Advertising turns popular culture into name brand

The following message is brought to you in part by: Craig Wood, a lecturer in the IU School of Journalism.

“Advertising affects us in just about every conceivable way we define ourselves,” Wood said. “In our very fractured media landscape, advertising is everywhere.”

That is perhaps a shocking claim, if not a reality, about our media-based society. But throughout the years, advertising has evolved. It’s become subtler, more entertaining and overwhelmingly pervasive.

In many ways, it is as much a part of pop culture as movies, TV, music and even journalism.

Wood teaches three courses in the School of Journalism about advertising, and he said he feels the lines between advertising and content are blurring.

“It’s often very difficult to distinguish what is advertising and what is not advertising,” Wood said. “We see more so than ever a blending of what has traditionally been editorial or content side of media and the paid side of media.”

Product placement, paid-for branding and embedded content within programming are all examples he cites of advertising’s place in our daily routines. In fact, the number of advertisements we see regularly are staggering.

Phil Meyer is an adjunct instructor in the IU Department of Telecommunications teaching a course titled Promotion and Marketing in Telecommunications, and he said there is an average of 3,000 to 8,000 messages that we see, hear and read in a single day.

“I don’t think people realize how pervasive it is,” Meyer said. “I also don’t think people realize how advertising changes our opinions and attitudes over time. You can’t point to any one ad or commercial that forces someone to buy something. There’s no correlation between one specific ad and purchase. It happens over time.”

Instead, ads are focused on creating a branding experience through recognition and attention-grabbing entertainment, a trend which contrasts with the highly-informative radio and TV ads of the 1950s and 1960s.

Meyer explained as the differences in the attributes of the product have shrunk and the outlets of media have simultaneously exploded, advertisers have found they must be in more places to reach the same number of people.

Robert Affe, a senior lecturer also with the IU Telecommunications Department, teaches a course on Electronic Media Advertising, which expands on this assessment of the industry.

“Because there’s so much advertising and competition for our attention and our eyeballs, the benefit side of this process is truncated,” Affe said. “We now see hundreds of ads every day that we don’t even remember. Advertising has morphed from a more leisurely, inform-and-persuade process to one where they’re just trying to grab our attention for a few seconds to reinforce the brand or the product.”

Affe described every advertising strategy as based upon interacting with the individual by counting every instance of interaction.

“Advertising has gone more to the immediate, the more incentivized and the more quantified form of getting the message out,” Affe said as he whipped consumer cards out of his wallet for the dozens of companies he said will do anything to reward the viewer for being a part of their brand.

Affe said the attention deficit mentality created by the rapid editing of MTV has shifted advertising everywhere, most notably in recent years to the web.
He used television as an example to illustrate how isolated messages to a mass audience are simply not enough.

“A hit show used to be a 25 rating,” Affe said. “Now if it’s a six rating it’s a hit. Fewer people are watching. Now advertisers have to shell out more money to reach the same number of people. The clients are complaining, and that’s why we have the migration to the web. The web can target specific individuals in a way TV never can.”

According to Wood, this dilution of messages creates fantastic opportunities for communication as well as an overflow of content.

“If you can embed your brand into content and have it accepted as part of content, that would be the Holy Grail,” Wood said. “As individuals are absorbing the content, they’re also getting the advertising message. That’s a huge opportunity, and all advertisers are trying to now move in that direction. But it creates an enormous mountain of advertising clutter, where everywhere we look, everywhere we are, an advertiser is there telling us something, offering us something, presenting us something, asking us to become engaged with something, wanting to develop a relationship with us.”

But Affe said ads work, and we need them.

“I can prove it because every company has to advertise,” he said. “If companies don’t advertise, bad things happen, which is nothing.”

Further, he claimed ads have never controlled us in a way detrimental to society or the media.

“Not all advertising is good, but advertising gets a bum rap,” Affe said. “People say it’s manipulative. It’s not. Nobody has ever been robotically programmed to say ‘Must Drink Coke.’ Advertising doesn’t turn anyone into zombies. Good advertising should inform us and persuade us, and good advertising does. Good advertising supports good products. That’s why Coke and Hershey’s and Ivory Soap will still be made 100 years from now.”

Those trying to resist it are fighting a losing battle, he said.  They’re taking away a crucial part of our civilization and our livelihood.

“We’re all creatures of advertising whether we are products of it or influenced by it,” Wood said. “It’s very difficult to say we are divorced from it. Our tastes, our aspirations, our value systems — so much of it is defined by advertising because we are a media saturated civilization. There are arguments that advertising is a directive in terms of how we should be, how we should think, how we should act and what our person should be based on consumption. And there’s another theory that advertising is a reflection of what we are, and products and brands become the means to transcend that and become something different or better.”