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Two Opposite Extremes in Advertising: Emotionalism vs. Consumerism

This paper will present an analysis of a sample of the Super Bowl XLVIII commercials

focusing on the contrast between two different languages that marketers employ: the language of

emotions and the language of consumerism. First, I will argue that that modern marketers,

differently from early-days advertisers, very often construct commercials that aim at winning

people’s attention via the peripheral rather than the central route to persuasion, by focusing more on

the story the ads tell than on the product they sell. I am going to explain how the Magic Bullet

theory of communication illustrates my claim, in the sense that people will be likely to absorb the

advertisement’s message – directed towards the subconscious level of emotions – immediately and

often unconsciously, and I will then focus on how this phenomenon relates to the Agenda Setting

theory. Lastly, I will discuss the Encoding/Decoding model of communication proposed by Stuart

Hall as a tool to understand why people interpret “emotional” advertisement in different ways,

highlighting the polysemy of media texts. After discussing two instances of commercials in which

marketers target consumers’ emotions, I am going to consider the much less common case in which

marketers put the product on the spotlight, discussing the attention-grabbing strategies they employ

and relating such a situation to the mere-exposure effect. Moreover, I am going to suggest an

application of the concept of the “creeping cycle of desensitization” in the case of commercials in

general and of one of the examples discussed in particular.

On Sunday, February 2, 2014, the 2013 American sport season was crowned by Super Bowl

XLVIII, which saw the Denver Broncos for the American Football Conference and the Seattle

Seahawks for the National Football Conference compete at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford,

New Jersey. The 2014 Super Bowl, broadcast by Fox, turned out to be the most watched TV

program in the United States in the whole history of television, registering 111.5 million viewers, as

reported by news agency Reuters (“Despite Rout”). Moreover, according to Nielsen’s SocialGuide,

of all the people who watched the game, 15.3 million were also talking about it on Twitter as the

Super Bowl went on (“Super Bowl XLVIII”), discussing not only the actual match and the halftime

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show starring Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but also the ads that aired during the

game.

Ads are in fact a pivotal element of every Super Bowl, with people tuning in to the channel

that broadcasts the game only to watch commercials, as reported by one advertising agency in a poll

conducted in 2011 regarding Super Bowl XLV (“Super Bowl Ads Rival Game”). Due to the huge

size of the event’s audience, commercials aired during the Super Bowl are known to be extremely

expensive. This year’s Big Game was no exception, reaching even higher peaks than usual: each

company paid around 4 million dollars for a 30-second advertisement without counting at least 1

million dollars spent in the production of each commercial, as the founder of advertising agency

Siltanen & Partners notes in an article for Forbes.

As Harvard University scholars suggest, “Advertising, like many other features of business,

has come fully into its own in the twentieth century,” yet “it is as old as competitive industry”

(Harvard U 12). It is hard to set a date for the invention of visual advertising. According to AdAge,

the first evidence of newspaper advertising is to be dated back to the early days of the 18th century;

the first advertising agency was found in the 1840s; and in the 1890s Frank Munsey was the first to

lower the subscription price to his magazine, deciding to rely mostly on advertising revenue rather

on than on newsstand sales (“Ad Age”), which is what most newspapers and magazines do today.

As Steven Heller notes in his introduction to All-American Ads 1900-1919, advertising became

more and more sophisticated during the first twenty years of the 20th century, targeting the new

bourgeoisie by employing the novel, appealing technology of four-color printing, and, more often

than not, by associating images with captions that illustrated the product’s function (Heimann 22).

After this golden age, the advertising industry plummeted together with all worldwide businesses as

the 1929 Wall Street Crash hit the United States and the whole world. Eventually, signs of recovery

came by means of radio and, later, television commercials, the first of which was a very short ad for

Bulova watches broadcast in 1941, right before a baseball game (Dalzell).

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Figure 1. A car ad that exemplifies what the first printed advertisements looked like.

(Source: Heimann, Jim. All-American Ads 1900-1919. Cologne: Taschen, 2005. Print.)

Since its inception, advertising has lived off people’s attention, and this condition has not

changed to the present day. Nonetheless, the very first commercials differed enormously from the

ones today consumers are used to. They were only printed on paper, since television had not been

invented yet, hence they a visual but not an auditory impact and displayed still rather than moving

images. Early advertisers employed attention-getting techniques as well, however rudimentary, but

their primary aim was to illustrate the functions and strengths of the product, as shown in Figure 1.

