Roundtable on Approaches to the Analysis of Advertisements

Robin M. Akert, Andy Berndt, Paul Kurnit, Robert Goldman, Doug Holt, Craig Markus, William O'Barr, Lisa Peñaloza, Tom Reichert, Faith Davis Ruffins

WMO: This roundtable will be conducted in two parts. During the first part, the scholars will meet to discuss interpretive strategies in teaching and research. During the second part, we will be joined by three people from the advertising industry—two of whom are creatives, and another of whom has a lot of experience working with creatives who write advertisements directed at children. The participants are diverse, providing a good academic mix and a variety of perspectives. I hope that we can not only have a significant dialogue among ourselves on the ways we interpret and use advertising in our research and teaching, but also share some of those perspectives with people in the industry and listen to their critiques of our ideas. But it is not simply a matter of listening to what they have to say by way of critiques, but also educating them and the industry to other ways through which they might look at things. The goal of this roundtable is a dialogue that goes both ways by opening up a dialogue that really hasn't existed much in the past.

The agenda for today is to focus on how we approach the analysis, decoding, and interpretation of advertisements. Judith Williamson started doing this in the late 1970s in her book, Decoding Advertisements. How she analyzed and interpreted advertisements gained a lot of currency among other scholars. People have taken notice of how she wrote about the meaning of advertisements. Some have followed her rather directly, some adopted her perspective, and others criticized it and went on to do other kinds of things with it.

If you look at other analysts, they have done both similar and quite different things over the years with what they've pulled out of advertisements, what they see in them, what they think is worthy of commentary. I'd like us to focus on that issue: what each of us does with regard to looking into advertising and drawing out the things and issues and perspectives. I'd like us to focus our discussion not just on what we do substantively and theoretically, but on how we do it as well.

I'd like to begin by asking each of the participants to take a minute to say exactly how advertising enters into your teaching and research and how you go about analyzing and interpreting ads.

TR: I'm Tom Reichert from the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Alabama. One of things we teach students is how to do advertising with good ethical considerations in mind, to make sure that they do responsible advertising. Also, we focus on developing strategies and various advertising skills. I approach advertising from a traditional social science perspective. I'm interested in the content and effects of advertising. That's what I'll be talking about today.

DH: Doug Holt. I used to be in an advertising department. When I was, I taught advertising management, but I tried to teach it as a culturalist course. In fact, I used Bob's book, Sign Wars,¹ as one of the assigned readings. I had a fun time trying to teach the students what hypersignification meant, even though I definitely thought it was one of the more accessible terms. Since moving to Harvard Business School, I've found that Harvard Business is very advertising-illiterate, and I've tried to push the students to be more culturally literate. I'm teaching a course called "Branding, Advertising, and Culture," from a culturalist perspective, but behind it is a critical, socio-cultural view that is presented as a management perspective. So it's kind of an odd synthesis, but I do teach in a business school.

RA: I'm Robin Akert. I'm in the Department of Psychology at Wellesley College, which is, of course, a liberal arts college. There are no business, marketing, or advertising majors. I'm a social psychologist. I always teach social psychology, and one of our big issues is attitudes and attitude change. I always use advertising as an example, a ubiquitous form of persuasive communication. Through the connection with the Advertising Educational Foundation and their Visiting Professor Program, I became even more interested a couple of years ago after my internship in an ad agency. I am now teaching a course called "Social Influence." The whole course is about advertising and the various ways of looking at it psychologically. I try to bring in some methodologies and theories from sibling social sciences, including the concepts of signifier and the signified, which students find difficult to understand and use.

FR: I'm Faith Ruffins. I'm a historian at the Smithsonian Institution. I don't usually teach in the college classroom. At the Smithsonian, I work at an archive² that holds among the largest, if not the largest, collection of what archivists call "ephemera"—things created to be thrown away. Advertising is ephemera. We have millions of pieces of paper that go back to the late 17^th century. We have television advertisements. Now we are collecting cable, email, and Internet kinds of advertising as part of collections that come in. In the Archives Center, I also work extensively with the people who are doing research, particularly people such as historians, cultural studies, anthropologists—people who are coming to look at advertisements for an understanding of the past. Advertisements from the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s are history to some of the people who come in, and they provide a very interesting perspective with which to look at history and culture.

BG: I'm Bob Goldman. I teach in a liberal arts setting as well, at Lewis and Clark College. There are no business students anymore, although we used to have some. I am in sociology, and I look at things from both political-economic and cultural perspectives. I would like to talk for a moment about what I don't know, because that's what I want to focus on today. I'm working on a project right now based on 887 television commercials. All are digitized and included in a database. I'm busy looking for ways to make that database useful to a wider group of scholars.

DH: It's fantastic. I've already used it.

BG: I'm trying to figure out what a master list of concepts looks like and how code ads so that they are useful not just to one person, but to a community of scholars. The website is called Landscapes of Global Capital http://it.stlawu.edu/~global/. My colleague, Stephen Papson, and I are interested in how you can begin to see the contours of a new world view emerging in the background of advertisements. I'm particularly interested now in how we encode or decode these, particularly in terms of the music and photography, because this is what my students keep pointing to. They often pick up on these things. At first, I would dismiss things like music and photography, but now I don't want to dismiss them anymore. I want to follow the interests they are alert to, but I realize that I don't have a language for describing music. I know what it means. I know how to decode it. Yet it is, for me, really difficult to figure out how it works in communicating the meaning of an advertisement. The reason I think music is so important is that we are now in a world of advertising where so much is done through affect. Ideology is now presented as affect. In this context, music becomes even more critically important.

LP: I'm Lisa Peñaloza from the business school at the University of Colorado, and I'm in an advertising department and teach advertising research. The way I approach ads is similar to Mack (i.e., WMO) and Doug in that I take a cultural approach. I found some success once students could understand what a cultural approach is. Students are much more familiar with a psychological approach and want to look at advertising in terms of through effects and motives and these kinds of things. I try to move them to see the way ads become used as a means of negotiating relationships between subcultures. I focus a lot on the Latino market. I'm interested in symbolic communication as a means for people to negotiate themselves vis-�-vis another group.

WMO: I'm Mack O'Barr. I teach at Duke University in an anthropology department and I deal with advertising and culture. I've struggled with exactly how to analyze commercials over the 20 years I've been teaching about advertising. I've gone all the way from Judith Williamson to anti-Judith Williamson. I bring Bob Goldman into it. I bring some other theorists in. It seems like every time I look at the issue of interpreting ads, there's something else to say and something different. I've struggled in my own mind with what are the most important questions and which is the right framework. I've become very interested in what other people are doing. I've been reading the theorists over again recently and come to think that maybe I really don't really have all the important questions in mind. I've focused a lot on issues like children, ethnicity, and other cultures. These are things I've looked at very deeply in terms of how they are constructed in the world of advertising. But I'm also interested in the whole narrative across the 20^th century of how capitalism has become deeply embedded in the society and how this narrative fits into our lives.

I'm going to take the prerogative of chair and begin with a television commercial as a concrete case. Faith, in deference to you, it's a little historical. It's from the Superbowl two years ago.

FR: Oh my goodness! You have delved deeply into the past!

[Laughter]

WMO: I choose it because, being a Superbowl commercial, we can be sure that it was widely viewed. We also know that Superbowl commercials are typically widely discussed as well, and that a lot of effort goes into planning and producing them. Thus, this is not just an accidental commercial. It is one that we can presume had the largest amount of efforts put into it because it costs a lot to air it. And we can be certain that, as far as commercials go, it got a lot of attention. Have a look at this one, because I've talked about it a lot in class and my students find this one intriguing.

Click here to view Bud Light Commercial (Windows Media File)

WMO: Let's talk about what we should say as scholars and teachers about it.

FR: One comment I'll make just off the top, being the historian, is that I tend to see advertisement as part of larger stories that are going on in the culture, and I think of particular commercials as bits of these stories. One of the interesting things about this particular commercial is that it depends upon knowing or experiencing the whole robot/ crash car competition scenario, which didn't exist ten years ago. It is a scenario that brings together people who, let's just say, could stereotypically be called "nerds" with people who might, stereotypically, be called "mechanics"—working-class guys of the body shop. Just by knowing who the characters are, you enter into a far larger story about something that is going on in American culture. Bud Light, in a way, is incidental to it. It's not incidental to Anheuser-Busch, but it's incidental to that larger story. In fact, it inserts Bud Light into a story that is already going on. We can ask what does it mean if the nerds are perceived to be the brainy guys who never get the girls and the crash car guys are the ones who maybe get a lot of girls, but they are also working-class figures. What does it mean that these two groups of people have now met in this scenario?

BG: I see a couple of interesting references here. The first one is the robot and the notion of destruction through technology. Then there is the narrative of desire, which is, in this ad, in the form of the beer. Desire trumps destruction. The whole point of this is that, "Oh my God, there's the beer," and the destructive march of technology pauses.

RA: Or, disturbingly, desire destroys you.

FR: Exactly!

RA: That little refrigerator is the stand-in for the woman. Desire stops your power!

FR: Desire doesn't trump destruction. It allows you to be destroyed!

LP: I was going with the idea of Transformers. I thought of these toys in terms of my nephew, and all the little things you could contort in all these different ways. What I was actually thinking of is that toys are for boys, and so these are toys for big boys. You have the playful aspect in it, but I do think it brings in class, which I think is a real challenge for beer, especially in the Superbowl. It's a young toy, and then it becomes a larger toy, one of these big crash car things. I haven't actually been to one, but I've seen them on TV.

RA: One thing I like that I don't think I've ever seen before in a beer ad is that there are very smart men doing these things. It's phenomenal what these creature-bots do. This is the only time I've ever seen a beer ad where the communicator in the message is, in a sense, a highly educated person. In beer commercials, there always seems to be guys, sitting around chatting, being guys. You never see beer ads with men in fancy business suits who just came off of investment banking on Wall Street, right? So this is a special group of people with abilities. But it still works for beer, because what are these intellectuals doing? They are banging things really hard and beating them up, and it gets to this classic gender role.

WMO: But I just want to remind you of what you saw, which is two groups of people pitted against each other, the hyper-technical folks that you've just described, and the mechanics on the other side.

RA: I wouldn't make that division. When I've watched real shows, there is not a separate group of mechanics. There are really smart guys who are building these things, fixing them, operating them.

WMO: It's really important to note, along with discussing this in terms of a larger narrative about American society, it also needs to be put in the context of a larger narrative about the game and the sport that is being played. The action in this commercial is very competitive, and it's all about competition. It's about the institutionalization and normalization of violence. When I saw this for the first time, the thing I focused on was the extraordinary violence in this commercial. When someone tries to take a beer from a refrigerator, he's demolished! Not just rebuffed, but literally demolished!

FR: And you get the sounds as if you hearing the commentator in a heavyweight fight, where they say, "Oh, no mercy!" The other thing I would like to say about these is that these robot thing competitions used to have commentators. One of the original commentators was Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who had, for five or six years in the '90s, a science program directed at kids. Then he started being the interlocutor on these robot war programs. He would say to you, the viewer, "Hey, they are trying to build so-and-so, they are doing this."—You can see that I have no technical knowledge, so I can't actually say. "They are putting this in because they are trying to build this, this, and this." Now when you see these shows, Bill Nye, or a person like that, is gone. You no longer presumably need this person to interpret for you what is going on.

In terms of the competitions, they have some that are just for high school students, and then they have some for big guys. They started really with big guys. And, just a footnote, Transformers were not originally directed at children. In the '80s, Transformers were really expensive things that you could by at stores like Shaper Image or Brookstone. They really were directed at men. I don't know the exact history of the marketing, but then you began to see them influencing the kids market. It is a Japanification—for lack of a better word—and it emerges from a video game and cartoon scenarios that come from Japan. It is an interesting thing that many of the viewers of this commercial, I would imagine, bring that knowledge to viewing this one.

BG: The other thing I see in this is Road Runner. Wile E. Coyote. At some level, it plays off of a very, very old narrative theme in pop culture.

TR: And one that we are exposed to as children. It's violence with humor.

LP: Here you have this fancy Transformer, and when it comes out, it is just this little box, innocent-looking. In some ways, I think it plays the class dimension in a really interesting way as to who gets the last word. This is very interesting from an advertising standpoint, because that fancy gadget wants the beer, but it's that little box that doesn't have any pretensions that ends up with the powerful hammer that sneaks up from behind.

FR: It also works in a basic element of a lot of humor, which is surprise.

TR: The only point I would make is that the approach really taps into the target market. I'll be flipping around television and see that BattleBots is on, and I'll watch it to see who's going to win. A lot of my friends do the same, and I think a lot of people do as well. So the ad really does tap into the male dialogue of gadgets and cars and women. For the target market, it's really appropriate.

DH: Just as background, I've been doing some research recently, in a way that is probably closest to Bob's Nike Culture book.³ I've been looking at advertising from the perspective of brands—which isn't typical—and it has led me to an analysis of ads as text. Listening to the conversation around the table, I agree with some of the points, but on the other hand, you're talking about the brand's referential system, and I think that is one thing that gets dramatically underplayed. When looking at an ad, the audience understands it in the context of Bud Light as author, one that has told them lots of stories over the past decade. Even in the Superbowl, there were four or five Bud Light ads. And I think that is the interpretative frame we must use if we are doing more than just intellectual critiques.

I've done a lot of work on Budweiser and Bud Light as kind of an offshoot of it. For me, in thinking about this commercial, the analysis has to fit into what Bud Light's branding is about—an American masculinity myth. It's a very odd and potent one, and it's about regression. It allows males to celebrate, through the juvenile male, all sorts of things that they are not allowed to celebrate as adult men—misogyny, violence. Everything we are not supposed to do, we can do via this commercial. There are certain kinds of stories that beer can tell: relaxation, time set apart. So beer gives you permission through these stories by saying, "It's not really serious. We're just guys going off and being guys. But guess what we do? We kick the shit out of things, we cross-dress, and we do all the things that, in polite society, we are not supposed to do." When you look at all the Bud Light commercials, this is an odd one. Most of them are not violent. Most of them are about sex, about boys wanting girls. So this commercial adds a bit of interesting texture to the overall set of Bud Light stories.

BG: To follow up on that, what's interesting is that, like Nike ads, you could see, if you follow advertising, a Bud Light aesthetic from the very get go. Part of the branding is in how you tell the story.

DH: Absolutely.

FR: Just as a footnote, I completely agree that it is about masculinity and those sorts of things. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there is a significant female audience for these robot shows. I like them, and my daughter and I watch them. I've thought about what's different about these versus the Indianapolis 500, which didn't seem to be particularly exciting to me, or the car crushing ones, which didn't seem very appealing to me either. But these robot things were very appealing to me. I think part of this is that it is an intersection between intellect and the thrill of destroying things. While we associate those concepts with masculinity, it's also true that a lot of girls might like that, too. So it's maybe directed at a male audience, but there's something there that is quite different from watching the Swedish Bikini Team, which doesn't do anything for me. I don't get a great thrill out of that. But this is actually thrilling in the same way that it is thrilling to guys. There may well be a lot of women in the audience who like what this ad is doing, too.

DH: But would you say that the women who enjoy it are, by implication, joining a certain kind of man's world?

FR: It's not the man's world—at least in our culture. It's the thrill.

WMO: Bob, do you have an ad for the group to discuss?

BG: Yes. This one is for Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Click here to view Bristol-Myers Squibb Commercial (Quicktime File)

BG: All of the ads we are working on are so full of signifiers. That is one of the things I want to play with here.

FR: Can you give us the time frame of the ads in Landscape of Global Capital?

BG: They cover the time frame from 1996 to the present. So this one is from 2001�2002.

TR: When you are talking about signifiers, you are talking about, for instance, the person in the lab coat, and that signifies research, lab work, right?

WMO: The double helix?

TR: Signifying scientific breakthroughs and so on?

WMO: The red liquid being poured, the family?

BG: Yes, and things like water. Water seems to be a big one here, although I'm not exactly sure what it means.

