour. Fruits and vegetables were sold in the city square fromthe backs of carts and wagons and their proprietors used street callers (town criers)to announce their whereabouts for the convenience of the customers.

As education became an apparent need and reading, as well asprinting, developed advertising expanded to include handbills. In the 17thcentury advertisements started to appear in weekly newspapers in England. These early print advertisements were used mainly to promote books and newspapers,which became increasingly affordable with advances in the printing press; andmedicines, which were increasingly sought after as disease ravaged Europe. However, false advertising and so-called «quack» advertisements became aproblem, which ushered in the regulation of advertising content.

As the economy expanded during the 19th century, advertising grewalongside. In the United States, the success of this advertising formateventually led to the growth of mail-order advertising.

In June 1836, French newspaper La Presse was the first to include paid advertising in its pages, allowing it to lower itsprice, extend its readership and increase its profitability and the formula wassoon copied by all titles. Around 1840, Volney Palmer established a predecessorto advertising agencies in Boston.[5]Aroundthe same time, in France, Charles-Louis Havas extended the services of his newsagency, Havas to include advertisement brokerage, making it the first Frenchgroup to organize. At first, agencies were brokers for advertisement space innewspapers. N. W. Ayer & Son was the first full-service agency to assumeresponsibility for advertising content. N.W. Ayer opened in 1869, and waslocated in Philadelphia.5

At the turn of the century, there were few career choices forwomen in business; however, advertising was one of the few. Since women wereresponsible for most of the purchasing done in their household, advertisers andagencies recognized the value of women's insight during the creative process.In fact, the first American advertising to use a sexual sell was created by awoman – for a soap product. Although tame by today's standards, the advertisementfeatured a couple with the message «The skin you love to touch».[6]

In the early 1920s, the first radio stations were established byradio equipment manufacturers and retailers who offered programs in order tosell more radios to consumers. As time passed, many non-profit organizationsfollowed suit in setting up their own radio stations, and included: schools,clubs and civic groups.[7]When the practice of sponsoring programs was popularized, each individual radioprogram was usually sponsored by a single business in exchange for a briefmention of the business' name at the beginning and end of the sponsored shows.However, radio station owners soon realized they could earn more money byselling sponsorship rights in small time allocations to multiple businessesthroughout their radio station's broadcasts, rather than selling thesponsorship rights to single businesses per show.

This practice was carried over to television in the late 1940s andearly 1950s. A fierce battle was fought between those seeking to commercializethe radio and people who argued that the radio spectrum should be considered apart of the commons – to be used only non-commercially and for the public good.The United Kingdom pursued a public funding model for the BBC, originally aprivate company, the British Broadcasting Company, but incorporated as a publicbody by Royal Charter in 1927. In Canada, advocates like Graham Spry werelikewise able to persuade the federal government to adopt a public fundingmodel, creating the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. However, in the United States, the capitalist model prevailed with the passage of the Communications Act of1934 which created the Federal Communications Commission.7 Toplacate the socialists, the U.S. Congress did require commercial broadcastersto operate in the «public interest, convenience, and necessity».[8] Public broadcasting now existsin the United States due to the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act which led to thePublic Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio.

In the early 1950s, the DuMont Television Network began the moderntrend of selling advertisement time to multiple sponsors. Previously, DuMont had trouble finding sponsors for many of their programs and compensated by sellingsmaller blocks of advertising time to several businesses. This eventuallybecame the standard for the commercial television industry in the United States. However, it was still a common practice to have single sponsor shows, suchas The United States Steel Hour. In some instances the sponsors exercised greatcontrol over the content of the show — up to and including having one'sadvertising agency actually writing the show. The single sponsor model is muchless prevalent now, a notable exception being the Hallmark Hall of Fame.

The 1960s saw advertising transform into a modern approach inwhich creativity was allowed to shine, producing unexpected messages that madeadvertisements more tempting to consumers' eyes. The Volkswagen adcampaign—featuring such headlines as «Think Small» and«Lemon» (which were used to describe the appearance of the car)—usheredin the era of modern advertising by promoting a «position» or«unique selling proposition» designed to associate each brand with aspecific idea in the reader or viewer's mind. This period of Americanadvertising is called the Creative Revolution and its archetype was WilliamBernbach who helped create the revolutionary Volkswagen ads among others. Someof the most creative and long-standing American advertising dates to thisperiod.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the introduction of cabletelevision and particularly MTV. Pioneering the concept of the music video, MTVushered in a new type of advertising: the consumer tunes in for the advertisingmessage, rather than it being a by-product or afterthought. As cable andsatellite television became increasingly prevalent, specialty channels emerged,including channels entirely devoted to advertising, such as QVC, Home ShoppingNetwork, and ShopTV Canada.

Marketing through the Internet opened new frontiers foradvertisers and contributed to the «dot-com» boom of the 1990s.Entire corporations operated solely on advertising revenue, offering everythingfrom coupons to free Internet access. At the turn of the 21st century, a numberof websites including the search engine Google, started a change in online advertisingby emphasizing contextually relevant, unobtrusive ads intended to help, ratherthan inundate, users. This has led to a plethora of similar efforts and anincreasing trend of interactive advertising.

The share of advertising spending relative to GDP has changedlittle across large changes in media. For example, in the U.S. in 1925, the main advertising media were newspapers, magazines, signs on streetcars, andoutdoor posters. Advertising spending as a share of GDP was about 2.9 percent.By 1998, television and radio had become major advertising media. Nonetheless,advertising spending as a share of GDP was slightly lower—about 2.4 percent.[9]

A recent advertising innovation is «guerrillamarketing», which involve unusual approaches such as staged encounters inpublic places, giveaways of products such as cars that are covered with brandmessages, and interactive advertising where the viewer can respond to becomepart of the advertising message. Guerrilla advertising is becoming increasingmore popular with a lot of companies. This type of advertising is unpredictableand innovative, which causes consumers to buy the product or idea. Thisreflects an increasing trend of interactive and «embedded» ads, suchas via product placement, having consumers vote through text messages, and variousinnovations utilizing social network services such as MySpace.

Public service advertising

The same advertising techniques used to promote commercial goodsand services can be used to inform, educate and motivate the public aboutnon-commercial issues, such as HIV/AIDS, political ideology, energyconservation and deforestation.

Advertising, in its non-commercial guise, is a powerfuleducational tool capable of reaching and motivating large audiences.«Advertising justifies its existence when used in the public interest – itis much too powerful a tool to use solely for commercial purposes.» – Attributedto Howard Gossage by David Ogilvy.

Public service advertising, non-commercial advertising, publicinterest advertising, cause marketing, and social marketing are different termsfor (or aspects of) the use of sophisticated advertising and marketingcommunications techniques (generally associated with commercial enterprise) onbehalf of non-commercial, public interest issues and initiatives.

In the United States, the granting of television and radiolicenses by the FCC is contingent upon the station broadcasting a certainamount of public service advertising. To meet these requirements, manybroadcast stations in America air the bulk of their required public serviceannouncements during the late night or early morning when the smallestpercentage of viewers are watching, leaving more day and prime time commercialslots available for high-paying advertisers.

Public service advertising reached its height during World Wars Iand II under the direction of several governments.

Types of advertising

Virtually any medium can be used for advertising. Commercialadvertising media can include wall paintings, billboards, street furniturecomponents, printed flyers and rack cards, radio, cinema and televisionadverts, web banners, mobile telephone screens, shopping carts, web popups,skywriting, bus stop benches, human billboards, magazines, newspapers, towncriers, sides of buses, banners attached to or sides of airplanes(«logojets»), in-flight advertisements on seatback tray tables oroverhead storage bins, taxicab doors, roof mounts and passenger screens,musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposablediapers, doors of bathroom stalls, stickers on apples in supermarkets, shoppingcart handles (grabertising), the opening section of streaming audio and video,posters, and the backs of event tickets and supermarket receipts. Any place an«identified» sponsor pays to deliver their message through a mediumis advertising.

Television

The TV commercial is generally considered the most effectivemass-market advertising format, as is reflected by the high prices TV networkscharge for commercial airtime during popular TV events. The annual Super Bowlfootball game in the United States is known as the most prominent advertisingevent on television. The average cost of a single thirty-second TV spot duringthis game has reached US$3 million (as of 2009).

The majority of television commercials feature a song or jinglethat listeners soon relate to the product.

Virtual advertisements may be inserted into regular televisionprogramming through computer graphics. It is typically inserted into otherwiseblank backdrops[10]or used to replace local billboards that are not relevant to the remotebroadcast audience.[11]More controversially, virtual billboards may be inserted into the background[12] where none exist in real-life.Virtual product placement is also possible.[13]

Infomercials

An infomercial is a long-format television commercial, typicallyfive minutes or longer. The word «infomercial» is a portmanteau ofthe words «information» & «commercial». The mainobjective in an infomercial is to create an impulse purchase, so that theconsumer sees the presentation and then immediately buys the product throughthe advertised toll-free telephone number or website. Infomercials describe,display, and often demonstrate products and their features, and commonly havetestimonials from consumers and industry professionals.