Today, advertisers’ ways of doing business have changed. Thousands of commodities are produced

every day, and the difference among the numerous brands selling the same kind of product is often

subtle. An advertising agency would likely go bankrupt if it were to convince people via the central

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route to persuasion, that is to say rationally explaining to the customer why he or she should go to

the store and buy a specific product.

Nowadays, the advertising industry cannot limit itself to showcase the product, because for

any new product launch there will be a thousand other substitutes already on the market. Therefore,

to stay afloat, advertisers need to employ more subtle yet effective strategies than a mere illustration

of the product. This situation has led today marketers to look for alternative routes, highlighting the

value of consumers’ emotions. As one media scholar notes, “It is primarily ‘social’ life and not

‘material’ life that seems to be the locus of perceived happiness. Commodities are only weakly

related to these sources of satisfaction” (Jhally 251), therefore marketers often do not emphasize the

characteristics of the product as much as the values linked to it or the emotional attachment it can

elicit. To achieve this goal, advertisers make large use of attention-getting techniques derived from

psychology such as emotional transfer.

Also known as emotional contagion, the phenomenon of emotional transfer was defined by

one psychoanalyst as “a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of

another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and

behavioral attitudes” (Schoenewolf 50). Indeed, marketers know people well. They know that

audiences enjoy touching stories, that they are moved by cute puppies and young kids, that music

puts people in a positive attitude, and that consumers are often unaware of all the reactions that all

this elicits. Cleverly, advertisers put this knowledge in action, designing ads that resemble very

short films rather than commercials, whose artistic value cannot be denied but that need to be

recognized as promoting an idea rather than a product. The 2014 Super Bowl commercials display

numerous examples of the prevalence of the story and the feelings on the actual merchandise. I am

going to analyze a selection of these to then underline the contrast between these and other

examples, picked again among the Big Game ads, whose focus is instead placed on the product

itself.

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One first example of the weight given to consumers’ emotions in advertisements is the

commercial “America is Beautiful” that Coke launched for the 2014 Big Game. During a process

that began with its 1971 jingle “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke,” the Coca-Cola company has

been refining the feel of multiculturalism that defines its famous carbonated beverage, suggesting

that the population of the United States represents that of the whole world, and in turn that all those

that drink Coke are part of the U.S.A. The Super Bowl ad keeps enforcing this pattern. The product

is shown frequently but casually throughout the ad, and the Coke logo is the last thing the audience

is exposed to, suggesting that the ad is not publicizing coke but telling the story of multicultural

America.

Through a number of very quick edits linked by the song “America the Beautiful” sang by

American women of different origins in their native languages, the ad connects people that come

from across the world but live in the United States and feel part of the American culture. The

commercial tells the story of a peaceful, harmonious country. In the America portrayed by Coca-

Cola, nature is loved and respected, as shown by the wide shots of the pristine land and of the vast

ocean, by the man petting the horse, and by the young people surfing and bonding with the sea. The

United States are a country where families enjoy each other’s company having lunch together, and

different generations bond, as shown by the close-up of grandfather’s hands tied to the child’s

shown, and by the shot of a child swimming with his dad in a pool. Likewise, the U.S. are a place

where both the “good old days” of cowboys – one of them is showed as he drinks a coke in the last

frame – and relatively new realities as gay families can coexist. Most importantly, the ad narrates

the story of an international community formed by all kinds of people, who are ordinary people just

like the consumers who watch the commercial, and who, irrespective of age, gender, religion, and

ethnicity, all drink Coke. The ad disregards hot issues such as the ever-present problem of racism

that plagues America, yet it serves Coca-Cola’s interest of increasing revenues by flattering

Americans through the slogan “America is beautiful,” which makes them proud to be part of such a

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welcoming country. Ultimately, Coca-Cola speaks to people’s hearts, presenting Coke as symbol of

the diversity of America that make it a society where everyone will happily find his or her place.

