"You Are a Strong Man and You Must Continue" (c) Arabic proverb

This blog has been quite lonely in the web for a while, but I am determined to pay closest attention to it (starting Monday, of course). Turned out blogging while in grad school takes some self-discipline (or class credit. Or both). But certainly the all-mighty advertising world has given life to some cool and interesting stuff since I last updated things here. Soon to come, in the meantime please don't ignore my Twitter for life-inspiring and very brief wisdoms.

And remember you are not a tree!

Subliminal Advertising

"Subliminal perception occurs whenever stimuli presented below the threshold or limen for awareness are found to influence thoughts, feelings, or actions. The term subliminal perception was originally used to describe situations in which weak stimuli were perceived without awareness. In recent years, the term has been applied more generally to describe any situation in which unnoticed stimuli are perceived" (Kazdin (Ed.), 2010.)


The concept of subliminal persuasion is  extremely relevant now with the emerging omnipresence of advertising in all possible aspects of our lives because it supposes that every day we are susceptible to the marketers' influence without even realizing that. 


The reseachers continue to argue whether subliminal advertising works. 
Here is a video by Derren Brown who is a 'psychological illusionist' as called by the press. He conducts an experiment making two designers create an ad for an unknown topic with no preparation for 30 minutes. Before that on their taxi trip to the place he makes sure they subliminally see certain images that they will later incorporate into their advertising artwork during the experiment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg 

(this link cannot be embedded due to author's restrictions, please click)

Some other methods of subliminal persuasion may include the following:
1.  Smell. In Disney world they use vanilla to warm up the pre-made cookies that have actually been baked somewhere else in order to attract the customers who are tempted by the smell.
2. Sound. You might not be realizing how lyrics of the popular song actually predetermine your choice of brands or certain attitudes. Also (though it is arguable) there is a common belief that some stores uses sounds at unrecognizable for a human ear levels to prevent shoplifting (Subliminal Persuasion, n.d.). 

Backmasking is another subliminal sound technique, and its proponents argue that  argue "the effects of listening to backward messages are manifested in an unconscious manner on the listeners' subsequent behavior" (Vokey and Don Read, 1985).

3. Sight. Many images contain other images that you might not recognize at the first sight, but you can see them if you look more closely. Usually they are differently placed, upside down, or just subtle/commonplace, so a human eye doesn't see them immediately. Some researchers (Key, 1976) argue that when advertisers embed word sex into the copy, it increases recognition. 

This video is showing examples of subliminal messages in modern ads, and it is really scary to think embedded images, symbols and messages can autonomically have effect on us.

Though further research hasn't proved that statement true. Actually, Vokey and Don Read (1985) after a series of experiments with the word sex embedded into the commercial space does not increase brand recall. Their study also proved that there is no way to force people to actually "hear" anything in backward speech (Vokey and Don Read, 1985). But it still a question of further research to find out whether any other types of subliminal work really influence people's behavior.


REFERENCES
Kazdin, A.E. (Ed.). (2000). Encyclopedia of Psychology (Vol. 7). New York: Oxford University Press.
Key, B. W. (1976). Media sexploitation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Goodman, M. (n.d.) Subliminal Persuasion In Mass media and society. Retrieved form http://130.18.140.19/mmsoc/subliminal/
Vokey, R.J., & Don Read, J. Subliminal messages: Between the devil and the media. Psychology in Action, November 1985, 1231-1239.

The Power Of Copy

To begin with, languages have always been my passion, and I was enchanted by the way words can transform and perplex the meaning. There is no way I want to discriminate the visuals here, but the way the message is designed determines how it will be processed. Bang! Universal truth. But still unarguable.

As Jeff Gothelf, an interaction designer points out in his blog, Robert Cialdini in his book Influence argues that the secret weapon of a copywriter is a message structure and it is made up of two things - sequence and word choice. And that slightly mediating one of these two components can affect the power of persuasion significantly.

And here is the case study that exemplifies this simple idea. TheLadders.com is a website for jobsearch. Jeff Gothelf who is one of the employes there has hold an experiment where he only changed the wording of literally several words on the website, but that helped increase membership dramatically!

So here is the story:

Our current labeling for these membership levels simply reads "Basic (free) membership" and "Premium Membership." There are price points listed to illustrate that the premium membership costs money but that's about it.

To put the power of consistency to work here, the only thing I changed on the page were the membership type labels. They were changed to "I'm just looking around" for the free membership and "I'm serious about my job search" for the premium membership. That's it. No other changes to any part of the page. The thinking was that if someone had declared themselves "job hunting" then asking them whether they were truly serious about that declaration would lead to more sign-ups.