Radio advertising

Radio advertising is a form of advertising via the medium ofradio.

Radio advertisements are broadcasted as radio waves to the airfrom a transmitter to an antenna and a thus to a receiving device. Airtime ispurchased from a station or network in exchange for airing the commercials.While radio has the obvious limitation of being restricted to sound, proponentsof radio advertising often cite this as an advantage.

Press advertising

Press advertising describes advertising in a printed medium suchas a newspaper, magazine, or trade journal. This encompasses everything frommedia with a very broad readership base, such as a major national newspaper ormagazine, to more narrowly targeted media such as local newspapers and tradejournals on very specialized topics. A form of press advertising is classifiedadvertising, which allows private individuals or companies to purchase a small,narrowly targeted ad for a low fee advertising a product or service.

Online advertising

Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internetand World Wide Web for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messagesto attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual adsthat appear on search engine results pages, banner ads, in text ads, Rich MediaAds, Social network advertising, online classified advertising, advertisingnetworks and e-mail marketing, including e-mail spam.

Billboard advertising

Billboards are large structures located in public places whichdisplay advertisements to passing pedestrians and motorists. Most often, theyare located on main roads with a large amount of passing motor and pedestriantraffic; however, they can be placed in any location with large amounts ofviewers, such as on mass transit vehicles and in stations, in shopping malls oroffice buildings, and in stadiums.

Mobile billboard advertising

Mobile billboards are generally vehicle mounted billboards ordigital screens. These can be on dedicated vehicles built solely for carryingadvertisements along routes preselected by clients, they can also bespecially-equipped cargo trucks or, in some cases, large banners strewn fromplanes. The billboards are often lighted; some being backlit, and othersemploying spotlights. Some billboard displays are static, while others change;for example, continuously or periodically rotating among a set ofadvertisements.

Mobile displays are used for various situations in metropolitanareas throughout the world, including:

·         Target advertising

·         One-day, and long-termcampaigns

·         Conventions

·         Sporting events

·         Store openings and similarpromotional events

·         Big advertisements fromsmaller companies

·         Others

In-store advertising

In-store advertising is any advertisement placed in a retailstore. It includes placement of a product in visible locations in a store, suchas at eye level, at the ends of aisles and near checkout counters, eye-catchingdisplays promoting a specific product, and advertisements in such places asshopping carts and in-store video displays.

Covert advertising

Covert advertising, also known as guerrilla advertising, is when aproduct or brand is embedded in entertainment and media. For example, in afilm, the main character can use an item or other of a definite brand, as inthe movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise's character John Anderton owns aphone with the Nokia logo clearly written in the top corner, or his watchengraved with the Bulgari logo. Another example of advertising in film is in I,Robot, where main character played by Will Smith mentions his Converse shoesseveral times, calling them «classics,» because the film is set farin the future. I, Robot and Spaceballs also showcase futuristic cars with theAudi and Mercedes-Benz logos clearly displayed on the front of the vehicles.Cadillac chose to advertise in the movie The Matrix Reloaded, which as a resultcontained many scenes in which Cadillac cars were used. Similarly, productplacement for Omega Watches, Ford, VAIO, BMW and Aston Martin cars are featuredin recent James Bond films, most notably Casino Royale. In «FantasticFour: Rise of the Silver Surfer», the main transport vehicle shows a largeDodge logo on the front. Blade Runner includes some of the most obvious productplacement; the whole film stops to show a Coca-Cola billboard.

Celebrities

This type of advertising focuses upon using celebrity power, fame,money, popularity to gain recognition for their products and promote specificstores or products. Advertisers often advertise their products, for example,when celebrities share their favorite products or wear clothes by specificbrands or designers. Celebrities are often involved in advertising campaignssuch as television or print adverts to advertise specific or general products.

The use of celebrities to endorse a brand can have its downsides,however. One mistake by a celebrity can be detrimental to the public relationsof a brand. For example, following his performance of eight gold medals at the2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China, swimmer Michael Phelps' contract withKellogg's was terminated, as Kellogg's did not want to associate with him afterhe was photographed smoking marijuana.

Media and advertising approaches

Increasingly, other media are overtaking many of the«traditional» media such as television, radio and newspaper becauseof a shift toward consumer's usage of the Internet for news and music as wellas devices like digital video recorders (DVR's) such as TiVo.

Advertising on the World Wide Web is a recent phenomenon. Pricesof Web-based advertising space are dependent on the «relevance» ofthe surrounding web content and the traffic that the website receives.

Digital signage is poised to become a major mass media because ofits ability to reach larger audiences for less money. Digital signage alsooffer the unique ability to see the target audience where they are reached bythe medium. Technology advances has also made it possible to control themessage on digital signage with much precision, enabling the messages to berelevant to the target audience at any given time and location which in turn,gets more response from the advertising. Digital signage is being successfullyemployed in supermarkets. Another successful use of digital signage is inhospitality locations such as restaurants<sup/>and malls.[14]

E-mail advertising is another recent phenomenon. Unsolicited bulkE-mail advertising is known as «e-mail spam». Spam has been a problemfor email users for many years. But more efficient filters are now availablemaking it relatively easy to control what email you get.

Some companies have proposed placing messages or corporate logoson the side of booster rockets and the International Space Station. Controversyexists on the effectiveness of subliminal advertising, and the pervasiveness ofmass messages.

Unpaid advertising (also called «publicityadvertising»), can provide good exposure at minimal cost. Personalrecommendations («bring a friend», «sell it»), spreadingbuzz, or achieving the feat of equating a brand with a common noun (in theUnited States, «Xerox» = «photocopier», «Kleenex»= tissue, «Vaseline» = petroleum jelly, «Hoover» = vacuumcleaner, «Nintendo» (often used by those exposed to many video games)= video games, and «Band-Aid» = adhesive bandage) — these can be seenas the pinnacle of any advertising campaign. However, some companies oppose theuse of their brand name to label an object. Equating a brand with a common nounalso risks turning that brand into a genericized trademark — turning it into ageneric term which means that its legal protection as a trademark is lost.

As the mobile phone became a new mass media in 1998 when the firstpaid downloadable content appeared on mobile phones in Finland, it was only a matter of time until mobile advertising followed, also first launched in Finland in 2000. By 2007 the value of mobile advertising had reached $2.2 billion andproviders such as Admob delivered billions of mobile ads.

More advanced mobile ads include banner ads, coupons, MultimediaMessaging Service picture and video messages, advergames and various engagementmarketing campaigns. A particular feature driving mobile ads is the 2D Barcode,which replaces the need to do any typing of web addresses, and uses the camerafeature of modern phones to gain immediate access to web content. 83 percent ofJapanese mobile phone users already are active users of 2D barcodes.

A new form of advertising that is growing rapidly is socialnetwork advertising. It is online advertising with a focus on social networkingsites. This is a relatively immature market, but it has shown a lot of promiseas advertisers are able to take advantage of the demographic information theuser has provided to the social networking site. Friendertising is a moreprecise advertising term in which people are able to direct advertisementstoward others directly using social network service.

From time to time, The CW Television Network airs shortprogramming breaks called «Content Wraps,» to advertise one company'sproduct during an entire commercial break. The CW pioneered «contentwraps» and some products featured were Herbal Essences, Crest, Guitar HeroII, Cover Girl, and recently Toyota.

Recently, there appeared a new promotion concept,«ARvertising», advertising on Augmented Reality technology.

Influencing and conditioning

The most important element of advertising is not information butsuggestion more or less making use of associations, emotions (appeal toemotion) and drives dormant in the sub-conscience of people, such as sex drive,herd instinct, of desires, such as happiness, health, fitness, appearance,self-esteem, reputation, belonging, social status, identity, adventure,distraction, reward, of fears (appeal to fear), such as illness, weaknesses,loneliness, need, uncertainty, security or of prejudices, learned opinions andcomforts. “All human needs, relationships, and fears – the deepest recesses ofthe human psyche – become mere means for the expansion of the commodityuniverse under the force of modern marketing. With the rise to prominence ofmodern marketing, commercialism – the translation of human relations intocommodity relations – although a phenomenon intrinsic to capitalism, hasexpanded exponentially.”[15]’Cause-related marketing’ in which advertisers link their product to someworthy social cause has boomed over the past decade.