FR: Water has traditional associations of healing.

BG: But also sadness, as you see.

FR: Just one little point that I find fascinating is that the people who are the researchers in the ad are white and Asian, and that is not accidental. When you look at ethnicity, and that is one my particular interests, it's not by accident that those are the ethnic groups that are represented in research. One of my observations in more recent ads is that when you see Asian and white Americans, you usually need the traditional third, and the way they got it in here was by having an African-American man, when they do the disease thing in the front. He just appears momentarily.

LP: The technical angle is really big. The science images give legitimacy to the company's research and the high price of pharmaceutical products, and legitimize the company's research efforts and high prices.

RA: Social psychology would say that they are doing two things which are quite clever. They are bringing both of the main channels with which you have to work into play: logic and emotion. So with the science aspect of the communicator, they're using the expertise variable. You've got the scientist and the double helix symbols. Very persuasive. Then they hit the emotional part, both positive and negative: the poor, sad people who have the diseases, and then the father and son.

FR: It's Lance Armstrong!

WMO: And it's a home movie, because you can see the little scratches.

RA: You see so much of that from the '90s on. Suddenly moms don't exist. Small children, and even babies, are always with the father. It's an interesting gender switch.

So you bring in the emotions, both positive and negative. And there's the happy message at the end, and all this science. So you've got everything going there.

TR: Absolutely. We go from tragedy to hope.

RA: And in case you don't get it, we see the word "hope."

TR: There are stereotypes of science, and I think that is really interesting. We see that in a lot of areas.

FR: Archetypes! I call them archetypes, not stereotypes.

WMO: Let's ask our brand manager what he thinks.

DH: One of the things I try and do with advertising, which is how my work's a little different, is to try to really figure out and focus on the encoding. I think it is very important to figure out what the strategy is and what they are trying to do, and then look at the executions. This allows you to focus the interpretation, I think, really nicely. They are spending lots of money to say something specific in 30 seconds. It's not an open-ended text.

What's interesting is that this just seems like pure industry-ideology stuff. This isn't branding Bristol-Myers Squibb. This is selling an idea of science in an era when biotech is mining the Human Genome Project and is going into a new chapter in American society—a society that has always been infatuated with science that now seems to exhibit a critical tension expressed through alternative medicine. In this environment, I think it would be interesting to see what the other large pharmaceutical companies are doing and really look at the landscape. It seems like they are saying, "There are these new kinds of drugs. Here's a way to think about them." But the thing that struck me here was the attempt to humanize the drug in American ideology. It's science—yes we love science—and then all of a sudden, the biker triumphs. Somehow it's an American success story.

FR: Absolutely.

DH: They use words such as "customize," so the drugs are individually tailored?

FR: Yes, to you.

DH: It's an incredible stereotype with the father and the son. You can see the story that they are trying to stitch together. It's too obvious. The strategy is showing here. I don't think this would be very effective. They are trying to cram too much stuff into it. But it's interesting because it seems to be at the industry-ideology level.

WMO: Let's ask Bob what he does with this ad.

BG: Much of what all of you've already done. Obviously, one of the things that is really interesting here is the implication of infinite progress, and even of resurrection with Lance Armstrong, the American hero. The dual landscapes in this ad intrigue me: the landscape of science, formed by the double helix and by the lab and the constant overlaying of pictures; and then you've got, on the flip side, nature. I don't know if you noticed it, and I actually didn't notice it until today, but there is one scene in there where they cut back to Armstrong, and there is a field of flowers behind him. It looks amazingly like the gene structure that they have been playing with up to that point. You've got this way of bringing these two levels together. I do actually see this as an effort at branding, although not a very effective one. I just think they are trying to establish this kind of insertion of humanity and nature back into biotech.

A final issue is what is not stated here—several billion dollars worth of investment. Especially in biotech ads, what is disguised is the fact that there is hopefully profit involved in this stuff. And yet we would be shocked if that was a motive in any of this. Here is a company that is clearly motivated by a desire to recoup some of that several billion dollars investment. Yet, this is a very different kind of text.

And the music. Did anyone have any ideas about the music? How is it that music can communicate so much to us, but at the same time, we all sort of pass over it? I am still struggling with that.

[Commercial is played again.]

FR: The music is Muzak-y. In the other part of my life at the Smithsonian, I do exhibitions. And in exhibitions, music is absolutely crucial. Some exhibitions are silent, but others are not. One of the things I would say about music is that some music is identifiable because it's a pop song or something that you've heard before like Frank Sinatra. Other music, like this music, sounds like several short bars that are replayed over and over. It may well be that the music that was composed for this commercial. More likely, it's some sort of generic music that isn't particularly distinctive.

LP: I'm glad you pointed out the music, because I didn't notice it until you did. It's almost New Age-y, isn't it?

FR: It has a tinkly quality to it. It goes with the river and the outside and the nature.

LP: So you get the human side, but at the same time, when they were showing the family, you get this effect as if it was from the Matrix, where they had the little digital numbers running down the screen in patterns.

FR: Another thing I'm interested in is celebrities and where they appear. This is the first one I've seen that uses Lance Armstrong and doesn't flash in the bike race. The Tour de France, shall we say, is not one of the most important sporting events in the United States. He's someone who became a star in a pretty obscure sort of sport for us. It's not football or basketball. At one time, that would have made him an obscure sort of celebrity. And I would argue that it is not simply the Tour de France, it's also overcoming cancer that has made him such an important person. And in this commercial, presumably, you know Lance Armstrong so well that that you no longer need the ad to identify to you who he is. That means his struggle over cancer is actually much more important, at least to Bristol-Myers Squibb, than the bike race.

BG: They still couldn't resist at the end with the yellow jersey.

FR: They throw that in and presumably, his son, so that you get the direct effect. It's not like it's a model and a baby. It's presumably his child that he was able to conceive presumably (because we really don't know—maybe they froze his sperm before) after his bout with cancer. So that's a whole story that you are bringing to this. And he's a relatively young person.

Several years ago, I did a whole series of roundtables on religion and spirituality in America with people who teach at divinity schools. One of the things they said was that they were experiencing a tremendous generational divide. When you say "religion" to people who are over 45 or 50, they associate community, church, synagogue. They say traditional kinds of things. When you say "religion" to people who are under about 40, they say, "Oh, religion? That's rigid, intolerant, prejudiced." The word they use is "spirituality," a word that, until recently, didn't even appear in dictionaries of American religion. So younger people—presumably the Lance Armstrongs, the baby boomers and the post-baby boom generation—are the ones that are being played to with the natural environment, the water, and the New Age music. The makers of this ad are definitely trying to put together, and they probably tested this, younger notions of hope and resurrection, since a lot of young people experience being out in nature as spirituality. This is not the case for older people, for whom spirituality means the same as religion—going to church and participating in your church community.

One last thing on red, white, and blue: In America, you see red, white, and blue over and over. You don't see it absolutely everywhere all the time, but you see it in many brands, and therefore it reoccurs in ads. In this one, they do it very subtly with what people are wearing, the red liquid, the white background. If you were to go through the commercial very carefully, I would suspect that you could see red, white, and blue in almost every frame.

DH: So science is scary, and we need to invert it. It's a pastoral scene where man has control of technology.

FR: Right, like a park. It's a civilized landscape. It's not a wild landscape.

WMO: Let's turn to Tom now.

TR: Let me give a little background, and then I'll show the ad. As I told you before, my background is content and effects research. Specifically, I'm interested in sex in advertising: what it is and how it works. So if we go to the literature, especially the effects literature, and try to find out if sex in advertising works, some people would say, "Of course." But other researchers would say, "Nah. I don't think so." In addition, there basically are two approaches to effects research in this area. One is from an information-processing paradigm and the other is emotion based. I would say, and I'll keep this very simple, that the assumption with both approaches is that sex in advertising, or sexual visuals in advertising, really doesn't have much meaning. The images are either a positive or a negative influence on the ad, and that they are used as attention-getters with no relevance to the ad's message. In my opinion, it's clear that those assumptions are not necessarily the case; sexual images are very meaningful. So we want to extend effects research by making the case that sex is used in ways other than just to attract attention.

In the ad I'm going to show you, I suggest that sex is presented as a benefit. It is used as an outcome of using the product. If you use this brand, and people see you using this brand, you're going to be more sexually attractive. In other ads, advertisers use sexual benefits to say that if you use our product, you're going to have more sex, better sex, or you're going to be sexier for your own satisfaction.

Sexual appeals are the kind of thing that interests me. Think of all the people who are lonely. Think of all the people who are not maybe satisfied with their sex lives. I'm interested in how brands and companies tap into those needs with sexual appeals.

You're probably familiar with this campaign. Other specific ads in it are very similar.

So if I'm looking at the first ad, there is no verbal message other than something that says, "B Kool." I want to figure out what else is going on, what gets communicated.

These ads appear men's magazines. There is a very consistent message. When I went online last night to ask for some input about these ads, everything that I could find was based on the subliminal sexuality, and, of course, they point to that gasoline pump in the background.

[Everyone talks at once about the gasoline pump in the background.]

WMO: Okay, it's clear, folks, that sex does get one's attention.

TR: But I wouldn't see the pump as a primary element in this ad. In my opinion, the primary message here is that if you use this product, you are going to get noticed by women who look like the ones in these ads.

WMO: There are a lot of things going on in this ad, but how do you go about the process of identifying which aspects of sex need to be talked about and which ones don't? That's what you are actually saying to us—that some things are relevant and some aren't. Tell us how to decide that.

TR: That's a good question. What I would look at here is that we have an attractive person, one who is obviously making eye contact, but not with the reader. We are a voyeur or bystander to the action. And she's not looking at his pack of cigarettes; she's looking at his eyes.

BG: Eye contact here is actually crucial.

TR: I would say that she is not looking at us.

WMO: She's looking at the camera, isn't she?

FR: I think she is looking at us, at least some of us.

WMO: I think this point about eye contact is really important.

RA: I don't think she is looking terribly high up.

WMO: Okay, hang on. Tom, give us your case first.

TR: The point would be that these are attractive women who are captivated or interested in the person who is the protagonist. There are perhaps some subliminal signifiers, but they are minor to the overall plot. When I went online to get some background information on these ads, I found a lot of sites with people who talking about phallic images in the ad, such as the way the hand is holding the pack.

FR: He's holding it as if it were a condom pack that he just took out of his back pocket.

TR: I wouldn't pick up on that. I try to look at what is the primary message here. Again, I would say that the primary message is that people who use this product are going to get noticed, or the types of people who use this product will get noticed. If you want to be noticed like this by these types of women, then this is a product that you need to consider.

BG: I think the message is pretty clear. At the top, it's "B Kool."

But I see more than one thing there. I see eyes and lips mainly, although legs as well. But it seems to me that you've got to break down the signifiers here, because a lot of students are going to pick up on the eyes and lips here. I've had five students write about this ad, so I know this one quite well. And the chain on the wrist is not an accidental thing. But I would like to know what you guys think about the ways in which their faces are turned, because that seems to me the key interpretative moment here in the seduction. You are looking at an image of desire.

WMO: And more than that, I think it is close to a pornographic pose.

BG: Very close. Because so much of the pornographic posing is looking at the camera and looking in submissive ways towards the viewer. You've got the male gaze and the objectification process and the submission to that objectification.

LP: Do students pick up on the hand? There is also something going on here.

TR: That's another point. Most of these women are with somebody else.

BG: This is a classic pornographic scenario. They are looking at their partner, but are looking elsewhere and saying, "Hi. How are you?"

LP: I think it is interesting to ask what the relationship of the viewer is to the scene. Does it put you in a voyeuristic pose watching this seduction take place, or are you invited to be the person there? I think that slippage back and forth is what makes the ad interesting and the desire that goes between the two positions.

RA: In the other three ads, where the woman is alone, what's intriguing to me is that you've got the male gaze. The voyeuristic thing is ubiquitous, right? I think what we've been seeing, since the 1990's on, is that while the woman is in that role, she's also shown in a more powerful stance. While I am not talking about it so much today, my field is nonverbal communication. What I notice in the case of women in ads is their gaze, their gestures, everything nonverbal about them—is it gender stereotypical or not? So what's intriguing here is that these are quite powerful women. These two are in a bar and look totally comfortable. There is a way in which they don't look like they are being observed. And they are not being made passive by an implied male gaze. This ad is playing with gender roles.

FR: She is expressing her own interest.

RA: You know those fashion ads where the women are standing in skirts with their legs apart and with no smile? They're all very tough. It's all very male.

FR: One of the things I would say is that on some huge level, a lot of consumption is about desire. Some products are more clearly linked to sexual situations, and the cigarette is one of them. You could take that back to the 19^th century. I can't tell you the number of cigar ads that are really directly about sex and are directly about whorehouses! Cigars and lobsters turn out to be really important in Victorian advertising—they were signifiers, essentially, for sexuality.

RA: Lobsters?

FR: Lobsters because lobster was a dish that at one level was trash. Ordinary people didn't eat it, but then it becomes a delicacy. But, in any event, one of the things I want to point out about this ad in particular [the Kool ad with two women sitting together], you may or may not know, is that Kool cigarettes have an important subculture to African-Americans. So, number one, being "cool," as a slang term, is very old now. It's probably at least 60 years old. Two, in this ad, the protagonist or alleged viewer is either clearly an African-American or somebody ambiguous enough that you could interpret it that way if you wanted. The arm of the man near the women, in contrast, is unambiguously African-American. You have an African-American woman and an Asian-American woman sitting there. This ad then brings in this other issue, which is, do you get to be cooler if you are more like a black man? That's another whole story, also at least 60 years old now, because it emerges in the '40s with the Beats. And his chain, which you could say is a kind of hip-hop thing, is probably a little older, too. There are precursors to that. Then you bring together Black sexuality. In three of these ads, the alleged viewer is holding a cigarette, but this also reinforces it, if you want to talk about a phallic quality, and this chain does too. And then you can make all kinds of . . . you might not want to go as far as S&M, but it has that kind of association with bondage, and it now also carries that sort of hip-hop kind of association of male jewelry.

RA: The message is pretty problematic, because if you interpret him as white, or a very light-skinned African-American, he is taking away women from the very dark-skinned African-American.

FR: Yes, you could make that assumption.

LP: Where were these ads pulled from?

TR: POV magazine, Rolling Stone, Details. Guys' magazines.

LP: So they've really gone beyond Ebony. It's been appropriated.

FR: Absolutely.

WMO: Judith Williamson has that long piece in her book about color, and she points out how links are made between things in non-conscious ways, because color links those things. In the first ad you showed, green links the pack and the woman, which is a theme carried throughout all of the Kool ads here on the table—the woman and the product are the same color. Therefore, you end up in a semiotic exchange system where what you can do to one, you can do to the other. So the fact that you can have enormous pleasure from the woman, you can have with the cigarette. Or the way that you can have enormous pleasure from the cigarette—you can use it and throw it away. Whatever it is that belongs to one of these things is transferable in a semiotic process.

BG: And a line goes through all of these things. You can see it connecting every dot.

WMO: Exactly. So I think there are messages here about controlling, of taking charge. You have the man holding the cigarette, holding the package, encasing the package in his hand—therefore the question about his possessing the woman. I believe you can do this with all of these, but this one [the ad with two women] has another dimension to it. I taught a course on advertising and masculinity, and it was really interesting to find that one of the things students invariably write papers about is the single man with two women in the ad, and this being an icon of male sexuality fantasy.

FR: And pornography.

WMO: And pornography. But the pornography wouldn't work if it weren't already part of male sexual fantasy.

FR: Absolutely.