The results were interesting and very encouraging. Just by changing the words we saw a DROP in free membership sign-ups of nearly 16% but we saw an increase of paid sign-ups of nearly 30%. All we did was change the words!

And that makes me think of the idea of universal truths again. Jeff used the concept of consistency to appeal to the customers, which suggests that if you declared something important, you are more likely to follow your path. But that concept simply didn't work when the message was different. Psychological trick, you'll say. The power of words, I'll argue. Language has long been embodying our norms, values, traditions, hopes and fears, which makes it an extremely influensive tool.

Copywriters are magicians.

To find out what other ways if spelling a cast on the consumers I asked Liyun Huang, a Copywriter from DDB Shanghai, China (with previous experience as a Junior Copywriter in McCann Erickson Shanghai, China) to answer several questions about persuasive power of copy.

Do you agree that cultural predispositions (language, traditions, myths) affect copywriting?

Strongly agree -  for example, the use of humor in copywriting is widely accepted in US for lots of product categories, however, in China, sometimes it's considered inappropriate - or at least not so common - for some products. Chinese consumers are much more sensitive to using humor, and sometimes could easily be offended.

Do you rely on human psychology when working on a copy? Can you think of any techniques you use to make the audience more susceptible to the ad?

Yes. I will consider the target audience's motives, personality types etc, and carefully choose the wording and tone. Can't think of any specific techniques for now...

What in your opinion can be more effective in terms of persuasion: type; message length; the sequence of words; the word choice itself; using metaphors, oxymorons etc; or the actual layout?

The word choice and metaphors. The same message can be communicated in many ways, and I will always experiment with different words and rhetoric. The key point is to find a new way of saying something common, whether using new combination of words or a metaphor that is so relevant but no one has used before.

What are your three things to avoid when writing a succesful copy?

Big but pointless words.

Beautifully written copy that forgets its purpose is to get the key message across to consumers.

Client tone.

If you were to give one piece of advice to a young copywriter who is just starting his way, what would you say?

The first advice is to always keep in mind a question when you have an creative idea or finish writing a copy, "If I was the consumer/audience, would I like this idea/copy?"

REFERENCES
Jeff Gothelf (April 09, 2010) The secret weapon of UX: Copywriting, In Perception is the experience. Retrieved from  http://www.jeffgothelf.com/blog/the-secret-weapon-of-ux-copywriting/ 
Cialdini, R.B. (1998) Influence: The psychology of persuasion. New York: Collins. 

Yes, Your Highness!

Speaking about the perception of advertising we are most likely to think of the consumers and how they react to the message. In the meantime, one significant thing is often left out of scope – the client.

Before the message gets from its creative cradle right into the hands of the final recipient – the consumer, it goes through the greatest (or maybe third greatest after highly self-deprecating creatives and highly creatives-deprecative account planners) censcorship – the client’s judgement. 

And this is definitely not the way your clients usually look at the advertising campaign.

We as educated professionals are used to treat our clients in the same way, however objective professional critique is not always what we get.

Clients are only humans, indeed. Means no matter how aware they are of what drives the sales, personal opinions, biases and predispositions still matter.

During my almost a year of working as a Media Planner Assistant in Vizeum (Aegis Group Plc.), Moscow-based advertising agency, I had to encounter with different clients and had a chance to observe how differently treat their agencies and spend their advertising budgets. I am going to share the most remarkable thoughts with you.

1. As I said, don’t think your client is a machine. Just as everyone else he struggles through morning traffic listening to repetitious commercials in his car, gets annoyed by the garish billboards, and zaps through TV commercials. One of our major accounts would redistribute a quarterly media budget every other week based upon whether he saw or didn’t see his advertisement during the morning news. Whether his 13-year old daughter liked the commercial was also a crucial factor. Should it be mentioned that the product had nothing to do with teenager girls?

2. Clients lack objectivity because they are attached to their product. Indeed, it is hard to make something you despise to become your life-work. And if you are forced to think about electric kettles for 40 hours per week, it is really hard to imagine yourself in the shoes of a regular consumer who doesn’t dream about kettles for more than 0.30 seconds a day. They are really proud of their kettles. Still unclear?

3. Never underestimate the power of the moment.  A creative agency I used to work at once lost a huge client just because the important meeting was scheduled for 8p.m, and the reception girl was sick that day, and there as no one around the entrance to open the door for him after the working hours were over. 

4. And the last, but not the least. Clients have their tastes and likes. They might as well have a bias agains certain media and/or channels. One of our clients, for example insisted that his ads would never be places in a top-rating reality show. That was a must, and the managers would be extremely concerned with that all the time for the only reason the owner of the company personally didn't liked the show.

