In this post, I will focus on the beginning of the advertisement industry in the US, as well as analyze an advertisement from the period of 1950s with the help of Machin’s method.
The birth of advertisement in US
As pointed out by Tungate in his book Adland: a global history of advertising, the advertisement had quite of a rough start in the US. The first ads in America were supposed to sell of patent medicines. As Tungate writes: „ Familiar today via a stock character in Western movies – the quack doctor who stands on a crate in a dusty frontier town, extolling the virtues of his dubious potions
– they generated profit margins that left plenty of room for advertising expenditure.” (Tungate, 2007, p. 13) These were the first advertisement to show the power of advertisements and pitch up the sales. The first advertising agency in US opened in 1842, and later, with the opening of more of them, came the positions of copywriters and designers. Tungate points out in his post that: „While European advertisers often commissioned established artists to design posters for their brands, in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century a new generation of illustrators working on a commercial basis began to emerge.” (Tungate, 2007, p. 16) IT was the first time that the advertisements began to influence the pop culture. In the following part of the post, I will explain the method of Machin, and analyze one of advertisements from 1950s.
Machin and multimodal analysis
In the Chapter 6 of his book Introduction to multimodal analysis, Machin explains his method of analysis, based on semiotics. He’s concerned with three things: how the semiotic resources and how they are aligning the viewer with the experiences of the participants ,how visually participants can be categorized and lastly how we can analyze what participants do in images.(Machin, 2007)
First, Machin explains different types of positioning the viewer in relation to the people inside the image. He mentions three of aspects: the gaze, angle of interaction and distance. The first one is concerned to what extent we are encouraged to engage with the
participants. The second one focuses on the creation of power relationships and involvement. The third one looks into the intimacy or remoteness created by an advertisement. (Machin, 2007) Next, he focuses on three different ways people are represented in an advertisement: individuals and groups, categorization and non-representation. Lastly, Machin talks about Agency and Action, so who does what (agency) and what gets done (action). (Machin, 2007) With the use of his method, I will now analyze an advertisement.
Advertisement
The advertisement that I’ve chosen is the 1950s advert of Camel Cigarettes. As a smoker of this brand myself, I’ve been curious how it has been advertised before, considering the fact than nowadays commercials of tobacco products are illegal.
The advert, depicted in black and white, shows two scenarios: doctors office as well as the doctor in the car. The advertisement itself has neither a jiggle or a dialogue, it has a narrator telling the “story” of the advertisement. It “relies” on surveys and tries very hard to show it as “objective”. In regards of the angles within the commercial, there are close-ups on the cigarettes, and it overall uses the horizontal angle. There are no repetition in the commercial, because even the package of the cigarettes is depicted on different backgrounds. The ad itself look quite coherent in it’s narrative.
The content of this advertisement hints at the „beneficial” points of cigarettes. It is shown that even doctors smoke Camel cigarettes during their free time or brake during work. It is implied that the doctors have a very busy days and the only activity they can do during the brake is smoking a cigarette. The advertisement shows the doctor, as well as the nurse, both young. It also presents the product itself (presented either in the doctors office or in the car). The commercials tries sell the product by using of the collective group of doctors – even if it presents only one man in the ad itself, it is implied by the narrator that all of the doctors smoke Camel’s during their free time (the use of the „survey”) The only person in the commercial that engages with the viewer (so, looks directly to the camera in attempt to „look on the viewer”) is the woman in the end of the commercial. (0:52 – 0:57) It is also possible to pin down the American values that this advertisements connotes, the consumer culture in the US as well as the popular belief during that time that the cigarettes are beneficial for health.
I hope you enjoyed my analysis of the advertisement, and that the information I provided in this post was helpful for you. See you in my next post!
Reference list:
Tungate, M. (2007). Adland: a global history of advertising. London and Philadelphia: Kogan Page Publishers.
Machin, D. (2007). Introduction to multimodal analysis. London: Hodder Arnold. (chapter 6: “Representation of social actors in the image”)