WMO: So the question of a guy having a woman is trumped only by a guy having two women. You never ever see the reverse where a woman would be with two guys, because this is unthinkable for lots of other reasons. But this is a very constant theme in advertising, where we see this portrayal of a guy somehow possessing two women. I think the chain is not at all accidental, for all the many reasons that Faith suggested. So what you might therefore want to do is look at the guy whose hand is shown trying to reach out and hold the woman in a benign way. Whereas the guy in the forefront is in the business of possessing; he's holding a phallic symbol or chain—it's a different kind of relationship to have to her. Now, that's a Judith Williamson kind of analysis, and I find it very productive with students to ask, "Is this what's going on?" and you end up with them saying, "Well, yes, those are kind of raw materials out of which these kinds of interpretations might operate." But then they get into the question of—and they always want to know—"Was it intended? Did the creative people think like that when they did the encoding?" You seem to think, Doug, that the encoding process is important for the decoding, but the vast majority of people who interpret ads, namely consumers, have no access to encoding, and so 99 percent of the time, encoding is irrelevant to how they extract meaning from ads.

DH: I'm saying that it is important for us as analysts. That helps us close down the interpretation.

TR: You mean to open up the interpretation?

DH: No, I mean to close down the interpretation. Ad agencies constantly put feelers out, to get a read on how each ad is being interpreted in the marketplace. At first, they have no idea. It's like a difficult jigsaw puzzle in which more clues on how the pieces fit together accumulate over time. Until the creatives nail the campaign (and sometimes this never happens), they don't know what works. But as they experiment and learn, they figure out which elements work and which don't. So when you look at a campaign develop over many ads, and talk to the creatives about why they made the changes that they made, with some recurring elements becoming really redundant and others rejected, you have a much better idea of what is important to the audience, what to look for. This isn't to say that creatives are able to provide interpretations of their ads that jibe with their audiences. Most of them can't; they use their own occupational language for talking ads. But the clues they offer on the creative choices they make give me lots of ammunition to argue that particular readings of the ads are dominant amongst the audience.

LP: But do they need to know? There's another thing going on: What they think the company is doing becomes a really important factor in the future. When analysts or academics look at ads, and they attribute certain intentions to companies, whether it is right or not. That's not the point. What ends up happening—and I see it very much in the Latino community—is that those ideas become part of that ongoing narrative.

DH: Absolutely. The company is an actor.

One quick thing to add. I agree with you about signifiers and how they get reframed and so forth, but the limitation of a Judith Williamson approach is that it misses the basic quality of the communication, which is that there is a story here. The problem with print is that it is not a good story-telling medium. It's very, very hard to tell a story in print ads, which is why they are much less effective than TV. But in this one, they are able, under incredible art direction, to present a story. It's about guys who are so hot and so popular that, in just strolling through with their cigarettes, they are able to attract well-dressed, desirable, beautiful women.

BG: There are two things. First, there are a multiplicity of stories. Maybe each of us comes up with one. I've seen at least five student analyses of this ad, and four of them were different from one another in some crucial aspects of the narrative. So one of the things about ads like this is that they empower viewers at some level. It makes them interpreters.

WMO: There is a wrong way to interpret an ad when the interpretation doesn't put a positive spin on what is being advertised. Somehow it has to be a story that puts Kool in a positive light.

BG: Actually, I would disagree. I would say that this ad, and this campaign, elicits as much anger and upset as it does positive interpretations. I you bring a feminist ideology and you look at this, you are going to say, "Whoa!"

WMO: But that's a counter reading of the ad.

BG: All I'm saying is that viewers play out their own ideological narratives in various ways.

The second point, which is so obvious that it probably doesn't need to be said, is that after this entire history of 80 or 100 years of cigarette advertising, we now are assumed to make the connection that by holding the cigarette, we are desirable ourselves. The link between the person and the object—that whole point of commodification—has been so heavily labored for so long that we now automatically make that connection.

FR: Just one thing on intentionality. Although I do think it is very important if you can get access to information about the intentions behind the ad—for some of things we have at the Smithsonian, such information does exist as it does for some of the historical advertising materials that that Duke has—⁴ but I would also say that the expressed intentions are not necessarily the only things going on, because people who produce the ads may be expressing things in the culture that they do not fully understand or could verbalize themselves.

The other thing I wonder about is how to think about sex or eroticism in ads. There's love and there's lust and there's casual sex and deep relationships—so many different elements of sexuality that don't all function simultaneously in any one ad. This ad is about naked desire, for lack of a better word. It's not, "Oh, let's be friends." It's very direct. But how should we think about other forms of sexual expression, particularly in ads where naked desire may not be so much at the forefront, but is present in a more background way? Not everything is derived from pornographic narratives.

WMO: Let's have someone else introduce an ad. Lisa?

LP: One thing that I always associate with Kool, and that is the menthol.

FR: That's why it's green.

LP: So you are selling this product that is really a difficult thing to use. I remember the first time I smoked; it's definitely something you have to learn to do.

WMO: Lisa, do you have an ad for the group?

LP: Yes, here's one from Hispanic Business. It's a Toyota ad and it says, "El placer de manejarlo sólo se compara con el placer de mostrarlo. [The pleasure of driving it alone compares to the pleasure of showing it (off).]"

When I teach ads, I start out by talking about the cultural approach. My students are business students, and they really haven't encountered that approach before. Even if they've had an anthropology or sociology course, they haven't really applied the perspective of culture to business. I used to just jump in and start talking about ads. Then I realized that it works better to take some time to explain the approach I'm going to use. I like Mack's wonderful book, Culture and the Ad,⁵ and I draw from that. But it's definitely a different view for a lot of them. I'm trying to get them away from the attribute selling model. I think my colleagues do that better than I would, and they do it very well. I try to emphasize the cultural part.

I start with the semiotic triangle by going through the whole idea of signs, the signified, and referent, to get at the idea that signs carry meanings and that there is a difference between the concept and the sign. I really give a lot of emphasis to the interpretant, that people read ads based on their own worldviews. That opens up a space for me to talk about the Latino as agent. These classes are usually 50 students, of which I'll maybe have four or five Latinos or Blacks. I ask the students to step outside of their subject positions to read these ads. I think this approach works pretty well.

I've taken to using Madonna videos to help teach semiotics. I ask: What is this video about? What's the role of sexuality? What's the role of ethnicity or race? I use things like "La Isla Bonita," with all its urban US imagery, and compare it to other Madonna videos and their imagery. It's fun to teach the semiotics! So I get them to signs first, and then I bring them to ads.⁶

Let's look at the ad.

One thing you probably notice is the ethnicity of the neighbors. You don't see the ethnicity of the owner of the car, but the ad invites this status thing. Now, this is where I think it becomes a challenge for the Latino community. What I really emphasize in working through this ad for Latinos is the way it depicts them negotiating relationships with others. So if social mobility is always moving out, what does that mean for us Latinos?

I'm currently working on a documentary film and have become sensitized to all the micro-editing that goes into video production—like that shot of the bicycle in the Bristol-Myers ad. There's so much that gets packed in, in so little time. So I'm developing a much deeper appreciation of the technicalities that go into production.

RA: I'm really confused by all the communicators in this ad.

FR: I would agree.

RA: First of all, why washing windows? Second of all, what are the facial expressions of the people in the window? The man in the window looks perplexed, or possibly upset, or even cognitively impaired. And who, in fact, are we supposed to think the people are? I don't get the story I'm supposed to get.

BG: I'm not sure I can answer that, because I wondered about the same thing. There are what I call dangling signifiers. The thing that I like about Judith Williamson is her conflict about using Altusser's solution of appellation. It seems to me that this is a nice example of hailing a viewer. Once they are hailed, they can think: "Ah this is me in the urban context. This is me in the at-home context. This is a possible me in another one." I don't know the exact interpretation here, but the ad does seem to me to be a very nice example of appellation.⁷

This is an example of an ad that was made for a broader audience first and then translated into Spanish. The people don't look very Hispanic.

FR: They look non-Hispanic.

WMO: There's an Hispanic guy who has come to wash their windows. That puts him in a class situation with regard to the people in the house who look Anglo. The house doesn't seem to belong to the Hispanic guy. It may be his car, but how is he going to buy a car like that by washing windows? So there is some problem here in this whole thing of how it works.

DH: What does the text say?

LP: I think there are several things going on here that are probably wrong. But what I think they are trying to do is to use this to talk about "keeping up with the Joneses," or as surpassing the Joneses.

BG: But there are two different houses. He lives here in the house on the left; it's his car and his briefcase. He's washing their windows so they can see more clearly.

[Laughter]

WMO: That's not a nice thing to do to wash someone else's windows!

LP: He doesn't belong to the car. For this to work for Latinos, it can't be his car. He's washing their windows and that's the deal. They are not really astounded by him so much, because they pay him to wash their windows. The briefcase confounds us a little bit. But there are two things that don't work here for the Latino community. One, you wouldn't talk about the pleasure of driving alone.

RA: It's a much more collectivist culture.

LP: It reminds me of one of the commercials for AT&T long distance. The woman wants the man to call the neighbors to say that they are going to be late to their party. Well, she wouldn't have him call, and certainly not to say that they are going to be late. So, some of these things really don't work. But the other troubling thing about this is the class dynamic. In other words—up and out.

WMO: It's also a gender dynamic, because if you look at it, the two guys are eyeballing each other over "guy things" of some sort, while the woman's checking to see if the window is going to cleaned or not, which is a lady thing. It's a strange ad.

FR: I must say that ad seems tone deaf.

RA: And visually blind. If you were marketing to a group that is somewhat more collectivist within a larger individualist American culture, why would you talk about driving alone?

LP: This is the challenge.

RA: This is how they are tone deaf. This is Toyota. They're a big company. They should do better than that.

LP: So many advertising strategies are based upon individual appeals and individual motivations. What probably would have worked a bit better is having them show people in the car together. It would have been something like, "We're a part of this group. . . "

DH: This is from Hispanic Business, which targets a different market from an Hispanic mass-market magazine. These are upscale, maybe more conflicted, people, and maybe not in the Hispanic communities.

LP: It is certainly assuming they are comfortable being outside the community.

DH: They're betwixt and between.

LP: It suggests they've arrived and they've achieved enough individualism that they've learned the pleasure of driving alone.

BG: What about the five images across the bottom?

DH: It looks like they put them in from another campaign.

WMO: Now think of this from the point of view of producing multiple versions of an ad for different audiences. Hispanic business is an important niche market, but it is not a major market in terms of producing ads specifically designed for this particular magazine, or even for Hispanic businesses. So this ad has got to be recycled in some way.

FR: When I first saw this, my reaction was that they had done this for somebody else and then they translated it and put it in Hispanic Business.

LP: Which points out the dangers of translation.

FR: Clearly, Toyota still hasn't gotten the Hispanic market understanding that they may need. I think this is a clear error. It defeats the purpose of the ad if you are distracted thinking about who that guy is.

LP: Can you see this bottom panorama of evoking a "guy world"—an established corporate person who's got women and travels?

FR: I think this ad doesn't work. I helped a person recently who was working on his dissertation on car advertising directed to Hispanics. Apparently, it's known in the car industry that if you want to sell cars to Hispanics, everybody has to come to the showroom. You can go and buy a car, but grandma, cousins, and everybody else has to come see it before you can buy it! That's well known in the industry, but it's not reflected in any way in this particular ad.

LP: You're absolutely right. It's assuming the individualist buyer.

FR: These cultural issues are important if advertising wants to speak effectively.

LP: There are actually two more examples in this same magazine. There's a Hummer and there's nobody in the ad.

FR: That's the American way—out on the road by yourself.

LP: I just want to mention one thing before we move on. This is Hispanic Business, which is directed at business people who are predominately males, but it also features women business leaders in response to an increasing trend.

But it also plays another role in the kinds of ads that you see when it talks about diverse employees and selling an idea of diversity. There's one here from Home Depot where they are showing all this diversity, the colors-of-the-rainbow kind of thing. It really does beg an interesting question as to what niche the magazine is reaching, and the challenge of trying to position diversity where it is palatable to the mainstream, and doesn't really piss people off, but still validates the minority enough to reach them.

RA: I'm thinking of Sang-Pil Han and Sharon Shavitt's work, where she looks at individual and collectivist messages in the ads and their relationship to cultural differences of viewers.⁸ They talk about whether the product is a shared or individual one in its use. A car would fall under shared product. A toothbrush would be an individual one. It turned out that individualist messages worked well, for example, for Korean subjects, if the product was an individual use one.

DH: I think this is a terrible ad, but I disagree with the idea that you have to show a bunch of people here. Advertising is about fantasy and about mythologizing things. And for immigrant Latinos, there is an American dream that isn't about having all my cousins and relatives hanging out by the car. It's a different ideal, and it's very powerful. Now how do you present that idea in a way that appeals to Latinos? If you mirror too closely and show somebody his or her life in the ad, it doesn't create desire.

RA: What if the ad is family-oriented?

LP: That's a good point, but it also matters what the dream looks like.

BG: I wonder if there's a middle-ground here where the commodity is the lifestyle. As we globalize and universalize markets, I suspect that more and more we'll see the empty vehicle standing for success. This ad may have problems, but why is every advertiser in this magazine making the same kind of cultural mistake?

LP: I don't think it is the same mistake. Advertising allows itself to travel when different viewers can put their own ideas and dreams and hopes and fears in it. The challenge is how to do that.

DH: To make it my dream, it doesn't have to be populated with the people I see around me in everyday life. That's the point I'm trying to make.

LP: Not everybody you see, but at least a few of them.

FR: As a footnote, I would also argue that one of the difficulties advertisers face in trying to appeal to the Latino community is that they don't have much real knowledge of history. A significant number of Latinos in the United States are not recent immigrants. Their roots go back prior to the founding of the nation. This is not reflected much in the ads. A lot of people who might be readers of Hispanic Business are very well-heeled people. Most aren't recent immigrants. I've been working on the Smithsonian's Goya Foods collection. The company was founded on Wall Street in the 1930s, but just about everyone says, "Didn't they come here?" Even Hispanics say, "Oh, didn't they escape from Cuba?" That's not their story. There are real differences in the Latino community. In contrast, there's a much longer history of the effort to understand diversity in the Black community. Now people are beginning to pay attention to the Latino community, but I don't think there is a lot of good information circulating about the history and diversity of the community. I think it's an absolute mistake in this ad to have anybody who could ever possibly be imagined as working-class. It makes you think, "Oh, do they park cars and clean windows and is that all that they do?" I would argue that if you are Latino, there's a good chance that this is going to make you uneasy. I'm not Latino, but when I saw that, I thought, "What is this guy doing in the ad?"

LP: It's not that there isn't historical information available, but advertisers just seem to go with whatever knowledge they have. It's usually more focused on contemporary society and often plays upon stereotypes.

WMO: Let's turn to Robin now and ask her to give us an ad.

RA: Social psychologists have not historically focused much on advertisements. It's not what they do. They look at attitude formation and attitude change via persuasive communications, although obviously, advertising is a form of persuasive communication. They've been much more concerned with the link between attitude change and predicting behavior. Why has that been the focus? Because the primary methodology of social psychologists like to use, by which they define themselves as different from other social sciences, is the experimental method. So that means they are creating persuasive messages and systematically changing variables and observing effects. That really means not too much analyzing of extant advertising, which is, in a sense, what we are talking about here. When social psychologists do analyze extant ads, we typically use a content analysis technique, with actual coding for various variables. We're also much more likely to use a quantitative approach than a qualitative one.

But what I wanted to tell you about today was that the classic research in attitude change, aspects of the communicator, aspects of the message, and aspects of the audience—the classic triumvirate, from Carl Hovland and the Yale Attitude Change group, is still very useful. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when the social cognition approach became the giant metaphor and theoretical approach for all social psychology, this earlier attitude change research was subsumed under the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). It's the forest that allows us to arrange all these persuasion variables, or trees.

Briefly, the ELM is saying that there are basically two routes to attitude change. So if we are thinking about advertisements, there are two ways they can convince us: One is called the central route and the other is called the peripheral route. Which route you are going to take depends on your motivation and ability to pay attention and think about the message itself—in this case, the ad. The model in the social cognition approach is that we are all basically cognitive misers in day-to-day life. We don't have that much time to think about everything; much of life is habit. We tend to ignore a lot of advertising, which is easy because it is embedded in so much media clutter. So if the message, an ad, can motivate us to think about it and elaborate on it cognitively, the central route to attitude change can occur. That should produce attitude change that is stronger, more stable, persistent, and more resistant to change from other pieces of information, and it should be more predictive of behavior. Some advertising is going to be like that—pretty special advertising. The vast majority of advertising is going to affect people through the peripheral route. That's where you are not able or motivated to pay attention. Then you are dealing with surface cues in the message, which literally can affect you. Attractive communicators are a classic peripheral cue.

