Correction: I love well made television commercials. Every time I see Ronnie Lamarque standing in front of a computer generated image of St. Louis Cathedral singing a terrible rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In" I die a bit on the inside.
For those of you who've never witnessed the horror, here is the textbook definition of a bad commerical:
Now what should a good commercial do? It should make some sort of appeal to someone so they want to use the product being advertised. That's hard enough to do but television commercials as a visual medium. The average television commercial is thirty seconds long. Film has 24 frames per second (FPS) (Digital video runs at 30 FPS) or images. The average commercial throws 720 individual images (900 on video) at its viewer. During a five minute commercial break, viewers are exposed to 216,000 individual images (359,100 images with digital video). Thinking of that many copies of Ronnie Lamarque can possibly inspire murderous rage (just ask his wife who put out a hit on him).
How can a commercial break though all the white noise that is being thrown at audiences. Almost fifty years of TV watching have pretty much desensitize most people to commercials as background noise. Do advertisers employ digital rhetoric? Perhaps we need shocking images during commercials? Consider this ad for Gap clothing stores by David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button):
If you're already wondering: Gap never ended up using this commercial for very obvious reasons. It is perhaps too jarring, too shocking. The every day of consumer shopping changed in a moment of very clear violence. The music ("The Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt) is similarly violent. Gap wanted to show that their stories were going to have a radical make over, but you really shouldn't advertise wanton destruction with 1. a shopping experience and 2. clean clothes (look at all that dust!).
From a classical rhetoric perspective, it does not do anything rhetorically either. It is not the Visa commercial which Bowers showed us in class. It doesn't ask the audience to achieve for anything greater (and think of all the ways that Visa can help you get there). It does not try to show that shopping at the Gap is better than other stores (Actually maybe I want to shop at the Banana Republic across the street?) nor how shopping at Gap will improve my life. It make me think that director Fincher had ulterior motives (Fight Club is a $60 million anti-consumerist film produced and released by Rupert Murdoch's Fox).
In a later post, I'll give an example of a commercial where the rhetoric works both argumentatively and visually. It also happens to sell clothing like the Gap ad.
But doesn't it use classic rhetoric in a visual manner?
ReplyDeleteThis commercial is very clearly saying something to us: that GAP clothing, while at first perfectly acceptable, calm, etc (i.e. the first scene, in which everybody is shopping peacefully) is about to undergo a drastic change--and not only is this change radical, but it also carries the power to instill passionate, bestial rage towards the old, to the point of upsetting societal norm and flinging oneself as a weapon into a perfectly innocent mannequin.
This commercial, rhetorically, says a lot. It says that GAP clothes have the power to make people just about willing to sacrifice their lives in disgust for the old and hope for the new. It says that GAP clothes, while often advertised in the complacent way of life fittingly reminiscent of upper-middle-class suburbia, reach something deeper in the human heart--something so deep that a change in their goods is strong enough to incite rage, destruction, and small-scale apocalypse.
It may not be said in words, but it's a pretty good argument.
I'm almost positive this commercial would've made any tv watcher take a second glance-especially because of the violence.
ReplyDeleteThere have been countless studies done to analyze our youth and why they are so violent and often blame it on tv. Some think it's pander theory, or giving the people what they want, and they want to see violence.
Others think it's mirror theory in that television reflects how the world really is.
Now, maybe, usual GAP buyers and employees wouldn't be this violent, but, from these studies done and different schools of thought on the matter, violence is most definitely a part of our culture and is most definitely on our minds.
For some, these are the mass murderers and killers who are locked in a maximum security prison for outwardly expressing their violence on their victims. But for the others, they are the suburban housewife, the college student, or the faithful employee who every once in a while get the sudden urge to scream, fight, punch and destroy.
Because of this either outward or inward expression of violence in our culture today, I think this commercial most definitely uses digital rhetoric to reach the inner beast in all of us to revolt for change.
Even if it is just clothes.