Advertising and Reality: A Global Study of Representation and Content 9781628927795, 9781441170002, 9781441191946

Citation preview

An introduction: Advertising—truth, trust, and belief

Amir Hetsroni Ariel University Center, Israel

R

ecently, at a dinner party, between the main course and the aperitif, I was approached by an angry dad. “You are an advertiser, right?“ he asked. “Sort of. I am actually a professor of advertising, but not working for the advertising industry.“ “Professor or not professor—all of you, admen, are the same. You all cause misery to my daughter. You use Photoshop in your ads to show skinny models that don‘t exist and convince my teen child that she should be permanently on a diet. As a result, she is not willing to eat her mom‘s cakes, which makes my wife miserable and she—of course—is making me miserable.“ The wife nodded in agreement to the idea that advertising is responsible for a pervasive family depression. This family‘s view is, in fact, quite representative of what large parts of the population think about adverting. Mittal (1994) and Shavitt, Lowry. and Haefner (1998) found that approximately half of US adults do not believe that products keep up their advertising promises. In other words—half of the US public think that advertisements do not tell the truth (or at least not the whole truth). On the same token, a recent Nielsen Company survey (2009) found that only 56% of Americans completely or somewhat trust advertising. In EU countries, this rate is even lower (49%) and in Israel—according to a survey

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 1

18/07/2012 07:22

2

Advertising and Reality

that I conducted in the mid-2000s upon invitation from a leading advertising agency, which decided not to publish the findings in light of their unflattering nature, the share of people who trust advertising barely scratches the 40% threshold. While in less developed parts of the world, trust in advertising is higher (75% in Latin American nations according to Nielsen Company, 2009), one cannot avoid the conclusion that a significant share of people who live in countries that are saturated with advertising messages do not trust these messages, and are therefore less likely to consider advertising a true representation of the world in which they live. The lack of belief in advertisements is part of a larger dissatisfaction with the advertising system. In surveys, recurring reasons for this dissatisfaction included the tendency of ads to insult their audience (Mittal, 1994), the willingness of advertisers to promote objectionable products such as cigarettes and contraception (Aaker & Bruzzone, 1981), and the inclusion of accolades for unrealistic products in commercial messages (Shavitt et al., 1998). Academic scholars, however, have generally taken issue with other advertising content aspects like the overrepresentation of men and Caucasians (and the underrepresentation of women and minorities), the apparent abundance of physical beauty, sex, and nudity and the celebration of hedonism while ignoring the less festive outcome of instant gratification and relentless spending (e.g. bankruptcy). Marxist thinkers have expressed more than once their objection to the way advertising distorts reality in order to promote the capitalist system (Schudson, 1984). However, prominent thinkers, who are not identified as bona fide communists, have also expressed their concern over the way the world is reflected in advertising. John Kenneth Galbraith (1957), for instance, said that advertisements bring consumers to change their natural preferences and buy products that they do not need because they give voice only to values and views that promote the purchase of certain goods and services and do not feature alternative views that are shared by many people. The result is a distorted presentation of reality which interferes and destroys market mechanisms. Is advertising supposed to equally represent people and views from all walks of life? As Diaz-Soloaga and Quintas Froufe show in Chapter 14 in this book—not every body figure is capable of selling any fashion outfit. Some pieces of clothing call for thin models. The inaccurate presentation of the world, commonly termed the “distorted mirror,“ is often mentioned as a con (Pollay, 1986). However, empirically, this distorted mirror is not fully proven (see Pollay & Gallagher, 1990 and Chapter 3 in this volume about values in advertising). Furthermore, from an ontological viewpoint not everyone accepts the distorted mirror concept. Morris Holbrook, renowned marketing scholar, claims that in order to convince potential consumers to purchase their product ads must comply with the public’s own worldview rather than run against it:

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 2

18/07/2012 07:22



An introduction: Advertising—truth, trust, and belief

3

No matter how hard a company or advertising agency tried to alter the salience or contents of people’s values, it would not convince them that friendliness and cuisine are more important than routes and schedules in choosing an airline or that they should prefer dangerous and fuel wasting rather than safe and economical automobiles. (Holbrook, 1987, p. 100) Besides philosophical observations, of the kind expressed by Pollay and Holbrook, which are represented in this volume in the work of Hopkins (Chapter 1), who questions whether advertising is truly a demoralizing factor, the other entries are mainly empirical contributions and literature reviews of research on specific advertising contents, where the main question is whether a topic is realistically portrayed and—if not—what are the main distortions and what are the implications of their presentation. Surprisingly, even though the research about advertising and reality consists mainly of content studies the theories used as rationale have been mostly effect theories such as cultivation, social learning, and modeling. This might be partly due to the established traditions of the discipline; the fact that the origin of advertising research (and media research in general) is in experimental psychology might have brought researchers to see things through the effect perspective, even when they test the content (Perse, 2001). It may also be partly ascribed to the applied trend in current media research. In order to get funding from organizations that are interested in human behavior, researchers dig effects that can justify the organizations’ spending. This way or another, empirical-cultural theories that do not hesitate to make culture the raison d’être of science rather than a framework to effects search is sorely missing from most of the studies on advertising and reality. To some extent I was able to fix that in this volume; not as much as I wanted to. In my call for papers I asked for contributions that either directly examine the representation of reality in advertising or discuss related opinions and theories. Proposals could offer new findings or review existing research, but had to adhere to social scientific (rather than polemic) standards. I was hoping to have enough cogent articles to cover most facets of everyday life, as they appear in advertising. Whether I succeeded or not it is for the reader to judge. This book is divided into three parts: views, times, and places, demography and gender. The first part, “Views, times, and places,” consists of seven entries. Chapter 1, “Mass moralizing” by Phil Hopkins offers a philosophical contribution to the discourse about advertising and reality. Specifically, this chapter asks: What is the relation of current dominant modes of narrativity in advertising to moral narratives and moral heuristics? The answer is that life is a series of choices between cultural narratives. The predominant narrative

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 3

18/07/2012 07:22

4

Advertising and Reality

in modern advertising inhabits our old familiar world, but does it in ways that translate those values and meaning systems into commodities that are purchased by consumers who use them as a way of signifying who they are. This contradicts non-commercial ways of being which shape identity through living and not via consuming. While Hopkins’ chapter does not count occurrences in advertising texts, its approach to analyzing commercial narratives indicates methods that can be used when conducting a systematic analysis and classifying ads. Chapter 2 presents the work of Dror Abend-David on translation of advertising. This author attempts to recognize the unique aspects of translation when working with commercial texts and to relate them to different theories of translation. Chapter 3 is my ten-year observation of values in Israeli advertising. This study aims to see whether changes in the economy are reflected in advertisements and finds that stability is the norm. This contributes to the notion that advertising as a socio-economic mirror is often (but not always) distorted. The fourth chapter is Michael Maynard’s “Real versus pseudo real in japanese television advertising compared withs television advertising.” This is a study of space in advertising in two cultures that addresses the question: How common are real and pseudo real spaces in advertising? US advertising comes out as far more realistic because the hard sell approach (which accords with realism) is more consonant with the US culture in general and with consumerism in particular. Chapter 5, Yoel Cohen’s “God, religion, and advertising: A hard sell” is a journey into the intersection of established religion and commercials. The author sheds light on the way that several theological streams within Christianity, Islam, and Judaism look at advertising and reviews the representation of religious symbols that are identified with these religions in mainstream advertising. This chapter also includes an exposure of the author’s research on holiday advertising in religious and non-religious newspapers. Chapter 6, by Shaheed Nick Mohammed, entitled “Arab and western images in Middle East satellite television advertising” quantifies Arab and Western images in Middle Eastern television advertising and finds a preponderance of Western images. This teaches us something about the current sources of inspiration in the Arab world. The seventh chapter, “Reflections on periodical representations in advertising” is my second contribution to this volume. The entry provides a review of research on nostalgia in advertising. Empirical and non-empirical studies along with theories that are concerned with the way bygone times are depicted are reviewed. This chapter also features, for the first time, the results of a large scale research where the use of nostalgia in Israeli

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 4

18/07/2012 07:22



An introduction: Advertising—truth, trust, and belief

5

advertising and consumers’ views of nostalgia were juxtaposed. The findings suggest congruence between the ads and the public in perceiving the distant past as exotic and incongruence in the perception of the near past as positive in advertising and negative in public opinion. The interpretation of these findings pays attention to the commercial role of advertising and—as a result of that—its professional obligation to portray periods in ways that promote the purchase of goods and services. The second part of the book, “Demography,” contains three chapters that revolve around the demography of models and of people who are featured in advertisements. Chapter 8, by Peter Simcock, entitled “Seeing Ourselves as the adman sees us? The representation and portrayal of older people in advertising,” is a state of the art review of studies on old people in advertising. After demonstrating the under-representation of this age cohort, the entry has an ambivalent bottom line: The ageing population and the increase in the number of pensioners are about to leave advertisers with a diminishing and increasingly impoverished youth market. However, paradoxically, it may be that with fewer young people, the cult of youth might be even more celebrated in advertising. Chapter 9, by Christopher Chávez, Meghan Moran, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, entitled “Ethnically Targeted Advertising and Social Meaning: An Analysis of Representation in Spanish Language Advertising” examines how social life is presented in Spanish language advertising in the USA and how this depiction is tied closely to ideological assumptions. Compared to what we know about mainstream television advertising, the characters in Latino targeted advertising (most of them Latino) are more reasoned and prudent and behave more rationally. Chapter 10, by Wei-Na Lee and Sejung Marina Choi, entitled “Celebrity advertising: The Asian perspective,” is an observation on the representation of celebrities in Korean and Japanese advertising. The findings suggest that the similar cultural milieus of Japan and Korea may lead to a largely comparable practice of celebrity endorsement in advertising with just a small number of fine differences in their executions. Specifically, in both countries there is a clutter of mostly local celebrities. A limited number of native stars are used once again in ads for different products. The efficiency of this multiple-use policy should be investigated in the future. The third and final section of the book is entitled “Gender”. Chapter 11 by Narissra Maria Punyanunt-Carter, Daniel Linden, and Kent Truett is an historical review of studies about the appearance of men and women in advertising and more specifically the representation of masculinity and femininity in advertising over the years. As the title of this chapter, “Masculinity and femininity in advertising,” suggests the authors are mainly interested in the way manhood

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 5

18/07/2012 07:22

6

Advertising and Reality

and womanhood are commercially expressed. Their major conclusion is that while over the years there has been a gradual move towards mutation of traditional gender role distinctions, these distinctions can still be found in current advertising in different countries. The authors also question whether, in the future, other groups that receive highly gendered treatment in advertising such as homosexuals will go through assimilation or maintain some of their traditional characteristics. Chapter 12, by Linda Godbold Kean and Shekinah Thomas presents a literature review of sexuality in advertising with emphasis on ethnic differences (Caucasians vs. African Americans) in US, settings. The authors also present, for the first time, their own study in which they compared sexual imagery in white and black orientated US magazines. They find that gender and media outlets are stronger than race as determinants of sexuality in advertising, that women are more sexualized than men, and that music magazines are more sexualized than men and women magazines which are still more sexualized than general reading magazines. My third and final contribution to this volume, Chapter 13, reviews a series of studies that I have conducted since the mid-2000s on the use of sex and violence in advertising and public opinion about this use. Termed together objectionable content, my studies show that such material is less prevalent than one may think. It is found in barely 5% of the ads. In contrast with previous research, I found no significant differences in the amount of nudity across gender lines. In fact, male models were even a bit more likely than female models to expose their bare body. A significant part of the audience perceive this minor appearance to be still “too much,” but this view is fueled by a general objection to the public presentation of objectionable content more than it stems from an accurate (or inaccurate) estimation of its frequency in advertising. Chapter 14, the last entry in this section and in the book, is Paloma Díaz Soloaga and Natalia Quintas Froufe’s quest for the typical model in fashion advertising. A close examination of fashion ads from distinctively different cultures such as the Iberian peninsula and China leads the authors to the conclusion that globalization is a forceful trend in this kind of advertising that is capable of eliminating cross-cultural differences. Let me end with a few acknowledgments: I would like to thank all the scholars who expressed interest in contributing to this book. Due to space limitations and the need to keep a cohesive content framework and a high level of scholarship, I was able to publish only 13 of the 45 chapter proposals which I received (interestingly, 14 of the 45 submissions were about women and gender, a figure which probably attests to the popularity of this domain in the scientific community). I do, however, wish to thank all those who

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 6

18/07/2012 07:22



An introduction: Advertising—truth, trust, and belief

7

expressed their wish to take part in the book for their vote of confidence and patience during endless revision iterations. I also thank the staff at Continuum for their willingness to publish this book and particularly Katie Gallof. If this head hunter had not hunted me this book would have never materialized. A different kind of gratefulness is sent from here to Professor Hanna Adoni, my all-time and old-time mentor from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose guidance helped me in completing my research on nostalgia in advertising, which was probably the cornerstone of this book. I am also indebted to my ultra-talented research assistant at Ariel University Center, Hila Lowenstein, who helped in formatting the book chapters and in giving good advice all the way through and showed that you don’t have to share the same beliefs as the editor in order to be his best assistant. Finally, I would like to thank my parents—Sima—who unfortunately passed away while I was completing this book—and David—who is in full force despite his eighty-something years on earth—for allowing me to get the education that is needed to complete this book, and my significant other, Katarazyna (Kasia) Markiewicz, for providing emotional support when the work became overly exhausting.