I brought this ad. It's one of my favorites. I've managed to keep it safe since 1982. It was in Glamour magazine and it's for suntan lotion. That's not a new product, but Sundown was new then.

They were carving out why they were different and better. And remember, 1982. You knew the sun could be bad for you, but not to the extent that we know in 2004. It's a model who has been cosmetically altered to show the signs of aging. The text says, "Every minute you spend in the sun is another minute you spend prematurely aging your skin. This makeup demonstration . . . long-term effects of the sun. And that's just one of the not-so-beautiful effects of the sun. Another skin cancer."

TR: So should we consider this a central or peripheral argument?

RA: I would consider it a central argument, and a very well done one.

TR: Almost using a fear appeal.

RA: That's exactly right.

TR: It's anxiety arousal.

RA: What is so interesting is that is the fear appeal we see all the time with PSAs. But when you start looking, they are all over the place for products. Sometimes they fit really beautifully.

WMO: Have you seen some of the ones from the 1930s that use fear advertising?

RA: Was that when Listerine created halitosis?

WMO: There's also another one in the J. Walter Thompson Archives at Duke about how using rough toilet paper would give you hemorrhoids and send you to the hospital. Who wants the shame of that particular problem and to be in the hospital to boot? So buy their brand. It's an old technique in advertising.

FR: It's interesting, because it must have been in about the early 1980s that the numbers about sunscreen protection began to appear on the bottles. Coppertone, for instance, never used to have levels; it was just Coppertone. It's interesting, because this brings in a scientific element, although I wouldn't say that's the primary element. The fear of aging is profoundly female in the United States. Although it may be that it exists in everyone, a lot of ads directed at women really emphasize that.

LP: I want to interject the word, "horror."

RA: Yes, that's why this is an anxiety arousing photo. But she doesn't have skin lesions from cancer.

FR: No, she doesn't.

RA: They hadn't taken it as far as they could have. But they mention cancer, which is actually quite interesting.

WMO: But it seems to me that it operates on another level as well, which is this thing about the split personality or divided self: who we are versus who we might be. It kind of raises that question of the inner self as opposed to the exterior one. It also gets into that Lacanian stuff about the mirror image and how we identify and understand ourselves.⁹ All of that seems to be invoked by this ad as well. What are the psychodynamics of how this thing works? I don't know how quite to explain it, but it's just that this person seems to have sides, kind of the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde female-on-the-beach version.

LP: It's odd that the print is over here on the right side.

WMO: That is interesting.

RA: They should have flipped her image.

WMO: Well, not to mention that usually the anthropologists point out that right is always the positive side in most cultures, and here she is aged on the right. The bad side should be placed on the left.

FR: Is that even true in cultures where people read from right to left?

WMO: Well, it's a very, very common thing, and there are some exceptions to it. But if you sum it across cultures, and certainly in Western culture, this is the case that right is positive.

BG: The problem here is that in 1982, the convention for ads was always to show the product in the bottom right hand corner.

WMO: Along the lines of layout, "before" and "after" should be the other way around.

FR: If you don't use the product, that's what you'll look like.

DH: The other thing is the copywriter could have won the battle over the art direction because he may have liked "Sundown" down in the right hand corner. That totally screws up the reading of the ad.

WMO: And Judith Williamson would have a fit, because the lipstick is the same color as the bottle. You wouldn't want to link it to the bad stuff in the semiotic way by connecting things that have the same color.

BG: I really like what you are doing with the notion of the ego ideal here and the mirror, and how it draws us in. It's fascinating to me. I haven't looked at ads from this long ago.

FR: This long ago! [Laughter]

BG: Your point is that you've got to read the ad to even find the right answer, and nothing else we've looked at this morning has required reading to get the point.

DH: Robin, it would be interesting to hear you talk some more about the ELM. I was trained at Northwestern by Petty and Cacioppo's disciples.¹⁰ ELM was developed in lab experiments and its applications to advertising use very simplistic, trivial, mocked-up ads. As I have studied real ads, I have pretty much rejected it as a useful approach. The model is designed for argument/lecture kinds of ads, reading the text to see if you agree or disagree—old Ogilvy kinds of ads, where you can find some examples where it works. But we're in a visual and mythological culture where the communication is primarily metaphoric images and storytelling. The ELM imagines a world of advertising that is almost the inverse of what really exists. What you are calling peripheral cues, people are clearly cognizing, but not in a rationalized way. They're interpreting, they're giving meaning to it, so the whole idea doesn't seem to apply to most of the advertising, particularly the more powerful advertising. Linda Scott's brilliant series of articles in the Journal of Consumer Research in the early 1990s makes this point very persuasively.

RA: I wouldn't say they're cognizing. They're reacting. It's a different kind of cognition when you are talking about something that is peripheral. Now most of the ads are peripheral.

DH: But people are engaged with the ad. They watch them over and over again. This kind of processing isn't in the model. In ELM, everything that is not a rational argument is treated as just some kind of barely-processed subconscious effect, which is registered from the tangential cues in the ad, such as the music, without devoting any direct attention to them. That's not what is happening in ads like this. If we are talking about Lance Armstrong in this ad, it's meaningful. They are interpreting him. Not rationally, probably not consciously, but as the protagonist in this little story. So that's not peripheral, but neither is it a rational argument.

RA: In that one, I would say that it is still pretty peripheral. Take repetitive ads that are thematic and go on and on. More of the variables in them seem more peripheral and don't require a lot of deep thought. Even the Absolut ad—here's no copy, just the picture. That repetitiveness and the way you play with it, because you have to think about it, makes it a central sort of cue. Central doesn't have to consist of stories or all that copy.

DH: But how is Lance Armstrong peripheral? If the most powerful ads are taking pieces of public culture—and Bob does a really good job of talking about this in his books—¹¹ and reframing them, using them to create narratives, then those ads work. We're interpreting them. It's not some magical effect that is happening outside of our vision. That's what makes the ad interesting. That's what we are engaging in.

RA: One, I didn't actually know that was Lance until you all told me. But if one knew that and one really thought about it, there is a reason he's in it. He had testicular cancer, and that is the sort of thing they are talking about, then that becomes very contextualized and he becomes not just an expert cyclist, but a person who is a cancer survivor with children. He becomes a central communicator for some perceivers.

DH: But it's not a rational process, right? You're entering a story. You're being hailed into a story and imagining yourself. Which isn't what central processing says. The ELM is a rational decision-making model, based on the metaphor of the mind-as-computer. There are knowledge structures. ELM says we process ads as arguments for or against our knowledge structures. The most powerful ads violate the premises of the ELM because the audience "processes" them like mad, but not as rational arguments about the brand.

RA: I don't interpret it that way, that it has to be so rational. The central route involves rational thought, but the peripheral route does not involve heavy-duty logic or cognitive processing.

DH: But that is what the whole paradigm is about.

RA: Twenty-five years ago, yes.

DH: So has the paradigm tried to adapt to this kind of advertising?

RA: I don't think anybody is even writing about the ELM and advertising. I've never seen this applied to advertising. It exists as it exists.

DH: In marketing, the ELM as you've described it is applied to advertising. It is the dominant approach. This is one of the central problems with the marketing literature. It's an ostrich with its head in the sand, purposefully ignoring the most powerful ads because its theories can't account for them.

RA: And it is used in regular social psychology as well, but it is used in an experimental methodology, typically with speeches as the persuasive message, not advertisements.

FR: I have one more thing to add. When you said "the divided self," one of the things I thought about was the feeling that people who look old may feel young inside. As we age, we may not appear in the mirror the way you look in our mind's eye. It's interesting to think about dreams. I don't know the answer to this, but I asked my husband this question: When you dream about yourself, what do you look like in your dream? Do you look like your young self, or do you look the way you look now? I raise that issue because the Sundown ad reinforces the youth part, because presumably, this is the mother and her young children in the background—a still young and fertile self who is sexually active.

LP: You could argue that they are really selling beauty, not just skin protection.

FR: Definitely.

[At this point in the discussion, three industry professionals join the group.]

WMO: Thank you very much for joining us. We've been talking among ourselves about some of the ways we approach ads, use them in our teaching and research, and interpret their meaning.

The people around the table represent diverse academic fields: anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, and business. Some people teach in liberal arts, some teach in business schools. One of us is on the staff at the Smithsonian. What we've done this morning is start out by looking at some ads and asking what we see in them and how do we interpret them? We've thought about how others might interpret them differently. It's been a very provocative discussion so far.

The idea for the afternoon is to have some people from the advertising industry join us, listen to the kinds of things we are concerned about, and offer their own views and responses to our ideas. We're hoping to hear how all this looks from your points of view. We don't often find ourselves in industry/scholarly dialogues, so we thought we'd try to engineer one.

Let's get started by reviewing one of the ads we talked about a lot this morning. I'm going to ask Tom Reichert from University of Alabama to introduce it, as he brought the ad to the group. It is part of a Kool campaign.

TR: I'm interested in sex and advertising and how it works. This is an example of sex being used in advertising to attract attention rather than as a reason for buying or using the brand. My question for you would be, Can you perhaps speculate on what went on behind the scenes in the creative process that would result in an ad that looks like this? I'm curious.

AB: I've never worked on cigarettes, so I'm not sure what goes on behind the scenes, honestly.

CM: Unfortunately, I've worked on cigarettes early in my career. I've also worked on liquor, and I've worked on fashion. What you find is that within the discipline of advertising, there are certain categories where the vocabulary is different and the rules are specific to that category. Fashion is not what a conventional ad agency would call conceptual. Agencies that deal with big ideas do not look at a fashion campaign or a cigarette campaign and say, "Those are big ideas." But if you did speak to Tommy Hilfiger, or if you spoke to Anna Wintour about Dolce & Gabbana's campaign, they would tell you that there's a conceptual idea and it could be a color. Or it could be a room. It could be pink.

I think cigarette advertising is somewhat like that. I think spirits are somewhat like that. Beer as well. There is enough evidence in their research techniques to point to the fact that sex and women attract attention and sell. For a lot of companies and a lot of clients, their success is based not just on the product's success, but on testing success, focus group success, and good results from things like Milward Brown.¹² These are not tools that any great creative will tell you they love.

If you want to ask what happens behind the scenes, it starts with: How do we get people's attention? We know that if the target is male, females do it.

TR: So this is probably the product of focus groups and research?

PK: Absolutely.

CM: This category is a big focus group, researcher, and disaster checker. They'll put it in groups, they'll put it in groups, and then they'll put it in groups one more time. Revise it and put it in groups, and then they'll run it and put it in groups again. It can be that ridiculous.

WMO: What do you learn from the groups about something like this?

CM: You learn what people are really like and how depressing this country can be at times!

FR: You learn that through history, too.

CM: I know. From a factual standpoint, you ask if there are things that can make an ad work better. To me, this is not an ad. This is not good advertising. I don't think anyone around this table would say that it is. It may be a powerful ad, but it is not what I consider advertising.

WMO: Why?

CM: Because I don't think there is an idea in there. I think if you held this up to somebody, they would wonder what are you trying to say about this brand? What's the brand space that it is living in? What are you trying to communicate about it? Looking at it, I don't think this brand stands for anything other than green, and the open fresh air, and sex.

PK: I would agree that it is not a good ad, but I would disagree about the idea. I think the idea is very simple: Smoke Kool, be cool. And there is basically a header here that says, "Be Kool." It's a very confusing layout. At first I didn't get it at all. But then when I looked closer and saw the disenfranchised hand holding Kool, I said to myself, "Well, the idea is basically: If you've got Kool, you're so cool that she's going to leave the guy she is with for a disenfranchised hand that is holding the pack of cigarettes."

Maybe it's been focus grouped—hopefully it's been focus grouped—but to me, it just lacks credibility. This brand was not doing very well. It had an image crisis for some time. It didn't have a lot of reason for being. But that's what's going on: Smoke Kool, be cool.

AB: I'm so far away from this world, honestly. I guess when you are faced with an utter commodity, this is the kind of thing you might do. Okay, I'm sure Kool would argue that they have fresh menthol or something, but it's usually in the zone of, How do you get people to pay attention and see the name? You end up with a couple of simple approaches, like sex, and that's where advertising goes. I hate to lack insight on this, but there's just not that much there. I'm sure there is a lot of research on it. This ad could last a couple of years, because there is nothing timely about it. And it could be a couple years in the making, quite literally. And they could have had ten versions they showed to focus groups. This girl could have had ten colors of hair, and they could have tested to see which hair color tested the best depending upon what magazine the ad was in. Or they might have checked out what worked better if they are trying to skew to a little bit more of an urban twist, or if they try to skew a little bit more to another group. Literally, they will shoot it down to that level of who is appealed to.

TR: In the campaign as it appeared, there are a lot of versions—different ages, different men, something for everybody.

PK: Which magazines did you get these ads from?

TR: Sports Illustrated—the swimsuit issue, POV, Details.

One last thing I would like to point out is—I don't necessarily see this, but some people do—the guy with the pump. Is that intentional?

RA: That's not accidental, is it?

CM: I don't think there is anything accidental in those ads. I think they are so studied. I think they might have said that they are subtly going to put it in there. But I don't think there is anything accidental.

AB: I'm split on this. There are some days when it is research like crazy, but if you ever watch some of this research, it can sometimes be so absurd that it's a little bit like that thing about the government faking the moon landing—the government would actually have a better chance of doing the moon landing than faking it. So even though it has been tested like crazy, testing can get caught up in itself to the point where it is lost in colors of hair. So I don't think there is always—and I could be completely wrong, this is just one guy's opinion—I think sometimes there must be a lot of subliminal stuff, but I wouldn't count on the fact that everything in there . . .

CM: . . . I don't think they intentionally went out and tried to fit some sort of subliminal image in. I don't think the sketch before this one had that in it.

RA: That's what I was going to ask.

CM: I think it might have happened in camera, and when they saw it, they said, "Oh, baby. We're not going to change that." But I don't think they spent a lot of time thinking about putting such things in ads.

AB: I don't think there was a meeting where they said, "Where's the phallus?" But on the other hand, nobody ever says, "Take that out. It's offensive."

PK: Keep in mind that they shot that ad 100 times. She had any number of different poses, as did he, and then they got the accidental image where somebody said, "Eureka!"

RA: So it can be intentionally left in. It doesn't have to originate with the storyboard. But there ends up being all this stuff from which to choose. So the creative team likes some versions more than others. Then, if they test well, they hang around and become the ad.

LP: You said something about that brand category. We were talking earlier about history, how products may be positioned with reference to specific markets. What about the position of Kool, in particular with regard to the African-American market? I'm wondering how you might respond to something in terms of an attempt to generalize or localize a campaign.

PK: That's why I asked what publications you had found them in, because my presumption was that he would have found them in more African-American or Hispanic publications than in mainstream publications.

FR: Where the brand remains strong.

PK: Where menthol cigarettes traditionally are stronger.

LP: But the ads are not in those magazines directed to African Americans and Latinos. They are from somewhere else. So what does that mean?

PK: Well, it suggests to me that it is a market driven campaign. What they are trying to do, obviously, is to take share from the Salems of the world and other big players, and maybe even some of the general cigarettes.

AB: You have to remember, too, where mainstream America gets its idols to emulate. If you go out to a mall in Jersey, you'll see white kids emulating hip-hop. Just because an ad uses minority characters does not mean that it is just for that market.

CM: I think that is a very good point. I think that's true even more so lately. In the last couple of years, as hip-hop gets accepted and revered by the mainstream . . . You should have seen how my seven-year-old walked out today. Then he went upstairs to get one more thing, a Nelly chain. I thought, "It's up to you, man."