All I am saying – targeting consumers is very important, but they might never see the commercial if the client doen't let it go through. It seems like speaking of advertising we many times leave out the significant part of dealing with the client.

And the client is always right.

Oh Mad World: Advertising in Postmodern Blues

In a mad world, only the mad are sane

Akira Kurosava

Thinking more of the topic of the previous post, I started questioning: What is advertising in contemporary culture? How is it different in postmodern era? Does it foster creativity or make it more complex to reach the desired audience?
And to begin with, can we say do we really live in postmodern blues?


For the answers I turned to Lucy Atkinson, Assistant Professor at the Department of Adverting at the University of Texas at Austin.

In our Advertising, Sustainability and Conscientious Consumer class we talked a lot about postmodernism. So my question is: Do you think we are living in a postmodern era? Do you believe in it after all the research you have done?

You know, I am really ambivalent about it. I don’t know. I think it’s a fascinating topic, and some days I think: Yes! We live in this postmodern world, we have all our own identities and our narratives are so malleable, and today I wanna be this, and tomorrow I wanna be that. But… other days I think it’s just all bullshit.  There is no change. It’s a useless way of thinking of becoming a civic person, it’s just about buying more crap. I don’t know, I am really ambivalent about it. I think it’s a fascinating topic, but I haven’t decided what it is.

And when you think about it as a “yes”, how do you think advertising is different right now in comparison with modern era? Do you agree that advertising in our postmodern times reflects the trend that the signifier no longer corresponds to the signified?

I teach History of Advertising to the undergrads, and it is interesting to see how advertising has evolved, and it goes in little cycles, but it has evolved generally from this very literal form of communication: You know, a boat would come from Europe and the newspapers would say “We have all these things, come and buy them”. Now it’s all about image, and associations, less about what the product does. You know, “This is a car, and it goes X amount of miles per hour”. It’s much more about selling the image, selling sex, or selling status. So I think advertising definetely has become of a more postmodern kind, but we still see a lot of crappy advertising, really basic, and not very exciting. And we can also say that really postmodern advertising isn’t really that effective. Does it actually make people go and buy the product? You know, we can look at it and say, “Oh that Old Spice ad is really enjoyable, I really enjoy that campaign”. And their sales did go up after the campaign, but they cut their prices, they gave a lot of discounts, a lot of deals, a lot of offers, and would that have happened anyway, without the campaign? And would have sale been that high if they didn’t offer discounts?

Do you think it easier/harder for advertisers now to communicate their messages to the consumer?

Definitely harder. There is so much more out there to compete with in terms of messages…

Just because lifestyles have been so crucial in terms of advertising?

Yes, I think it is harder in terms of that people can TiVo through their commercials, consumers are almost immune to it. Kids have grown up with marketing being so prevalent, that it is really easy to tune a lot of it out. But I think there is a plus side to that, which is that consumers are really sophisticated, and if you can appeal to them in a way that they like, maybe you will be more effective. If you treat your consumers respectfully and understand that they are intelligent and smart consumers of media messages, maybe they’ll get it a lot faster.

So, turns out it is really hard to find a definite answer how applicable the concept of postmodernity is to our contemporary culture. There is a lot of ambivalence even among the researchers about it. But there is no doubt that advertising being a part of the culture, is influences by it, and have an influence on it in a reciprocal way. As Martin Peter Davidson talks in the introduction to his book The Consumerist Manifesto: Advertising In Postmodern Times:

[Advertising], "As a commercial practice, it has a history, a culture and a methodology all its own. And as a key-hole on our world, it offers a fabulous and voyeuristic on our cultural values, both good and bad. It is morally ambiguous, an expression of impulse as deep as any in us – the love of trading, hustling, selling and persuading; but at the same time, it is shameless, exploitative and garish. But it is only when armed with a sense of this ambivalence that I think we can get much of a handle on it, by being prepared to explore both aspects of its divided cultural posture.

REFERENCES
Davidson, M.P. (1992) The Consumerist Manifesto: Advertising in postmodern times. London; New York: Routledge.

Advertising and Postmodernity

 

Nowadays we here the word "postmodern" everywhere. It sort of became a way of thinking about and dealing with things. And advertising has been influenced by that in the first part. But what is it exactly? A philosophy? A stage of social development? New cultural paradigm?

Wiki explains postmodernism (also know as Po-Mo) is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. (And by the way Wiki itself seems to be a very postmodern thing - knowledge accumulated on an openly-editable basis).

Postmodernism is a whole yet scattered concept, and it is considered to be rooting from the DaDaism movement in the 1920s, and later incorporate the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson and others. Let's look at the postmodernism categories described by Frederic Jameson in his work Postmodernism and Consumer Society and then analyze how these notions may influence advertising.