References Aaker, D. A., & Bruzzone, D. E. (1981). Viewer perceptions of prime time television advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 21(5), 15–23. Galbraith, J. K. (1957). The Affluent Society. New York: Mentor. Holbrook, M. B. (1987). Mirror, mirror, on the wall, what’s unfair in the reflections on advertising? Journal of Marketing, 51, 95–103. Mittal, B. (1994). Public assessment of TV advertising: Faint praise and harsh criticism. Journal of Advertising Research, 34(1), 35–53. Nielsen Company (2009). Nielsen online global consumers survey: Trust, value and engagement in advertising. New York: Author. Perse, E. M. (2001). Media Effects and Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pollay, R. W. (1986). The distorted mirror: Reflections on the unintended consequences of advertising. Journal of Marketing, 50(2), 18–36. Pollay, R. W., & Gallagher, K. (1990). Advertising and cultural values: Reflections in the distorted mirror. International Journal of Advertising, 9, 359–72. Schudson, M. (1984). Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Basic Books. Shavitt, S., Lowrey, P., & Haefner, J. (1998). Public attitudes toward advertising: More favorable than you might think, Journal of Advertising Research 38(4), 7–22.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 7

18/07/2012 07:22

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 8

18/07/2012 07:22

1 Mass moralizing Phil Hopkins Southwestern University, USA

Key words morality, narrative, personal identity, representation, tribe

Publicity adds up to a kind of philosophical system. It explains everything in its own terms. It interprets the world. (John Berger, 1972, p. 149)

The noble lie The discipline of philosophy has been slow to acknowledge and slower to examine how mass media discourse practices shape the ways we think about and practice morality. Mass marketing operates primarily in an existential register. Its messages no longer focus primarily upon product qualities or benefits, but, at least since the rise of branding, offer instead meaning systems designed to present group and individual identity as consumer choice. Even when its content is not overtly moralistic, such a dynamic is ineluctably moral. The question of who we are and who we want or ought to be is the central concern and territory of ethics. Many media practices, including advertising, have always been at least subtly moralistic in tone and content, co-opting and employing traditional moral ideas and values. In this chapter, however, I will argue that what one might call the ontological dynamics of mass media advertising present our relations to advertising as a

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 11

18/07/2012 07:22

12

Advertising and Reality

profound and in some ways new moral question embedded in the very fabric of its practice. At the heart of this argument is the claim that we are fundamentally and even primarily narrative beings. Most of our cognitive activities, those activities aimed at understanding ourselves and our world, are exercised in creating a coherent narrative that makes sense of experience. We are first and finally storytellers, telling stories of ourselves to ourselves and to others into a world we fashion as story. And it is the nature of marketing as story that both demands and will benefit from philosophical analysis. Jhally (2000) has said: The right question would [be to] ask about the cultural role of advertising, not its marketing role. Culture is the place and space where a society tells stories about itself, where values are articulated and expressed, where notions of good and evil, of morality and immorality, are defined. In our culture it is the stories of advertising that dominate the spaces that mediate this function. If human beings are essentially a storytelling species, then to study advertising is to examine the central storytelling mechanisms of our society. The correct question to ask from this perspective, is not whether particular ads sell the products they are hawking, but what are the consistent stories that advertising spins as a whole about what is important in the world, about how to behave, about what is good or bad. Indeed, it is to ask what values does advertising consistently push. This chapter explores, philosophically, that is, through analysis of the particular world structures that marketing discourse practices construct, just the question Jhally poses: What is the relation of current dominant modes of narrativity in advertising to moral narrative and moral heuristics? To deal with this question, I must first argue that all ethics take the form of Plato’s “noble lie.” The rhetorical strategy behind any articulation of ethical guidelines is to posit a human subject which is capable of entering into the description of human nature or world structure that it offers with the idea that such a person will then act in ways that are better for him/her and better for all. We may be skeptical of some or all ethical formulations because they foreground some particular possible relations or behaviors on the basis of one or another view of human beings which we may not agree with. But that skepticism is not really to the point. Each ethical theory describes how one acts once one accepts a description of what generally matters and how the world is, not whether that description has ever been the case historically or theoretically. This is to say that an ethical system will always posit a human subject which is capable of entering into it, and that the posited human

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 12

18/07/2012 07:22

Mass moralizing

13

subject does not pre-exist the frame but arises with the ethical framework which has described it into existence. Each theorist frames interactions and elements of human nature corresponding to the demands his/her ethics makes of the people it describes.1 In precisely this way, advertising offers ethical narratives that explicitly state what matters and describe how the world is, and then place us, or at least strongly invite us to place ourselves, into that description. When they do so, they do not invite us to place some pre-existing self into their narratives. They create identities by means of their narratives which we may adopt. When we do so, we find ourselves in worlds that compete, overtly or subtly, with each other and with the world we take to be our actual world. To the extent that we inhabit those worlds, we do so in terms that organize our obligations and possibilities in different ways, and each of those ways constitutes a moral possibility for being in the world. Each advertisement frames interactions and elements of human nature corresponding to the demands of selling us its product. We may be skeptical of those demands, and even of the world the ad constructs, but that skepticism is beside the point. The very presentation of the possible world of the ad, and the possible selves we are positioned as free to choose creates an ethical framework that is necessarily critical of all alternate frameworks. The primary impact of advertising discourse I want to examine is the way in which that practice presents us with possible selves and worlds, and so morality, as a commodity, something we can “shop” for and acquire, choosing between one “system of values” or another, adopting them as ways of establishing and maintaining “identities.” Morality as a set of obligations or duties we experience flows directly out of the metaphysics of the worlds we inhabit. Such worlds are narratively constructed. It is decidedly not the case that we find ourselves in a world with these or those elements, with this or that set of relations, and then freely choose between competing moral systems of values. Once we construct a world, by telling ourselves stories about what is and how it is, we have already constructed the moral system operative in that world. Ethics, then, both in the sense of the process of living our lives, but also in the process of philosophical theorizing, is and has always been a narrative process. Ethics requires and inhabits stories. We tell stories, not just about human subjects and the sort of thing being human is through stories about what being a friend or being courageous means, but also about the way things are, the way the world is, such that this or that character or action is right or good. That is why, for Socrates, some story must be told, true or not, which provides the ground for specific obligations and relations which form the foundation of those values. We do not know how to posit such valuations

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 13

18/07/2012 07:22

14

Advertising and Reality

without a narrative frame within which they achieve the character we assign to them and that provides the criteria for that valuation. They achieve that character, moreover, not as a result of their congruence or isomorphism with some rule or immutable category, but within and through the narrative elements as they are coherently related by a given story.

Selling selves through storytelling In our world, mass marketing is the dominant source and medium of narrative and argument. It achieves this status if for no other reason than its saturation levels. As Louise Story (2007) said, there is very little space that isn’t occupied by marketing. There was perhaps a time when marketing was a kind of hawking of products, not unlike a mass mediated version of the snake-oil salesman, or the carnival barker, whose clear job it was to arrest attention and induce consumption of whatever ware was for sale. In such cases, the public distinguished the activity of the hawker from the normal activity of their lives. Such activity was a break from the norm, an entertainment, perhaps, but a novelty at least. Now, not only is it difficult to find any space that isn’t carnival space, as it were, that isn’t crowded with mass media barkers, but, if we take into account the way marketing has integrated into most other mass media, such messages are the stuff of daily life, the primary interpreters and narrators of experience for many of us. Marketing is clearly about selling things by telling particular stories, both concerning the products about which it is ostensibly informing us, and, more importantly, about the way the world and we in it really are or can be. Because its discourses are the primary discourses we encounter, its particular form of argument is the argument form with which we are most familiar. Outside of law courts, or a few other very specialized and formal practices of arguing in our culture, no other practice is as fully engaged in “argument” in the classic sense of that term: a discourse that aims to produce conviction or provide persuasive conclusions by means of linked evidence in the form of grounds for belief and authoritative backing. Marketing arguments purport to tell us if not the “truth,” at least what we might, or even should, believe. Moreover, it has risen to dominant status by colonizing other narrative forms taking them up as its own. This adoption and adaptation has allowed marketing to fold itself “seamlessly” into entertainment media. All media is, after all, packaged. The images are often the same, the graphics and soundtracks, the “sets.” All are broadcast through the same physical boxes, which, of course, no matter how large and immersive or small and handy, are

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 14

18/07/2012 07:22

Mass moralizing

15

still boxes. What we watch on any screen, we watch knowing that what we view is something distant, something elsewhere, happening to others. There is very little content or form difference to distinguish marketing from other forms of mass media storytelling. The real distinction is the truth conventions of each. This difference is largely a propaganda difference. But it is a difference that matters in terms of our reception. Into these dominant “truth”-telling narratives, which have always exhibited a moral impulse, we have recently transferred a great deal of moral authority. We live in an age of carefully tailored images and exquisitely focused messages broadcast to audiences of staggering proportions at unimaginable frequencies and saturation levels, all saying largely the same few things structured according to a limited dynamic. The “truth” of that dynamic echoes something we seem to always have believed about ourselves: that the truth of who and what we are is grounded in “freedom.” Morality is intrinsically a matter of choice. The “truth” of mass marketing is that we are both “free” to choose who we are or will be, and that the options are limited to a select and narrow set of pre-packaged alternatives.

Tribes These new narratives are precisely ethical by virtue of being about identity and identity choices. Marketing, and so now almost all mass media, offers pre-packaged identities as consumable products, but it does more than this in the process: it tribalizes (Godin, 2008). Constructing group identities allows mass marketing to negotiate the tension inherent in presenting a message that purports to be about each individual consumer to mass anonymous audiences. In other words, not only does Dr. Pepper invite us to be a Pepper too, the brand’s advertisements suggest quite strongly that we, of course, really want to be a Pepper too, and imply that not to choose to be a Pepper too is at least odd, perhaps wrong. Such marketing presupposes and constructs a new tribal identity in the process of applying the age-old marketing formula: buy our product and become the special person you always wanted to be and knew you deserved to be. As silly as it may seem on the surface, the invitation to tribal affiliation is almost always genuine. We may scoff at being Peppers, but there are many, many more tribes to choose from. We have been invited to be Malboro men, or Virginia Slims women. We are told constantly that we simply are either PC people or Mac people. In my time, one was either Ford or Chevy, Coke or Pepsi, Levis or

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 15

18/07/2012 07:22

16

Advertising and Reality

Wrangler. Inner city youth have carved themselves into groups through identification with particular brands of shoes and other brands of clothing. It is not always a binary choice. Saturn heavily marketed its brand as something more and other than a choice in what car to buy, but rather as a community we may join, complete with nostalgic values and a better way of life. Harley-Davidson would like us to believe that there are no real alternatives to their motorcycle/ lifestyle brand; and Starbucks would like us to believe that they offer more than coffee, that they offer a “third place” that is not home and not work, and where we can ourselves be something new and other (Klein, 2000, pp. 15–26). Indeed, a significant part of brand marketing works as an at least implicit, and often quite explicit, invitation to join a tribe, if not a cult (Atkin, 2004). These tribal identities offer themselves as largely shallow but still more or less coherent sets of social, political, and moral values, that is, as ideologies.  Of course, these are the largely shallow but still roughly coherent ideologies of our culture. Being a Pepper is not really being anything new or different. Still, these tribes claim to cut across biological and social realities of all sorts, across historical and physical dynamics.  They offer belonging as choice, rather than genealogy, as free and freeing, while simultaneously binding and grounding.  The choice is always presented as double: not just who to be as an individual, but with whom and to what larger community we may belong. Being a Pepper matters much more because we can be a Pepper too. Obviously, what kind of person to be simply is the central ethical question, and what we owe each other, both in and out of our “communities,” is a central moral question. Marketing restructures both questions. The decision of who to be is at the same time the decision of what to belong to or whom to belong with, and both are framed as consumer decisions, not social or political, much less historical, decisions. Marketing relies upon the fiction that we are completely free to make such moral/ethical consumer choices. Therefore, in a strange conceptual twist, systems of values and responsibilities, codes of behavior and duty, may be shopped, not as the corollary of market choices—if we want to be a Pepper then we necessarily join all Peppers in a community and take on the duties of that community, however minimal or nebulous—but as the point—we want to be a Pepper because a Pepper is articulated as a set of values and relations to others and the world that we desire or desire to perfect. The self purchased, the self acquired through market decisions is not one who consumes and feels pleasure through brands, but is constituted as consuming, as identified with and through brands. Such a self is a Pepper, not something else who happens to like Dr. Pepper. That is the primary significance of Dr. Pepper’s slogan. It does not invite us to purchase cans of corn syrup and feel pleasure in drinking them, or even in attaching ourselves to

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 16

18/07/2012 07:22

Mass moralizing

17

their brand. It does not invite us to take on new loyalties. It invites us to be that brand. That is the point of brands. They are not understood by marketers to be lifestyle symbols or commodity loyalties. They are understood to be pre-packaged meaning systems we can choose not so much to inhabit as to become (Atkin, 2004). In marketing, a person’s qualities are almost never presented as uniquely their own, recognized as such, detached from how others view them, and not grounded in anyone’s desire to emulate them. In marketing, a person’s qualities are presented as potential, grounded in a social dynamic, requiring a social system of validation. Experience is deferred and projected (Berger, 1972, p. 132). One of the most interesting aspects of marketing dynamics is the way in which each mass market message needs to say to each individual viewer that the message speaks to him/her, individually, while, of course, simultaneously speaking to millions of people, hoping each feels the same, as if they were unique and uniquely addressed. Necessarily, then, everything that happens in these worlds happens to someone else somewhere else, even if we are to imagine that someone as us. We are invited to and can merely observe, envy, judge. Part of that judgment is implicitly, at least, moral, in that we are constantly presented with the possibility of moral failure if we fail to actualize the person that advertising promises we can become. The exemplars in advertising are avatars, exhibiting moral possibilities that require the correct (consumer) actions of the auditor to realize.