FR: It may also be that products are advertised to show that they are non-racist. In other words, it's not really that they are using African-Americans or hip-hop to show that something is so cool. It may be what they are doing is showing that this is a product that is consumed by and enjoyed by this diversity of people.

CM: When you are working on an ad and you get into casting, there is a definite, "You want to keep it big and open and diverse."

AB: Inclusive.

FR: Which is not true for every product, but it is certainly true for some.

LP: But at what point do you hit the limit of that kind of appropriation, where the community that was originally the owner of that brand, so to speak, or was associated with that brand, sees the ad as negative, that the brand's been watered down or generalized too far?

WMO: Show your ad, Lisa. We spent some time on this ad from Hispanic Business.

LP: It says, " El placer de manejarlo sólo se compara con el placer de mostrarlo. [The pleasure of driving alone is at least as good as the pleasure of showing (it off)]." It's a Toyota Camry.

CM: This is about recognition.

LP: I think. Yes. It's got the two houses.

CM: What does it say again? The pleasure of driving alone?

LP: "El placer de manejarlo sólo se compara con el placer de mostrarlo. [The pleasure of driving alone compares to the pleasure of showing off the car.]"

CM: It's a puzzler. But interesting. There is a lot in here. It's in Spanish, so it is obviously targeting a particular audience, but there is clearly a white couple looking over the hedge with envy.

LP: But even using Spanish is really controversial. Should you use it? What does the ad mean? Does it associate Latinos with immigrants?

CM: I work on Dos Equis Beer, and I've been in this land. I did the campaign and actually found out that there is a broadcast Spanish, there is colloquial Spanish.

LP: The language differs in all kinds of ways.

PK: It seems to me, in a world of "keeping up with the Joneses," this is about getting one step ahead of the Joneses.

LP: But then, when you look at the window washer, that is where we get stuck.

PK: Who is he?

LP: You see the briefcase behind the car. Is he washing their windows so they can see better?

AB: I can see the meeting where they are having the same conversation, "Does this guy live there or over there? What if we put a briefcase there?" When you look at that, it looks like the briefcase has been touched in. It wasn't part of the original photo.

WMO: But how do you help us make sense of what we see there? Because we can't come up with a story.

PK: I can't. I was going to ask you where they got this guy, this accidental window washer.

LP: Except the accident could be really offensive to a Latino audience if they are being projected as window washers.

PK: I agree.

RA: And the man in the window, look at his face. He's got a bizarre expression.

LP: So maybe the briefcase should be out, so that it looks like they are washing their own windows.

PK: You know, we are not always that bright. Someone could have had this big idea and said, "Do you know what is going to make this even more dramatic about the car? We are going to have somebody washing their window, and that would put it in their face." But then it comes up, "Who is this guy?"

LP: We're not always that bright, either.

AB: Especially in print, this kind of situation happens a lot. Sometimes people think you can actually tell a large, complicated story in print. Most of the time, you can't. So they get very involved with this and this and this, but when you actually go to shoot it, you put it together, you want to bring it back to the client, but you want to say, "This is a total mess. We couldn't do it."

PK: Yes, it takes your eye off the car.

AB: The truth is, would it have more impact if you just had a beautiful picture of the car on white with the line you quoted?

LP: Actually, there are three or four in the same magazine that are just cars.

CM: I had the feeling that this was probably done by an Hispanic agency.

LP: It could be.

CM: We work with Hispanic agencies. Every major network has them. You get in a situation where they play on their expertise to drive advertising to a place that breaks some of the rules we know about the craft—like the rule to keep it simple.

BG: Do you recognize the work of other agencies when you look at the television?

CM: I know a little bit too much. I know clients, and so when I know a certain client, I know who the agency is. I can tell. I think we can all tell who did the work. It seems like it might have come from a particular agency, and it's always a great surprise when it hasn't.

PK: We know who holds which accounts and we look at it with envy and disdain. My people used to always come to me and say, "We're going to go after this account!" And I would invariably say to them, "Why would you go after an account that has good advertising out there, when there are so many that have really poor advertising? Come back to me with one of those."

LP: Can I come back to the issue of generalizing across markets? It's not at all clear whether this was really done for the Latino market. When we were discussing this ad, we wondered whether this is really a general market ad and if Toyota might have just used it in this magazine.

AB: Most large companies have diversity programs where they have certain executions that will run in diverse magazines, and sometimes they have broader executions to target a range of markets. Our rule is always to make everything speak to some truth that is universal. The truth is when you leave that zone, you get into things that are too complex and are so subjective that everybody's interpretation of what is racist is different. You may feel that a picture of a woman is racist, but someone else might think, "Oh, that's not at all." Many times, such a situation will be a lose/lose proposition for an agency and for a client. On the other hand, if you do work that speaks to a larger truth, it resonates broadly. Just like the simple idea of "I'm proud of this car—I have this car, and people envy it." I'm not trying to be evasive, but my point is: If you want to speak to diversity, speak to diversity. Make an ad about diversity. A lot of big companies do that.

PK: That said, though, this is a specifically targeted ad in Spanish in an Hispanic publication. There are times when you do specific targeting and the strategy changes. If you think of Toyota and the Anglo market, for example, Camry is a very sensible car—neither the high end nor the sexiest car in their line. This idea of pride, which I've assumed they've researched and it seems to be an effective strategy in the Hispanic market, may not be based on the Camry advertising that you see in the Anglo market. It may not be their main strategy. Strategy can change depending upon the market, especially if you can keep it targeted to that market. No one in the Anglo market is going to see this ad, so Camry can be whatever they want it to be if they are specifically targeting the Latino market.

WMO: Let's return to a Superbowl commercial from a couple of years ago. We started with this commercial this morning and discussed what we see in it. We'd be very interested in hearing your views. [Bud Light commercial runs again.]

Click here to view Bud Light Commercial (Windows Media File)

AB: I think something like that in the beer category is great because there is an attitude in there that it's just beer. It stays away from all the slippery slopes that beer can go over, such as idiotically juvenile humor, or sex , or that kind of thing. It plays on that show, BattleBots, that I've been guilty of watching, late at night on cable.

FR: I've watched it.

RA: I've watched it.

AB: All it says is that we know that goofy, overgrown, adolescent kinds of guys watch that show, and we made a little joke about it. We're up on what's going on culturally. If you could keep a lot of beer advertising in that zone, I think that would be great for everybody.

DH: The advertising that we are talking about is Bud Light advertising. In the context of Bud Light advertising, are they off strategy, then?

PK: No. They're the leader. Certainly, on some level, there is the cache that they are tuned into the culture, that it's just beer. But it's also definitely brand as badge in the sense of drinking this brand, holding this icon in your hand, and not therefore not getting it wrong.

CM: I think it is very in keeping with their brand. All their spots are broad humor, with certain kinds of guys cast. I think this is one of their really good spots: not gratuitous and a lot of fun to watch. It doesn't fall into some of the traps of "We do the things that we know, and that make meters and Milward Brown jump," and all that kind of stuff like that. And it's a really great spot on the great stage of the Superbowl.

AB: The benefit of being the leader is that you're not trying to argue that you taste better than anyone else or that you should be bought. You just stay at the top and sort of roll in it. That really is what's going on here. It's just a goofy piece of entertainment, with sort of a subtext about the power thing, but above all, it's just keeping the name in front of people.

WMO: What do you think of the kind of critique that a parents' group might make about how this spot is just continuing to promote violence on television? It says that if you want something, you beat the hell out of other people to get it.

CM: It's in the middle of a football game.

[Laughter]

FR: Ritualized violence!

CM: It seems like clearly harmless entertainment to me, and I'm surrounded by this kind of thing. I work in the video game category, so I hear it left, right, and center. And I work in the beer category. I think you can't take that spot out of the context that it's on during the Superbowl. That, in itself, requires a commercial to out-entertain the next spot. It's a show within the show. It gets compared to what was done last year. The quality of the work is on the line in this environment.

DH: I've talked to a lot of Bud and Bud Light folks. I think that's DDB's¹³ view: We're just making great entertainment for men. The way Anheuser-Busch does this, which is so crafty, is that they make zillions of ads. They test them, they run them through focus groups, and whichever one wins becomes the ad.

CM: A-B takes all the commercials they have made for the Superbowl and tests them in a manner like the USA Today Ad Meter. Then they take three or four top spots and run them on the Superbowl.

DH: They are producing a very particular kind of entertainment, narrowcasting a distinctive kind of humor which will be funny for a distinctive kind of man, and doing it over and over again. When you say that it is trivial, mindless entertainment, don't the 100 Bud Light ads that are nailing that sensibility and sense of humor cumulatively have a powerful impact on the culture? They are filling the airwaves with a sense of humor that celebrates a particular ethos. From what we know about how mass culture works, we have to infer that these ads have influenced how American men understand masculinity.

CM: It's like the chicken or the egg, right? Is it driving culture or is it reflecting culture? I don't know.

PK: What's going on is: like my ad, like my product, remember my product, buy my product. It's really that simple, and that's the luxury the leader has. Getting back to the violence issue, it's totally cartoon violence. The hammer appears from nowhere. We could, of course, have a long discussion about cartoon violence in this culture. But that's part of what it's trading on, as well as on BattleBots.

AB: He asked a different question, which is: Do 300 commercials like this a year, running incessantly, make the permanent adolescent thing acceptable, or does it perhaps reinforce it in some way? That's a tough one.

DH: I've already accepted the fact that media has big effects. Clearly media matters. Bud Light came out of nowhere in the mid-1980s with a campaign that champions a certain kind of adolescence—sexist, misogynist, a little violent, but not too. They became a leader by championing a worldview for men.

PK: What built the brand was the "I love you, man" campaign, which is very different from what you are seeing right now. It was beer-as-important-male-bonding kind of thing.

DH: They also had the cross-dressing and the contests.

PK: That came later.

CM: I have yet to meet a client who wants to take the power of their budget and use it to raise the level of mankind.

[Laughter]

DH: I agree. They are great at selling beer. I think that is one of the slipperiest bits of language in the business, the contention that it's trivial. Advertising is very powerful, for good or for bad. Humor is the most powerful persuasive devise around, because you are not telling people to behave this way; instead, it's laugh with me. It's powerful.

WMO: This commercial is interesting in the context of the extreme hypermasculinity of things like football games and adolescent guys, but how are we to understand the Bud Light brand in the context of some of the other places it is also found? Bud Light is also advertised in places Out magazine, targeted specifically to gay men. I should have brought one of my favorites, which is a six pack of Bud Light with one of the bottles slightly out of the package, and the caption underneath reads, "Another one coming out tonight."

That's Bud Light in Out magazine. So much has been written about targeting the gay community recently. It's a community with enormous buying power. But isn't it a little ironic that that Bud Light is playing to both groups? It's trying to become an icon in the gay community while it's also standing for the opposite of all their values.

PK: This speaks to what we were talking about before, which is the opportunity a big brand with big budgets has regarding more specialized targeting of diverse groups. In this case, they can be quite confident that the straight community is not going to see the ad in Out magazine. It gives them the opportunity to do a much more focused, albeit humorous, campaign to the gay community that doesn't impinge upon what they are doing in the general community.

CM: It's also kind of safe to do it now. Absolut had a billboard downtown. It was Absolut Out—Absolut opening a closet. Now Absolute fancies itself as being a cultural curator. But it didn't do that ten years ago. They can do it now, when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has made it okay. It's all of a sudden okay for a heterosexual male to talk about how he's got homosexual friends. We're all fine with that now, but we weren't ten years ago. I don't think Bud Light was doing this ten years ago. I think they are doing it now, now that everybody has agreed that we're all okay with homosexuality.

AB: There is also the reflective factor—the gay-chic thing. Look at Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The gay community used to be hidden behind the scenes, influencing the styles and purchases and all that kind of stuff of the straight community. That show brought that out of the closet, but it has always been there with high-end design.

I think the bigger question is what a brand is. Do we look at a brand and say, "You are being a hypocrite," because it is saying, "Be macho" and "Be feminine"? The weird thing about brands is that we want it to almost be like a thing with a soul, something real with which we can have a special relationship. On the other hand, it is beer. You're kind of putting your hopes as to how things should act onto Bud Light. We in the business have a responsibility of what we do in this context, but it's also a little bizarre in terms of what people expect from us. I'm not saying that you shouldn't expect the company or brands not to be hypocritical, but at the end of the day, everybody drinks beer. They just appeal to different people in different ways. I think about this a lot because it comes up all over the place and it is really important. I suppose you could act like Howard Stern and say, "Just turn off the TV. Just don't watch TV." But that doesn't really work. But it's an interesting thing—how people think about brands and what's important to them. It's good for a company when their brand takes on an almost human element, but we need to be able to keep a bit of a detachment and remember that it's a kind of beer we are talking about.

BG: But it makes a lot of difference what the brand is for—a beer brand as opposed to Nike, when they would do [Charles] Barkley as a role model and some people would say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa."

DH: But that's their soul. That's who they are.

CM: They have a space. The question is, How far can you stretch the brand until someone just won't go there with you? One of our clients is MasterCard, and we move around a lot in terms of hitting different targets, but it all comes back and it all works together. I also think that we think about brands a hell of a lot more than the consumer does. Especially so now with the speed of the world—even though it's such a clich� about the advent of email, etc. I had a client yesterday say to me, "I want a beer commercial that will make somebody sitting on the couch never try another beer again."

[Laughter]

I looked at him and said, "I can't do that. I don't drink beer that way, and you're my client!" People don't consume brands the way we wished and hoped. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try and do our jobs really well, but let's be realistic about it.

WMO: Has the new morality emerging out of the Janet Jackson brassiere business affected advertising in a new way? It seems to be affecting media elsewhere. Howard Stern is no longer on some stations and various things like this.

CM: I can tell you that the beer business specifically is under a lot of heat right now. There are a lot of lawsuits flying around as a reaction to Catfight.¹⁴

WMO: You mean the Catfight commercial?

CM: Yes. My clients are ultra-sensitive right now. It doesn't mean that we won't go there. It doesn't mean that we won't talk about some of the real issues concerning fun kinds of things between guys and girls.

WMO: How do you see Catfight?

CM: We had it coming. That's how I see the Janet Jackson thing, too. We asked for this. We've been playing the lowest common denominator too much. It's all been moving in this direction. We shouldn't be surprised that it happened. It was bound to happen at some point. I guess it's good in a way that it comes out in such a big way, but I know people who have been shouting about these things for a long time.

PK: What was bizarre about the Janet Jackson thing is that to me, it was about the least offensive thing on the Superbowl.

CM: It was in the middle of a football game. It's football. I remember that little spot that was pulled from the Rams game. U2 was on during that half time. I'm a huge Ram fan, and I was like, "Can we get to the game, please? I'm dying here." We've turned football into something else. We've done it with everything, in our desire to be more and more raunchy.

WMO: There are a lot of people who would be willing to watch things like football without commercials. Just like you were saying, "Let's get back to the game."

FR: I think more of those people are over 40, though. I really do think there are some generational differences. The younger you are, the less likely, I would say, to want TV with no commercials. People my age say that, but I don't hear my children saying it.

BG: There may be regional differences. I hear a lot of students on the West Coast even saying, "Just get rid of television."

PK: The pendulum swings. There is not only the pressure in terms of what's appropriate from a sexual standpoint. My expertise is in the youth market, and the pressure on the youth market advertising right now is about as excruciating as we've seen in a long time. Not only with the American Psychological Association pushing to ban advertising eight and under, which is so na�ve for a bright organization. How would you ever pull this off? There are networks—Nickelodeon among them—that now demand that kids have got to be shown being active. So you do a breakfast cereal commercial, and this can go from the ridiculous to the sublime, where you've got a kid running down the street eating his breakfast cereal! It's really gotten completely, completely out of control.

WMO: Doug, you had brought some commercials that we didn't have a chance to discuss this morning.

