According to Judith Williamson, whose primary purpose is not to measure advertisement influences but is to analyse what can be seen in them. She says that ‘advertisements are one of the most important cultural factors moulding and reflecting our life today, with an apparently autonomous existence and immense influence’. This statement agrees with the one by Bullmore. Williamson proceeds to talk about how ‘ideology mediates what we know, how we feel and the way we live’. She describes the function of advertising which in definition she believes is, ‘to sell things to us’, and that they must take into account the natural qualities and features of the products that they are trying to sell and the way in which these properties can be made to mean something to us. It is important to understand her political status in order to analyse her theories which are that of a Marxist-feminist framework. Mason Griff gives an interesting opinion regarding advertising which I feel indirectly agrees with Bullmore and Williamson. He says; ‘advertising’s goal is the deliberate breaking down of the rational process both directly through persuasion and indirectly through the use of techniques to circumvent the conscious rational process’. Which I interpret advertising as communicating through persuasion and methods which avoid logical awareness. This supports the idea that advertising changes the way people think however unconsciously. Looking at Paul Jobling and David Crowley’s reproduction and representation, they suggest that ‘the most successful type of mythology in advertising is concerned with the achievement of pleasure, which can be signified as having the potential to gratify human senses and desires and increase pleasures’. All associating advertising as affecting the way people feel. A practice of looking is written by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright which implies that ‘we live in a culture that is increasingly permeated by visual images with a variety of purposes and intended effects. These images can produce a wide array of emotions and responses, with these images we create and encounter the power to persuade or mystify’. Thus agreeing that the advertising industry sets out to change people’s ways of thinking. They proceed to talk about images associated with ideologies. They highlight the use of propaganda as a ‘crude process of using false representations to lure people into holding beliefs that may compromise their own interests.’ It can be argued that ideology is more of a persuasive process in which we all interact with whether we are aware or not. They tend to ‘inform our lives in subtle and barely noticeable forms’. Referring to advertising and consumer culture through which assertions about feelings are both ‘constructed and responded to’. Sturken and Cartwright consider how we negotiate the meanings of images and believe images affect us as viewers and consumers by being reliant on the cultural connotations and the social and political contexts in which they are viewed. The meanings do not lie in the image alone but are adopted when they are consumed. They talk about an advert campaign produced by United Colors of Benetton of a black woman holding a white child. The image can be understood on the basis of skin colour connoting that the woman is not in actual fact the child’s biological mother. It can be perceived as an image promoting racial harmony, however it was frowned upon in America as to them it connoted slavery. ‘Thus the intended meaning as an icon of an idealised interracial mother-child relationship is not easily conveyed in a context where the image’s meanings are over determined by historical factors’. There is also a subtle suggestion regarding the Benetton campaigns that if you buy their products, you are in fact helping the third world and therefore Benetton is viewed as superior by the way it changes how people think. In John Berger’s Ways of seeing he depicts that ‘publicity persuades us of a transformation by showing us people who have been transformed, and as a result are enviable’. The way he talks about transformation is evident that he is referring to changing the way we feel. He describes the publicity of an image in another way; ‘the image steals her love for herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product’. So I would argue that I agree with Bullmore’s statement to a certain extent, however I do believe advertising does change the way we feel, but it does that to sell things. This is what I believe Berger is saying. He continues to describe how ‘publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future. It cannot itself supply the standards of its own claims’; therefore it sells things by changing the way the viewer feels. Berger believes the ‘purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with himself. It suggests that if he buys what is offering, his life will become better and offers him a better alternative.’ So through the use of advertising, he believes you can sell things by offering a better feeling.
Here are two images; both are advertisements of cigarettes; however they differ in the extreme sense.
The first advert is from a campaign by ‘Camel’ promoting a glamorous image of smoking in the 1970’s and the second is an ad campaign by the ‘NHS’ trying to demote smoking. I am going to analyse each image in detail and see how they compare and contrast. The first advert for camel began in 1913 and then two years later they promoted that their products ‘have no unpleasant cigaretty after-taste’. In the twenty’s Camel began a new campaign to try and make smoking look healthy, and then a decade later, they utilise photographs of people instead of drawings which was seen to make them more realistic and believable. There was a major emphasis around the female smoking market, so they began to include women in the promotions. By 1933 Camel started to use athletes in their adverts to encourage a healthy image. Another campaign claims that the cigarettes are ‘slow burning’ which is described as reducing nicotine levels. The war played a large part in a campaign for Camel and as soon as it ended they ran ads saying that most doctors smoke Camel cigarettes, which portrayed the idea that if a doctor smokes then it must be ok for us to. Regarding the Camel campaign image I have chosen to focus on they have introduced a ‘tough guy’ image by bringing in their own ‘Camel Man’ and in every ad, there is a different woman staring at him. This conveys to the viewer an ideology that if you smoke, you are cool enough to grab the women. This has been created through a ‘macho’, ‘masculinised’ and ‘heroic’ figure with a cigarette in his hand a toned body and totally appealing to the ladies. According to Jobling and Crowley; cigarette advertising is one of the world’s largest economic categories. They analyse a gender stereotype attached to cigarettes when ‘Marlboro, the world leader in cigarette sales, changed it’s identity during the fifty’s from being a woman’s brand to a man’s by association with various masculine figure-heads including the Marlboro cowboy’.
In contrast to this ad campaign I have selected the NHS one as a complete contrasting image. It’s a health campaign which showed smokers being snatched in the cheek by fish hooks. It is aiming at highlighting the dangers of being ‘hooked’ on cigarettes. The image shows an excruciating pain and how severe it is to un-hook yourself, therefore connoting how hard it is to stop smoking. I think the right balance is created between raising awareness of the dangers attached to smoking and it’s highly addictive nature. This caused uproar within society, drawing in a lot of complaints, mainly for frightening children. In contrast to the Camel advert, this one is highlighting the lethal and often fatal control that cigarettes have over you. Personally the more graphic the image is, the more successful the campaign is, and regarding Bullmore’s statement, these adverts are obviously aimed at changing the way people think, however not promoting for more to be bought. In contrast, Camel is using advertising by changing how people feel towards their brand, in an attempt to sell the product.
After studying various theories around advertising, it would be fair to conclude that advertising changes the way people think and or feel, however it does this in order to sell the product.
Bibliography
Poulter, S. (2007) ‘Anti-smoking advert 'is too frightening'’ [internet], London, Daily Mail 24 hours a day, Available from: [www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/...]. [10/3/2008]
GMT. (2007) ‘Hooked smoking ads 'broke rules'’ [internet], London, BBC News 24, Available from: [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6658335.stm ]. [10/3/2008]
Unknown author (2005) ‘Camel Cigarettes Advertising Methodologies Through The 20th Century’ [internet], Unknown place of and publication, Available from: [http://indymotorspeedway.com/cigs/1960s.html ] [10/3/2008]
Williamson, J. (1995) Decoding Advertisements, London, Marion Boyers.
Sturken, M. and Cartwright, L. (2001) Practices of looking an introduction to visual culture, New York, Oxford University Press Inc.
Jobling, P, and Crowley, D. (1996) Graphic design, Reproduction and representation since 1800, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Berger, J. (1977) Ways of seeing, London, British Broadcasting Corporation.
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