Advertising exploits the model role of celebrities or popularfigures and makes deliberate use of humour as well as of associations withcolour, tunes, certain names and terms. Altogether, these are factors of howone perceives himself and one’s self-worth. In his description of ‘mentalcapitalism’ Franck says, “the promise of consumption making someoneirresistible is the ideal way of objects and symbols into a person’s subjectiveexperience. Evidently, in a society in which revenue of attention moves to thefore, consumption is drawn by one’s self-esteem. As a result, consumptionbecomes ‘work’ on a person’s attraction. From the subjective point of view,this ‘work’ opens fields of unexpected dimensions for advertising. Advertisingtakes on the role of a life councillor in matters of attraction. (…) The cultaround one’s own attraction is what Christopher Lasch described as ‘Culture ofNarcissism’.”[16]

For advertising critics another serious problem is that “the longstanding notion of separation between advertising and editorial/creative sidesof media is rapidly crumbling” and advertising is increasingly hard to tellapart from news, information or entertainment. The boundaries betweenadvertising and programming are becoming blurred. According to the media firms allthis commercial involvement has no influence over actual media content, but, asMcChesney puts it, “this claim fails to pass even the most basic giggle test,it is so preposterous.”[17]

Advertising draws “heavily on psychological theories about how tocreate subjects, enabling advertising and marketing to take on a ‘more clearlypsychological tinge’ (Miller and Rose, 1997, cited in Thrift, 1999, p. 67).Increasingly, the emphasis in advertising has switched from providing ‘factual’information to the symbolic connotations of commodities, since the crucialcultural premise of advertising is that the material object being sold is neverin itself enough. Even those commodities providing for the most mundanenecessities of daily life must be imbued with symbolic qualities and culturallyendowed meanings via the ‘magic system (Williams, 1980) of advertising. In thisway and by altering the context in which advertisements appear, things ‘can bemade to mean «just about anything»’ (McFall, 2002, p. 162) and the‘same’ things can be endowed with different intended meanings for differentindividuals and groups of people, thereby offering mass produced visions ofindividualism.”[1]

Before advertising is done, market research institutions need toknow and describe the target group to exactly plan and implement theadvertising campaign and to achieve the best possible results. A whole array ofsciences directly deal with advertising and marketing or is used to improve itseffects. Focus groups, psychologists and cultural anthropologists are ‘’’derigueur’’’ in marketing research”.[44] Vast amounts of data onpersons and their shopping habits are collected, accumulated, aggregated andanalysed with the aid of credit cards, bonus cards, raffles and internetsurveying. With increasing accuracy this supplies a picture of behaviour,wishes and weaknesses of certain sections of a population with whichadvertisement can be employed more selectively and effectively. The efficiencyof advertising is improved through advertising research. Universities, ofcourse supported by business and in co-operation with other disciplines (s.above), mainly Psychiatry, Anthropology, Neurology and behavioural sciences,are constantly in search for ever more refined, sophisticated, subtle andcrafty methods to make advertising more effective. “Neuromarketing is acontroversial new field of marketing which uses medical technologies such asfunctional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) — not to heal, but to sellproducts. Advertising and marketing firms have long used the insights andresearch methods of psychology in order to sell products, of course. But todaythese practices are reaching epidemic levels, and with a complicity on the partof the psychological profession that exceeds that of the past. The result is anenormous advertising and marketing onslaught that comprises, arguably, thelargest single psychological project ever undertaken. Yet, this greatundertaking remains largely ignored by the American Psychological Association.”[18] Robert McChesney calls it«the greatest concerted attempt at psychological manipulation in all ofhuman history.»

Dependency of the media and corporate censorship

Almost all mass media are advertising media and many of them areexclusively advertising media and, with the exception of public servicebroadcasting are privately owned. Their income is predominantly generatedthrough advertising; in the case of newspapers and magazines from 50 to 80%.Public service broadcasting in some countries can also heavily depend onadvertising as a source of income (up to 40%).[19]In the view of critics no media that spreads advertisements can be independentand the higher the proportion of advertising, the higher the dependency. Thisdependency has “distinct implications for the nature of media content…. In thebusiness press, the media are often referred to in exactly the way they presentthemselves in their candid moments: as a branch of the advertising industry.”[20]

In addition, the private media are increasingly subject to mergersand concentration with property situations often becoming entangled and opaque.This development, which Henry A. Giroux calls an “ongoing threat to democraticculture”,<sup/>by itself should suffice to sound all alarms in ademocracy. Five or six advertising agencies dominate this 400 billion U.S.dollar global industry.

“Journalists have long faced pressure to shape stories to suitadvertisers and owners …. the vast majority of TV station executives foundtheir news departments ‘cooperative’ in shaping the news to assist in‘non-traditional revenue development.”[21]Negative and undesired reporting can be prevented or influenced whenadvertisers threaten to cancel orders or simply when there is a danger of sucha cancellation. Media dependency and such a threat becomes very real when thereis only one dominant or very few large advertisers. The influence ofadvertisers is not only in regard to news or information on their own productsor services but expands to articles or shows not directly linked to them. Inorder to secure their advertising revenues the media has to create the bestpossible ‘advertising environment’. Another problem considered censorship bycritics is the refusal of media to accept advertisements that are not in theirinterest. A striking example of this is the refusal of TV stations to broadcastads by Adbusters. Groups try to place advertisements and are refused bynetworks.

It is principally the viewing rates which decide upon theprogramme in the private radio and television business. “Their business is toabsorb as much attention as possible. The viewing rate measures the attentionthe media trades for the information offered. The service of this attraction issold to the advertising business”[22]and the viewing rates determine the price that can be demanded for advertising.

“Advertising companies determining the contents of shows has beenpart of daily life in the USA since 1933. Procter & Gamble (P&G) ….offered a radio station a history-making trade (today know as “bartering”): thecompany would produce an own show for “free” and save the radio station thehigh expenses for producing contents. Therefore the company would want itscommercials spread and, of course, its products placed in the show. Thus, theseries ‘Ma Perkins’ was created, which P&G skilfully used to promoteOxydol, the leading detergent brand in those years and the Soap opera was born…”

While critics basically worry about the subtle influence of theeconomy on the media, there are also examples of blunt exertion of influence.The US company Chrysler, before it merged with Daimler Benz had its agency,PentaCom, send out a letter to numerous magazines, demanding them to send, anoverview of all the topics before the next issue is published to “avoid potentialconflict”. Chrysler most of all wanted to know, if there would be articles with“sexual, political or social” content or which could be seen as “provocative oroffensive”. PentaCom executive David Martin said: “Our reasoning is, thatanyone looking at a 22.000 $ product would want it surrounded by positivethings. There is nothing positive about an article on child pornography.”<sup/>Inanother example, the „USA Network held top-level ‚off-the-record’ meetings withadvertisers in 2000 to let them tell the network what type of programmingcontent they wanted in order for USA to get their advertising.”[23] Television shows are created toaccommodate the needs for advertising, e. g. splitting them up in suitablesections. Their dramaturgy is typically designed to end in suspense or leave anunanswered question in order to keep the viewer attached.

The movie system, at one time outside the direct influence of thebroader marketing system, is now fully integrated into it through thestrategies of licensing, tie-ins and product placements. The prime function ofmany Hollywood films today is to aid in the selling of the immense collectionof commodities.[24]The press called the 2002 Bond film ‘Die Another Day’ featuring 24 majorpromotional partners an ‘ad-venture’ and noted that James Bond “now has been‘licensed to sell’” As it has become standard practise to place products inmotion pictures, it “has self-evident implications for what types of films willattract product placements and what types of films will therefore be morelikely to get made”.

Advertising and information are increasingly hard to distinguishfrom each other. “The borders between advertising and media …. become more andmore blurred…. What August Fischer, chairman of the board of Axel Springerpublishing company considers to be a ‘proven partnership between the media andadvertising business’ critics regard as nothing but the infiltration ofjournalistic duties and freedoms”. According to RTL-executive Helmut Thoma“private stations shall not and cannot serve any mission but only the goal ofthe company which is the ‘acceptance by the advertising business and theviewer’. The setting of priorities in this order actually says everything aboutthe ‘design of the programmes’ by private television.” Patrick Le Lay, formermanaging director of TF1, a private French television channel with a marketshare of 25 to 35%, said: «There are many ways to talk about television.But from the business point of view, let’s be realistic: basically, the job ofTF1 is, e. g. to help Coca Cola sell its product. (…) For an advertisingmessage to be perceived the brain of the viewer must be at our disposal. Thejob of our programmes is to make it available, that is to say, to distract it,to relax it and get it ready between two messages. It is disposable human braintime that we sell to Coca Cola.”

Because of these dependencies a widespread and fundamental publicdebate about advertising and its influence on information and freedom of speechis difficult to obtain, at least through the usual media channels; otherwisethese would saw off the branch they are sitting on. “The notion that thecommercial basis of media, journalism, and communication could have troublingimplications for democracy is excluded from the range of legitimate debate”just as “capitalism is off-limits as a topic of legitimate debate in U.S. political culture”.[25]

An early critic of the structural basis of U.S. journalism was Upton Sinclair with his novel The Brass Check in which he stresses the influenceof owners, advertisers, public relations, and economic interests on the media.In his book “Our Master's Voice – Advertising” the social ecologist James Rorty(1890–1973) wrote: „The gargoyle’s mouth is a loudspeaker, powered by thevested interest of a two-billion dollar industry, and back of that the vestedinterests of business as a whole, of industry, of finance. It is never silent,it drowns out all other voices, and it suffers no rebuke, for it is not thevoice of America? That is its claim and to some extent it is a just claim...”[26]

It has taught us how to live, what to be afraid of, what to beproud of, how to be beautiful, how to be loved, how to be envied, how to besuccessful… Is it any wonder that the American population tends increasinglyto speak, think, feel in terms of this jabberwocky? That the stimuli of art,science, religion are progressively expelled to the periphery of American lifeto become marginal values, cultivated by marginal people on marginaltime?“[27]

Popular culture

Popular culture (commonlyknown as pop culture) is the totality of artistic products, ideas,perspectives, attitudes, memes,[28]images and other phenomena that the average person of any nation or group islikely to have encountered or been influenced by. In developed countries,cultural products are often disseminated by market-driven mass media (at leastfrom the early 20th century onward). For this reason, it sometimes comes underheavy criticism from various scientific and non-mainstream sources (mostnotably religious groups and countercultural groups) which deem it superficial,consumerist, sensationalist, and corrupted.[29]

It is manifest in preferences and acceptance or rejection offeatures in such various subjects as cooking, clothing, consumption, and themany facets of entertainment such as sports, music, film, and literature.Popular culture often contrasts with the more exclusive, even elitist»high culture",<sup/>that is, the culture of ruling socialgroups, and the low or folk culture of the lower classes.<sup/>Theearliest use of «popular» in English was during the fifteenth centuryin law and politics, meaning «low», «base»,«vulgar», and «of the common people»; from the lateeighteenth century it began to mean «widespread» and gain in positiveconnotation. (Williams 1985). «Culture» has been used since the 1950sto refer to various subgroups of society, with emphasis on culturaldifferences.