DH: I've been studying histories of brands by going back and forth between agencies and clients. I've been studying this in archives and by talking to people. One of the things I have focused on is Mountain Dew. Here's an old ad from 1993.

Click here to view Mountain Dew "Get Vertical" Commercial (Windows Media File)

PK: This was about the time that the brand was reborn. It was nowhere and seemed to have little reason for being. They did something quite interesting, and then Sprite followed. It was to reposition the brand as an attitude brand, as a youth brand. If you remember, one of the first commercials they did was the original beeper promotion that was hugely successful. Those kids wanted to run out and get free beepers that they could use in their schools before they were banned. It capitalizes on extreme sports. It was one of the first campaigns to do that. That was tremendously appealing to kids, and the idea is, basically, "'Do the Dew' and be cool and be out the edge." The brand got rebuilt.

DH: Anyone have other thoughts?

CM: That was the beginning of their repositioning. It totally turned the brand around and saved it. For BBDO and Mountain Dew, it was a great opportunity. It's funny how dated this looks now, and how much better the work for this brand has become. Once they carved out the new space, they really started making good commercials for it and started to have fun with it. So it's all about staking space out.

DH: How would you describe this space?

CM: A little extreme. I think they were the beginning of the extreme movement. Youthful extreme. Extremely youthful lifestyle.

AB: What do you think?

DH: This "Super Dewd" ad, and the larger campaign of which it was one execution, was a disaster. PepsiCo pulled it because it didn't work. The company devoted Mountain Dew's entire ad budget to this campaign. Do the Dew was an accident. It was originally Do Diet Dew. It was just a side campaign, a tactical campaign to build distribution for Diet Mountain Dew, which was done separate from Super Dewd. PepsiCo found that Do the Dew was actually working far better than Super Dewd as advertising for the entire brand so they dumped Super Dewd. This campaign starts getting really African-American when they get this Super Dewd character, as they call him, with the Dew rags, stomping through the 'hood, doing sort of extreme stunts. In terms of the process, what's interesting to me, and what I find in this research, is that a lot of great brand-building ads are created by real serendipitous experimentation—where you have a client with a lot of money and confidence making lots of ads. That's when, over time, you discover little bits of pieces until finally, "Aha!"

In terms of content, what's interesting to me about Mountain Dew was that it was not about extreme sports. PepsiCo and BBDO were producing Mountain Dew ads with extreme sports from 1988 on, and most of the ads don't work. In everything you read, everyone says the same story: "Mountain Dew, they got extreme sports. Ta-da." If you look at the ads, it's very clearly not the story. They had all sorts of executions with extreme sports that didn't work. But then, when you bring the Dew Dudes in, there's a certain point of view—this juvenile, Gen-X point of view—and then the pop culture satires with Jackie Chan and Mel Torme, and that's when it all hits.

So how do you explain why the Super Dewd campaign bombed? This is at a time when Nike is taking off, mining the 'hood very well, Sprite is starting to do "Obey Your Thirst." This is primetime for hip-hop as the key cultural epicenter of youth culture. Yet the audience didn't allow Mountain Dew to go there.

CM: Do you find that when they actually started to have an idea in the advertising, the brand really started to take off?

PK: Where is the consumer in the proposition? I've never worked on Mountain Dew, so I don't know the thinking here. But extreme sports have been used by lots of people as kind of a crutch. Lots of advertising without an idea, and it has failed dismally for lots of campaigns. So I think what happened for the later Mountain Dew stuff is that the kid viewers identified with the kids on screen, or, in other cases, "Obey your thirst," which is a totally different proposition. It's basically, "Cut the hype, this is all about a brand I like that tastes good, and I'm there."

DH: Let's see the couple of commercials after that.

Click here to view Mountain Dew "Super Dewd" Commerical (Windows Media File)

Click here to view Mountain Dew "Basketball" Commerical (Windows Media File)

Click here to view Mountain Dew "Done That" Commercial (Windows Media File)

AB: Please, no more.

[Laughter]

CM: That is why when I say that I make commercials, people kind of look the other way.

AB: This is MTV and Just Do It. Those are the two main things. It's fast cutting, music, and Just Do It, which means, "Don't be like everybody else," even though everybody else is trying to be like nobody else. And, "Do something that has never been done before and something your parents wouldn't like." That's where all that comes from. I think a lot of this stuff is about timing. What was happening in 1993? Which institutions were utterly failing? Which ones were utterly succeeding? I think a spot could come out, you could test it, change everything, and then nine months later, it wouldn't work anymore.

PK: There's another piece that I worked on—the first carbonated soft drink that basically reached out to teens and said that this is uniquely for you. That was key in the repositioning, because it had never been done before. It had Coke and Pepsi absolutely shaking in their boots about advertising to kids.

CM: What happens is that, a lot of times, it's hard to get a client to see the difference between doing a piece where they go, "Yes, that's my brand," and a piece where the consumer goes, "Yes, that's my brand." That's where you end up with the difference between a brand film that shouts at you, "This is who we are," a good commercial that helps the consumer think, "That's for me."

DH: There are two pieces of information that helped me interpret all of this better. One is that there was a big move in the ads to the more-energy thing. The marketing people said in their brief, "Now let's pump it up. It should be energizing, not just refreshing." So that stimulated them to go this route. The other thing is that Mountain Dew always wanted to be a national brand. It had always been a rural white brand. They wanted to go urban metro and figured that it was through black culture that they could get there. And so have this very white-identified rural brand knocking on the door. And you're always tempted. They're tempted again, because hip-hop is no longer hard-core ghetto stuff. So they think, "Maybe we can go into that space;" but no, they can't. Consumers said that Mountain Dew is not like that. It just doesn't work.

FR: I'm glad you brought that up, because I always associated Mountain Dew with a Southern rural product. This is striking, because I am one of the five Americans who doesn't like colas. So when I have to drive long distances, I always drink Mountain Dew. When I used to buy it, people would look at me like, "Why are you buying Mountain Dew?" You can't say, "I don't like colas." I've always been a Mountain Dew drinker. It was fascinating for me to see all these commercials and find that, all of sudden, I'm drinking something that is hot! I had been drinking it all along, right? So it's interesting to see how this really does impact the social environment. Now people don't say, "Why do you drink Mountain Dew?" Now it's, "Mountain Dew? Oh, yes."

AB: It's still the same Mountain Dew, just so you know.

FR: And then when they started advertising Diet Mountain Dew, I thought, "Who wants Diet Mountain Dew?" The whole purpose is to get the jolt.

WMO: Now I want to show another commercial that we haven't seen before. This is one that is now 20 years old and falls into the extreme history category. It's also a very different kind of commercial, because it was used to introduce something. Most advertising, in this day and age, is not usually introducing a lot of new things. I'm interested in hearing what the creative people have to say about a commercial like this.

Click here to view IBM Commercial (Windows Media File)

WMO: This is from 1984 when the IBM personal computer was being introduced as a business tool.

AB: This is as much about context as it is about the thing itself. This is also the pre-ironic age in some ways. People could watch this and listen to it literally. It wasn't irony upon sarcasm upon irony upon sarcasm until you don't know where you even stand. The idea of using computers was so new then. I think it's really great to watch these things. You actually get something from them. They have a bit of wit for the time. They are kind of classy. I think it was a good point for advertising. I think it is something that people look back at and are really proud of. But again, you are working now against such a different viewer sitting there, thinking "Guilty until proven innocent," instead of, "If you told me that it makes my teeth white, that's terrific." It was a different world. I love this stuff. It's fun to look back and see it and say that it's different. Honestly, lots of the key messages from IBM are still basically the same: Make your business run better, make it run smoother. There are different ways and different tools, but the message stays the same. I like this kind of stuff. I think it is interesting and effective for the time. Now, I could show you real horror spots that were done between this and now, where they tried to redo this, and it's painful, because the production quality and the wit and intelligence kind of fall apart. Then you are in a danger zone, because it's goofy.

WMO: Can I play devil's advocate and ask you some questions?

AB: Sure.

WMO: Always, in these old ones, a red rose is sitting on the desk. When students are looking at this and are trying to decode ads, they often go to places like that. There is always a red rose on the desk in all these old IBM commercials. Why? What does it mean? Even if you can't answer it specifically, answer generically for me as to what we are to do with something like the rose.

BG: I'll start. I don't have as good a feeling about this one as you do because of the violence it does to the original Charlie Chaplin films. They've done a real selective job of lifting things. But I know the films, and that rose is a reference from Charlie Chaplin. That rose is the key signifier about his hope for a future with this woman and her transformation. It's all about transformation.

WMO: Now I'll be devil's advocate again. Who knows that? You do, but the thousands of people who see it don't.

BG: When we look back at it, this ad is about transformation. The first half is about a world that is not working very well. The second half is about a world that is transformed and things run smoother. That red rose is such a favorite in anti-depressant ads. It's perhaps Desyrel which uses the red rose. At first, it's not open, when you're depressed. When you're not depressed anymore and you use the product, lo and behold, it's a nicely opened red rose. It is used over and over as a signifier.

WMO: What do we do about signifiers that most people don't know?

PK: Again, we're not that bright. I would venture to say, show this to 20 advertising people, and 19 of them won't see it. So the creative director here, I think it was Lord Geller Federico Einstein,¹⁵ obviously, on some level, had an incredible love for Charlie Chaplin. The red rose is homage. It is wrapped up with all that symbolism, but to you, to me, independent of the red rose, there is a reason for the loveable tramp. Life � la Modern Times doesn't work. Now that the IBM product is here on center stage, the world works. So, without that knowledge, it works just fine anyway.

BG: I guess the question here is, What kind of collective memory do we have for symbols in a world that is really moving very rapidly, where we throw out more culture each day than we perhaps have? How is it that there are certain continuities despite all that? And there seem to be. The fact that Budweiser runs ad after ad isn't predicated upon you knowing the earlier ads. It's just having a feel for the photography, for the style. So there is some part of our collective memory that holds on, but what that is exactly is a really good question. How does advertising contribute to some kind of collective memory on the one hand, while shredding it at the same time?

AB: I think he's right about this stuff. You have to remember that the people behind the scenes making this stuff are film fanatics. They are wannabe film directors.

DH: So they are making little films.

AB: They are, and the best of them usually have the broadest understanding of film, pop culture, and all that stuff. When you sit around and talk about different scenes in a lot of commercials, you reference movies, and that is the language for talking about that stuff. And when you actually execute it, you know there are little things that are just part of that pride of the craft that people put in there. Quite frankly, sometimes clients don't even notice these things. Not that we are trying to sneak anything through. It's just a little flourish.

WMO: Thank you for the red rose. I have a better understanding of that now, and what you say is interesting. The rose also looks nice on the desk, so you can think about it on lots of levels. Plus, I like roses.

LP: But before we leave roses, there's another level in which it functions, and that is—given that there is all this technology, this business kind of environment—you get this little bit of nature. It's interesting to make that kind of contrast. It may be artistic, but it functions at another level, and that is still aesthetic.

FR: And the Chaplin figure is a humanizing element in conjunction with IBM. One of the problems I find with students looking at older ads is that they don't know there is a whole reservoir of cultural symbols that have to do with history, the Bible, things like that. Often they are stumped. They look at an ad and say, "I have no idea what it means," because they cannot interpret the symbols.

WMO: It's very interesting to listen to other people critique national advertising traditions. One of the things that is often said about British advertising from an American point of view is that it is full of in-group jokes that are really hard to get. You have to be British to understand it. But I think that is a really important clue to the difference between American and British advertising. An English copywriter explained it to me. She said, "Look, we all go to school and we all study the same curriculum. Everybody knows the same thing. Therefore, when an ad refers to something, there's a probability of assuming that everybody gets it. In America, you guys don't have a common curriculum. You can't make many assumptions about general knowledge." It produces a very interesting cultural situation in which there are problems with referents, because people have different information, different cultural knowledge. What does this mean for the creative process in advertising? What kinds of assumptions can you make about what people know or what they will understand?

FR: This is also true about films. At a certain point in time, a lot of younger people stop getting references about older films. So when you see an ad and think, "Oh, that's Casablanca," you can't really be sure everyone in your class knows it.

AB: The same is true in a commercial.

FR: But they are more likely to know it if it's from a commercial!

WMO: That brings up a point, that people often confuse the derivative with the original. The derivative can even become the new original. The commercial use can override the original idea. It makes for an interesting intertextual process.

FR: That's something that you see happen a lot in music. The Chevy commercial that has, "Like a Rock." At some time, I was playing the Bob Seeger album and my daughter came up to me and said, "And I just thought that was a commercial. I didn't know it was a song." But you see, you and I know it's a song, because we're in a certain age group; but for my daughter, it's just a commercial.

WMO: When my daughter was seven, she was listening to a commercial at her grandmother's house in Chicago: "Butternut Bread. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Then later when she discovered poetry, and I'm reading to her some famous poems, including "Sonnets from the Portuguese," her words were, "Hey, they stole that." So the original reference for her was the commercial.

BG: Let's ask the creative guys: When you are looking for references that you think will resonate with a target audience, is this what you do? Do these issues play into it at all?

CM: We're really good at borrowing, and some people are really good at being ahead of the game. But you can really see when it is not working. Especially in youth marketing, there is a lot of, "Hey, this is cool," and sometimes it really doesn't work. But there are really well referenced advertising people—directors and photographers—who can capture different styles. I've shot things intentionally—we all have, in different styles—to have the vibe of Dracula or the vibe of a Leoni Western. These are great things that our collective culture treasures. When you pay homage to them in the right way, it can be really great. When I watched the Mountain Dew reel, the one with the Black guy stomping through the 'hood in a comic book style, I thought of another ad, although I may have my timeline messed up. Nike did a series of spots for the Olympics for the first Dream Team in 1992, where they used Barkley, Robinson, and all the players were all animated in that style. It was great, because they were making their own comic book. But Mountain Dew is mimicking Nike, and that happens a lot. The spot, "Barkley of Seville," was fantastic. When people do things really well, it's a lot of fun. But when they don't do it well, it's painful. The Pizza Hut Muppets commercial during the Superbowl with Jessica Simpson was a mess.

Click here to view Pizza Hut "Step Away" Commercial (MPEG File)

AB: I am thinking about how you can keep drawing from the culture, but there is also an issue about filling the culture back up. Quite frankly, because of the all the resources that we have, the industry pumps this stuff out quite quickly and in tremendous volume. I think a lot of the other institutions that traditionally fill culture, some have proceeded better than others have. The public sphere—politics, government—hasn't really been adding anything we can be tremendously proud of over the last 20 years. Religion. Things like that. I'm not saying that they are falling behind or that they are wrong, but the relative presence of those things to pour back into the culture bucket is a lot smaller than it used to be. It's also very hard to compete with commercial productions, because we have amazing resources to generate this kind of stuff. We all like to work on pro bono stuff. It's great to use all the tools to do that kind of stuff.

CM: We get to buy some of our soul back that way.

PK: One of the things that is interesting in youth culture today is that the pendulum is swinging back. There is a new authenticity out there. Even though Brittany is out there being as outrageous as she can, Nora Jones looks like she is going to single-handedly save the music industry, and she is a "real deal" kind of thing. These people can really play and write. Vanessa Carlton, Avril Lavigne, Michelle Branch, and a whole slew of people who can actually compose, play instruments, and all that kind of stuff [are emerging] as a reaction to all the manufactured bands. So the good news about culture is that it does refill itself at a certain point in time. Certainly we see it among youth. They've had enough of phony stuff rammed down their throats. The Justin Timberlake phenomenon is pretty interesting, because the kid actually has some talent.

LP: This idea of cultural ownership . . . Given the kinds of resources in the different institutions that you are talking about—religion, politics, or even community organizations—that have played a much stronger role in the past in terms of contributing back to the cultural bucket, what do you think of Adbusters or some of these critical groups out there? It really does bring into question public-versus-private culture and the role of the ad industry as a cultural institution using, appropriating, and reappropriating public space.