The second and third commercials I will consider are both by Budweiser, and they were

respectively rated as most memorable and second most liked among all the ads that aired during the

Super Bowl, as reported by the Nielsen Company in February (“Dancing in the End Zone”). The

first Budweiser commercial, “A Hero’s Welcome Home” tells the story of a surprise homecoming

party for Chuck Nadd, a soldier returning to his hometown in Florida from Afghanistan. The whole

ad, which was supposed to be only thirty seconds long but was than extended to sixty, visually

narrates the story of the surprise to Chuck. Beer is never mentioned, not even shown; the only clue

to the commercial being an ad and not a very short film is the Budweiser logo shown during the last

six seconds, and placed on the parade cart. Indeed, what Budweiser did with Nadd’s commercial is

not mere publicity but a form of art like cinema is, as we can see by looking at the five-minutes

long documentary film the brewer released together with the ad.

The whole commercial is again, as in the case of the Coke ad, accompanied by a meaningful

song, “I’m Coming Home” by J. Cole. Many people in America know someone who is or was in

the army, hence many could relate to Chuck’s and his town’s experience. However, even when one

has never met a soldier personally, the story of a person that goes back home after having served his

country tugs at everyone’s heartstrings. Anomaly, the New York marketing agency that created

both this and the other Budweiser ad, aimed at values deeply rooted in people’s heart. They

depicted patriotism, the importance of (traditional) family – as Chuck’s girlfriend and mother

movingly greet him –, the love of a community that comes together to celebrate one of its members,

as well as the value of life, as the soldier comes back alive, young, and happy from a risky mission.

One could argue that Budweiser only portrays the joyful side of the coin, for instance not taking

into account the distress a soldier feels after having experienced the brutalities of war. Nevertheless,

although this last criticism appears to be true, the aim of the commercial is rather to spur the

country to honor its soldiers, and of course to catch people’s attention. All things considered,

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marketers are not social activists: they will give people what they like, which turns out to be

emotional happy endings, because they know that this is what will better highlight the products they

sell.

The other Budweiser commercial broadcast during the Big Game is extremely sentimental

as well. In this second case, Anomaly relied on the power of cuteness, making a puppy and the

famous Budweiser Clydesdale horse the protagonists of “Puppy Love.” This commercial tells the

story of a puppy that keeps escaping from its kennel to join his friend Clydesdale at a nearby stall.

Eventually, the baby dog is adopted and Clydesdale, missing his friend, gathers his fellow horses to

get the puppy back. The commercial never displays a can, a bottle, or even a glass of beer. The only

reference to the brewery is the logo shown at the end of the sixty-second ad. As noticed by The

Nielsen Company, “Budweiser’s sentimental approach and unique ownable concept establishes an

emotional connection [with the viewer] (who doesn’t love horses and puppies?)” (“Dancing in the

End Zone”). Add to this powerful friendship between cute, young animals Passenger’s catching

song “Let Her Go,” and the rising love story between the dog’s and the horse’s masters, and you

will get the magic formula for a commercial that will stick to people’s heads.

The description of emotional transfer exemplified through the ads I discussed seems to

support the Magic Bullet theory. This model, also known as “Hypodermic Needle” theory, suggests

that audiences are constantly bombarded with messages coming from the media – particularly, in

this case, from commercials – and cannot help but absorb the information that is fired at, or injected

into their brains, or, in the specific case of emotional transfer, into their hearts. The Magic Bullet

theory views the audience as an inert, passive, anonymous mass that mass media can easily

manipulate. Corollary to this is the idea that mass media set people’s agendas, suggesting them

which aspects of an issue to focus on, or, in advertising specifically, endorsing one particular

product against its competitors and, as a consequence, creating needs that consumers did not know

to have before.

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On the other hand, according to the Encoding/Decoding model proposed by Stuart Hall,

communication is a flexible, two-side process. Hall’s theory is in fact based on the idea that media

text are polysemous, in the sense that different audiences will interpret the meaning of the message

in ways that may differ from what the sender of the message intended. The receiver will decode the

message according to one of three frameworks – a dominant, negotiated, or oppositional reading –

depending on his or her level of acceptance of, and agreement with the message. Commercials that

aim at consumers’ emotions are an interesting case study when it comes to understanding which

reading viewers apply, because feelings are especially unique to each individual, hence how people

interpret a particular story depends on factors that potentially differ for each viewer, such as

personal experience, cultural background, mood, and personality.