Definitions

Defining 'popular' and 'culture', which are essentially contestedconcepts, is complicated with multiple competing definitions of popularculture. John Storey, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, discusses sixdefinitions. The quantitative definition, of culture has the problem that much«high culture» (e.g. television dramatizations of Jane Austen) iswidely favoured. «Pop culture» is also defined as the culture that is«left over» when we have decided what high culture is. However, manyworks straddle or cross the boundaries, e.g. Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.Storey draws attention to the forces and relations which sustain thisdifference such as the educational system.

A third definition equates pop culture with Mass Culture. This isseen as a commercial culture, mass produced for mass consumption. From aWestern European perspective, this may be compared to American culture.Alternatively, «pop culture» can be defined as an«authentic» culture of the people, but this can be problematicbecause there are many ways of defining the «people.» Storey arguesthat there is a political dimension to popular culture; neo-Gramscian hegemonytheory "… sees popular culture as a site of struggle between the'resistance' of subordinate groups in society and the forces of 'incorporation'operating in the interests of dominant groups in society." A postmodernismapproach to popular culture would «no longer recognize the distinctionbetween high and popular culture'

Storey emphasizes that popular culture emerges from theurbanization of the industrial revolution, which identifies the term with theusual definitions of 'mass culture'. Studies of Shakespeare (by Weimann, Barberor Bristol, for example) locate much of the characteristic vitality of hisdrama in its participation in Renaissance popular culture, while contemporarypractitioners like Dario Fo and John McGrath use popular culture in itsGramscian sense that includes ancient folk traditions (the commedia dell'artefor example).

Popular culture changes constantly and occurs uniquely in placeand time. It forms currents and eddies, and represents a complex ofmutually-interdependent perspectives and values that influence society and itsinstitutions in various ways. For example, certain currents of pop culture mayoriginate from, (or diverge into) a subculture, representing perspectives withwhich the mainstream popular culture has only limited familiarity. Items ofpopular culture most typically appeal to a broad spectrum of the public.

Institutional propagation

Popular culture and the mass media have a symbiotic relationship:each depends on the other in an intimate collaboration.»

—K. Turner (1984), p.4[30]

The news media mines the work of scientists and scholars andconveys it to the general public, often emphasizing elements that have inherentappeal or the power to amaze. For instance, giant pandas (a species in remoteChinese woodlands) have become well-known items of popular culture; parasiticworms, though of greater practical importance, have not. Both scholarly factsand news stories get modified through popular transmission, often to the pointof outright falsehoods.

Hannah Arendt's 1961 essay «The Crisis in Culture»suggested that a «market-driven media would lead to the displacement ofculture by the dictates of entertainment.» Susan Sontag argues that in ourculture, the most "...intelligible, persuasive values are [increasingly]drawn from the entertainment industries", which is «undermining ofstandards of seriousness.» As a result, «tepid, the glib, and thesenselessly cruel» topics are becoming the norm.<sup/>Some criticsargue that popular culture is “dumbing down”: "...newspapers that once ranforeign news now feature celebrity gossip, pictures of scantily dressed youngladies...television has replaced high-quality drama with gardening, cookery,and other “lifestyle” programmes...[and] reality TV and asinine soaps," tothe point that people are constantly immersed in trivia about celebrityculture.[31]

In Rosenberg and White's book Mass Culture, MacDonald argues that«Popular culture is a debased, trivial culture that voids both the deeprealities (sex, death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple spontaneouspleasures… The masses, debauched by several generations of this sort ofthing, in turn come to demand trivial and comfortable cultural products.»<sup/>Van den Haag argues that "...all mass media in the end alienatepeople from personal experience and though appearing to offset it, intensifytheir moral isolation from each other, from reality and from themselves."[32]

Critics have lamented the "… replacement of high art andauthentic folk culture by tasteless industrialised artefacts produced on a massscale in order to satisfy the lowest common denominator."<sup/>This«mass culture emerged after the Second World War and have led to theconcentration of mass-culture power in ever larger global mediaconglomerates.» The popular press decreased the amount of news orinformation and replaced it with entertainment or titillation that reinforces"… fears, prejudice, scapegoating processes, paranoia, andaggression."

Critics of television and film have argued that the quality of TVoutput has been diluted as stations relentlessly pursue «populism andratings» by focusing on the «glitzy, the superficial, and thepopular.» In film, «Hollywood culture and values» areincreasingly dominating film production in other countries. Hollywood filmshave changed from creating formulaic films which emphasize "...shock-valueand superficial thrill[s]" and special effects, with themes that focus onthe "...basic instincts of aggression, revenge, violence, [and]greed." The plots "...often seem simplistic, a standardised templatetaken from the shelf, and dialogue is minimal." The «characters areshallow and unconvincing, the dialogue is also simple, unreal, and badlyconstructed.»[33]

Folklore

Folklore provides a second and very different source of popularculture. In pre-industrial times, mass culture equaled folk culture. Thisearlier layer of culture still persists today, sometimes in the form of jokesor slang jargon, which spread through the population by word of mouth and viathe Internet. By providing a new channel for transmission, cyberspace hasrenewed the strength of this element of popular culture.

Although the folkloric element of popular culture engages heavilywith the commercial element, the public has its own tastes and it may notembrace every cultural item sold. Moreover, beliefs and opinions about theproducts of commercial culture (for example: «My favorite character isSpongeBob SquarePants») spread by word-of-mouth, and become modified inthe process in the same manner that folklore evolves.

Owing to the pervasive and increasingly interconnected nature ofpopular culture, especially its intermingling of complementary distributionsources, some cultural anthropologists literary and cultural critics haveidentified a large amount of intertextuality in popular culture's portrayals ofitself. One commentator has suggested this self-referentiality reflects theadvancing encroachment of popular culture into every realm of collectiveexperience. «Instead of referring to the real world, much media output devotesitself to referring to other images, other narratives; self-referentiality isall-embracing, although it is rarely taken account of.»[34]

Many cultural critics have dismissed this as merely a symptom orside-effect of mass consumerism, however alternate explanations and critiquehave also been offered. One critic asserts that it reflects a fundamentalparadox: the increase in technological and cultural sophistication, combinedwith an increase in superficiality and dehumanization.[35]

Examples from American television

According to television studies scholars specializing in qualitytelevision, such as Kristin Thompson, self-referentiality in mainstreamAmerican television (especially comedy) reflects and exemplifies the type ofprogression characterized previously. Thompson[36]<sup/>argues shows such as The Simpsons use a "...flurry of culturalreferences, intentionally inconsistent characterization, and considerableself-reflexivity about television conventions and the status of the programmeas a television show."<sup/>Extreme examples approach a kind ofthematic infinite regress wherein distinctions between art and life, commerceand critique, ridicule and homage become intractably blurred.

Long-running television series The Simpsons routinely alludes tomainstream media properties, as well as the commercial content of the showitself. In one episode, Bart complains about the crass commercialism of theMacy's Thanksgiving Day Parade while watching television. When he turns hishead away from the television, he is shown floating by as an oversizedinflatable balloon. The show also invokes liberal reference to contemporaryissues as depicted in the mainstream, and often merges such references withunconventional and even esoteric associations to classical and postmodernistworks of literature, entertainment and art.

Advertising in Literature, Art, Film, and Popular Culture

What is advertising? Advertising is a means of conveyinginformation to consumers about a product or service that exists in manydifferent media. Advertising serves to persuade and inform a consumer base inorder to influence them and their purchasing power.[37] No matter the channel by whichthe advertising is communicated, be it in print, video, or sound-alladvertising seeks to accomplish the same goal.

Is advertising a direct affect Popular Culture, or is it a directeffect of Popular Culture? Through the exploration of advertising history inthe 20th century, brand identities and their development, along with theexamination of Popular Culture, and historical events occurring during the sametime frame, we can hope to find an answer to both of these questions.

