During the 1950s, television commercials were all about beauty – a “feast for the eye” as Marling (1996) phrases it. Throughout his discourse analysis of Betty Crocker’s cook book and the following transformation of the whole food industry, he also sheds light on the practice of TV advertisements. Beyond the food business, airlines and manufacturers of different products in fact adapted this distinct portrayal of womanhood: a competent household expert embodying maternal authority and heritage (p. 208). In the process of conveying the message that cooking and baking is effortless, fast and that there is no possibility of failure (a major fear of women back in the day), the cake mix and, ultimately, other convenient foods became the “perfect solution” (p. 227). Betty Crocker’s visually packed cook book simply reassured women that they were still wonderful cooks even if they were making use of the cake mix, which was merely meant as a “tool” supporting the customer’s talents (p. 228). In the meantime, the frozen food companies invested considerable shares of their advertising budgets into sponsorships of “popular, low-key, family television shows” (p. 236) in order to link the practice of eating such meals to the medium of television as another artifact embodying “delight”, lack of effort and pictorial pleasure” (p. 236). That being said, the whole food industry adapted and further developed the connotations previously attached to Betty Crocker. Here, the introduction of television as a medium for advertising played a crucial role since it “threatened to change the pictorial relationship between audience and corporate symbol by exposing the agreed-upon fiction of Betty Crocker” (p. 211). Betty Crocker suddenly had to become a “real” person, whereas radio commercials allowed her to “be” multiple voices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeJ2UrrF2Rk
At this point, it is helpful to draw on Tungate’s work (2007) since he concerns himself with the historical and technological context of advertising. By 1878, advertising had become a professional practice with J. Walter Thompson opening up the first modern advertising agency (p. 25). Throughout the 1920s – the “boom years” (p. 28) for advertising – and long afterwards radio was viewed as the medium to promote products and ideas. For instance, the “Jack adventure series” by Wheaties ran from 1931 until the 1950s, while the soap opera “Ma Perkins” was actually broadcasted for 37 years (p. 34). This eventually changed though when the first television commercials aired in 1941. By 1949 already, the renowned US advertising agency BBDO was spending 4 million Dollars on this new medium and expanded its TV department from 12 to 150 people. The total spending on advertising in the US rose from 12 million Dollars in 1949 to 158 million Dollars only 3 years later (p. 36). This did not mean however that advertising obtained the image of a honorable profession. It was rather considered somewhat “glamorous” by the beginning of the 1950s.
I will now proceed to elaborate on an example of a TV commercial that I personally chose in order to conduct a multimodal analysis based on Machin’s method (2007).
1956 Commercial for Kodak Signet 40 Camera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqR1QhE6U58
Generally speaking and in coherence with Machin (2007), images and videos displaying individuals aim at communicating “particular ideas about the participants and a particular attitude towards them” (p. 109). Within this TV commercial from 1956, Kodak tried to position its new Signet 40 camera as a convenient accessory for young and “stylish” couples. The commercial both offers information as well as includes certain demands, which Machin refers to as “image acts” (p. 111). In the first scene, the narrator requests the spectator to “see” how colorful the big photo slides are, which are being watched by a man and a woman cuddling on a sofa. That said, the participants are not acknowledging the viewer, while the narrator is asking them to do something. Ultimately, he or she takes up the role of an “observer” (p. 112) and is prompted to associate with “the theme of their feelings rather than their individual case” (p. 112), i.e. to relate to this particular situation based on own life experiences. The scene thus contains both an offer and a demand. After a close-up of the camera model itself, the (presumably) same couple is portrayed on a cruise ship. Both dressed in fancy suits, they are, again, looking past the camera. After pointing at something next to the camera, the woman takes a photograph facing this direction, accompanied by the narrator’s brief instructions (“Just aim, focus, snap. It is as easy as that.”). Throughout the commercial, the narrator is directly addressing the viewers, who remain observers though since the participants themselves are not acknowledging them directly. The angles of interaction mostly remain vertical, the camera slightly looking up to the protagonists. According to Machin (2007), this strategy is supposed to give the audience a sense of them having a higher status and more power (p. 114). Some angles are also oblique, adding movement and energy to the images, which suits the topic of “action shots” mentioned in the third scene. Here, the husband is engaging in a game of badminton while his wife is taking a photograph of him. Subsequently, the roles switch when the husband is taking a close-up shot of his wife – again, filmed from a lower angle. Throughout the different scenes, the distances (close shots / longer shots) change constantly. In fact, proper close-ups are only focussing the camera itself. By drawing on Machin (2007), this can be interpreted as the means to position the artifact as ‘the actual’ intimate companion, while the couple itself is supposed to embody a rather random, “general” (p. 116) couple or people, which could be anybody in fact. However, this notion is to be seen in Machin’s paradigm of “cultural categorisation” (p. 120), which might be supported by “generic and specific depictions” (p. 120). Here, stereotypes play a crucial role: As briefly mentioned before, the couple is wearing rather fancy clothing. The male appears in a suit, even a smoking, while the woman wears a blazer and skirt, a white polo shirt, a dress and an Alice band. What comes to mind is the “Hamptons” type of couple – white and wealthy yet young, married yet open for (classy) adventures ( e.g. going on a cruise). Significantly, the woman appears to be the “agent” – in this case, taking more photographs than her husband (and ultimately empowering woman to ‘take the lead’). That said, this product’s customer is not probably ‘anybody’. It is supposed to be someone (preferably female) who can certainly afford this technology as well as those journeys and activities providing especially beautiful motives.
References
Tungate, M. (2007). Adland: a global history of advertising. London and Philadelphia: Kogan Page Publishers.
Marling, K. A. (1996). As Seen on TV. The Visual Culture of Every-day Life in the 1950s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Machin, D. (2007). Introduction to multimodal analysis. London: Hodder Arnold.