In his book “Advertising the American Dream. Making Way for Modernity, 1920 –1940.”, Marchand (1985) expresses the idea that ads allow us to reconstruct past ideas, images, stereotypes, and can serve as a testimony of the past. Indeed, ads aim at reflecting and shaping social values and popular attitudes. However, one can question whether the content of advertisements mirror the consumers’ actual conditions and behavior or their fantasies and aspirations? (Marchand, 1985, p. xvi). Even though perhaps the ads did not provide an accurate reflection of social reality, “advertisers have been motivated by a particularly direct and intense need to understand and communicate effectively with their audiences” (Marchand, 1985, p. xviii). Moreover, ads could shape or reinforce the same popular attitudes they sought to reflect in showing repeated visual clichés (Marchand, 1985, p. xx). If advertisements can then serve as source of the past, they need to be placed in the same category as many traditional historical documents and be analyzed in details. Indeed, adverts go through many stages of editing and restyling and then end product is designed to communicate particular ideas about the participants and a particular attitude towards them (Machin, 2007, p. 109). I will here present an analysis of and advert of the 1960s following the semiotic approach that Machin proposes.
Machin (2007) proposes to look at semiotic ressources used for aligning the viewer with the experience of the participants and considering how visually participants can be categorized. In the semiotic analysis we will look at the gaze, the angle of interaction and the distance of the camera from the participants.
In the Folger’s commercial, the participants never look straight to the camera. Marchand explains that if the participant is looking at the viewer, it means that the viewer is acknowledged and the participant asks something from him in an imaginary relationship. On the other side, if the participant does not look, it implies an impression of exhibition as the viewer is able to look at the represented person as an observer. In this commercial, the participant can feel as a witness of a daily life scene where a wife bring some coffee to her husband, do the groceries and eat diner. They are however not directly asked to respond or to engage with the participants. See below a few pictures of the scenes. One can notice that the actors look at their interlocutor but not to the camera itself.
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(Figure 2)
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As Machin mentions it, “our involvement in a scene can also be changed through viewing positions, through the angle of interaction around the horizontal plane” (2007, p. 112). Here, people are viewed from their side. This means that the viewer’s involvement is reduced and considered as a witness. However, the viewer is also involved in the story as the scenes are presented as the viewer was the interlocutor. It has the effect of aligning the viewer with the represented person (Machin, 2007, p. 113).
The distance of the camera to the represented person’s face is also a way to analyze the kind of demand, or the mood of address. The advertisement here mixes the close up shots and ones with more distance. One can notice that when the couple is together, the distance is more pronounced than when the woman is talking to the grocery man. Then, when the husband is happy with the coffee, closer shots are presented. As Machin (2007) explains it, close up shots allow the viewer to identify with individuals as they show more the reactions and the emotions. This means that viewers got to see the characters as individuals with feelings.
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After looking at the aspects of the alignment of the viewer with the participants, Machin looks at the semiotic resources for depicting kinds of participants. Firstly, he looks at the individuals and groups represented. This is important in connecting the viewer to the interests and experiences of the participants. Here, the advertisement presents the experience of an individual woman. As Machin (2007) mentions it, “this has the effect of drawing us close to specific people and therefore humanising them” (p. 117) and that “All tabloid journalists know that a story telling the experiences of one person will be far more compelling than statistics that speak of many” (p. 17). However, Folger advertised its brand through different story of the same type of woman but all similar in the type of lifestyle presented and with the same replicas. This implies that many woman have the same problem of unsatisfying their husband with their coffee and that Folger’s coffee bring them the solution.
Then, Machin looks at the categorization of the presented person and argues that visual categorization is either `cultural’ or `biological’ or a combination of the two (2007, p. 118). The cultural categorization can be done through the analysis of the standard attributes such as the clothes, the hairstyle, the body adornment, etc. Here, the couple is from a middle or upper-class. The husband wears a shirt or a suit, the woman wears casual but classic outfits and the sells man wears an apron to represent a drugstore man, a more intimate and specialized place than a grocery store. The biological categorization is achieved through the stereotyped physical characteristics. Here, we can see that the couple is made of young and white people, representing the ideal American family. The biological categorization is stronger with the sells man that has a strong accent which can induce an exoticism as coffee might induce.
Machin does not study the linguistic or signs semiotics here even though one might go further in the analysis of this advert and recognize that the lexicon uses strong words such as “crime” opposed to “flower”, using adjectives to describe coffee such as “weak”, “bitter”, “flavor”, “nice and rich”, etc. Moreover, the symbol of the mountain is repeated through the the signs in the shop and the arms of the wife.
Sources:
Marchand, R. (1985). Advertising the American dream. 1st ed. Berkeley [u.a.]: Univ. of California Press.
Images Sources:
Featured Image: [Digital image]. (n.d.). Retrieved June 08, 2017, fromhttps://twitter.com/shoutstr
Figure 1: Image captured from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRYfouuHPvs accessed on the 8th of June 2017
Figure 2: Image captured from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRYfouuHPvs accessed on the 8th of June 2017
Figure 3: Image captured from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRYfouuHPvs accessed on the 8th of June 2017
Figure 4: Image captured from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRYfouuHPvs accessed on the 8th of June 2017
Figure 5: Image captured from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRYfouuHPvs accessed on the 8th of June 2017