AB: I think the culture is best served by well-educated people who can discern truth from falsehood. The information age does not make everyone smart. The information age just gives everyone a lot of information. If people know how to think critically through things, everybody is better off. Business institutions do have resources. They're also tightly managed and researched, with all those focus groups and that kind of stuff. I think it is incredibly important that media awareness groups and other critics exist. The truth is, if we are let to go too far, we will be rejected by our own excesses. I was reading something today that Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, wrote back in the 1950s. It was a speech to employees, and it said that we exist at the whim of the public. If we behave, we get to stay. If we don't behave, we don't. Now that's a different world from today, but that's the way he felt. I have two kids, too, and my kids watch commercials. I don't want to say that these people can't advertise or these people can't say this. That's not the way the country is set up. Everyone gets to say what they want, but there has to be the basis of people being able to say, "I agree, I don't agree. That's true. That's false." I'm all for the presence of Adbusters and other critics. I think we should be scrutinized fully. I also think we have a responsibility to control ourselves.

CM: I very consciously bring these things to the attention of my clients so that they understand them. All my businesses are young adult businesses. I run a group at McCann which is young-adult oriented. It's all 18-to-30. They need to know our job is to keep the window open. That's good dialogue going on out there. You can't be afraid of that stuff. It's just like you can't be afraid of a movie like The Passion of the Christ. Don't walk away from it. Go find out about it and make up your own mind.

WMO: I want to ask one more question about the IBM spot. I'd like to hear your response to an observation that some of the critics have made about advertisements in general. It is that one of the overwhelming characteristics of 20^th century American and other advertising traditions, but particularly American advertising, is how products appear without being referenced to where they come from. Namely, the production process is always obscured. We never see the labor that goes into making a car. We never see where things come from—how things are produced through hard work and labor. Commodities just appear, and then they are consumed. This particular commercial is a rare example of taking us into the workplace. But what we see in that workplace is a joyful, happy environment where people are roller-skating, the boss is happy, and so are all the workers. Actually, someone slips and falls on a conveyer belt—something that could well be disastrous in real life—but in the commercial, it's just another joyful experience. To the critics, this commercial tells us a false story about the nature of work and life and about social class and about lots of issues like this, while we are being asked to join in the fun and happiness of the whole thing. So there is an essential falseness in what the ad is telling us. In repeating that essential falseness over and over again in the discourse of advertising, a very heavy ideological trope goes along with advertising messages. This is just an example of the problem. In being led to believe certain things like this and doing other things like confusing the original with the derivative source, what ends up happening is that a particular ideology of work and consumption gets presented. People who actually work in factories would probably never tell the story quite like that, nor would this be likely to jibe with their experiences. Some of the critics are deeply concerned about such ideological messages that come through ads in this way.

PK: A couple of things in response. One is that I don't agree with you. I don't agree with you on this one, because the choice of the Chaplin character is very intentional and this is not reality. It's Modern Times. It's an allegory. That's what's being traded on. Another way I disagree with you is that there have been cases where we have seen factories that were very carefully chosen. The Saturn was built on the back of real people and factory workers and a production line that communicated "a different kind of car company." They aren't having the best time today, but for Chevrolet to come out of nowhere with a different brand name plate and treat it differently, and to deal with real people connecting with real people on a car that made sense, was an example.

WMO: But that's worker pride that you see brought in. That's a connection to American workers. But I'm talking really about the nature of work, about what work itself is like.

PK: And you are talking factory people per se. The flip side of it is that there have been plenty of factory commercials in the kid market, and they all fail. They all fail basically because there is no idea in them. Because the way in which a product is made in the 30-second, limited format that we have, there is no real there there. There's no excitement about it.

WMO: But that's not my question. The question is about the nature of work. What does it tell us about society itself? That's the critical question.

BG: Take a more recent piece. Here I think of Fed Ex, who ran a campaign a few years ago where the shops of Europe are very quiet and still. "Is this any way to run a business?" And then it cuts to what looks like Asia and a factory, which is also empty, and then you see, suddenly, a few people, and then a truck goes out and the shop fills, and so on. In some odd way, that ad, compressed as it is, does give you a little insight into a new system of production on a global scale. It doesn't really show you workers, and we really don't know how well they are treated or not, as in the whole issue of Nike factories and so on, but it does give you some insight into out-sourcing, globalization, and no need for warehousing and so on and so forth. It seems to me that sometimes we need to read ads in terms of not just what is immediately visible, but also what is implied absent. There is a lot in there that we can pull out, and in the case of Fed Ex, they want to tell a story: It's more efficient to produce that way. But they don't want to say, "We're shipping your jobs over to Sri Lanka because it's more profitable," because then they are in the position of the White House today.

RA: There is another ad, talking about the workplace, same year, same product line. 1984 Macintosh. Think about what the workplace there is like. Maybe think about brand personality, too. When you said it was a 1984 ad, I first thought of an Orwellian ad. This IBM ad is really a solid demonstration of IBM's personality, and that's a good thing. There is a solidity in those 20 years. Then I thought, Oh, my God. The Orwell ad of 1984. What an extraordinary foil. What if, on a given night of TV, I could have seen that ad? They were so different. What a different way of talking about the workplace. It doesn't need to be smashed open.

Click here to view Apple Commercial (Windows Media File)

AB: They need each other, but remember, Charlie Chaplin is a conceit because it's a guy dancing around in an office, but you have to remember that the 1984 workers were a conceit too. Now, I've seen some pretty miserable offices, but we are not quite at that point yet. Now, I think in terms of portraying the world of work, I think this is a bigger problem in programming than it is in advertising. I think one of the most crushing things about television is that it portrays professions that wouldn't make nearly that much money with people with a particular lifestyle. It puts so much pressure on people who ostensibly have the same job but are supposed to live with that standard of living. It's the Friends problem. All these people that people compare themselves to and think, "How come I don't have this, this, or this?"

WMO: It started with the Huxtables, I think, because it was a TV show where the doctor didn't have to see patients and the lawyer never had cases and they just lived in luxury.¹⁶

AB: Well, it's a studious avoidance of the mundane. There is nothing mundane in these people's lives. There are no boring hours that fill the space. There's always something exciting happening. I think, quite honestly, that people don't take much advertising seriously enough to interpret it as falsely portraying the workplace. I don't worry as much about that. And frankly, advertisers don't usually want to portray the workplace—it's miserable.

CM: Let me tell you what's interesting, though. You talk about a trend and the way people's tolerance for something starts to kick back and they start to ask for something else. The show, The Office, has a very mundane look. It's very funny, almost painful. It's almost painful to watch. It's not Seinfeld. It's Seinfeld sitting next to the devil. But out of The Office, you get the new Burger King work—very much influenced by the ho-humness, the mundane.

Click here to view Burger King Commercial (Quicktime File)

I think what is happening here is that first, you realize the public wants it, and then somebody is smart enough to convince a client that this is where it's headed. So the first client hops on it with a bit of a vision and will get credit. You can see that the public gets sick of it. I do think the bigger issue is not an advertising issue. It's a popular culture issue, a programming issue, and movie issue. It's the way we idolize and depict each other.

WMO: The truly remarkable thing is that if you go to all these other parts of society and you ask similar questions about responsibility and culture, they will also say that it's not us either. They'll insist that the problem lies elsewhere.

CM: They're wrong!

[Laughter]

LP: But isn't there something in advertising because it's directed at consumers, highlighting a certain dimension of people's lives as consumers, that skews it in a certain direction?

CM: Our job is to make you feel good about something.

DH: But sometimes ads do talk about work, especially middle-class work. Nike was a campaign about work. Just Do It. Let's work. In the old Bud ads, This Bud's for You was about work. They aren't showing work, but they are referencing it. You're asking ads to portray reality rather than tell a dream.

LP: I'm not actually asking that question. My question is really, Why do we expect it to show work? I think it probably should be more interested in showing consumption, because it's about consumption.

WMO: The reason that is done is because Marxists are analyzing work and labor, and it's a part of a Marxist critique. It's a critique that asks about class, and therefore about the production of goods. It's a line of thinking that implies certain questions. But yes, this is a good point to make, which is that depicting work is not what an ad is about.

LP: But even if it was something like Nike, I'm not sure Nike really was about work.

DH: It was Nike's philosophy applied to work.

LP: I think it was about leisure, and leisure that you could just turn around and Just Do It. I mean, I did it when I was doing my dissertation. I had that mantra: Just Do It!

AB: At IBM, we have done maybe hundreds of commercials about depicting work as it really is. Like the fact that you have a meeting, the fax doesn't work, the speakerphone doesn't work, everyone's in the wrong room. This is not so much in a class zone, but it is more like we all work in an office and we deal with this. We are supposed to be this well-oiled machine, but the truth is, it is fairly Keystone Cop-ish a lot of the time. And that's the truth. I think that portraying that for IBM, rather than the Chaplin character, is great. A lot of people say, "Okay, they actually get what I'm up against on a daily basis. Maybe they actually understand what I have to deal with. Maybe they make stuff that helps." It seemed to work.

[Paul Kurnit leaves the discussion to go to another appointment.]

WMO: As we move into the final stretch here, let's look at one more commercial, which is the one that Bob had shown us earlier. Let's ask the creatives to help us understand.

Click here to view Bristol-Myers Squibb Commercial (Quicktime File)

AB: I knew we would get hit with the pharmaceuticals.

[Laughter]

CM: It's too big a business now.

AB: This is a very complicated one, because this goes back to everyone's ability to discern what they see. Because you can have negative feelings about these commercials, but if my kid got sick and was going to die, and there was a medicine that could save him, all bets are off. I also think it is very difficult to generalize about this category. You see a lot of the direct-to-the-consumer stuff that doctors have feelings about: Is it good? Is it bad? Does it suggest to people that they have something that they may not have? This is an endless conversation.

DH: Can you talk about the composition of this specific ad? To me, it seems like it is pretty straightforward, and it seems to raise some of the ethical issues we were talking about before. Your argument that it's the consumers' responsibility to know the product, to read the labels, and so on, makes good sense when applied to the beer category. Beer is a simple product made of four ingredients. The taste and the alcoholic effect don't vary much. So, it's okay to presume that consumers understand the product and how it works.

Drugs are very different. There is no way that Joe Public can know about the technical details of these products or understand completely the scientific studies on their effects. So pharma ads can have powerful imagery. They are teaching us how to think about what the product is and its effects. They are teaching us about drugs. This seems to me to be an ethnical issue. What do such ads teach us? What are the effects on individual and social welfare?

BG: What are the many ways in which we could have done this differently?

CM: I think there are other ways to do this, and I think this execution is a fallback. Let's just say it in a heartfelt way and put in beautiful imagery and we'll pay for Lance Armstrong because everybody knows that is a tremendous story. We're a great company, and we do great things. But you could back up to before you even begin the work and ask, "What is it that you want us to communicate? Give it to me in one sentence." That isn't to say that you couldn't break the rules and end up with something as simple as a 1984 kind of spot, because you are really talking about groundbreaking medicine, right? There are various ways to approach the topic that are different from what's been done, but I think companies fall back on this way, on this kind of corporate advertising. You see the same ad run for insurance companies, medical companies, sometimes even beer companies. "I'm Pete Coors out here in the Rockies . . . I'm here to make the company feel good." A lot of the time, it's not really done for consumers. It's done for the shareholders or it's done for the sales force. Even in beer, we do the work six months ahead of time. We do it for sales meetings so that distributors get behind it and get going.

AB: The problem is that a lot of these companies don't want to go out on a limb, because these are dicey, legal spaces to say that we are curing this and we are curing that. But it would be beneficial to understand some of these things and what they are. Some of the stuff we do on IBM is kind of obscure. We try to explain a little bit about what it is, so that people have a sense of what these complicated things are. I think it could be a lot more interesting, but you're right. These exist for the most convoluted combinations of consumers and doctors and patients and lobbyists and . . .

FR: . . . shareholders and politicians who are influencing drug policy.

AB: Like Craig said it, it's a general feel-good thing. It's a bit of a missed opportunity, because there are some facts about these companies that you wished people knew. Like, yes, sometimes it can be scary what they are working on, but on the other hand, it could save your child's life. I think they gloss over a lot. It would be helpful if they were a little more frank.

CM: It would be more powerful if they were. What happens is that too many people end up looking at it and having their say about the spot. Getting advertising approved is excruciating. If you are lucky, there are only two or three people you have to work with. If you are unlucky, you get a committee!

Somebody will say, "Well, we got Lance, so we've got to show Lance." Somebody else will say, "Show the lab, because it tells them we are technical," or, "Maybe we should show Lance with his son, because that's the story of life propagating."

BG: Are corporate ads like this also run through focus groups?

CM: Yes, and remember that focus groups can breed some of the worst work out there.

RA: Do you ever not use focus groups?

CM: There are some clients who don't.

AB: There are good ways and bad ways to use groups.

CM: I believe in using them. When I worked at Deutsch, we had a saying: "We don't test commercials, we test issues." Let's figure it out. Let's get on our knees and figure out what is motivating. I worked on pharmaceuticals. I worked on Zyrtec, and we actually did some pretty interesting work because we found something underneath that was compelling. It can be really useful to talk to consumers. It's just that when people let that make their decisions for them, it doesn't always work.

AB: Like anything else, there is really great research conducted by people who are really good at it who sift through comments and understand human dynamics around a table, and the fact is that there is always the awful person who goes, "They're a bunch of liars!" But you let some of these go and you say there is a fundamental issue, and the fundamental issue here is that you are sitting behind the glass of the focus group and a lot of people tend to treat it like a debugging operation, "Found a problem. Found a problem!" That's tough to deal with, because if you made a commercial that says, "Whatever drug you are taking. It costs $1000 a month. That sounds crazy. It sounds like we are just a big, bad, greedy company. But if it took 20 years and $150 million and 300,000 scientist hours to get there, and it makes you healthy, that's what we do." Now, the thing is, you put that in a focus group, and you say that it costs $1000, you get, "Ack! It costs $1000? That's incredible! I hate drug companies!" The whole thing can get blown out of proportion. So it's tough to get good things from the groups sometimes.

BG: Can I follow up on this in a different direction? Where's the cutting edge now in advertising? What do you regard as the best new advertising?

AB: Actually, I've done several things lately—all very brilliant.

[Laughter]

I tend to be impressed with stuff that has a voice that builds over time. I'm continually impressed by Volkswagen. It has a fabulously confident voice that never seems to have to pander. It is always right on the tone of who they want to talk to, but always leaning towards dignifying that group rather than taking them down. They may operate on that quasi-adolescent-forever thing about "Cookie falls on the floor, five second role." But it's dignified in a sort of fun way. Their voice is so good over time, so consistent, and they manage to be positive without being hokey or fake. They push the envelope for the rest of us. I think that spot they did with the squares was just a masterpiece.

CM: I agree. And I think Apple has been doing some really interesting things too. The fact that iPod has been able to create work that doesn't really have any words in it, not even any people. You don't even see anybody's face, and it has generated so much buzz around it.

From a bigger standpoint, I am more interested in what people are doing outside of television right now. We are looking at ways, given smaller budgets and less television watching, of how to connect in different ways. I think it is all changing. Even though it's a clich� to say so, it really is. I'm drawn to people who are doing unconventional stuff.

WMO: Well, thank you all very much. We very much appreciate you coming today to help us talk through a whole lot of issues.

AB: Can I ask one question of the professors?

WMO: Sure.

AB: Conversations about advertising often revolve around the stuff that repulses us. I wonder if there are elements or thoughts among students or you guys about the best, the stuff that raises the bar. And not just creatively, but socially, in terms of expecting more, challenging people to think. We don't want to end up doing the lowest common denominator work and therefore attracting lowest common denominator people into the business. What do your students think about advertising? Where are people in terms of what they think of the business?

BG: My college students are—

CM: Are you on the West Coast?

BG: Yes, on the West Coast. My students are anti-advertising in the sense that there is a culture out there, which, as you know, sort of says, "I don't want to admit that I am ever influenced in any way by an advertisement, because that would indicate that I have a weakness of spirit in some fashion." So you have to discuss it with them via the back door. It often turns out that they like a lot more than they will let onto. But I think students really do like advertising. For example, they will talk all day about the IBM ads and about the aesthetics. It turns out that their real fascination with advertising is often around aesthetic issues.

