ABSTRACT
Most of this book analyzes the narrative power of style-its ability to signify, heighten, or occasionally undercut stories in television. But vast expanses of broadcast time in the United States are less concerned with storytelling than with product selling. Commercials might, and ofien do, rely on narrative to do that selling, but more ofien than not they employ other rhetorical strategies. Chief among these strategies are uses of television style to convince us to purchase products and services. But not all television advertising seeks to persuade us through verbal repetition and sledgehammer exhortations to buy. Many advertisers understand what Paul Messaris calls the “value of indirectness.”1 They use evocative imagery, enticing audio, and surprising editing to persuade viewers without attacking or numbing their sensibilities. And yet, commercials all still seek to persuade us in some fashion. Throughout this book, I have argued that style results from a mix of economics, aesthetics, technology, and standardized crafi practices. While this is true for commercials as well, they are also the television texts that most baldly serve an economic function-to impel the consumer to take purchasing action. This chapter views commercials as texts that have developed particular techniques of persuasion in order to serve the economic needs of the industry. We know that ads must sell us products in order to survive, but what the television analyst needs to understand is how that selling is accomplished. Most previous work on commercials focuses less on style and more on the ideologically determined meanings signifted by commercials.2 And since these meanings and the style that signiftes them are so intertwined, it is worth outlining the socially deftned meanings, values, and illusions-the polysemythat are commonly employed in the service of selling products before analyzing their stylistic manifestation. Elsewhere, I group these meanings into broad categories: luxury, leisure, and conspicuous consumption; individualism; the natural; folk culture and tradition; novelty and progress; sexuality and romance; alleviation of pain, fear/anxiety, and guilt; and utopia and escape from dystopia.3 Bearing these meanings in mind, I have identifted eight stylistic techniques used to convince us that certain products contain them:
1. Metaphor 2. Utopian style 3. Product differentiation and superiority
4. Repetition and redundancy 5. Extraordinary and excessive style 6. Graphics and animation 7. Violating reality through visual effects 8. Reexivity and intertextuality
Perhaps the most common way that advertisers assert the desirability of their products is to associate them with activities, objects, or people that are themselves desirable. Essentially, such association constructs a metaphor between the product and that desirable activity, object, or person. These metaphors ofien link products with unexpected or incongruous things or activities. One famous instance of metaphoric sex is a 1960s commercial for Noxzema shaving cream (available on TVStyleBook.com). In tight close-up, Gunilla Knutson, a former Miss Sweden, suggestively runs her lips across a string of pearls (Figure 3.1). With her distinctly Swedish accent, she breathlessly intones, “Men, nothing takes it off like Noxzema Medicated Shave.” A brass band then begins to blare “The Stripper,” which accompanies close-ups of a man shaving his face (Figure 3.2). “Take it off,” Knutson commands, “Take it all off.” Noxzema implies here that shaving is metaphorically equivalent to stripping. The metaphor in this case is created through the commercial’s sound mix (the woman’s dialogue and the music). By bringing together sound and image that are normally not connected, Noxzema creates a metaphoric meaning. That is, the commercial’s meaning is not a literal one: “The man is stripping.” But rather it is a metaphorical one: “Shaving is like stripping in that something is removed in both cases.” It sounds bland when summarized so simply, but to suggest that removing shaving cream is similar to removing clothing fastens a sexually provocative connotation to a normally quotidian activity. Another method for generating metaphors is through a sequence of images, much as advocated by Soviet montage theory in the 1920s. By bringing two or more images together in sequence, a ftlm-maker can imply that
Figure 3.1 Noxzema Medicated Shave relies on metaphoric sex for its impact.