Tele-being This aspect of tribal marketing, the commoditization of value systems, is enhanced by an important structure in television generally. “Televising,” in the sense of the mechanical reproduction of “what happens,” transforms what transpires into what is transmitted. What happens in the world of our activity, our lives as lived, is not really consumable, at least in fungible terms. This world is a world of engagement and interaction, not products. But filming that world, editing and packaging that world, changes the ontological status of that world. From a world in which, as Heidegger (1962) would put it, we are already-alongside as ready-to-hand (equipment) together-with involved in some project, we are transformed into objects, present-at-hand, now able to be examined, questioned, appropriated, bought. The world shifts from a world-we-are-in into a world-over-against-at-a-distance. Less clumsily (with all due apologies to Heidegger), the world of our activity, familiar and intimate, the context as it were of our being and doing, becomes an image world, the world of seeing and being seen, a little strange and distant no matter

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 17

18/07/2012 07:22

18

Advertising and Reality

how familiar. It becomes spectacle (Debord, 2000). This transformation is not, or not much, an epistemological transformation, not a matter of seeing the world differently. It is an ontological transformation, a different way of being the world and being in it. One is a world in which our behavior is the substance of what happens, the other a world in which our behavior is the content of a completely other happening. This ontological shift is not new, of course, and not created by mass media. It has always been around as long as inquiry has been around. To take some part of the world with which we are engaged in activity toward some goal and begin to ask after its nature is to perform the same ontological shift. Television, however, as perhaps the most reproductive of the various mechanical reproductions of reality, has naturalized and normalized this shift in interesting and influential ways. This matters a great deal for a number of reasons. Different ontological status entails different commitments and different potentialities. Both worlds are not habitable in the same ways with the same purposes. To eat or to vote, for instance, and to view eating or voting broadcast as part and parcel of some advertisement for a restaurant or an election, have almost nothing in common as activities. Rather, both of these activities present completely different dynamics, goals, consequences, and meanings. Further, the element of mechanical reproduction confuses these ontological distinctions. The broadcast of voting or eating, for instance, is the broadcasting of some people actually voting or eating. It is the representation of the substance of some activity as the content of another, the one we are actually engaged with at the moment, the viewing of the news or the commercial. It is only in the past decades that images of life in action have achieved a fidelity to lived experience such that they can begin to effectively blur the ontological boundary just adduced. Only the most recent generation has grown up fully in an image world where life and image are so fully conjoined and integrated, so mutually referential and reflective. Before this generation, there was an apparent distinction between the world as lived and the world as represented.2 There was life and there was image and the two were not only clearly separate, but one was dominant and occupied the vast portion of our experience, while the other was occasional, perhaps novel, and largely recreational. This relation has been turned on its head. Parallel to this phenomenon, there was a time, perhaps, when the interpretation of the world offered by marketing and the perceived condition of the world was clearly distinct for most auditors, even starkly so, as on those occasions when the world presented in marketing found itself juxtaposed against the world presented by journalism in the morning paper or during the commercial breaks of the news program, or, in the case of those

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 18

18/07/2012 07:22

Mass moralizing

19

classes whose conditions do not include consumer power, those occasions when marketing images spread into their decidedly different circumstances and environments. But for many people, those who enjoyed a sufficient level of socio-economic privilege, the perceived conditions of the world came to resemble quite closely those they encountered in marketing, and when other less familiar worlds impinged, they did so mostly in images, offering a glimpse of a distant world brought close but still removed. As such, the “actual” but distant world was encountered in exactly the same way as the marketing world, as a series of narrative images; and we were at least implicitly and structurally invited to encounter them in the same way, so that the image of the “actual” world, of the tragic event, was subsumed under the same dynamic as the marketing image, that is as representation. The line between “real” and image was further blurred when marketing began using images of the non-commercial world, of revolution or famine, of conflict or social crisis, in its own campaigns, as material for its own world constructions. Marketing is always looking to inhabit new representational territory, and so is always looking to transform elements of radically non-commercial ways of life into stock elements in its own constructions. It is aided in the process by the phenomenon I am here calling attention to, the way that so many non-commercial ways of life have been “captured” as media images. The point I want to make is that the technological advances of mechanical reproduction coupled with the swing of mass media journalism toward entertainment and marketing motifs has perhaps eradicated this boundary between the actual and the image. The images we receive from journalism of an “actual” world of crisis and conflict, pain and need, are both in substance and in style, both in technical detail and narrative framing, no different from those images we encounter in marketing. There may have been a time when encountering, in some magazine or newspaper, an image of starving children in Ethiopia while viewing on the facing page or under the fold some advertisement for perfume or a luxury automobile might have caused some cognitive dissonance, might have generated some at least momentary recognition that the world is not wholly market, that not all events or choices confronting us are consumer choices and opportunities. I deeply suspect that this is less and less the case. We have seen too many images of both sorts, and there has been too much crossover. Witness the Benetton campaign ads (Figures 1.1–3) where images of war or racial conflict (or harmony) or death and illness are presented, without commentary, as commercial images harnessed to the purpose of exciting consumer interest in their brand.3

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 19

18/07/2012 07:22

20

Advertising and Reality

Figure 1.1 

Figure 1.2 

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 20

18/07/2012 07:22

Mass moralizing

21

Figure 1.3  In Benetton’s press information (2011) about their campaign, they say: The photos of the AIDS patient, the soldier and the Albanian emigrants [not shown] were not taken for the ad campaign but were actual agency photos, in typical reportage style, used for conveying the news. These were photos that portrayed the “real” world, fell within the conventions of information, and introduced a new and intriguing question about the fate of advertising: can marketing and the enormous power of advertising budgets be used to establish a dialogue with consumers that focuses on something other than a company’s products? Where was it written that advertising could only portray the absence of conflict and pain? And even if some images of world conflict do not include in their frame the familiar consumer symbols and signs, these are not necessary for the interpretive conflation to occur. Since marketing no longer intends its symbols and signs to gesture toward particular consumer products but rather to evoke emotional and moral identities, to call up formulaic narratives of possible lives, then the image and narrative of the “actual” world we encounter, even without those symbols and signs, may be viewed as instances of those established and pre-packaged formulas. Such a tendency is perhaps a natural development of normal human heuristics, magnified by the increased general familiarity with a limited set of

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 21

18/07/2012 07:22

22

Advertising and Reality

near-universal motifs that truly mass (global) marketing technology has propagated. But the categories are vastly more general now, and the authority for forming them has shifted from personal experience and local authorities to mass media.

The all-seeing eye Of course, as marketing infiltrates every possible space to break through the clutter, as it develops new techniques explicitly designed to eschew the external markings of marketing, to appear to be journalism or advocacy or public discourse or simply the “real” world, then the fact that it is the same medium, the same vehicle of image and narrative as is used by all other forms of discourse just mentioned, magnifies the conflation of its messages. For all practical purposes, the same voice constantly speaks to us. Telling us about the world no longer occurs in clearly distinct categories with clearly distinct functions and mediators, such that we can recognize the authority and motivation of the “truth tellers” as different one from the other, teacher from reporter from salesman. I am not talking about the way in which one form of “truth telling” can be seen to be “like” another. I am talking about the very real way in which none of the “territory” of any one of these forms of “truth telling” has remained intact and discrete. There is no “content” or “process” of education that hasn’t been appropriated by the other forms, and vice versa. All these forms of world talk, of world presentation and representation, have both intentionally and unconsciously borrowed from each other, if only as a result of the perhaps innocent impulse to innovate, to use the latest technique/technology, to borrow and adopt the most appealing narrative frames. As Boorstin (1992) foresaw, the pseudo-event, a “happening” that has been created exclusively for the purpose of being reported or seen, has supplanted the event. Things do not seem to us to be events unless they bear the marks of having been processed to be seen. In this way, and as Bourdieu (1999, pp. 6–7) has made clear, journalistic narratives have lost their dynamic aspect. They do not unfold. We do not see cause and effect, just effect, for which a cause must be manufactured and reported or, increasingly, merely puzzled over. We do not learn of the world in ways that show us the development of the “events” we view. So the “events” have no real event dynamics. It is odd, but the immediacy of media has made media images the narrative equivalent of still-frame photographs, capturing no more than a moment in time, an artificially truncated and objectified representation of life, not life itself, however endlessly replayed.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 22

18/07/2012 07:22

Mass moralizing

23

The illusion of video representation is that we are seeing the world unfold. This aspect has been reinforced by the essentially “eventless” nature of marketing, which, as Berger (1992, p.  153) suggests, exists always in the future (and subjunctive) tense. Events do not unfold in marketing, no matter how a particular marketing narrative is structured to look like an event. Instead, they only promise an unfolding for the consumer upon the condition of their participation in the market. And it is always the same promises. The marketing world, for all its sometimes jittery (multiple frames per minute) presentation, is static. The same goals beckon, the same procedures apply, the same mechanisms obtain. The only variable is the material element: this car rather than that, or rather than a particular airline or even clothing item, offers the same promise of freedom or luxury. But it is perhaps the ubiquity of the representations, the degree to which we are flooded with our being in the world as content of mechanically representing the world as happening that has contributed most to the blurring of the boundaries between these two worlds. The world we inhabit as agents has been remapped as the world we observe as spectacle. We are, famously, hyper-aware of ourselves as objects and image, televisualizable if not always or presently or even ever actually televised. We have come to think of our world of activity as a model or instance of the spectacle rather than the other way around.4 I do not want to belabor this point, as many others have articulated this phenomenon with great care and insight. I simply wish to call attention to the way in which this conflation, this transformation, in which this reproduction subsumes the production, allows for our world of activity to be seen by us as consumable after all, as product, as marketable good.

Tele-morality This conflation colludes with the dominant motifs of marketing in which values and ideals are transformed, packaged, and repackaged, into consumable goods. Morality, a dynamic aspect of our lives as lived, is thus transformed into market options, consumer choices. The moral agency we necessarily enact in our lived lives becomes the moral narratives and clichés of those lives reflected back at us as spectacle which then, because they echo across all spectacle, all forms of representation, including marketing, represent themselves to us as moralized products and consumer choice. Reporters and anchors, talk show hosts and commercial announcers are all now moral guides, guardians of middle-class and middle-of-the-road morality (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 46). They are constantly telling us what we should think, how we should act, and how the world should work.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 23

18/07/2012 07:22

24

Advertising and Reality

As in all marketing, these narrative moral/ethical products are presented as something we lack, but can gain, merely by participating in the marketplace and making smart consumer choices. Just as with the promise of a sparkling clean kitchen or a more exciting and appealing self, morally inflected worlds are offered to us not as a necessary and deeply contingent aspect of living our lives, but, through the representation of values and moral sentiments as the point of almost all products we can actually buy, as the thing we are indeed buying when we buy products like soft drinks or cars. Morality is represented as something just out of our current reach but attainable by joining the right tribe by means of buying the right stuff. One of the more interesting aspects, or oppositional tensions, within marketing is the need to simultaneously create dissatisfaction in the auditor with his/her life and lifestyle, while also validating, even valorizing the pop culture lifestyle in general (Berger, 1972, p. 142). The goal is not to make the consumer dissatisfied with the world, just his/her place in it. This has interesting connections to moral heuristics, since, in large part, it offers a similar dynamic. Moral rules serve to perpetuate and consolidate a moral order. Moral deliberation as popularly understood—the individual application of general rules to one’s own behavior—usually results in the failure to fully realize this order. Marketers play off this dynamic of our failure to realize a more perfect moral universe by suggesting that what we are failing to live up to is our culture’s and our personal full possibilities, to be as sexy and successful and happy, not as we might, but as we ought to be. Our failure to realize our more perfect potential in the material universe is a moral failure. All of this is further complicated by the fact that marketing genres participate in a very limited range of motifs. Most marketing narratives are collapsible into each other. They all present consumer choice as an identity choice mapped along an attenuated spectrum of human being. However, since the identity packages we are offered are thoroughly moralized packages, our moral choices are located along the same attenuated spectrum of human being. Jhally has called our attention to how marketing, since the 1920s, has explicitly sought to link products to the real social desires of people: No wonder then that advertising is so attractive to us, so powerful, so seductive. What it offers us are images of the real sources of human happiness—family life, romance and love, sexuality and pleasure, friendship, and sociability, leisure and relaxation, independence and control of life. That is why advertising is so powerful, that is what is real about it. (2000, p. 6)

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 24

18/07/2012 07:22

Mass moralizing

25

The truth of an ad is not measured in the potential of a product to fulfill the promise of the ad, nor in the relation of the world of the ad to our lived lives, not, at least, in terms of material culture (the truth of the extravagantly beautiful burger in a McDonald’s ad is never a correspondence with the burger we buy and get). The truth of an ad is measured in the relation of the ad’s narrative world to the narrative worlds of our fantasies. The truth of an ad is the truth of our desires. Advertising executive Jerry Goodis puts it this way: “Advertising doesn’t mirror how people are acting but how they are dreaming” (cited in Nelson, 1983, p. 10). Berger insists that: The gap between what publicity [marketing] actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is filled with glamorous day-dreams. (1972, p. 148) When an ad5 shows a family eating dinner together at McDonald’s, all smiles and excitement (see Figure 1.4), it is clearly claiming that eating at McDonald’s with one’s child is a way of giving to the child, perhaps repaying the child for neglect, a way to foster warm family relationships. We do not measure this claim against the “real” world; we measure it against our desires for this to be true, for it to be possible. The marketing argument is that believing enough in the possibility that having a cheap burger in a McDonald’s playland will constitute good parenting, wanting enough for that to be so, can make it so. No amount of believing can make the cheap hamburger a nutritious meal; so McDonald’s shies away from claims of that sort. It makes carefully calculated claims that can be measured not against some testable quantity of the material world, but only against our psyches. We are offered the opportunity to belong to implicitly or explicitly moral tribes through the consumer process of assuming personal identities, of becoming who we want to be. As is the case in all marketing, in explicit mass media moralizing we are repeatedly positioned as needing to pick certain pre-packaged moral issues to inhabit and fight for in order to gain moral character at all, because, until we pick those issues, we lack it. Many people have recognized that, as Berger (1972, pp. 149, 152) puts it, consumer choice has supplemented political or social choice, the act of consumption substituting for the democratic act. I want to argue that consumer choice, with its always implicit, and often explicit, register of personal identity formation, has come to stand for moral choice. The ethical question of who one desires to be, what sort of person one will actualize,