AB: The craft.

BG: The craft. About the detail. About the way it is boxed. About the use of color. For example, we did fonts. In advertising, they are great. For people who say they never watch an ad, they could all go, "Ah, Pepsi," when you show them one part of an "A"! Or, "Nope, that was Coke before 1960."

[Laughter]

I think they are really tuned into those things. It's just that you have got to find a way to get them to talk about it. They really do appreciate the quality of advertising in terms of contributing to a cultural form, but not the content. That's where they sort of say no.

CM: That's interesting, because I think people really love brands. They really are interested in brands and branding and it's no different than the logo of a football team on your shirt or the Coke logo or whatever.

DH: A lot of brand advertising is terrible. But if you look at it, I think 90 percent is client fault and not the agency's. Clients have all the power. You guys get the rap, always.

CM: Right.

DH: When you look at it, do you have a client that allows you to deliver good work? Because of the processes you just talked about, most of it is crap work and that is the stuff we get inundated with, so occasionally we find the Nikes and the Volkswagens, where you go, "Wow, this is astonishing stuff."

CM: Unfortunately, not every company is content contributing to the ten or 20 percent of good work. There are three or five companies—I think HP is also a good example of a brand that has done really strong work lately—that occupy that ideal space. It would be nice if the proportion were higher.

LP: I just want to make a couple of comments. I am making a documentary film right now about Mexican-Americans. I'm really giving them the opportunity to talk back in response to being targeted as a market. What a couple people said I thought might be relevant for you. One person basically says that she thinks being targeted as a market is a lot of crap. She says that the reason she feels it is a lot of crap is because she feels like the companies are not taking the issues of the Latino community seriously. Again, I'm not sure that's the role that they should have, but at any rate, this is her comment. Things like social issues affecting the Latino community. Like low rates of graduation, drugs, or teen pregnancy, poverty, et cetera, et cetera. Another person said she really liked seeing people like herself in a magazine or on TV. That is really gratifying to her. At the same time, she said, "You know, the best advertising is when it's sincere." Then she catches herself and says, "Well, no advertising is sincere. It's all trying to sell you something. But when it tricks you into feeling that it is sincere," and she goes on. But you get that inspirational part where it is about racial identity and then also being a social player, dealing with issues.

WMO: Robin, what goes on at Wellesley about advertising?

RA: Like what Bob said before, my students probably wouldn't want to admit that they really care about brands despite the fact that they are always buying the same ones, because that would indicate that the ads, in fact, have been persuasive. But they like advertising very much and they see advertising as a form of entertainment—anything that produces some kind of real emotion, particularly the funny, witty, and clever ones. They notice the heartwarming ones, too. There was a Volkswagen ad a few years back, maybe for Passat, I can't remember. But it's very musical.

Click here to view Volkswagen Commercial (Quicktime File)

The students liked it so much they asked to see it over and over after I showed it in class. And then they started reminiscing about that ad. Where they were when they saw that ad. There were huge stories about that ad. I had somehow missed it when it came out the year before. But it's a pretty cool ad. The music is great. So they had reactions like that to a lot of ads.

Some of them are interested in it as a business, sure. I've got some interning in Boston now who hope to get jobs in advertising when they graduate. A few. My students are all women, of course. I don't know if they are not interested in going into the creative side or if they feel that it is not going to be accepting or easy for them. There don't seem to be too many women wanting to head in that direction.

CM: There are a lot of women in creative jobs.

RA: They more go into the account side.

CM: Both of us work for companies that are largely run by women. My creative group is still mostly male.

RA: The women students somehow realize that.

CM: But it's definitely not like a ten percent. We're probably 35 or 40 percent women.

RA: What do you think it is industry-wide for all the big firms? Do you think it is down to ten or 20 percent women?

AB: I don't think so.

CM: I don't think so. At Deutsch, there were more women than men.

RA: Really?

CM: That was Donny!

DH: Yes, he takes his shirt off and gets the women around him.

RA: Well, there you go!

AB: You said that they know, of course, that no ads are sincere. Do they think anything is sincere? This is a very big question.

BG: It's a very cynical culture.

AB: People attempt to mock mockery, right? You go and make fun of the TV show with the little machines that beat each other up. And I wonder if there is such an expectation of insincerity that it doesn't matter. And I wonder if that goes across politics, where you just assume everyone is bullshitting. I'm curious about that when you try to make earnest messages, because people don't want to talk in an earnest way about anything that would suggest commitment or hope.

RA: I think it's even more basic. Any time it is an ad, someone is trying to sell you something. That means what they are doing is self-serving. And even if they are being sincere about what they say, there is always this element that makes it feel a little untrustworthy.

WMO: My students are always looking for the catch in an ad. They always think there is something more to it than seems to be the case. When they hear something that sounds good, they want to know what it's going to cost them—and not just in terms of money. They are used to waiting for the shoe to drop. They seem to be prepared for ads to be like that. They're very jaded.

BG: A bunch of students brought in a clipping about Ken and Barbie last week.

WMO: Oh, yes. That about killed the students.

CM: I missed that one.

FR: Ken is not in the picture anymore.

RA: They broke up.

BG: Now it's Blaine.

RA: He's gay, and they finally found out!

BG: Every single person in that classroom was, like, "This is a marketing ploy. This is a marketing gimmick. Why have they done this?" They'd dated for 43 years.

AB: One of the oddest things to me is the complaints about product placement, about product placement on TV being evil. I could only think, "Wait a second. That's the whole reason for television!"

[Laughter]

They are claiming that somehow TV had morphed into a device to sell.

WMO: That's the whole reason for it in America, but the British and the Canadians chose otherwise in the beginning.

FR: That is true. In our culture, that relationship is essential.

LP: But what does that say about us as a people? I think after 9/11, these things work against each other. I think we are really having a hard time grappling with the power that this nation has. We think of ourselves as an underdog and as people who are always right. So I think underlying all of that, cynicism is a belief.

DH: But you cannot believe through commerce anymore.

AB: But that's the thing. Commerce was never set up to be a belief system.

DH: But that's how it has made its money for a lot of years.

AB: If you come to it and say, "I want salvation or spiritual sustenance," you're not going to get it! I know that is partly what brands are about, but we get into a scary space where we say, "If you really want to go that far, that's not going to be fulfilling. You can like this brand or you can like that brand, but if this is morphed in your mind from an entertainment device sponsored by the soap manufacturers to a place where you are trying to find meaning, that's a contextual issue that's very large."

DH: These ads are plopping meaning in a bottle. That's what these ads do. That is what you guys are selling. That's what makes great Nike ads and great Volkswagen ads. That's the game you guys are in.

WMO: It also seems, on this point, that everybody is trying to sell you something. This is what life is all of a sudden.

LP: I could see where you would be intimidated, because that's a big project. If you think about giving meaning the way certain institutions did—the Church did this, or the political institutions did that. At the same time, I think as Doug said, you're on this terrain. If you are giving people back their identity, or if you are selling people back their identity, then you are in this meeting space. But then the question is, what do you do with it, not whether people will stop or start to look for meaning in this zone, because clearly they do. So that ups the ante for you all, in terms of what are the kinds of demands that people are making upon you.

CM: You're right, though. Everybody is trying to sell you something, but the point is that we have to learn to be discerning consumers of anything someone is trying to sell.

My mother called me. She's a devout Catholic. She's very French-Canadian, church-going every morning. And she's like, "You have to go see The Passion." And I ask her, "Why do I have to go see it?" And she says, "Because it's true. It's the story of Christ." And I said, "It's Mel Gibson's version of the story of Christ." It baffled her that I would even throw it back that way. But that's what is great about this country and what is dangerous about this country. Bush is trying to sell you something. Kerry is trying to sell you something. IBM is trying to sell you something. Microsoft is trying to sell you something.

BG: We now have a next generation caught in between. On the one hand, they really do want something that is probably gone forever, which is the Truth. On the other hand, they don't believe anybody at this point, and it's the clash between desire and disbelief that is so hard. I was thinking of branding as you were talking about it. I was thinking of all the kids I see now—not so much my students, but others who are tattooing themselves with brands. How can you tattoo yourself with a brand unless you really believe in it somehow?

AB: That's happening?

RA: Is that happening out West? Is it here?

FR: I don't think it's just out West. It may be more so out West.

CM: But that's life—the search for Truth. That's what every philosopher has ever grappled with.

BG: What's different now is that the dominant institutions are no longer religious. In some ways, it's your institution that people now look to for meaning and identity. You ask about my students. The other thing my students desperately want is community.

CM: Yes. We know that.

BG: They desperately want—in a world where nothing has a place any longer—they want a place, they want a community, they want friends, they want some of those things.

CM: I think that is very clear.

BG: Look at how global commerce works. Meanings are fleeting. What you see one day is gone the next. It makes some sense to grab onto anything. Music is a biggie where they invest their identity. One of the things I do with my freshmen is that I make them play a song that they hate, and then say to them, "Now you are going to go and introduce yourself to somebody, and that this is music you like." Boy, their body language says, "No, I'm not going to do that," because they now recognize that they are now the sum total of the signifiers that they consume.

AB: What a great job you professors have.

Notes

¹Goldman, Robert and Stephen Papson. 1996. Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising. New York: Guilford Press.

²The Smithsonian collection of advertising material is located at the Archives Center at The National Museum of American History http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d-7.htm. INTERNET

³Goldman, Robert. 1998. Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

⁴The Duke University collection is located at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Marketing, & Advertising History http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/hartman/. INTERNET.

⁵O'Barr, William M. 1994. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in Advertising. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

⁶Published work featuring students in this exercise appear in "Consuming Madonna: A Critical Look at the Structure and Dynamics of Celebrity Consumption," Lisa Peñaloza, in 20 Years of Madonna: New Approaches to Madonna's Cultural Transformations, Freya Jarman and Santiago Fouz, editors, (forthcoming 2004), and "Madonna T/Races: Music Videos Through the Prism of Color," Lisa Peñaloza and Thomas Nakayama, in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory, ed. Kathy Schwichtenberg, (Boulder, CO :Westview Press, 1993, pp. 39-55).

⁷ For a detailed discussion of appellation, see Judith Williamson's Decoding Advertisements (Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1978, pp. 40-59.)

⁸Han, S. and S. Shavitt. 1994. "Advertising appeals in individualistic and collectivistic societies." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 30: 326-350.

⁹Judith Williamson explains in Decoding Advertisements (Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1978, p. 62) that one's relationship to one's mirror-image involves two contradictory perceptions. At one level, both the person and the mirror-image are the same; there is a flow of identity between the self and the representation of self. Paradoxically, at the same time, for the image to represent the "self," it must be split-off from the self; in order for a sign to signify or to "mean" a person, it cannot be that person.

¹⁰Psychologists Richard Petty and John Cacioppo developed the ELM model.

¹¹See for example, Goldman, Robert. 1992. Reading Ads Socially. New York: Routledge, and Goldman, Robert and Stephen Papson. 1996. Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising. New York: Guilford Press.

¹²The Milward Brown Group is a market research agency.

¹³DDB refers to the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach.

¹⁴The controversial Miller Lite Catfight commercial goes from a poolside argument into an angry, clothes-shredding wrestling match between two women who end up in bras and panties.

¹⁵The advertising agency, Lord Geller Federico Einstein, no longer exists.

¹⁶The Huxtables were the primary characters of The Cosby Show, a popular situation comedy that revolved around the everyday adventures of an upper-middle-class black family.

Robin M. Akert is a Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College. Her research has primarily focused on nonverbal communication, exploring the decoding and attributional stages of interpersonal perception. She recently began teaching a course at Wellesley, "Social Influence," which analyzes advertising as a form of persuasion and attitude change. She is currently investigating themes of racism in print advertising, by content-analyzing American periodicals from the 1930's and 1940's. She is the co-author of the college textbook, Social Psychology, which is currently in its fifth edition and has been translated into four languages.

Andy Berndt is Senior Partner and Creative Director at Ogilvy & Mather, New York. At Ogilvy, he has worked on IBM and ONDCP, among other accounts. Prior to Ogilvy, he worked on launching Microsoft's Windows 95, Nike's US business, and re-launching Apple Computer and the "Think Different" campaign. His work has appeared in venues from CA to the One Show to the Clio's to the London International Advertising Awards.

Paul Kurnit is Founder and President of Kurnit Communications and KidShop. He is an expert in social and cultural trends and is an innovator in the communications business. He is a frequent speaker and writer for television, radio and print media (e.g. NBC, CNN, Fox, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Barrons, Ad Age, AdWeek, BrandWeek). He has shared his expertise in consulting work for Disney, General Mills, Hasbro, McDonald's, Nickelodeon, Pepsi, Polaroid, Scholastic, Sony, Universal Studios and many other blue chip companies. Mr. Kurnit is also Clinical Professor of Marketing at Pace University.

Robert Goldman is Professor of Sociology at Lewis & Clark College. He is the author of several books relevant to the study of advertising, including Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh (with Stephen Papson), Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising (with Stephen Papson), and Reading Ads Socially. He is currently at work on a new project with Stephen Papson. This new work is entitled "Landscapes of Capital: Representing Time, Space, & Globalization in Corporate Advertising." It has been written as a book for the Internet and is a fully multimedia effort. It can be viewed at http://it.stlawu.edu/~global/ INTERNET.

Doug Holt is Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School where he currently teaches first year marketing. His academic research draws upon social and cultural theories to examine how the most important social categories impact consumption, and also how these categories are leveraged by firms in their branding activities. He is co-editor (along with Juliet Schor) of The Consumer Society Reader.His work has been published in journals such as Harvard Business Review, Strategy and Business, and Journal of Consumer Research.Before returning to school to receive his doctorate, Holt worked in brand management at Clorox and Dole.

Craig Markus is the creative co-founder of tag at McCann-Erickson, New York. He has created award-winning ideas for Labatt USA and worked on brands such as Rolling Rock, Dos Equis, and Bass Ale. Mr. Markus also launched Microsoft's Xbox and has guided the brand's creative voice in the incredibly competitive and fast-moving gaming business. In addition to tag, he has creative credits on MasterCard and Coca-Cola. Prior to moving to McCann, he was Senior Vice President and Group Creative Director at Deutsch, New York, where he was responsible for brands such as Tanqueray, Snapple, Tommy Hilfiger, Foot Locker, and Old Navy.

William M. O'Barr is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and Editor of Advertising & Society Review. His books include Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising, Rules versus Relationships, and Just Words: Law, Language, and Power. In addition to his interest in the social and cultural aspects of advertising, Professor O'Barr has researched law in a variety of cultural settings including East Africa, Canada, and the United States.

Lisa Peñaloza is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research is concerned with how consumers express culture in their consumer behavior, and in turn, how marketers negotiate various cultures of consumers. Market subcultures examined in her work relate to ethnicity/race, nationality, gender/sexuality, and industry. Her most recent work is a documentary film exploring the role of the market in the development of Mexican American community in San Antonio, Texas. Her work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Public Policy and Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Consumption, Markets and Culture.

Tom Reichert is Associate Professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Alabama. His research interests include media and politics, social marketing, and the content and effects of sex in the media. His research has appeared in Journal of Advertising, Journal of Communication, and Journalism Quarterly. He authored The Erotic History of Advertising (Prometheus, 2003), and co-edited and contributed to Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal (Erlbaum, 2003).

Faith Davis Ruffins is a historian in the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Her research interests include ethnicity and nationalism. She has curated numerous exhibitions on African American history, and her work has been published in Advertising & Society Review (http://0-muse.jhu.edu.biblio.eui.eu/journals/asr/v001/1.1ruffins.html INTERNET), AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Black Issues in Higher Education, Gender and History, and The Journal of the Washington Academy of Science. She is current working on a book, Finding Our Story in the History of the Nation: A Guide to African American Museums and Monuments (Smithsonian Press, 2005).