Lowering of prices and the beginning of mass production madeproducts more widely available to the public, and thus carrying with it, theneed to bring their attention to the new items on the market. With the creationand development of the transcontinental railroad, a national market forproducts opened.

Although the first advertising agency was developed in 1841 byVolney B. Palmer, it wasn't until the 20th century that advertising agenciesbegan to offer a full spectrum of services ranging from branding and logodesign, to concepts, and implementation of the campaign. Originally, the agencyserved to secure the ad space in a newspaper. By the time the 20th centurybegan there were several agencies for companies to choose from. Experts startedcoming out of the woodwork left and right to share their thoughts onadvertising and the best methods to use, writing book after book on thesubject.[38]

Literatureand Advertising

Scholars and literary critics differ over what constitutesliterature. The once revered canon of texts (such as The Canterbury Tales, TheMerchant of Venice, and Wuthering Heights) has given way to the study of a muchbroader range of texts (including popular romances, soap operas, andadvertisements) and voices (especially kinds of voices that had not beenincluded among canonical texts such as African-, Asian-, and Latin-American writers).Some definitions of literature specify criteria that a text must have in orderto qualify as literature whereas others emphasize acceptance by a readingcommunity as the primary marker. The following two definitions of literaturerepresent these differing approaches:

In antiquity and in the Renaissance, literature or letters wereunderstood to include all writing of quality with any pretense to permanence.[focuses on textual criteria][39]

… literature is a canon which consists of those works inlanguage by which a community defines itself throughout the course of itshistory. It includes works primarily artistic and also those whose aestheticqualities are only secondary. The self-defining activity of the community isconducted in the light of the works, as its members have come to read them (orconcretize them). [focuses on community acceptance][40]

Whether one of these or yet another definition of literature ispreferred, there is a widely shared sense that literature stands apart frommore ordinary texts such as telephone books, shopping lists, operatinginstructions, and advertisements. A practical approach to understandingliterature might enumerate some widely shared characteristics:

— Literature consists of written texts.

— Literature is marked by careful use of language, includingfeatures such as creative metaphors, well-turned phrases, elegant syntax,rhyme, meter.

— Literature is written in a literary genre (poetry, prosefiction, or drama).

— Literature is intended by its authors to be read aesthetically.

— Literature is deliberately somewhat open in interpretation.[41]

Are advertisements «writings of quality with pretenses topermanence»? Are advertisements widely understood to be a form ofliterature? Are they careful in their use of language, written in arecognizable literary genre, intended to be and actually read aesthetically,and deliberately open in interpretation? In fact, advertisements fail by any ofthese definitions to qualify as literature. It is this difference that givesrise to the sense that literature is a part of «high» culture whileadvertisements are something else and belong to «low,» or mass,culture.

However, this binary division does not reflect the realrelationship of literature and advertising either in the present or the past.The literary theorist Jennifer Wicke argues that neither the novel as aliterary genre nor the advertisement as a text can be properly understood alonebut rather share a long and intimate history. She notes that prior toGutenberg, scribal manuscripts contained advertisements (or notices) thatexplained the circumstances of the copying. For example, a notice that copyinghad been done during holy days would signify that the text was not to be sold.At first, such notices appeared at the end of manuscripts. Later, after theprinting press was invented, printers began placing them as prefatory materialbefore the main texts. The content of these notices expanded to announce,describe, and indicate ownership of the texts that followed. Thus, the verytechnology of printing spurred the development of advertisements of printedtexts.

Elizabeth Eisenstein, investigating this historic relationship ofthe book and the ad, writes: «In the course of exploiting new publicitytechniques, few authors failed to give high priority to publicizing themselves.The art of puffery, the writing of blurbs and other familiar promotionaldevices were also exploited by early printers who worked aggressively to obtainpublic recognition for the authors and artists whose products they hoped tosell.»[42]

This promotion of printed works by printers also led to thesignificant identification of texts with authors. The crediting of the authorhad not always occurred previously when oral stories were written down. Thesenew techniques established books as intellectual property and made many authorsinto celebrities.

These early advertisements eventually became separated from thetexts themselves. «By the late seventeenth century… [these] publicitytechniques called 'advertising' had slipped out from the covers of literaryworks and helped to create the newspaper—The Advertiser became a generic namefor journalistic offerings.» At this point, advertisements as we know themtoday began to develop separately from books, appearing not only in newspapersbut in public spaces as signs and posters as well.

In the 19th century, the novel emerged as the most importantliterary genre and remained so until film, radio, and television challenged itspopularity it in the 20th century. After advertisements became separate andindependent texts in their own right, the relationship between literature andadvertising did not cease. Rather, it assumed complex new forms, as Wicke showsin her masterful analysis of three classic novelists—Charles Dickens, HenryJames, and James Joyce.

In several of the novels by Charles Dickens (Sketches by Boz,Pickwick, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, and OurMutual Friend), advertising figures prominently. In Sketches by Boz he wrote:"...all London is a circus of poster and trade bill, a receptacle for thewritings of Pears and Warren's until we can barely see ourselves underneath.Read this! Read that!"

Dickens knew intimately of what he wrote. Before establishinghimself as a novelist, he worked in Warren's blacking factory where shoe polishwas manufactured. It seems that he sometimes helped write the copy foradvertisements and that for a while he was placed in a window polishing shoesas a form of advertising. Later, when he wrote his novels, the power andpresence of factory work and the promotion of goods played significant roles.

In addition, Dickens engaged with advertising yet another way bytaking great interest in the advertising of his own novels—choosing or writingads for them. The great popularity of his stories led to the incorporation of manyof his characters into a broad range of advertisements in ways that arefamiliar today. Player's cigarettes issued in 1912 a set of trade cards (oneinserted in each pack of cigarettes) for Dickens's characters. Variouscommercial products mimicked the style or used the name of one or more of hischaracters—from Dolly Vardon aprons to chintz fabrics emboldened withDickensiana. This trend continues even today as various brands make referenceto «A Christmas Carol» or ask «Oliver Twist.»

The American author Henry James similarly engaged advertising inhis novels. The American stage for spectacle, exaggeration, and outrageousclaims was set earlier in the 19th century by P.T. Barnum and his extravagantand outlandish publicity for his traveling shows, circus, and museum. An America that succumbed to Barnum and unchecked advertising claims of every sort fascinatedJames. This fascination is reflected in his novels. According to Wicke, James'sown style of fiction «bears a confessed kinship to the melodramatics ofadvertising.» His late work The American Scene (1907) takes up the subjectof the consumer society.

His book commemorates the trip he took in 1904, after returningfrom twenty years in Europe, a «pilgrim» come to see his own nativeland. The patchwork of places and sights—St. Augustine, Newport, theWaldorf-Astoria, Hoboken—may seem impressionistic renderings of his journey,but above all the text explores the phenomenon of a capitalist culture that hascome into its own since his departure.[43]

Irish author James Joyce, like Dickens before him, wroteadvertisements at an early stage of his career. (He ran a film theatre andoften wrote the ads for it.) It is his masterful Ulysses (1922) that directlyconjoins literature and advertising. Leopold Bloom, the central character inthe novel, works as an advertising canvasser thus occasioning many referencesto advertisements in the novel. More profoundly, «the constantly unfurling'stream of consciousness' that is Bloom's narrative style is largely made up ofhis 'mind' wending its way through the eddies, currents, and shorelines ofadvertising or advertised goods.»

Many literary theorists have recently noted connections like thoseabove between literature and the culture of consumption for which advertisingis the mouthpiece. The James Joyce Quarterly asserts that advertisinginfluenced the writer at least as much as Thomas Aquinas, Dante, or Shakespearedid.[44]Other writers like George Eliot and Sherwood Anderson have been studied fortheir connections to advertising discourse as well. Eliot's Middlemarch(1871-2) contains passages reflective of Bloom's interior monologues aboutconsumer goods in Ulysses.[45]Anderson himself had a long career in advertising before writing his manyobservations about its practices.

Thus, what all these connections between literature andadvertising show is the impossibility of maintaining any strict divisionbetween the «high» culture of literature and the mass culture ofadvertising. Some writers of great literature were also authors of manyadvertisements to which and from which they took their style of writing. Moreimportantly, many influential writers have brought advertising into theirstories in order to analyze the role of advertising in society. Finally, thestudy of literature has opened itself to the examination of many kinds ofnon-canonical texts such as advertisements in order to understand the culture thatgenerates them.

Advertisingand Art

The relationship between advertising and art is even more intimatethan that with literature. Over the centuries, artists have been hired to paintsignboards, shop walls, and other kinds of images in the service of commercialpromotion. However, it was in the 19th century that a much closer relationshipbetween advertising and art developed.

In London, the well-known illustrator Cruikshank was commissionedin 1820 by Warren's blacking company (the same company that Dickens worked foras a boy) to illustrate an ad. The drawing he produced—a cat frightened by itsown reflected image in the sheen of a highly polished boot—clearly added sparkto the long-copy advertisement it accompanied. Such relationships were typical19th-century interactions between the art world and advertising.

In addition to the drawings and other images produced directly forcommercial use, a second relation of advertising to art was the appropriationof high art for use in advertisements. For example, John Everett Millais'ssentimental painting Bubbles (1886) became a poster for Pears soap, but notwithout considerable critical uproar from those who wanted to keep«art» on a high pedestal above the crassness of everyday commercialappeals.