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 25

18/07/2012 07:22

26

Advertising and Reality

Figure 1.4  is sublimated by the consumer question that carries the exact same significance. Whatever else it is, marketing is a moral system. It valuates the world, and interprets it in morally charged terms. It constructs, borrows, fashions, and refashions interconnected and relational systems of moral symbols, values, and entities. I do not want to argue that one system of moral values (more to be desired or better in some moral or extra-moral sense) is being replaced by another and consumerist system of values (of a worse or more shallow sort). I want to argue that our historical and cultural systems of values are being (re)configured as consumerist. I think current and dominant mass media discourse practices invite us to inhabit our old familiar world, the world of our familiar cultural narrative frames, attenuated significantly, adopted and adapted, but still recognizable as our values and our meaning systems. The radical change is that it invites us to do so in ways that make of those values and meaning systems commodities, market goods, to be purchased as a way of becoming who we are, as opposed to allowing them to remain non-commercial ways of living and being which, through actualization in our activity, shape who we are in the living (rather than in the consuming). Is this change for the better? For the worse? I do not know how to answer that question without invoking some, perhaps impossible, rubric that stands apart from the very system I am analyzing. But I do, obviously, think we are participating in dynamics that are changing the way we think and act in the world, and being aware of that change, of those dynamics, is important, if only

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 26

18/07/2012 07:22

Mass moralizing

27

to keep open the possibility of direct and effective agency on our part. It is fair to ask, and important to be able to ask, whether we want a world in which everything, even the questions of who to be and to whom we owe obligation or duty, is product, and in which every choice, even moral/ethical choice, is market choice. As I have argued, the choice I believe we do have is a choice between narratives. Once we inhabit a narrative, and the metaphysics that narrative invokes and constructs, we have our moral system. Therefore it is incumbent upon us to critique all narratives, including and perhaps especially the narratives offered by marketing. I believe the only way to do so, and the way straightforwardly available to us, is by critically inhabiting, that is, explicitly relating and interrogating the various narratives available to us.

Notes 1 I owe some of the formulation of the ideas of this paragraph to Chris Elford, an exceptional student in my History of Western Philosophy: Ancient class at Southwestern University in the fall of 2007. 2 I am not arguing that such a distinction is actual, just that we have in the past, I would argue, experienced these events or activities as distinctly different in a way that is harder and harder to maintain. 3 Images used in this chapter are protected by the Fair Use Clause of the Copyright Act of 1976, which protects the unlicensed reproduction of media for the purposes of criticism, commentary, and education. 4 As Holmes (1859) feared and as Berger (1972) eloquently argues. 5 Website ad retrieved March 15, 2011 from http://mcdonalds.com.au/#/families

References Atkin, D. (2004). The Culting of Brands. New York: Portfolio. Benetton Group. (2011). Retrieved March 17, 2011 from http://press. benettongroup.com/ben_en/about/campaigns/history Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin. Boorstin, D. (1992). The Image. New York: Vintage. Bourdieu, P. (1999). On Television. New York: The New Press. Debord, G. (2000). Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red. Godin, S. (2008). Tribes. New York: Portfolio. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row. Holmes, O. (1859). The stereoscope and the stereograph. The Atlantic Monthly. 738–48. Jhally, S. (2000). Advertising at the edge of the apocalypse. Retrieved January 28, 2007 from http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 27

18/07/2012 07:22

28

Advertising and Reality

Klein, N. (2000). No Logo. New York: Picador. Nelson, J. (1983, April 16). As the brain tunes out, the TV admen tune in. Globe and Mail, 10. Story, L (2007, January 15). Anywhere the eye can see, it’s likely to see an ad. The New York Times. Retrieved January 16, 2007 from http://www. nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html?ei=5070&e n=93bd167b233e1331&ex=1169528400&adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&ad xnnlx=1169442323-z80bDJLAO2quWPZ6ljkabg

Discussion questions 1 How does the marketing you consume present you with the

opportunity to join a tribe? What values are presented as associated with or embodied by those tribes? Are there responsibilities or obligations and privileges to belonging to tribes? 2 How does the marketing you consume frame the possibilities of

personal identity? What kinds of freedom are offered or promised? In what ways does marketing present your choices as limited? 3 How is identity packaged by marketing? What are the kinds of identity

models offered? Do those faithfully or richly reflect the choices you find in living your life? 4 How much do marketing narratives rely upon existing cultural

narratives, or the community of marketing narratives? How do they alter or inflect those narratives? 5 As you consume marketing, try to identify both the explicit moral

values presented, and the implicit moral choices offered. How do those relate to traditional moral concepts? In what ways is traditional morality re-fashioned by the arguments of the ads? 6 How do the questions of morality—questions of what sort of person

to be and how to live with others—change when they are put in the service of selling things?

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 28

18/07/2012 07:22

2 The disintegration of the box: Narrativity, performance, and translation in television commercials Dror Abend-David University of Florida, USA

Key words commercials, narrativity, performance, translation

W

hen one comes to speak of Translation and Television Commercials, Translation and Television, or even of Translation and Media, it is important to explain that one is dealing with a groundbreaking and emerging field, yet simultaneously an area in which little has been published, and certainly not in a unified or consistent manner. A list of sources in this “field” might seem sporadic, and perhaps even arbitrary and lacking in a common methodology and ethos. However (and perhaps particularly under these circumstances), the past decade has witnessed some innovative and highly original works on Media and Translation. Two recent major works by scholars in Translation Studies on issues relating to Media and Translation are Michael Cronin’s Translation Goes to the Movies (2009), and Translation in Global News (2008) by Esperanca Bielsa and Susan Bassnett. A slightly older

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 29

18/07/2012 07:22

30

Advertising and Reality

book is (Multi) Media Translation: Concepts, Practices, and Research by Yves Gambier and Henrik Gottlieb (2001).1 On the side of Communication Studies, two major works are Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema by Abe Mark Nornes (2007) and the more technical but quite valuable book, Overcoming Language Barriers in Television Dubbing and Subtitling by Georg-Michael Luyken and others (1991). I refer in this chapter to two other recent sources in this area: The first is Fotini Apostolou’s article, “Mediation, Manipulation, Empowerment: Celebrating the Complexity of the Interpreter’s Role” (2009), where the author refers to the movie, The Interpreter (Pollak, 2005), in order to discuss the unobtrusive and inconspicuous role of the ideal interpreter (and translator). The second is O’Hagan and Ashworth’s book, Translation-Mediated Communication in a Digital World: Facing the Challenges of Globalization and Localization (2002), in which they develop a theoretical model of Media and Translation. It is also worth mentioning two recent articles that discuss the challenges of dubbing films and television series by Christine Heiss (2004) and Eric Plourde (2002), as well as Michael Wood’s article, “The Languages of Cinema” (2005), in which he considers non-verbal elements in films (such as music, scenery, and silent gestures) as part of the cultural and national message that “the Language of Cinema” tries to mediate. One might still claim that this is a somewhat “awkward” list that draws sources from a number of topics and disciplines—but the common thread between these sources is the realization that foreign language is an essential—and previously unaccounted—element of mass communication. It is important to note that better established work in Drama Studies, either in relation with Multilingualism or Dramatic Adaptation, refer only tangentially to issues of multilingual drama, and with no direct relation to electronic media. However, some recent works in Translation Studies, such as those of Michael Cronin (2003) and Dirk Delabastita (2004), reflect important notions both on the issues of translation and new technology, and on the dramatic affects and contexts of translation. Cronin (2003, pp. 65–7) suggests that rather than fearing the advent of machine translation, translators should see it as an opportunity to take a wider and more active role in the act of intercultural communication. Delabastita adds to this a notion about the dramatic effect of translation. Speaking, in his case, of Shakespearean Drama, he highlights what is evidently true of any fictional translator: that he/she is not a translator at all, but an actor (or character) that merely performs a translation for dramatic effect, sometime “when comprehension of the original text is not an issue at all” (Delabastita, 2004, p. 39). These two arguments play a key role in this discussion as they suggest both the breaking with the traditional role of translators (and translation), and the non-textual nature of Dramatic Translation (“non-translation” in Delabastita’s terms—see Delabastita, 2004,

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 30

18/07/2012 07:22

The disintegration of the box

31

p. 31), which is highly relevant to the reading of translation in television commercials.

A “box model” of communication A number of disciplines such as Linguistics, Literature, Media Studies, Psychology, and Translation Studies are united by a basic model of communication: A straight line that marks the transmission of a message from the original sender to an intended receiver, both of whom are often represented by two square boxes. When the direction changes and the receiver replies to the sender, transmission turns into communication, and the theoretical field of human exchange is able to advance. In Linguistics, this model is almost a century old. It is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure (Lodge, 2000, pp. 2–10), who—greatly thanks to this model—is known as the founder of the science of Linguistics. De Saussure takes language out of the realm of anatomy and into the realm of human interaction, as he provides a diagram of two speakers who are connected by dotted lines that do not reach either their mouths or the ears, but the very center of their heads, where their mind and imagination are assumed to function (Lodge, 2000, p. 5). Over some hundred years, the same model of sender-message-receiver has been greatly elaborated on and taken in different directions such as Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology. Jacques Lacan, in “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious” elaborates on the component of signification through which communication is enabled (Lodge, 2000, pp. 91–101), while Mikhail Bakhtin (Lodge, 2000, pp. 125–57) and Jacques Derrida (Lodge, 2000, pp. 108–24) elaborate on the same model, supplementing it with the possibilities of multiple conversations, interpretations, and inner references. It might be misleading, and certainly reductive to suggest that this model has not changed a great deal over time, and particularly during the second half of the twentieth century. One communication scholar who consciously tries to distance himself from the linearity of this model is Stuart Hall. In his article “Encoding/Decoding” (1980), Hall elaborates on what he sees as a linear model as he describes the process of mass communication as a circular exchange between production, circulation, distribution, and reproduction (p. 128), and speaks about the connotative and denotative meanings of various signs (pp. 131–4). More importantly, Hall describes a number of modes of interpretation and underscores the extent to which the reception of the message, and the significance that is assigned to it, depend on the identity and the attitude of the receiver (pp. 137–8). But, without detracting

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 31

18/07/2012 07:22

32

Advertising and Reality

from the significance of these observations, it is also important to note that Hall does not contradict the basic suggestion of de Saussure, of an original, intelligible message with a certain internal logic and structure, that is always expressed (encoded) and interpreted (decoded) by senders and receivers. In other words, even the most skeptic, or “oppositional” (Hall, 1980, p. 138) receiver must base his/her interpretation to some extent on an original message in order for communication to take place. The underlining assumption in all of these models is of a certain narrativity, as they posit a meaningful exchange that even at its briefest and most flexible form is assumed to contain an internal order and progress. In other words, the message must be assumed to “make sense” in order to be interpreted at all. Both sender and receiver are enclosed within their diagramed boxes, and unless they communicate through meditation, they must approximate a mutually accepted language, cultural context, and shared references in order to converse. And whether such language is written or spoken, verbal or visual, it must be assumed to tell a “story” in order to be worth the effort of deciphering. Referring specifically to advertising, Roland Barthes claims that such communication can also be carried effectively through visual signs or icons (Barthes, 1977, p. 38), so long as one interprets correctly the meanings and connotations that different images might offer, and the meaning that the entire combination of visual images might present to the viewers (Barthes, 1977, p. 41). It is, therefore, a language system that is not different from written and verbal communication. Senders and receivers, for all the added emotional and intuitive value of visual iconography, are still confined to their theoretical boxes, connected only through arrows of an intricate linguistic system and a shared narrative.

A “box model” of translation The same “box model” seems particularly appropriate for Translation Studies, as translation is most often defined as the interpretation of an original text with the greatest possible fidelity to its assumed sense and meaning. The most notable source in which this model is adapted for translation is The Theory and Practice of Translation by Eugene Albert Nida and Charles Russell Taber (Nida and Taber, 1969). While Nida and Taber analyze further each component in this chart, they essentially add one more box to the diagram, of the translator, situated half-way between the sender and the receiver, both enabling and mitigating the message. The translator, an entrusted middleman, is confined to his/her box and the rendering of the message as precisely

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 32

18/07/2012 07:22

The disintegration of the box

33

as possible. The translator is not expected to alter the message, and he/she is certainly not expected to produce a message of his/her own. This diagram corresponds to a traditional view of translators as silent assistants who best serve their task without any notice either to themselves or to the act of translation. And this is even more appropriate to the contemporary settings of simultaneous interpretation—as the interpreter is literally enclosed within a soundproof box at the far end of the room, out of the sight of the audience who is unable to make eye contact or have any visual communication with the interpreter. The audience must look at the speaker of the source language, and try to pretend that he/she speaks in the target language, and that the interpreter does not exist at all. O’Hagan and Ashworth (2002, p. 5) mitigate this view to some extent as they adapt it to Media Translation. They expand the chart to recognize non-verbal communication through body language, visual images, and tone of voice. The viewer is, therefore, imagined to receive input through two different sources, or two arrows: one arrow, of verbal communication, stretches from the box of the translator/interpreter; the other, of non-verbal communication, originates with the sender and bypasses the act of translation. The translator or interpreter, however, still remains confined to his/her box and to the verbal message. He/She does not have license to contextualize, comment, or participate in the process of communication in any form. Theoretically speaking, the translator is literally imagined as a box, or a machine, that does not do (and is not allowed to do) more than receive the original message at one end, and transmit the translated message at the other.