• "the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture" (Jameson, n.d.).
• Pastiche and parody of multiple styles: old forms of "content" become mere "styles"
• stylistic masks, image styles, without present content: the meaning is in the mimicry
• "in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum" (Jameson, n.d.).
• No individualism or individual style, voice, expressive identity. All signifiers circulate and recirculate prior and existing images and styles.
• The postmodern in advertising: attempts to provide illusions of individualism (ads for jeans, cars, etc.) through images that define possible subject positions or create desired positions (being the one who's cool, hip, sexy, desirable, sophisticated...).
• "our advertising...is fed by postmodernism in all the arts and is inconceivable without it" (Jameson, n.d.)
• Po-Mo as late capitalism: transnational capitalism without borders, only networks and info flows.

So based on the categories and ideas described by Jameson, I want to try to analyze how is advertising different if viewed within the framework of postmodernism, and what features of Po-Mo it can use to make the messages more effective.

Postmodernism believes that the world is mediated by and relies upon consumption. And consumer society is based on the principle that people build their identities and even make political choices by purchasing goods. Advertising unarguably plays a huge role here creating (or supporting) the desire to do so. Still, however, the question is how to make it relevant in such a diverse world? Is it harder to break through clutter of a postmodern world?

REFERENCES

Irvine, M. (2009) Approaches to Po-Mo. In The Po-Mo page: Postmodern, Postmodernism, Postmodernity. 

Jameson, F. (n.d.). Postmodernism and consumer society. In Athenaeum library of philosophy. Retrieved from http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/jameson_postmodernism_consumer.htm

Retrieved form http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/pomo.html

Postmodernism. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved rom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism.

Archetypes in Advertising

How to break through clutter? This is the question all advertisers have been thriving to answer over the decades. The consumers are bombarded with thousands of messages every day, and among all those -- how on Earth can you make your ad more appealing, persuasive, but first of all – breaking through?

From the 1950s ads “Here is our product, that’s what it does, buy it!”, advertising  has evolved into something “Here is the life you desire, just a couple of dollars away from you!” And to sell a lifestyle you have to appeal to deeper levels of people’s consciousness.

Psychological theory talks about archetypes defining and targeting which could actually help marketers in reaching the audience and engaging it more deeply into the consumption by creating an integral brand identity. If you look closely enough you'll see that a lot of brands today base their ads on universal human truths and depep-seated needs - archetypes.

"They are the most exciting tool for revitalising a brand," JWT senior planner, Vija Blumbergs said. "People get it straight away. Archetypes provide you with a strategic direction without inhibiting creativity."

According to Carl Jung and his archetypal theory, "There are forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the Earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as individual products of unconscious. These are imprinted and hardwired into our psyches".
There are multiple classifications, but I ran across this interesting one highlighting 
12 archetypes most commonly used in advertising. Each archetype has three levels, with Level 1 being the simplest and least moving form of the archetype and Level 3 being the most complex and appealing:

For example, Marlboro cowboy embodies the archetype of Hero - brave and strong, confident, independent, using the strength to create power in the world. 

Persil ads play with the archetype of the Explorer, promoting slogans like "It's not a mess. It's Curiosity" and "Dirt Is Good".

Persil It's Not Mess
Watch the ad...

All in all, archetypes is a very useful tool for advertisers. However, it need to be used carefully. Some guidelines I accumulated form online creative sources:

1. Do not over-generalize. Human truth should appeal to a human, not to the whole humanity. Always think as if you are trying to reach attention of one person instead of everyone.
2. Present archetype subtle. Since it is appealing to subconsciousness, the message cannot be too loud and explicit. Leave some space for imagination.
3. All the archetypes have negative connotations. Don't concentrate on that because it's inevitable (or better say inevitably human), and people tend to associate with the positive first.

But regardless of how powerful archetypes in advertising can be, it is still hard to give brand an image that would not only be remarkable and recognizable, but also to drive sales.


REFERENCES
Advertising Archetypes (n.d.) In Active Imagination: Sports marketing agency. Retrieved from http://www.marketingforsports.com/content161.html
Crowley, S. (2007, November 14). Cut Through Advertising Clutter with Archetypes. In Creative Pro. Retrieved from http://www.creativepro.com/article/cut-through-advertising-clutter-with-archetypes
Jung, C.G. (1968) Man and his symbols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Patterson, N. (2004, November 8). Which archetype could your brand be? In B&T. Retrieved from http://www.bandt.com.au/news/which-archetype-could-your-brand-be