Even more significant, however, was the close connection betweenadvertising and modern art that developed in the later years of the 19thcentury. Both advertising and the artistic movement known as modernism emergedabout the same time—around 1860 to 1870. The stage for their collaboration wasset by at least two factors: the development of techniques supporting the massproduction of images, and an abundance of consumer goods hitherto unknown.Modernism dismissed literal representations in favor of freer modes intended toevoke the sorts of fantasies and emotions that marketers were coming to realizewould help move products. By the final years of the 19th century, modern artand modern advertising were freely borrowing from and influencing one another.

The French advertising poster of the late 1800s marks thebeginning of this crossover between advertising and art. For example, Henri deToulouse-Lautrec produced advertising posters, as did many other artists whoare usually thought of as belonging to the «high art» tradition. Itwas Jules Chéret, however, who invented and perfected the advertisingposter as a new genre that had no real precedent in earlier artistictraditions. His poster for the Folies-Bergère in Paris privilegesmovement over literal representation. Its bright colors also depart fromliteralism to convey the excitement of the spectacle of the Folies-Bergère.

Despite widespread use, the advertising poster did not always meetwith universal acclaim. There were those who felt that filling the streets of Paris with advertising was a sure sign of cultural decay rather than progress. Aconservative writer, Maurice Talmeyr, published an article entitled «TheAge of the Poster» in which he assessed its impact on society.

[The poster] does not say to us: «Pray, obey, sacrificeyourself, adore God, fear the master, respect the king...» It whispers tous: «Amuse yourself, preen yourself, feed yourself, go to the theater, tothe ball, to the concert, read novels, drink good beer, buy good bouillon,smoke good cigars, eat good chocolate, go to your carnival, keep yourselffresh, handsome, strong, cheerful, please women, take care of yourself, combyourself, purge yourself, look after your underwear, your clothes, your teeth,your hands, and take lozenges if you catch cold!» [46]

The artist Georges Seurat became a great fan of Chéret andthe style of his posters. He drew inspiration for some of his later work fromthem. Chéret's high-stepping dancers in Les Girard: Folies-Bergère,a lithograph from 1879, reappear a decade later in Seurat's Le Chahut(1889-90). Many similar links between «high» artists and the popularcultural artists producing advertising are recognized by historians of art.

In 1990, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted anexhibition entitled High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture that explored therelation in such areas as words, graffiti, caricature, comics, and advertising.The exhibition catalogue noted: "[T]he story of modern artists' responsesto advertising, and vice versa, is the most complex and tendentious of thevarious histories [the exhibition] addresses." The exhibition traced thelink between art and advertising from the French advertising poster to thepresent.

An artistic movement based around «found objects»spilled over into advertising itself. The now familiar Michelin Man (1898)emerged from Édouard Michelin's observation that a stack of tires mightresemble a man with the simple addition of arms. It was in such moments, whereart and life come together, that many great advertising ideas of the 20thcentury were born. Another example is the RCA dog inspired by a real pet and anactual incident.

The influence between advertising and art moved the other way aswell. Picasso, in his Landscape with Posters (1912) and Au Bon Marché(1913), and many Dada avant-garde artists incorporated images of ads or actualparts of advertisements into their productions. In the 1920s, Fernand Légermodeled his painting The Siphon (1924) on an ad that appeared in the Frenchnewspaper Le Matin. Examples such as these abound in 20th-century art.

The social theorist Michael Schudson has termed Americanadvertising «capitalist realism» in order to indicate the similarityof advertising art in the 1930s to the propagandistic art forms that grew up inNazi Germany and the Soviet Union at that same time. According to Schudson,each of these states celebrated the different local ideas of heroism(communist, national socialist, or capitalist) in styles that were«reassuringly legible and impervious to ambiguity.»

After World War II, artists like Andy Warhol commented on modernlife through references to advertisements. Warhol painted cans of Campbell's soup repetitively to comment on modern life—a world in which endless copies ofmechanically produced products are available and serve to homogenizeexperience. (Ironically, Andy Warhol was later commissioned by Absolut Vodka toproduce an image of its famous bottle in the Warhol style as an actual advertisement.)Artistic commentaries on the nature of capitalism, consumption, and a worldpopulated with advertising imagery are mainstays in contemporary art.

The omnipresence of advertising imagery in contemporary society issurely one of the hallmarks of this period in history. When future generationslook back on 20th- and 21st-century life, they will surely marvel at how littlecare we took to preserve the popular art of advertising—most of whichdisappears quickly. TV commercials are intended to evaporate, billboards tocome down, and magazines and newspapers to be recycled. Yet, the mutualinfluence of high art and popular culture is one of the most salientcharacteristics of contemporary expressive culture.

Advertisingand Film

Since the end of World War II, first Hollywood films and later TVscripts have frequently included advertising as one of their themes. TheHucksters (1947) and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) tell storiesabout the lives of men who work in advertising, but the stories they tell arenot flattering. In fact, they constitute the beginning of a long tradition in Hollywood to use advertising (often as a backdrop to a story rather than its central focus)in a highly stereotyped manner. The establishment of this screen version ofadvertising and its perpetuation even into the present has provided for membersof the public—most of whom have never been inside an advertising agency and donot know anyone who works in one—their primary source of information about theinner workings of advertising. It is no different really from how the massmedia has constructed images of lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists, airlinepilots, movie stars, and a host of other professions. Although theserepresentations develop mythologies through repetition and are usuallysecondary to the main themes of stories, they nonetheless leave after-imagesthat linger in our minds about what we have seen.

How does Hollywood represent advertising? For the purposes of thisunit, a list of several films that deal with advertising in some way wasdeveloped. Then about half of these films were studied in detail for how theyrepresent advertising. On the basis of this analysis, recurrent themes aboutadvertising in the films were identified.

The themes that will be discussed in detail are the Hollywood representation of: (1) advertising as a profession, (2) the impact of advertisingon society, and (3) the characteristics of people who work in advertising.

By setting a film in an advertising agency and/or featuring peoplewho work in advertising, the film describes (albeit inadvertently) theprofession of advertising. Films typically make advertising appear to be easywork. Creative ideas are not depicted in relation to strategy and research, butrather ideas seem to emerge while throwing pencils like darts at the ceiling orin a moment of serendipity. For example, a creative team in Nothing in Common(1986) invents skits and songs by acting out an idea for a commercial. Thescene conveys a convivial, friendly, and fun atmosphere at work. Ray Liotta'scharacter comes up with the perfect jingle in Corrina, Corrina (1994) whilebanging out notes in a piano duo with his housekeeper, played by WhoopiGoldberg. Many scenes show the fun aspects of his job as a writer forcommercials for Jell-O and Mr. Potato Head. In the clip, the creative solution«just happens.» In How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), MatthewMcConaughey's character is engaged in a conversation with Kate Hudson's, who usesthe word «frosting» to describe diamonds. He recognizes theoriginality and power of the description and develops the tag line, «Frostyourself,» for a diamond company.

None of these representations portray the lengthy process thatgoes into making an advertisement nor the strategy that lies behind it. Rather,the most photogenic aspects of the creative process are selected and editedinto the story about advertising that gets told through movies.

Another aspect of advertising's appearance in film is theglamorous lifestyle that surrounds the field. The collage of images in Figures31-34 below shows advertising professionals dressing stylishly, working inbeautiful offices, attending elegant parties, and living in extraordinaryapartments and houses. For example, Ben Affleck in Bounce (2000) has a homewhose large glass windows give a spectacular view of Venice Beach and the waves of the Pacific beyond it. Keanu Reeves in Sweet November (2001) lives in ahigh-ceiling refurbished loft in San Francisco. This early morning scene showsthe elegant furnishings that include 12 flat-screen TVs. Mel Gibson in WhatWomen Want (2000) lives in a Chicago high-rise apartment with a large balcony,elegant furnishings, and a killer view of the cityscape.

Offices are at least as impressive as homes in Hollywood's versionof the lifestyles of advertising professionals. Offices are lively, colorful,interesting places to work. For example, Mel Gibson's office in What Women Wantis filled with award trophies, leather chairs, and advertisements. Its darkwoods and colors signify masculinity. By contrast, Helen Hunt's office in thesame film is brighter and has lots of flowers and a more feminine feel. Herlarge office has not only a very big desk but plenty of other furniture andmemorabilia of her career. The interior shots of the agency in the film show alarge open space with many workstations where mid-level employees work. Thearchitecture of the old building, complete with mezzanine and old ironwork,exudes style and good taste.

Advertising people attend lots of parties in the movies. Meg Ryanis shown below in a still from Kate & Leopold (2001). The setting is abusiness dinner where everyone is well dressed, all the tables have beautifulflowers, and the room itself is lovely. In a second clip from How to Lose a Guyin 10 Days, the party is a gala evening black-tie affair; the occasion is thecelebration of an ad campaign for diamonds, plenty of which sparkle in theroom. In Picture Perfect (1997), guests attend a lavish dinner where canapéspass on trays and two models dressed as the product celebrate Gulden's Mustard.