The disintegration of the box Over the past decade, Translation Theory has been forced to contend not only with a more frequent presentation of foreign language and translation in popular television programs and films, but also with a more complex presentation that often challenges traditional views of translation and inter-lingual communication. Some examples include rather ironic uses of translation in the television drama Brothers & Sisters (Baitz, 2006–11) in Chinese (Season  2, Episode 11; February 10, 2008) and in French (Season 4, Episode 4; October 18, 2009), or House M. D. (Shore, 2004–) that featured a recent opening scene in Dutch (Season 7, Episode 7; November 15, 2010). In Brothers & Sisters, Chinese and French remain untranslated, highlighting the fact that Sarah (Rachel Griffiths) is ignorant of these languages, while the men that she is involved with speak them fluently. In House M. D., the main character, Dr. Gregory House (Hugh

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 33

18/07/2012 07:22

34

Advertising and Reality

Laurie), prefers the translation of an online Dutch stripper to the services of a professional translator, which can possibly be construed as a comment on the nature of this profession. Two feature films that not only include scenes of translation, but actually address issues of inter-lingual and inter-cultural exchange, are Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003) and The Interpreter (Pollack, 2005). Particularly the latter seems like a direct attack on a traditional model of translation, as the character of Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman), an interpreter for the United Nations, literally steps out of the interpreter’s box and interferes in a humanitarian crisis in Africa. At the end of the film, the interpreter holds a gun to the head of an African dictator who is responsible for war crimes (and the death of her own brother). Fotini Apostolou (2009) writes of the transgression of the neutrality and obscurity of the interpreter in this film. She responds both to the heroine’s stepping out of the interpreter’s booth and to the sanctions that she must consequently endure, concluding that the darkness of the interpreter’s booth most “befits interpreting” (Apostolou, 2009, p. 15). Apostolou responds metaphorically to the diagram of “the box” as it is illustrated by O’Hagan and Ashworth, as she urges Silvia Broome to stay both physically and theoretically within the interpreter’s booth. It might seem antithetical, therefore, that translation, either through bilingual dialogue, dubbing or subtitling has been making its way into the media in general, and into television commercials in particular at this time. It is perhaps the influence of reality television, which is not filmed according to a premeditated script, or a general distrust of a structured message that renders in many contemporary television commercials a complete disintegration of the “box model,” frustrating any preconceptions of narrativity, argumentation, persuasion, or beguiling. While a classic commercial would present the product, tell the viewer of its merit, or simply insinuate that using the product would actualize the viewer’s sexual fantasies—some commercials simply tell the viewer nothing, and certainly nothing that is even remotely connected with the advertised product. One such impressive commercial is Orange—Portal (UK) (Murro, 2006). To the music of Nat Baldwin, the heroine in this British commercial steps through a rainbow and walks through a series of rooms, each one containing differently unexpected and inexplicable objects. The viewer later discovers that the rooms are actually the compartments of a huge head, and the announcer suggests that conversations are magical because they allow us to step into each others’ heads. If not for a brief display of the advertiser’s logo at the end of the commercial, it would have been impossible to guess what the advertised product is.2 But to the producers of this commercial, an effective commercial is seen as one that would take a hold of the viewers’ attention, frustrate their expectations, and perhaps have them guessing what the advertisement is for.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 34

18/07/2012 07:22

The disintegration of the box

35

Translation, a methodical rendition that centers on deciphering the internal logic of the original, would have little to do with such texts. But, as Delabastita explains, translation has been out of the box of narrativity for quite some time, and its use as a dramatic device, sometime with “much more at stake … [than] semantic equivalence” (2004, p. 34), is as old as Shakespeare, who often used translation with little or no relation to the exchange between texts.3 Some recent television commercials, therefore, do not only strengthen Delabastita’s notion that translation is not necessarily “about translation,” but also the notion of Cronin (2003, p. 67) that translation (and the translator) can take a central role rather than a back-sit to others. A commercial in which translation steals the show and overshadows the possible merit of the advertised product is Orbit Tropical Remix—Translator (Hughes, 2010). This commercial, which was aired in the United States, describes an international incident on a tropical island between a Spanish-speaking official in military uniform and an English-speaking official in a bright suit. The wife of the Spanish-speaking host awards the English-speaking guest with a tray of tropical fruits, and he tries his hand in complementing her in Spanish. His translator or assistant explains to him (and to the viewers) that he compared the host’s wife to a donkey. The two of them grab the tray of tropical fruits and run towards the boat to escape. There is a slight relationship between the content of the commercial and the product itself, as the tropical fruits stand for the flavor of the chewing gum that would wash away the “dirty mouth” of the main character (as the announcer suggests at the very end). But the “translation” in this commercial is not only nonsensical; it is not exactly a translation at all, as the advisor/ translator explains to the English-speaking official what he had just said (“you said that ...”) rather than mediate between the English and Spanish speakers in the commercial. But the exchange in the commercial is not important at all. Even the main story of miscommunication is inconsequential and has nothing to do with chewing gum. But that is exactly the point: The commercial is funny because the exchange makes no sense, and translation is used as an excellent prop for miscommunications and non-sequiturs. Rather than inhibiting structural and verbal mischief, translation seems to be an excellent tool for intended misunderstandings, double-entendres, and language games. In the French commercial, Schweppes—Uma Thurman (LaChapelle, 2011), actress Uma Thurman plays herself as she gives an interview to a young male journalist in her hotel room. She reclines over a chaise longue as she confesses her passionate and uncontrolled desire for Schweppes. She then offers the shocked interviewer to have Schweppes with her. The commercial runs in English with French subtitles—making room for the possibility of an error in communication. The hopeful journalist says, “I am sorry, Uma, but you mean sex, right?” But of course she doesn’t,

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 35

18/07/2012 07:22

36

Advertising and Reality

and the interview is cut off with a rebuke from Thurman’s assistant and her own ironic comment: “Hey, what did you expect?” The commercial does present a clear fetish, confusing Schweppes and sex, but there is an ironic twist in the fact that this is spelled out and ridiculed by the characters in the commercial. The commercial adds a sophisticated mockery of advertisers who use sex to sell a product, while of course doing so at the same time. The bilingual presentation of the commercial adds to its international splendor and the depiction of Thurman as a desirable femme fatale. And while the French subtitles follow the text with a great deal of fidelity, the tension between Schweppes and sex is also a tension about the fidelity of the translation, and the hope that somehow one has been substituted for the other. The scandal over the actress’s sex addiction would therefore also be a scandal of translation. But the translator seems to share the same wink that Thurman shares with the sophisticated viewers, who do not fall for the cliché of substituting sex for the product. The correct translation has been “Schweppes” all along. After all, says the translator: “Vous vous attendiez à quoi [what did you expect]?” The “disintegration of the box” therefore seems accommodating, and even ideal for the inclusion of foreign texts, accents, dubbing, and subtitling which serve to enrich, complicate, and frustrate common expectations. An intoxication with a freedom of translation is celebrated in L’Oreal Paris Happy New Year Wishes 2011 (R/GA), a multilingual commercial that was most likely aired in the United States and elsewhere, in which a good deal of the text is not translated; some of it is translated aloud into English; and some by subtitles. The translation is a purely dramatic prop, as the text bears almost no meaning (or significance). The parts of the commercial that are translated highlight the superficiality of translation: “because … you are worth it … because we are worth it ...” The words are shallow and insignificant, but the act of translation and repetition in several languages comprises the essence of the commercial: its international quality; the voices of the French models; and the mesmerizing music of unintelligible foreign words (which the viewer does not stop to scrutinize or make sense of). The commercial does not only deconstruct the act of translation. It is also devoid of any real text, storyline, or dominating images. One cannot even accuse L’Oreal of tying its product with an erotic fantasy. The models in the commercial are pretty, but they are not presented in an erotic fashion. It features men and women, young and old models from different places who speak in different languages. The product, other than being mentioned by name, is completely divorced form the contents of the commercial, and translation, rather than transmitting any original text, is merely used to enhance the multilingual, multicultural, and international image of L’Oreal.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 36

18/07/2012 07:22

The disintegration of the box

37

Translation in television commercials may also be a part of the creation of a virtual community, where a global viewership relishes watching commercials from different countries. The act of translation certainly helps in bringing commercials to the attention of multilingual internet users, and some translated commercials have become quite popular on YouTube and other sites that feature short video segments. It is a direction in which an academic scholar treads with difficulty for a frequent lack of proper citations, but it is impossible not to mention at least one translated commercial that became extremely popular over the internet. The company, Ukfoods, actually produced the commercial by itself and uploaded it to YouTube in March 10, 2008 under the title of Rhyming Slang Translation—Commercial (Ukfoods, 2008). It is unclear whether a local version was broadcast anywhere in the United States. This is one of two commercials in which actor Dennis Banks advertises imported food products that are brought from Britain to the United States by Ukfoods for the benefit of nostalgic British expatriates. Although the commercial does not contain any foreign languages, translation is featured front-and-center, as Banks talks of the imported products of Ukfoods in a local East London British slang, and his words are translated by subtitles into Standard English. This is, again, a non-conventional use of translation which is carried out with the dramatic effect of highlighting the cultural differences between the British and Americans, in language as well as in food.

Conclusion Because television commercials are most often intended for a local market, translation seldom accompanies a commercial out of a need to decipher a text in a foreign language. In fact, if a foreign language is featured (and translated), this is done in order to create a linguistic gap that can be used to award a commercial with an international quality, prestige, and, in the case of the Schweppes—Uma Thurman commercial, even a certain sex appeal. In commercials such as the Orbit Tropical Remix—Translator or the Rhyming Slang Translation, translation can be used as a prop for highlighting cultural differences with either humor or nostalgia. In many cases, the act of translation has little to do with the source text to which it is referring, and the source text itself is often of little significance. In these commercials translation often takes the center of the stage rather than remain an auxiliary function that chronicles the events in the commercial. Translation, either of the unfortunate “compliment” to the host’s wife, or of the East London slang of Dennis Banks, turns into the main event in the commercial. Much

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 37

18/07/2012 07:22

38

Advertising and Reality

like Nicole Kidman in the character of Silvia Broome, who breaks out of the “interpreter’s booth” to unleash her restrained powers—translation is used in contemporary television commercials to disintegrate the box of traditional communication. It is entertaining, shocking, humorous, glamorous, and, possibly, erotic. If a commercial needs to transport us to distant worlds, unfamiliar fragrances and unimaginable experiences—then nothing is more equal to the task than the je ne sais quoi of translation.

Notes 1 Additionally, the John Benjamins Publishing Company, an important source for publications in Translation Studies, lists two more books by Pilar Orero (2004) and Andrew Chesterman and others (2000). It also lists two articles by Samia Bazzi (2009) and Marta Mateo (2002). A search for “subtitling” without further search terms yields a much longer list of sources. 2 Ironically, the commercial does contain a resounding political message which is communicated in the erasure of a key quality of the product. The color orange (which is the namesake of the product) is carefully avoided as it carries a particular significance in Irish politics. 3 For example, in The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio pretends to translate a text from Latin, but actually uses the intervals between the Latin phrases to send a love message to Bianca. The original meaning of the Latin text that he quotes is of no significance either to him, Bianca, or the audience.

References Apostolou, F. (2009). Mediation, manipulation, empowerment: Celebrating the complexity of the interpreter’s role. Interpreting: International Journal and Practice in Interpreting, 2(1), 1–19. Baitz, J. R. (Creator). (2006–11). Brothers & Sisters [Television Series]. Los Angeles: After Portsmouth. Barthes, R. (1977). Rhetoric of the image. In H. Stephen (Ed. & Trans.), Image, Music, Text (pp. 32–51). New York: Hill and Wang. Bazzi, S. (2009). Media translation and conflict. In S. Bazzi, Arab News and Conflict: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (pp. 185–212). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bielsa, E., & Bassnett S. (eds). (2008), Translation in Global News. Milton Park: Routledge. Chesterman, A. G., Natividad, S. S., & Gambier, Y. (eds), (2000). Translation in Context: Selected Papers from the EST Congress, Granada 1998. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 38

18/07/2012 07:22

The disintegration of the box

39

Coppola, S. (Director). (2003). Lost in Translation [Motion Picture]. Los Angeles: Focus Features. Cronin, M. (2003). Translation and Globalization. New York: Routledge —(2009). Translation Goes to the Movies. New York: Routledge. Delabastita, D. (2004). ‘If I know the letters and the language:’ Translation as a dramatic device in Shakespeare’s plays. In T. Hoenselaars (ed.), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (pp. 31–52). London: The Arden Shakespeare. Gambier, Y., & Henrik, G. (eds), (2001). (Multi) Media Translation: Concepts, Practices, and Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/Decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language (pp. 128–38). New York: Routledge. Heiss, C. (2004). Dubbing multilingual films: A new challenge? Meta, 49(1), 208–20. Hughes, B. L. (Director). (2010). Orbit Tropical Remix—Translator [Television Commercial]. USA: Orbit® Tropical Remix. Retrieved on November 6, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtQ8rHYl-eQ LaChapelle, D. (Director). (2011). Schweppes—Uma Thurman [Television Commercial]. France: FRED&FARID (FFL). Retrieved November 7, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wng-vKN2bE Lodge, D. (ed.). (2000). Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London: Longman. Luyken, G. M. Herbst, T., Langham-Brown, J., Reid, H., & Spinhof, H. (1991). Overcoming Language Barriers in Television Dubbing and Subtitling for the European Audience. Manchester, UK: European Institute for the Media. Mateo, M. (2002). Review of “(Multi) media translation: Concepts, practices, and research” by Yves Gambier and Henrik Gottlieb (eds). Target 14(2), 365–70. Murro, N. (Director). (2006). Orange—Portal (UK) [Television Commercial]. London: Independent Films. Retrieved November 6, 2011 from http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=D75XDGk2A0E Nida, E. A., & Taber, C. R. (1969). The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Nornes, A. M. (2007). Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. O’Hagan, M., & Ashworth, D. (2002). Translation-Mediated Communication in a Digital World: Facing the Challenges of Globalization and Localization. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Orero, P. (ed.). (2004). Topics in Audiovisual Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Plourde, E. (2002). The dubbing of the Simpsons: Cultural appropriation, discursive manipulation and divergences. SALSA VIII: 2000—Texas Linguistic Forum, 44(1), 114–31. Pollack, S. (Director). (2005). The Interpreter [Motion Picture]. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures. R/GA (Producers). (2010, December). L’Oreal Paris Happy New Year Wishes 2011 [Television Commercial]. New York: R/GA. Retrieved September 11, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YDh5AQFQfw

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 39

18/07/2012 07:22

40

Advertising and Reality

Shore, D. (Producer). (2004–). House M. D. [Television Series]. Los Angeles: Heel & Toe Films. Ukfoods (Producers). (2008). Rhyming Slang Translation—Commercial [Internet Commercial]. Kent, UK: Ukfoods. Uploaded to YouTube by ukgoods on March 10, 2008. Retrieved November 7, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JzxttGuq1s4 Wood, M. (2005). The languages of cinema. In Bermann, S., & Wood, M. (eds), Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (pp. 79–89). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Discussion questions 1 Do you believe that as globalization proceeds translation of

commercials will still be needed, or will television ads be broadcast in only one version around the world? 2 In what ways is translation of commercials different from translation

of dramatic content? 3 Do you think that the majority of the audience prefer translated ads to

locally produced commercials or vice versa? Why?

