Biondo 1 Two Opposite Extremes in Advertising: Emotionalism vs. Consumerism This paper will present an analysis of a sample of the Super Bowl XLVIII commercials focusing on the contrast between two different languages that marketers employ: the language of emotions and the language of consumerism. First, I will argue that that modern marketers, differently from early-days advertisers, very often construct commercials that aim at winning people’s attention via the peripheral rather than the central route to persuasion, by focusing more on the story the ads tell than on the product they sell. I am going to explain how the Magic Bullet theory of communication illustrates my claim, in the sense that people will be likely to absorb the advertisement’s message – directed towards the subconscious level of emotions – immediately and often unconsciously, and I will then focus on how this phenomenon relates to the Agenda Setting theory. Lastly, I will discuss the Encoding/Decoding model of communication proposed by Stuart Hall as a tool to understand why people interpret “emotional” advertisement in different ways, highlighting the polysemy of media texts. After discussing two instances of commercials in which marketers target consumers’ emotions, I am going to consider the much less common case in which marketers put the product on the spotlight, discussing the attention-grabbing strategies they employ and relating such a situation to the mere-exposure effect. Moreover, I am going to suggest an application of the concept of the “creeping cycle of desensitization” in the case of commercials in general and of one of the examples discussed in particular. On Sunday, February 2, 2014, the 2013 American sport season was crowned by Super Bowl XLVIII, which saw the Denver Broncos for the American Football Conference and the Seattle Seahawks for the National Football Conference compete at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The 2014 Super Bowl, broadcast by Fox, turned out to be the most watched TV program in the United States in the whole history of television, registering 111.5 million viewers, as reported by news agency Reuters (“Despite Rout”). Moreover, according to Nielsen’s SocialGuide, of all the people who watched the game, 15.3 million were also talking about it on Twitter as the Super Bowl went on (“Super Bowl XLVIII”), discussing not only the actual match and the halftime
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Biondo 1
Two Opposite Extremes in Advertising: Emotionalism vs. Consumerism
This paper will present an analysis of a sample of the Super Bowl XLVIII commercials
focusing on the contrast between two different languages that marketers employ: the language of
emotions and the language of consumerism. First, I will argue that that modern marketers,
differently from early-days advertisers, very often construct commercials that aim at winning
people’s attention via the peripheral rather than the central route to persuasion, by focusing more on
the story the ads tell than on the product they sell. I am going to explain how the Magic Bullet
theory of communication illustrates my claim, in the sense that people will be likely to absorb the
advertisement’s message – directed towards the subconscious level of emotions – immediately and
often unconsciously, and I will then focus on how this phenomenon relates to the Agenda Setting
theory. Lastly, I will discuss the Encoding/Decoding model of communication proposed by Stuart
Hall as a tool to understand why people interpret “emotional” advertisement in different ways,
highlighting the polysemy of media texts. After discussing two instances of commercials in which
marketers target consumers’ emotions, I am going to consider the much less common case in which
marketers put the product on the spotlight, discussing the attention-grabbing strategies they employ
and relating such a situation to the mere-exposure effect. Moreover, I am going to suggest an
application of the concept of the “creeping cycle of desensitization” in the case of commercials in
general and of one of the examples discussed in particular.
On Sunday, February 2, 2014, the 2013 American sport season was crowned by Super Bowl
XLVIII, which saw the Denver Broncos for the American Football Conference and the Seattle
Seahawks for the National Football Conference compete at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford,
New Jersey. The 2014 Super Bowl, broadcast by Fox, turned out to be the most watched TV
program in the United States in the whole history of television, registering 111.5 million viewers, as
reported by news agency Reuters (“Despite Rout”). Moreover, according to Nielsen’s SocialGuide,
of all the people who watched the game, 15.3 million were also talking about it on Twitter as the
Super Bowl went on (“Super Bowl XLVIII”), discussing not only the actual match and the halftime
Biondo 2
show starring Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but also the ads that aired during the
game.
Ads are in fact a pivotal element of every Super Bowl, with people tuning in to the channel
that broadcasts the game only to watch commercials, as reported by one advertising agency in a poll
conducted in 2011 regarding Super Bowl XLV (“Super Bowl Ads Rival Game”). Due to the huge
size of the event’s audience, commercials aired during the Super Bowl are known to be extremely
expensive. This year’s Big Game was no exception, reaching even higher peaks than usual: each
company paid around 4 million dollars for a 30-second advertisement without counting at least 1
million dollars spent in the production of each commercial, as the founder of advertising agency
Siltanen & Partners notes in an article for Forbes.
As Harvard University scholars suggest, “Advertising, like many other features of business,
has come fully into its own in the twentieth century,” yet “it is as old as competitive industry”
(Harvard U 12). It is hard to set a date for the invention of visual advertising. According to AdAge,
the first evidence of newspaper advertising is to be dated back to the early days of the 18th century;
the first advertising agency was found in the 1840s; and in the 1890s Frank Munsey was the first to
lower the subscription price to his magazine, deciding to rely mostly on advertising revenue rather
on than on newsstand sales (“Ad Age”), which is what most newspapers and magazines do today.
As Steven Heller notes in his introduction to All-American Ads 1900-1919, advertising became
more and more sophisticated during the first twenty years of the 20th century, targeting the new
bourgeoisie by employing the novel, appealing technology of four-color printing, and, more often
than not, by associating images with captions that illustrated the product’s function (Heimann 22).
After this golden age, the advertising industry plummeted together with all worldwide businesses as
the 1929 Wall Street Crash hit the United States and the whole world. Eventually, signs of recovery
came by means of radio and, later, television commercials, the first of which was a very short ad for
Bulova watches broadcast in 1941, right before a baseball game (Dalzell).
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Figure 1. A car ad that exemplifies what the first printed advertisements looked like.