Not to be outdone by their surroundings, advertising people dressexceedingly well in the movies. Doris Day's character in Lover Come Back (1961)steps out of a convertible only to be covered by a canopy leading to the doorof a fashionable New York building. She wears a matching dress and jacketoutfit that is complete with a fur collar. Cuba Gooding, Jr., in The FightingTemptations (2003) is smartly dressed in a well-tailored, fashionable suit ashe addresses attendees at a board meeting. Meg Ryan in Kate & Leopold wearsan expensive crushed velvet riding jacket to a business lunch in an uptownrestaurant.

On top of the glitz and glamour that is advertising in film is adarker image that is repeated again and again. This is the notion thatadvertising is filled with lies and manipulation. The following clips fromfilms are typical. Each of them conveys this idea rather directly. In TheFighting Temptations, Cuba Gooding, Jr., says in a conversation with his bossthat deception is company policy in advertising. In Picture Perfect, IlleanaDouglas's character, speaking with Jennifer Aniston's, remarks, «I didn'tlie, I sold.» Even more pointedly in Crazy People (1990), Dudley Mooredescribes advertising work by saying, «We lie for a living.»

This notion dates back at least to the age of P.T. Barnum, whoseexaggerated and frequently false claims, as mentioned earlier, gave the publica bad taste for advertising. It was not helped by traveling salesmen whodrifted in and out of town in 19th-century America nor by the unrestrictedclaims about the benefits of patent medicines that were common well into the 20thcentury. When Hollywood began to depict advertising, all this plus VancePackard's exposé about motivational research had alerted the public tothe idea of deceit in advertising. This is the image of advertisers that waslaid down on film, and these stereotypes have remained largely unchanged thoughthere has been little if any effort to offer evidence for them.

A second theme about advertising in films concerns its impact onsociety. The idea is that advertising generally causes people to buy thingsthey do not need. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House features Cary Grant asan advertising executive who wants to move from New York City to the country.It is his success in advertising that provides the means to make this decision,but the work Mr. Blandings does is not respected by his children. In aparticularly pointed statement, one of his daughters speaks of the social evilsassociated with advertising. In The Fighting Temptations, another indictment ofadvertising's social policy in the willingness of Cuba Gooding's character toexploit the public for gain and his condescending attitude toward them.

A third idea in the Hollywood depiction of advertising is thatthere is a certain kind of person who does well in advertising. This is someonewho is willing to do almost anything asked of him or her, to put job beforefamily and personal life, and to sell things that they might not believe inthemselves.

An additional theme in some of the films is discrepancy betweenmen's and women's jobs in advertising. For example, in Lover Come Back, DorisDay and Rock Hudson both work in advertising. However, she works while heplays. In What Women Want, Mel Gibson gets all the credit for Helen Hunt'sideas.

Advertisingand Popular Culture: The Super Bowl

Each January advertising moves onto center stage in Americanpopular culture. The occasion is the Super Bowl—itself one of the country'smost watched TV programs. In the weeks and days leading up to the actual event,media hype about the game and the commercials predicts game outcome, celebratesfans, and promises ever more spectacular ads.

In 2006, viewers in more than 45 million homes tuned in to theSuper Bowl, making it the second-most viewed program in the history of Americantelevision. More than 15 percent of these viewers claimed to be watchingprimarily for the commercials.[47]As for the commercials themselves, they are among the most expensive to produceand air. It was reported that airing a 30-second spot could cost as much as$2.5 million in 2006. Having come to appreciate the appeal of Super Bowlcommercials, advertisers are making their Super Bowl offerings available forvideo streaming online—for watching again, forwarding to friends, adding topersonal web pages, and even downloading to video iPods.

In return for their investment, advertisers hope that viewers willremember their commercials and associate them with their brands. Nothing ismore distressing than a viewer who says, «That was a very funny ad forlight beer, but I couldn't tell you if it was for Miller or Bud.» Despitethe entertainment value of Super Bowl commercials (including the picking ofwinners and losers), these ads must still do their work of reinforcing brandloyalty, encouraging selection of their brands over the competition, or, morerarely, introducing new products or services.

The cost of airing commercials has risen from $42,000 during thefirst year to $2.4 million in 2006. The reach to homes and viewers has steadilyincreased during this period, making it a highly ranked and prestigious venuefor showcasing ads.

A few spots from previous Super Bowls have achieved something of acult status as best-liked ads. According to a poll conducted by America Online,the three best Super Bowl commercials ever were Coca-Cola's Mean Joe Greene(1980), Apple Computer's 1984 (1984), and Reebok's Terry Tate (2004). Each ofthese commercials struck responsive chords with audiences by focusing on themeslike sports heroes, distrust of corporate giants, and work environments.

Newspapers, magazines, and above all the Internet reviews the adsafter they appear on the Super Bowl. This publicity, if it is positive, is ofincalculable value to the sponsors, but not all of it is positive. For example,the 2006 post-Super Bowl assessments included the following:

Let's start with the lowest of the low: GoDaddy.com. Talk about a$5 million vanity project (so bad they had to run it twice). This complete messwas what it took Bob Parsons 14 tries with ABC to get through.

— Barbara Lippert, Adweek

A prehistoric air express delivery—of a stick, via pterodactyl—isstymied by a hungry tyrannosaurus, leading to the first-ever mailroom firing.Adorable and funny. Also, how can you fault a strategy (nobody ever lost hisjob for choosing FedEx) that's 40 million years old?

— Bob Garfield, Advertising Age

Ah, now here's a show stopper that should have been our lead-in:Burger King puts on a Busby Berkeley musical number. Singing and dancing«Whopperettes» dress as various burger components (my favorite is themayonnaise dress, followed by the beef-patty tutu). This was the only ad allnight that was outsized and garish enough to be Super Bowl-worthy.

— Seth Stevenson, Slate

Atmosphere BBDO developed an extension of Pizza Hut's Super Bowlpromotion with Jessica Simpson creating a site that allows consumers toliterally play with their food. The Pizza Hut Cheesy Bites site allows visitorsto remix their own version of the Jessica Simpson Pizza Hut song, «TheseBites Are Made for Poppin.'» With 28 musical tracks and 40 sound effectsto choose from, people can watch and share their version of the song playedalong with the television commercial and see Jessica singing along to theircreation.

— AdRants.com

Our favorite of all the Anheuser-Busch work this year is thehysterically funny, «On The Roof,» where Bud Light-loving husbandsseek refuge. The comic timing is perfect. Ditto the meticulously realizedvisuals."

— Lewis Lazare, Chicago Sun-Times

In addition to these professional columnists and commentators,many others offered their opinions of Super Bowl commercials via the Internet.One blogger wrote, «Nicely shot, but what's the point?», incisivelycutting through the usual verbiage. Bulletin boards posted rants and ravesabout the commercials. And more than a few groups specially assembled for thepurpose of reviewing Super Bowl commercials were reported on in the press. Forexample, in Boston members of ad agencies assembled to view the ads together.From their group emerged the not surprising finding that men and women likeddifferent ads more. The women in the group were especially approving of Dove'scommercial focusing on women's self-esteem.

Many times when people express opinions about ad preferences, theylack reasons for the preferences. Even when reasons are given, they tend to bemore emotional than rational reactions. The Wall Street Journal, in an articlequoting viewers' opinions about Super Bowl ads, included the following:

— the ad broke through and was attention-grabbing.

— it was so unpredictable.

— the spot was very moving.

— hilarious, everyone cracked up laughing.

— didn't like it, I was waiting for a spoof.

— tons of impact and very memorable.

— I'm a sucker for monkeys. [spot featuring office run by chimps]

All this hype about Super Bowl commercials brings the phenomenonof the TV commercial to public attention once a year and results inconsiderable discussion about the aesthetic and business value of this mode ofadvertising. Unlike the more highbrow domains of culture like literature, art,and even film, the commercial is at home in popular culture. For many, it isunabashed fun and hilarity. Maintaining the suspense about the commercials canbe as exciting as the football game itself. The Super Bowl becomes the onemoment in American cultural life where advertising is unabashedly welcomed.

Conclusion

Advertising arised in antiquity when the majority of peoplecouldn’t read or write. The period of after the World War II was the period ofprogress of TV advertisement, intense competition in selling and branding.

Advertising has certainly come a long way since the beginning ofthe century. While the basic principles remain the same, as society becomesmore accepting of certain topics, the advertising will continue evolve. Forinstance, consider in the '50s when it was taboo for pregnancy to be shown ontelevision. «I Love Lucy» broke this wall down, and it is nowcommonplace. Things that are «politically incorrect» and aren't seenin advertising during one time period become accepted and visible in another.