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 40

18/07/2012 07:22

3 Values in Israeli advertising: A decade-long observation Amir Hetsroni Ariel University Center, Israel

Key words advertising, distorted mirror, Israel, reality, values

A

decade ago I published a content analysis of values in Israeli advertising (Hetsroni, 2000), which was based on a sample of television ads from the years 1995–7. The current chapter compares that data with a sample of television ads from the years 2000–4 to obtain an historical account of the changes (or lack of) that mainstream television advertising went through amid cultural and economic changes. The work also refers to the distorted mirror metaphor (Pollay, 1986)—the supposed hedonistic bias of advertising and its neglect of altruism in an Israeli context.

Values in advertising—research directions A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or an end state of existence is personally-psychologically or socially-culturally preferable to a converse mode of conduct or an opposite end state of existence (Levi, 1990). A set of closely related or substantially similar mini-values constitutes

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 41

18/07/2012 07:22

42

Advertising and Reality

a value system. A value system, thus, is an enduring organization of beliefs concerning preferable modes of conduct and preferable states of existence (Rokeach, 1973). Human values and goods and services are distinct entities, yet advertising links the two by loading goods and services with psychological-cultural significance that goes far beyond the concrete purpose of a particular product (McCracken, 1986). Even the most laconic ad that only lists the qualities of a product is not “value free” because these qualities represent a preferred mode of conduct or an aspired end state of existence. Empirical research regarding values in advertising can be divided into three types: 1 Cross-cultural: These studies compare the values portrayed in

advertising in one culture with the values portrayed in another culture. The trend among researchers is to use the extensively surveyed American advertising as a base rate. When compared with typically collectivist cultures, such as China (Cheng & Schweitzer, 1996) and Japan (Mueller, 1987, 1992), American ads were found to contain more individualism. When American ads were compared with ads from Western countries like Sweden (Wiles, Wiles, & Tjernlünd, 1996) or the UK (Caillat & Mueller, 1996; Frith & Toland, 1991), the crosscultural differences barely noticed. 2 Advertising vs. public opinion: This kind of research juxtaposes the

predominance of values in advertising with the values held by the public. Such research examines the distorted mirror, a metaphor coined by Pollay (1986, 1987) to connote the supposed tendency of advertising to emphasize and favorably portray hedonistic values that celebrate instant gratification, materialism, and covetousness, portray vulgarity in abundance, not criticize uncontrolled expenditure, support impulse buying, and avoid entirely or negatively portray altruistic characteristics which advocate the postponement of gratification and show the advantages of calculated buying. In practice, only one study of this sort appears in the literature, and that study did not yield unequivocal results (Pollay & Gallagher, 1990). One reason for that could be the difficulty in generating operational definitions of values that would fit content analysis as well as public opinion surveys (Hetsroni, 2000). Another potential explanation is that the mirror of advertising is possibly not so distorted. In order to convince potential consumers to purchase their product ads should comply with the public’s own values rather than run against them. As Holbrook (1987)

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 42

18/07/2012 07:22

Values in Israeli advertising

43

noted, attacking basic values is a good way to get the consumers’ attention but a very unproductive way to induce them to buy a product. No matter how hard a company or advertising agency tried to alter the salience or contents of people’s values, it would not convince them that friendliness and cuisine are more important than routes and schedules in choosing an airline or that they should prefer dangerous and fuel wasting rather than safe and economical automobiles. (Holbrook, 1987, p. 100) 3 Historic: This research compares the values portrayed in current

advertising with the values that appeared in commercials in the past. The main research question is whether the dominance of certain values has changed over the years. The answer from studies conducted so far is not clear-cut. While there is some evidence that advertising has shifted from inner directedness to outer directedness, and from stressing more the functional qualities to presenting more the hedonistic benefits (Belk & Pollay, 1985; Leiss Kline, Jhally, & Boticelli, 1986), the overall picture shows many signs of stability as well. Periodic changes, such as an increased tendency to express patriotism during World War II, did not have a lasting effect (Pollay & Gallagher, 1990). Value systems in advertising (as opposed to specific mini-values) have changed very little over the years (Wiles, Wiles, & Tjernlünd, 1996). The work discussed in this chapter belongs to the historic type. It is a case study that examines whether cultural and economic changes are reflected in Israeli advertising. To learn more about the local context, a short review of relevant issues in Israeli advertising appears in the next section.

Israeli advertising Advertising agencies started to operate in Israel rather late (in the early 1930s). For decades the industry developed quite slowly and consisted mainly of single-man workshops (Gornichovsky, 1998). A number of factors contributed to the slow development: The meager size of the population (that was still less than five million people in the late 1980s); the isolated character of the local economy, which—for years—was dominated by the government and strong workers’ unions; the small number of brands and corporations

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 43

18/07/2012 07:22

44

Advertising and Reality

(partly because of a longstanding pan-Arabic boycott on Japanese and European companies that traded with Israel); and the lack of commercial television stations left together very little room for a thriving advertising industry (Hetsroni, 2012). That changed in the mid-1990s, when the peace process brought to Israel international corporations with large advertising budgets and the first commercial television station (Channel 2) finally started to broadcast in late 1993. Gradually, the advertising industry grew in size and became more similar to Madison Avenue exemplars (Friedman, 2003). Population wise, Israel is a Western, capitalist, democratic society, but almost half of the population originates from Eastern countries in Asia and North Africa that are characterized by high levels of collectivism and mutual trust. The history of Israeli society itself is also rich in collectivism. Before the establishment of the state and in the early years of its existence Israelis saw themselves as pioneers who had to stick together and help each other in order to survive (Almog, 2004). In the 1970s, Israelis were still more collectivist than Americans, Canadians, Australians, and most Europeans (Rokeach, 1973; Hofstede, 2001). Over the years, the feeling of “togetherness” among Israelis has gradually diminished, although some traces of it remain (Almog 2004). An early 1990s comparative examination of print ads from America, Brazil, Chile, Finland, France, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, and Taiwan, revealed that Israeli ads were then still richer in individualism and poorer in collectivism than Asian ads but also richer in collectivism and poorer in individualism than American and Western European ads (Albers-Miller & Gelb, 1996). A comparison of the value systems presented in print advertisements from the 1950s and 1990s shows that the frequency of Western values substantially increased over the years, whereas the frequency of collectivism, militarism, and Zionism sharply declined (Bar-Magen Rosenberg, 2000). A relevant development during the last decade is the entry of international advertising agencies (e.g. BBDO) to the Israeli market. These agencies brought with them global standards that may affect the flavor of ads. Concurrently with that, Israeli ads began to win prizes in international competitions such as the Effie and Cannes festivals (Hetsroni, 2012). In the more general context, since 1996, when the labor government was replaced by a right-wing government, the country has been going through a process of privatization of national assets. The transfer of ownership from the government to the private sector of major advertisers might have also induced many of the ads to be less collectivist in their approach. The current study empirically maps values and value systems in two time periods: 1995–7 and 2000–4). As this is an historical research, we are mainly searching for differences over the years that would (or would not) reflect cultural mirroring.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 44

18/07/2012 07:22

Values in Israeli advertising

45

Method Seventeen values that are ascribed to advertised products were drawn from a number of sources in the advertising literature (Belk & Pollay, 1985; Caillat & Mueller, 1996; Cheng & Schweitzer, 1996; Mueller, 1987, 1992; Pollay, 1983; Pollay & Gallagher, 1990, Wiles et al., 1996; Zhang & Gelb, 1996). Table 3.1 offers concise descriptions of the values drawn from these sources. Five communication students with a background in advertising classified each value according to its value system (altruistic, hedonistic, or functional). The students were given the description of values, as it appears on Table 3.1, as a guideline and agreed on the classification of all the values.

Sample The data consist of commercials that were aired on Channel 2, Israel’s main commercial television station (and the only commercial station until 2001). Each year was divided into six periods: January–February, March–April, May– June, July–August, September–October, and November–December. Then, every year, one month in each period was randomly chosen, and all the ads that were aired during that chosen month were sampled. No ad appears in the sample more than once. The overall ratio of sample to population was 1: 2.25 in the 1995–7 period (861 commercials overall) and 1:5.85 in the 2000–4 period (2,351 commercials overall).

Coding procedure and reliability A team of 45 coders, mass communication students who had not participated in the original classification of values into value systems, coded the television commercials. They were trained for six hours in a group and an additional two hours individually, and were given a written description of the values (see Table 3.1) as a guideline. For each ad, coders had to determine whether a value was ascribed to the advertised product. If the value was ascribed, the ad was coded “1” for this value; if not, it was coded “0”. Coders were instructed to code the values separately, and were told there was no upper or lower limit to the number of values an ad could carry. Each coder worked alone and analyzed approximately 150 ads, and each ad was analyzed twice by different coders. To measure agreement between coders and coding reliability, Perreault and Leigh’s Ir statistic was computed.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 45

18/07/2012 07:22

46

Advertising and Reality

Table 3.1  Value in ads—descriptions and literature sources Value

Description

Source

Beauty

The ad asserts that using the product enhances the beauty of its user, or suggests that the people in the ad are handsome because they use the product.

G, I, J

Collectivism

The people in the ad, who are typical users of the product, are depicted as a group whose members spend time together and help each other. It is the product that brings these people together.

C, D, G, H

Competiveness

Distinguishing the product from its counterparts in one characteristic or more than one characteristic (but counting is necessary), and comparing the product with alternative brands.

C, D, G

Excellence

Stressing that the product excels in one or more characteristics (but counting is necessary) without referring to alternative brands.

C, D, G

Courtesy

Politeness and friendship towards the consumer are associated with the product.

A, B, G

Saving

Stressing the low price of the product, mentioning discounts, free bonuses, gifts or special paying arrangements.

B, G

Efficiency

Emphasizing the product’s capacity to accomplish the goal for which it is used.

B, G

Joy

Suggesting that the use of the product makes one happy or causes joy, by showing happy people and contending that they are happy because they use the product.

A, B, G

Individualism

Stressing that the product can help its user to become self reliant or free him of his dependence on others.

C, D, E, F, G, H

Leisure

Showing that using the product leads to relaxation, or depicting scenes of leisure that are clearly the result of using the product.

A, B, G, I

Modernization

Stressing that the product is innovative, based on a new technology.

A, B, C, F, G

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 46

18/07/2012 07:22

Values in Israeli advertising

47

Table 3.1  Value in ads—descriptions and literature sources (cont.)

A. B. C. D. E. F. G. H. I. J.

Value

Description

Source

Charity

Suggesting that helping other people without seeking a reward is an indispensable positive virtue of the product, or showing that helping other people without seeking a reward is a result—clearly desirable—of using the product.

A, J

Patriotism

Suggesting that love for the homeland, loyalty to the state, sacrificing oneself for the country, and so forth, is a positive virtue that is clearly related to the product.

G, J

Popularity

Emphasizing the large number of people who use the product, mentioning that some brand is very heavily consumed (perhaps more heavily than other brands).

A, B, G

Quality

Stressing the overall superb and durable character of the product without referring to any specific virtue.

A, G

Sexuality

Suggesting that using the product is either related to or enhances sexual activity in the broadest sense of the word (from flirting through petting and erotic body contact to full intercourse), or saying that the product enhances its user’s sexual attractiveness.

A, B, F, G

Tradition

Stating that the product enjoys a long impressive history, or suggesting that using the product helps to transmit values and beliefs from generation to generation.

B, C, D, F, G

Pollay (1983) Pollay & Gallagher (1990) Mueller (1987) Mueller (1992) Frith & Toland (1991) Caillat & Mueller (1996) Cheng & Schweitzer (1996) Zhang & Gelb (1996) Wiles, Wiles & Tjernlünd (1996) Belk & Pollay (1985)

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 47

18/07/2012 07:22

48

Advertising and Reality

Its value for any pair of coders and across all the characteristics ranged from 0.86 to 0.94. The value of Perreault and Leigh’s Ir for any value and across all pairs of coders ranged from 0.82 to 0.97. These figures are above the minimal value for reliability in coding of advertisements, which is normally set at 0.8 (Kassaarjian, 1977). The employment of a large number of coders, necessary because of the high number of ads and values, did not result in loss of reliability. In fact, as Fleiss (1971) pointed out, the greater the number of coders (if properly trained and working independently) the greater the reliability, because the results can be more safely generalized to a “pool of coders” (as a population) and the potential for measurement error by any singular coder is smaller.