The answer to our question, whether or not advertising is a directeffect or affect of advertising, is simple. Both are yes. Advertising uses whatit sees as popular in its audience at the particular time the campaign is ran,to call attention to the product. What people see in the advertising of aproduct that they consider popular, creates a new trend in culture. Advertisingboth directs and reflects popular culture. Thousands of products are advertiseddaily in many different ways. Oftentimes people will discuss the manner inwhich the product was advertised as frequently, if not more so than the productitself. What makes any particular advertisement memorable is the«personality» which it is given, and the consumers ability to relate.While some advertising has proven itself to be more effective than others, onceagain it all serves the same basic purpose-to inform, and persuade. As long asthere is a creative motivation to create new products and to allow the familiarones to continually impact us, advertising will continue to drive and be drivenby popular culture.

So you see that the role of advertising in American pop culture isvery high: we can see hidden ads in films, on the pictures, even in music.Advertising affects on pop culture: ads can put such market conditions that anew direction in pop culture can appear.

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Appendix

The Art and Science of the Advertising Slogan

by Timothy R. V. Foster

1. A slogan should be memorable

Memorability has to do with the ability the line has to berecalled unaided. A lot of this is based on the brand heritage and how much theline has been used over the years. But if it is a new line, what makes itmemorable? I suggest it is the story told in the advertisement — the big idea.

The more the line resonates with the big idea, the more memorableit will be. 'My goodness, my Guinness!', as well as being a slick line, wasmade memorable by the illustrations of the Guinness drinker seeing his pintunder some sort of threat (perched on the nose of a performing seal, forexample). It invoked a wry smile and a tinge of sympathy on the part of theaudience at the potential loss if the Guinness was dropped.

If it is successful, ideally the line should pass readily intocommon parlance as would a catchphrase, such as 'Beanz meanz Heinz' or 'Where'sthe beef?'

In addition to a provocative and relevant illustration or story,alliteration, coined words, puns and rhymes are good ways of making a linememorable, as is a jingle.

2. A slogan should recall the brand name

Ideally the brand name should be included in the line. 'Mygoodness, my Guinness!' thus works, as does 'Aah, Bisto!'. On the other hand,'Once driven, forever smitten' does not easily invoke the word Vauxhall, nordoes 'All it leaves behind is other non-bios' scream out Fairy Ultra. This, bythe way, is possibly the worst endline in the history of advertising! Itcertainly gets my vote. It's a brand manager at P&G speaking to a brandmanager at the competition and it means it doesn't leave a nasty residue in thewash — the laundry equivalent of 'no bathtub ring'. No 'housewife' couldpossibly understand it.

What's the point of running an advertisement in which the brandname is not clear? Yet millions of pounds are wasted in this way. If the brandname isn't in the strapline, it had better be firmly suggested. Nike dares torun commercials that sign off only with their visual logo — the 'swoosh' — like a tick mark or check mark, as the Americans say. The word Nike is unspokenand does not appear. This use of semiotics is immensely powerful when it works,because it forces the viewer to say the brand name.

Rhymes — with brand name

One of the best techniques for bringing in the brand name is tomake the strapline rhyme with it. Here are some lines we've selected from theAdSlogans.com database. See how well it works if the brand name is the rhymingword.

3. A slogan should include a key benefit

'Engineered like no other car in the world' does this beautifullyfor Mercedes Benz. 'Britain's second largest international scheduled airline'is a 'so what?' statement for the late Air Europe. You might well say «Iwant a car that is engineered like no other car in the world.» But it isunlikely you would say «I want two tickets to Paris on Britain's second largest international scheduled airline!»

In America they say 'sell the sizzle, not the steak.' In Britain they say 'sell the sizzle, not the sausage.' Either way, it means sell the benefits not thefeatures.

Since the tagline is the leave-behind, the takeaway, surely theopportunity to implant a key benefit should not be missed? Here are some...

4. A slogan should differentiate the brand

'Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach' does thisbrilliantly. When the line needed refreshing, it was extended in laterexecutions to show seemingly impossible situations, such as a deserted motorwayin the rush hour, with the line 'Only Heineken can do this', and lately showingunlikely but admirable situations, such as a group of sanitation engineerstrying to keep the noise down to the comment: 'How refreshing! How Heineken!'

The distinction here is that the line should depict acharacteristic about the brand that sets it apart from its competitors. In theabove examples, we see Swan Light, an Australian low-alcohol beer. 'Won't makea pom tiddly' is brilliant. It plays on the expression 'tiddly pom', the sortof noise a stiff-upper-lip Brit would say in the colonies when reviewing thetroops as they march past, and, of course, a Brit to an Oz is a pom. And whatcould be worse than a tiddly (tipsy) pom? This line gets my vote as one of theall-time greats. And it runs on double-decker bus 'super sides'.

5. A slogan should impart positive feelings for the brand

Some lines are more positive than others. 'Once driven, foreversmitten', for example, or 'Aah, Bisto!'. Contrast this with Triumph's line forits TR7 sports car in 1976: 'It doesn't look like you can afford it', or America's Newport cigarettes: 'After all, if smoking isn't a pleasure, why bother?' «BecauseI'm hooked, you bastard!» might well be the answer from those who areaddicted to the weed, a sentiment the cigarette company may not appreciate aspart of its message.

Publishers will tell you that negative book titles don't sell. Itis my belief that negative advertising is hard to justify.

Notice how boring all the negative electioneering is in general elections.The voters just want to turn off.

6. A slogan should reflect the brand's personality

How can a brand have a personality? Our dictionary sayspersonality means 'habitual patterns and qualities of behaviour of anyindividual as expressed by physical and mental activities and attitudes;distinctive individual qualities of a person considered collectively.'

So think of the brand as a person. Then consider whether the lineworks for that person.

7. A slogan should be strategic

Some companies can effectively convey their business strategy intheir lines.

8. A slogan should be campaignable

This means that the line should work across a series ofadvertising executions. It should have some shelf-life. Then you could have adozen different ads or commercials, each with its own unique story, with asingle common tagline that supports them all.

9. A slogan should not be usable by a competitor

In other words, you should not be able to substitute a competitivebrand name and use the line. For example, 'My goodness, my Murphy's!' justwould not work, but 'A company called TRW' could be a company called anything.Let's look at these characteristics in more detail, illustrating the pointswith more examples.

So many slogans have absolutely no competitive differentiation.You could add any brand name to the line and it would make sense. And thisoften is proven by how many users of a line there are.

10. A slogan should be original

In advertising, originality is king. A new way of sending amessage can set a brand apart from copycats and also-rans.

11. A slogan should be simple

Remember, the endline is what you want the punter to 'get'. SoKISS (keep it simple, stupid!).

12. A slogan should be neat

We're using the word neat in the teenage sense. A neat line helpsportray the product progressively in the punter's perception.

13. A slogan should be believable

Poetic licence is allowed. Even exaggeration.

14. Does the line help when you're ordering the

product or service, or at least aspiring to it?

15. A slogan should not be in current use by others

The more different users of a slogan, the less effective it is.

AdSlogans.com offers its LineCheck service so you can make sureyour line isn't in use by others.

16. A slogan should not be bland, generic or hackneyed

Slogans that are bland, redolent of Mom and apple-pie, clearlysuffer a weakness.

17. A slogan should not prompt a sarcastic or negative response.

18. A slogan should not be pretentious

This is the pomposity test.

Try reading the line with the utmost gravity, like an Americannarrator in a 50's corporate film, giving it the true spin of importance.

19. A slogan should not be negative

Publishers will tell you that negative book titles don't sell. Itis my belief that negative advertising is hard to justify.

Notice how boring all the negative electioneering is in generalelections. The voters just want to turn off.

20. A slogan should not reek of corporate waffle, hence soundingunreal.

21. A slogan should not be a «So what?» or«Ho-hum» statement

22. A slogan should not make you say «Oh yeah??»

23. A slogan should not be meaningless

These are… What on earth are they trying to say?

24. A slogan should not be complicated or clumsy

25. You should like it

26. It could be trendy — All in a word

There area two trends in slogans these days. One is thesingle-word line, such as exemplified here:

Budweiser: True

Hankook Tyres:   Driven

IBM: Think

Irn-Bru:      Different

Rover:        Relax

United Airlines:   Rising

It could be trendy — All in three words (or three terse ideas)

It is hard to deliver a complex message in a single word, so thatbrings us to the other trend — the triple threat...

Air France: New. Fast. Efficient.

British Gas:         Energy. Efficiency. Advice.

ICI:   World problems. World solutions. World class.

Jaguar:       Grace… Space… Pace...

Marks & Spencer:         Quality. Value. Service.

And of course...

AdSlogans.com: 

Check. Create. Inspire.

It could be trendy — The twenty most frequently used words inslogans

We thought it would be interesting to see which words were themost prevalent in slogans, so we delved through the AdSlogans.com database.

Omitting such words as 'the' and 'and', etc, here's what we found.The percentages represent the number of lines using that word out of the totalnumber of lines.

1.      you   11.15%

2.      your  7.94%

3.      we     6.03%

4.      world          4.18%

5.      best   2.67%

6.      more 2.54%

7.      good  2.43%

8.      better 2.12%

9.      new   1.90%

10.    taste  1.85%

11.    people 1.54%

12.    our    1.49%

13.    first   1.42%

14.    like    1.41%

15.    don't 1.36%

16.    most  1.19%

17.    only  1.16%

18.    quality 1.15%

19.    great  1.13%

20.    choice 1.08%