Results and discussion Table 3.2 presents the frequency of hedonistic, functional, and altruistic values in television advertising in 1995–7 and in 2000–4. The table includes a notation of significant difference between the two periods (based on the Chi-Square test), and—when applicable—an estimate of the effect size for this difference (λ coefficient). The figures point out a remarkable stability over time. Eleven of the seventeen values have not significantly increased or decreased their share throughout the decade in which the monitoring took place. Even in those values that did increase or decrease their frequency, the change accounted for less than 2% of the variance. In both periods, hedonistic values such as joy and functional values like saving, efficiency, and excellence—had the highest frequencies. Altruistic values, e.g. patriotism and collectivism, had only a minor presence, but that presence did not decrease over the years. This stability stands in contrast with what Bar-Magen Rosenberg (2000) found in her analysis of print advertisements from the 1950s and 1990s, perhaps because the major part of the Westernization process that Israeli culture went through had been completed by the 1990s. The economic changes that took place later (e.g. privatization of governmental companies) happened when Western-style functionalism and hedonism had already become the bon-ton. The majority of Israeli advertising presents a mixture of functional and hedonistic values. This picture has notable resemblance to what we see in American advertising (Cheng & Schweitzer, 1996), however, it does not resemble the picture depicted in Chinese advertising, where Cheng and Schweitzer detected a double distorted mirror. In addition to the ordinary

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 48

18/07/2012 07:22

Values in Israeli advertising

49

Table 3.2  The appearance1 of functional, hedonistic and altruistic values in TV advertisements in 1990s and the 2000s 1994–1997 N = 861

2000–2004 N = 2353

Significant difference (Chi-Square test)

λ coefiicient (effect size estimate)

Saving

23.3%

29.4%

P < .005

.010

Efficiency

22.9%

30.7%

P < .001

.014

Competitiveness

12.2%

12.1%

NS

–

Excellence

28.6%

38.0%

P < .001

.018

Comfort

20.0%

19.3%

NS

–

Modemization

11.6%

16.5%

P < .01

.002

Quality

22.6%

23.7%

NS

–

Individualism

 9.2%

 8.7%

NS

–

Beauty

11.7%

10.0%

NS

–

Joy

38.2%

31.9%

P < .01

.012

Leisure

15.0%

11.6%

P < .05

.002

Sexuality

12.5%

10.4%

NS

–

Popularity

 7.9%

 9.6%

NS

–

Collectivism

 8.7%

 9.2%

NS

–

Charity

 2.1%

 2.5%

NS

–

Patriotism

 3.5%

 2.3%

NS

–

Tradition

 5.2%

 2.5%

NS

–

Functional Values

Hedonistic Values

Altruistic Values

Note: Since there was no limitation on the number of values coded per advertisment, the columns do not add up to 100%.

1

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 49

18/07/2012 07:22

50

Advertising and Reality

hedonistic bias, Chinese ads represent only those hedonistic values that do not contradict Chinese tradition. There is no evidence that such a systematic abstention from showing certain hedonistic values characterizes Israeli advertising. This may perhaps express the difference between a developed economy (Israel) and a developing economy (China) and the similarity between two developed economies (Israel and the United States). However, the non-decreasing share over the years of altruistic values does indicate that traces of altruism, and particularly collectivism, remain. In other words, the nature of Israel as a society in transition, which has not been completed yet (Almog, 2004) is noted in local advertising. The mirror, so to speak, is not so distorted. Israeli advertising does not mix hedonism with overall altruism, but it does identify hedonism with collectivism in the form of group effort and mutual aid. Similar signs of a uniquely Israeli combination of hedonism and collectivism were already noted by Rokeach (1973), who, on comparing the value systems of students in Israel, the USA, Canada, and Australia, found that Israelis were more group oriented but not less hedonistic. Oyserman (1993) found that for Israelis individualism and collectivism are not opposite poles of a singular construct. This perception is not overlooked by advertisers, who, to increase the potential appeal of their ads, merge group effort and mutual aid into the ordinary hedonistic-functional framework. The result is a hybrid. Typically, these hybrid ads show a group of people who share a common goal (soldiers on a march, workers in a factory, and so forth). The group enjoys a product (say thirsty soldiers thrilled to drink a delicious soft drink during a tedious march, or hungry workers delighted by the sight of lunch). The people in this group also use the product to accomplish the mutual goal (becoming less thirsty or less hungry, and hence capable of completing the common mission successfully). Further studies in other countries that went through rapid cultural and economic changes (e.g. Eastern Europe) may show whether the hybrid formula is unique to Israel, or whether it is an advertising tactique that crosses over cultures.

References Albers-Miller, N. D., & Gelb, B. D. (1996). Business advertising appeals as a mirror of cultural dimensions: A study of eleven countries. Journal of Advertising, 25(4), 57–70. Almog, O. (2004). Farewell to Srulik: Changing Values among the Israeli Elite [In Hebrew]. Haifa: University of Haifa Press.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 50

18/07/2012 07:22

Values in Israeli advertising

51

Bar-Magen Rosenberg, M. (2000). The reflection of the value change in print advertisements in Israel since the country’s establishment [In Hebrew]. Master’s thesis, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. Belk, R. W., & Pollay, R. W. (1985). Images of ourselves: The good life in twentieth century advertising. Journal of Consumer Research, 11, 887–96. Caillat, Z., & Mueller, B. (1996). Observations: The influence of culture on American and British advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 36, 79–88. Cheng, H., & Schweitzer, J. C. (1996). Cultural values reflected in Chinese and U.S. television commercials. Journal of Advertising Research, 36 (3), 27–45. Fleiss, J. L. (1971). Measuring nominal scale agreement among many raters. Psychological Bulletin, 76(5), 378–82. Friedman, G. (2003). On the way to the wilderness days [In Hebrew]. Otot, 274, 7–9. Frith, K. T., & Toland, D. (1991). A comparison of cultural values in British and American print advertising: A study of magazines. Journalism Quarterly, 68(1–2), 216–23. Gornichovsky, D. (1998). Issues in the history of advertising in Israel [In Hebrew]. Otot, 100, 58–60. Hetsroni, A. (2000). The relationship between values and appeals in Israeli advertising: A smallest space analysis. Journal of Advertising, 29(3), 55–68. —(2012). Israeli advertising: From oriental dilettantism to professional Westernism. In E. C. Alozie (ed.), Advertising in Developing and Emerging Economies (pp. 69–77). Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing. Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences; Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations across Nations (2nd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Holbrook, M. B. (1987). Mirror, mirror, on the wall, what’s unfair in the reflections on advertising?” Journal of Marketing, 51, 95–103. Kassaarjian, H. H. (1977). Content analysis in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 4(1), 8–18. Leiss, William, Kline, Stephen R., & Jhally, Sut (1986), Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products and Images of Well Being. New York: Methuen. Levi, S. (1990). Values and deeds. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 39(4), 379–400. McCracken, G. (1986). Culture and consumption: A theoretical account of the structure and movement of the cultural meaning of consumer goods. Journal of Consumer Research, 13, 71–84. Mueller, B. (1987). Reflections of culture: An analysis of Japanese advertising appeals. Journal of Advertising Research, 27(3), 51–9. —(1992). Standardization vs. specialization: An examination of Westernization in Japanese advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 32(1), 15–24. Oyserman, D. (1993). The lens of personhood: Viewing the self and others in a multicultural society. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(5), 993–1009. Pollay, R. W. (1983). Measuring the cultural values manifest in advertising. In

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 51

18/07/2012 07:22

52

Advertising and Reality

J. H. Leigh and C. R. Martin (eds), Current Issues and Research in Advertising (pp. 71–92). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. —(1986). The distorted mirror: Reflections on the unintended consequences of advertising. Journal of Marketing, 50(2), 18–36. —(1987). On the value of reflections on the values of the distorted mirror. Journal of Marketing, 51(3), 104–9. Pollay, R. W., & Gallagher, K. (1990). Advertising and cultural values: Reflections in the distorted mirror. International Journal of Advertising, 9, 359–72. Rokeach, M. J. (1973). The Nature of Human Values. New York: Free Press. Wiles, C. R., Wiles, J. A., & Tjernlünd, A. (1996). The ideology of advertising: The United States and Sweden. Journal of Advertising Research, 36(3), 57–66. Zhang, Y., & Gelb, B. D. (1996). Matching advertising appeals to culture: The influence of products‘ use conditions. Journal of Advertising, 25(3), 29–46.

Discussion questions 1 To what extent do you feel that the mapping of values in Israeli

advertising (as reported in this chapter) represents the situation in your country? 2 Do you think that advertising is morally (or otherwise) obliged to

carry certain values? Is advertising in this regard only a commercial business, or does it have public duties to fulfill? 3 Do you estimate that historical changes in the representation of

values in advertising that were reviewed in the chapter still continue?

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 52

18/07/2012 07:22

4 Real versus pseudo real in Japanese television advertising compared with US television advertising Michael L. Maynard Temple University, USA

Key words advertising, content analysis, cross-cultural comparison, globalization, Japanese advertising, real and pseudo real, US advertising

T

his chapter addresses real and pseudo real representations in Japanese advertising in comparison with that of the USA. More specifically I ask two questions. First, how common (and in what form) are real and pseudo real spaces depicted in recent primetime Japanese television advertising? Second, how does this compare with real and pseudo real spaces depicted in recent primetime US television advertising? To answer these questions I first review the salient characteristics of Japanese advertising. Then, I conduct a content analysis of television commercials aired in Japan during the primetime hours and compare the findings with those obtained in a similar analysis of US primetime television commercials. The findings are interpreted

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 53

18/07/2012 07:22

54

Advertising and Reality

in light of communicational and cultural similarities and differences between the two cultures. In a more global context, the study in this chapter asks how a local culture (Japan) preserves its identity within the context of multiplicity? In our postmodern world where the realities depicted in the media, perhaps especially in advertising, are more accurately called “pseudo realities,” examination of the advertising in a hyper-postmodern country such as Japan in comparison with the USA is most appropriate. Are television commercials around the world incrementally becoming the same because a worldwide consumer culture is eroding their native cultures? What sort of world is pictured in television commercials? Images in advertising tend to present a narrow view of reality (Richins, 1991), which some even term a distorted mirror of the surroundings (Pollay, 1986). Television commercials depict a metaphorical scheme of representation, capturing and presenting the world of reality as it exists or as it may be idealized. Their objective is to show a world to which the viewer can relate. Actions, events, and scenes of narrative seem plausible and authentic to achieve a sense of verisimilitude through actor, voice, situation, or some combination thereof. The paradox of verisimilitude in television commercials, of course, is that despite the portrayal of a simplified reality, the narrative actually creates only the illusion of it. Viewers are tricked into believing they are being shown a “slice of life.” In the main it can be argued that the success of modern advertising reflects a culture that has itself chosen illusion over reality. Yet even though viewers realize that mass media in general and advertising in particular present the world in a stylized and idealized way, they make sense of what they see (Hirchsman & Thompson, 1997). The study in this chapter extends research on advertising in Japan beyond the familiar analyses of soft sell/hard sell (Inoue, 1996; Lin, 1993; Maynard, 2003; Mueller, 1992, 1987; Ramaprasad & Hasegawa, 1990), celebrity endorsement (Kilburn, 1998; Lin & Salwen, 1995; Money, Shimp, & Sakano, 2006; Prieler et al., 2010) and idiosyncratic zaniness (Johansson, 1994; O’Toole, 1985). This study examines the worldview expressed in Japanese television commercials as revealed in the material setting of the action. Is the setting a depiction of a real world? Or is it a depiction of a pseudo world? To the author’s knowledge, no study has analyzed how reality is portrayed in the settings for television commercials, and thus the introduction of a real world and pseudo world codification contributes to the literature. The study also contributes to the understanding of cross-cultural differences in advertising by comparing the advertising settings in television commercials from the USA and Japan.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 54

18/07/2012 07:22

Real versus pseudo real

55

Japanese advertising To a significant degree, advertising in Japan during the post-war reconstruction years imitated the hard sell style of US advertising (Aoki, 1993). Since the 1970s, however, the “creative turn” image advertising or “feeling commercials” took root and became the trend (Aoki, 1993, p. 6). The 1970 Fuji Xerox campaign was emblematic of this creative trend. The line, in English, was “From mooretsu to beautiful.” Mooretsu means “fierce,” and the line made no sense even to the Japanese (Aoki, 1993). This indigenous movement to make advertising into an art form gradually became the dominant trend within the Japanese advertising community. The legacy of this “creative turn” in Japanese advertising is known broadly throughout the world as having the same characteristics today as when it originated in the 1970s (Nikkei Advertising Research Institute, 1984). The Nikkei Institute offered five prominent characteristics of Japanese advertising: de-emphasis of the product, ambiguity of sponsorship, oblique language of unfamiliar expressions, celebrity endorsement, and foreign models. It is not surprising that outsiders would note and possibly magnify these characteristics of Japanese advertising. O’Toole (1985, p. 58), for instance, having visited Japan, described as “inscrutable” a commercial for Shiseido foundation makeup that depicted a man applying the white face powder of ancient times to a passive girl. O’Toole also found obscure a commercial for Suntory beer in which animated penguins cavorted. O’Toole’s cross-cultural commentary derives from his (and most of the world’s) perspective which assumes that the “creative turn” is most representative of Japanese advertising. Accordingly, Japanese advertising would seem to skew toward a “soft sell”: indirect, non-linear, ambiguous, emotionally involving, perhaps obscure, verbally minimalist, and visually maximalist (Aoki, 1993). Echoing this characteristic of an artistic preference and quoting Fields, Rouse (1984) writes “Japanese TV commercials tend to be more artsy” (p. E2). Indeed, as if confirming the proposition that Japan since the postwar years has experienced a more artful turn, Mueller (1992) states that “the Western hard sell appeal, proposed to be a growing trend, makes only a rare appearance in Japanese advertising” and suggests that “in fact Japanese advertising may be becoming increasingly ‘Japanese’” (p. 22). By this Mueller (1992, 1987) as well as others (Inoue, 1996; Johansson, 1994; Lin, 1993; Maynard, 2003; Ramaprasad & Hasegawa, 1990) generally describe Japanese advertising as taking a soft sell approach. Adding to this characteristic, others have found a tendency of Japanese advertising to present information indirectly (Fields,

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 55

18/07/2012 07:22

56

Advertising and Reality

1984; McLaine, 1982; O’Toole, 1985). Inoue (1996) describes the tendency toward indirectness as “a deep-seated cultural preference” (p. 26). Lin (1993) reports that in television “Japanese advertisements reveal an indulgence with sensitive crafting of product image and appearance slated within a subtle frame of reference” (p. 44). Hong, Muderrisoglu, and Zinkhan (1987) find that Japanese advertising is more emotional than US advertising. Uwagawa (1991) extends the notion of the importance of emotion in Japanese advertising in his discussion of “empathy.” He stresses the visual and musical components of a television commercial such as beautiful flowers and a sweet song that cause viewers to share a sensual feeling. Nakanishi (1996) posits that for the Japanese “the purpose of the commercial is to link a positive affect or emotion with the product by emphasizing the sensory and aesthetic aspects of the setting or atmosphere” (p. 8). Related to this description of the aesthetics characteristic of Japanese advertising, with respect to the magazine Katei Gahoo, Moeran (1995) notes that the image offered is a sort of “dream world,” where in the depiction of nature “every bamboo grove, mountain plateau, or sea shore shown in the magazine’s pages is devoid of people” (p. 137). “‘Dream’ is said to be the most frequently used word in Japanese advertising—especially in ads dedicated to women” (White, 1995, p. 265). Johansson (1994) notes that Westerners are frequently struck by Japan’s “fantasy” oriented approach to advertising. While acknowledging occurrences of logic-based television commercials in Japan, Melville (1999) notes that the Japanese respond well to “mood” and that “it is better to seduce them through imagery” (p. 169). Nakanishi (1996), also, in his study of Japanese television commercials notes “beautiful pictures/scenes” and “empathy” as positive image components (p. 18). It would be an unfair exaggeration to claim that all Japanese advertising is and always may be characterized by a moody, soft sell approach (Maynard, 1997, 1994; Moeran, 1996). Barrager (1993a), for example, describes NEC and Compaq “squared off in comparative ads in yet another example of a trend toward comparative advertising in what amounts to an about-face in the country where direct confrontation is taboo” (p. 10). Barrager (1993b) quotes an advertising executive from Dentsu who says: “TV commercials were image-oriented … but now we’re making TV commercials that are logical and realistic, based on everyday, believable things” (p. 13). Despite these occasional references to an increase in the “hard sell” approach, however, Japanese television commercial advertising in particular seems to be more accurately characterized as following the cultural preference for what Hall and Hall (1987) identified as a “high context” style of communication. With words given minimal importance, the environment

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 56

18/07/2012 07:22

Real versus pseudo real

57

or the setting strongly underscores the message to be communicated. What gets through to the viewer is not so much the dialogue of the actors in a television commercial, but the context in which they are placed (Maynard, 1996). This suggests that the background, the setting, and the scene in a Japanese television commercial together play a predominant role in framing the message. Might then the Japanese consumer aesthetic for an idealized dream world contribute toward advertisements “framed” in an unattainable, unreal world?

Research questions Given the above, and returning to the key question the study in this chapter seeks to answer, it seems that the world as it is depicted in primetime Japanese television advertising would be altered considerably from a realistic representation; it would tend to favor a pseudo real world. Consequently the following hypothesis is offered. H1: A pseudo world will be depicted more frequently than a real world in primetime Japanese television advertising. To put this study in a broader context it is useful to examine data from another culture. Thus, this study seeks to answer the question of whether the ratio of real world depictions to non-real world depictions in the television advertisements found in Japan is significant. Put in question form: How will the results in the Japanese sample contrast to a comparable sample of advertisements shown on US television? The literature addressing advertising approaches in the USA in comparison with those in Japan (Belk & Pollay, 1985; Hong, Muderrisoglu, & Zinkhan, 1987; Koga & Pearson, 1992; Lin, 1993; Miracle, Taylor, & Chang, 1992; Mueller, 1992, 1987; Okazaki, Mueller, & Taylor, 2010; Ramaprasad & Hasegawa, 1990) generally characterizes US advertising as being more direct, more logical, more forthright in benefit appeal, placing more emphasis on the product, and following a more “hard sell” approach. Notwithstanding the many examples of notably creative “soft sell” commercials produced for the US public such as the emotionally laden narratives for Hallmark Cards and the image campaigns created for fashion and cosmetic products, by and large, the tendency for commercial messages in the USA to be more straightforward than those in Japanese advertising seems to make sense. Although a pseudo world of reality certainly plays often in US commercials, portrayals of a more realistic world would seem the norm. Accordingly, a second hypothesis is as follows:

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 57

18/07/2012 07:22

58

Advertising and Reality

H2: A real world will be depicted more frequently than a pseudo world in primetime American television advertising compared to similar Japanese advertising.

Method This study uses content analysis to examine Japanese television commercials in terms of pseudo world versus real world situations. Four popular 2008–10 primetime general entertainment weekly dramas were selected on the basis of consistently high ratings: Natsu no Koi wa Nijiiro ni Kagayaku (Summer Love is like a Shimmering Rainbow), Unubore Keiji (Out of Control Detective), Kami no Shizuku (A Drop of God), Ryuusei no Kizuna (Bonds of the Shooting Stars). A total of 40 episodes broadcast between July 2008 and September 2010 were examined. For comparison of real versus pseudo real situations in the Japanese sample to those of US television commercials (Research Hypothesis II), an equal number of advertisements (364) shown in primetime programming in the USA was content analyzed. The design called for viewing as close to equivalent as possible popular programs aired between 8 and 11  p.m. on US commercial television. The following convenience sample of primetime network and cable programming was thought to be close enough in time to the 2008–10 airing of the Japanese programming so as to control for history. CSI, glee, Grey’s Anatomy, Justified, Law & Order LA, Private Practice, Sex and the City, and The Closer, and the movies Jumper and The Brave One, all general entertainment dramas, were selected on the basis of likely high viewership.

Procedure The researcher viewed DVD sets of the four Japanese dramas that included all the commercials aired along with the episodes. After viewing the commercial pods, the researcher re-ran them marking them into real world or pseudo real world categories. These two dichotomous categories were then subdivided and coded according to how they “presented” the world being advertised. Advertisements depicting the real world were coded as falling into one of four real world settings: home, urban, rural, or commercial. Advertisements presenting a pseudo world were coded as falling into one of four non-real settings: empty space, artistic prop, cartoon, or graphics. Commercials were

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 58

18/07/2012 07:22

Real versus pseudo real

59

identified and classified based on the predominant scene through the length of the spot. A second coder, a Japanese national who speaks fluent English, assisted in analyzing and coding the commercials. The first task was determining the categories. A part of the sample was first examined together. Each then coded an episode from the drama series independently so as to determine the reliability of the decision rules. Discrepancies were resolved through discussion and through this approach a refined coding sheet was designed. Cohen’s K coefficient was calculated using SAS to determine the degree to which intercoder agreement was greater than that expected by chance. Intercoder agreement was .924 and significant at the p < .0001 level. The complete number of commercials aired during the full run of the four hour-long Japanese dramas totaled 791. Discounting repeated airings of the same commercial yielded 364 unduplicated commercials that qualified for analysis. The same procedure was followed for the US sample, using the same two coders. A total of 18 hours of the aforementioned US television programs broadcast between January and February 2010 were examined to match the Japanese sample of 364 unduplicated advertisements.

Coding: Real world Home Commercials coded as “home” are set in the living room, kitchen, bedroom, or other part of a traditional home or apartment. An example is a Febreze commercial where a male teenager’s bedroom becomes the focal point for the brand’s efficacy.

Urban This real world category is broadly the opposite of “home.” It includes shots on the street, in the park, downtown city sidewalks, suburban roads and walkways, plus vignette format commercials where the action cuts to a series of three or more people addressing the theme of the spot. A docomo spoof detective spot qualifying as “urban” shows the detective at a crime scene, standing on the sidewalk, and using his docomo cell phone.

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 59

18/07/2012 07:22

60

Advertising and Reality

Rural Outdoor scenery, bodies of water, fields, forests, hills—these are some of the unspecified backgrounds for commercials coded as rural. A spot for all-natural bread places the spokeswoman in an outdoor camp.

Commercial This category includes scenes of business environments such as car showrooms, beauty salons, department stores, grocery stores, noodles shops, airports, and such. An advertisement for Kirin beer featuring Ichiro (Seattle Mariners outfielder) in a bar qualifies.

Coding: Pseudo real world Empty space Commercials showing nowhere, essentially a limbo background, are coded “empty space.” This is where no identifiable location of any sort is apparent. An example is a Toyota commercial opening on a blank screen depicting a red box tumbling toward us side over side over side (thump, thump, thump) until it materializes into the new Toyota.

Artistic prop These commercials may be called Empty Space Plus. That plus is an artistic addition to the empty stage creating an aesthetic touch. A tea commercial for a Coca-Cola product, for example, features several models in traditional yukata dress with what faintly appear to be Roman columns in the background. In this setting the actors are raising their cups in salutation to the product. The hint of sheets waving in the wind adds further to an unreal (a surreal like) environment.

Cartoon This category includes commercials where the story is played out in the unreal realm of cartoons. A commercial for a brand of LOTTE cookies has as

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 60

18/07/2012 07:22

Real versus pseudo real

61

its spokes critter a cartoon koala bear. The cute, cartoonish bear is presented in an unspecified environment.

Graphics This category includes any type of graphic representation. An example is the Coca-Cola ZERO spot that borrows from the James Bond movie series. Playing off the “0” in 007, the commercial employs an illustrative artistic style similar to what we find in graphic novels. The black-and-white drawn, international spy hero and his female romantic interest face off in an undefined space, where with dynamic music and quick cuts, a sports car suddenly races toward us coming to a stop when magically it spins into a can of Coke Zero.

Results According to the first hypothesis, a pseudo world was expected to appear more frequently than a real world in primetime Japanese television advertising. As the results in Table 4.1 indicate, more commercials in the Japanese sample were situated in real world settings, 56.3% (N = 205) than in pseudo world settings, 43.7% (N = 159). Thus H1 was not supported. The second hypothesis stated that a real world would be depicted more frequently than a pseudo world in primetime US television advertising compared to Japanese commercials. As shown in Table 4.1, the vast majority of commercials in the US sample (71.2%) did, in fact, portray a real world setting. Chi square analysis showed that the difference was significant (χ² = 17.3, p .10 φ = .06} or contact {χ2(1) = 0.1, p >.10; φ = .01}. Vibe had a significantly higher percentage of its advertisements displaying sexual clothing than did Rolling Stone. Ebony and Glamour were compared in the fashion genre. According to the data, overall there was more sexuality coded in Glamour than Ebony, but not in all categories. The amount of sexual clothing in Ebony was 14% compared to Glamour’s 26%. Sexual body positioning coded in the Ebony magazines was 4% compared to 9% in Glamour. Sexual contact in Ebony was 8% and 8% in Glamour. The results of the chi-square analyses revealed significant differences for clothing {χ2(1) = 8.2, p < .005; φ = .11} and body positioning {χ2(1) = 3.9, p < .05; φ = .08}, but not contact {χ2(1) = 1.8, p >.10; φ = .05}. Glamour’s advertisements had significantly more sexual clothing and body positioning. In the category of entertainment news, the amount of sexual clothing in the advertisements in Jet was 6% compared to 15% in People. Sexual body positioning was 12% in Jet compared to 8 people in People. Sexual contact in Jet was 8% compared to 3% in People. Chi-square results indicate significant difference by race of target audience among this genre for clothing {χ2(1) = 3.3, p = .05; φ = .10}, but not for positioning {χ2(1) = 1.3, p >.10; φ = .07}, or contact {χ2(1) = 1.1, p >.10; φ = .06}. When breaking the data down by genre and then looking at the target audience by race, there does appear to be some differences in the amount

9781441170002_txt_print.indd 217

18/07/2012 07:22

218

Advertising and Reality

of sexual imagery in advertisements, however the pattern is inconsistent. For those outlets with a more female audience (fashion and entertainment news), the Caucasian magazines showed more imagery of sexualized clothing in the advertisements. In the case of fashion, sexual positioning was more common as well. For the more male-oriented magazines, the increase in sexuality was in the African American music magazine Vibe, which had more sexual clothing. In advertisements with sexual clothing, the model was three times more likely to be female than male. So in all cases, the models were more likely to be female regardless of whether the audience was male or female. Finally, we asked whether the amount of sexual content varied by magazine genre regardless of race of target audience. The percentage sexual clothing was 13% in the music genre, 17% in the fashion/lifestyle genre, and 11% in the entertainment news genre. Using chi-square to test for differences, we found the difference to be significant between the three genres {χ2(2) = 6.0, p < .05; φ = .07} with fashion having the greatest proportion of its images containing sexual clothing, followed by music, then entertainment. Analyses revealed that the differences between fashion and entertainment news were significant while music was not significantly different from either fashion or entertainment news. In terms of raw percentages, frequency of sexual body positioning was 14% in the music genre, 6% for the fashion/lifestyle genre, and 9% in the entertainment news genre. Chi-square results indicated that the differences between genres in the area of sexual positioning was significant {χ2(2) = 22.3, p