For instance, in support of Hall’s model, the Coca-Cola ad elicited opposite emotional

responses, in this case mostly depending on the political orientation of the viewers. Some

conservative commentators think that the Coca-Cola company misrepresented the concept of

patriotism, including in the definition of the American nation those that society still does not regard

as genuinely American. For example, Sarah Barnes fiercely attacks the Coke ad, lamenting that it

gives the world a wrong idea about America, and claiming that a true representation of America as

it is should not encompass the variety of languages and cultures portrayed by the Coca-Cola

company, considering that they are not really accepted in the country. Against this view,

commentators like Huffington Post’s Nataly Kelly for the Huffington Post interpret the commercial

in light of a more liberal view, remembering that America is indeed a multicultural nation, where as

many as 381 languages are spoken, and where “nearly everyone is the product of immigration”

(Kelly).

Marketers seem to have found a goldmine in people’s emotions. In fact, many studies have

demonstrated that human beings remember what they experience first and last better than what is

shown in the middle of a (Sousa 88), therefore the picture of the product or its logo shown at the

end of the commercial remains printed in people’s memory. Yet, when touched on the subtle,

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subconscious level of empathy, as they relate to the feelings that the commercial aims to generate,

people will tend to display favorable attitudes, and consequently favorable behaviors, towards the

source of empathy (Balconi and Canavesio). Therefore, consumers will react positively to ads that

employ the technique of emotional transfer successfully, that is ads that elicit some form of

emotional response in the audience, and they will most likely prefer the product that is advertised

when they find themselves before a wide range of choice, as typically happens in a consumerist

society. As one theorist put it, “advertising helps shape values, thoughts, fantasies, and behavior”

(Kellner 333).

In contrast to emotional ads, although more rarely, advertisers focus on the product itself.

With regards to this, I am going to analyze the attention-grabbing strategy that marketers employ.

One first interesting example is a Super Bowl commercial that advertises Sonos, a wireless hi-fi

system produced by Sony. The whole commercial is devoted to the presentation of the product.

Viewers are led by a number of dollies through a wealthy, immaculate apartment that discloses to

them as if to live in such a place were something everyone could afford, and their attention is subtly

drawn to the product through close-ups. Meanwhile, a relaxing tune accompanies the camera

movements, and soft-colored lights spread on the walls, creating a feeling of peacefulness. It is

striking that not one person is present in the commercial, except for the anonymous hand that plays

the music on the phone. From an ideological perspective, the one-minute long advertisement

portrays the reality of consumerism. In fact, objects are the only protagonists of the world

displayed. Indeed, objects are the only inhabitants of a cold apartment that is not filled with the

warmth of human affection but solely by the commodity itself, as metaphorically shown by the

expanding colored lights. Ultimately, the message consumers are left with is that the only way to

feel happy and serene is to own the money that will allow one to buy a new commodity, even

effective in replacing human company.

Another example might even be more direct. “Cool Twist” by Bud Light does not raise

philosophical question. It quite simply shows a bottle of beer and it explains the qualities that make

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it stand out from the crowd of beers produced in the world, suggesting that Bud Light is unique and

therefore people should buy it. Through very quick edits that show the bottle from different angles,

and with the help of lively background music (Afrojack’s “Ten Feet Tall”), the commercial presents

Bud Light as a refreshing drink for young, active people. Paradoxically, Bud Light, which is merely

the light version of Budweiser, was advertised following a completely different strategy from its

more alcoholic version, whose Big Game commercials I discussed in the first part of this essay.

Indeed, this point reinforces the idea that marketers may walk different paths, but their intention

will always be that of grabbing consumers’ attention, holding it for as long as possible.

Both the Sony and the Bud Light commercials mainly employ two attention-grabbing

techniques: repetition and the offering of apparent simple solutions (“It’s easy”). The “It’s easy”

technique was already noticed in the case of Sonos, where the hi-fi system seem to magically light

up the world of the house, although the costs to own that kind of apartment in the first place, and to

then fill it all with music, are unaffordable to many. In the Bud Light ad, the product is also

presented as something that is for everyone and that everyone will be easily able to get and enjoy.

The strategy of repetition is even more used in both the Sonos and the Bud Light commercials. The

Sonos commercial reinforces the value of the product through the music diffused around the house

and the continuous spreading of the lights on the walls. Instead, the beer commercial is all centered

on the presentation of the same object from slightly different perspectives, yet always placed on the

same background, and accompanied by the same song and by the same graphic effects.

This last consideration builds up on the psychological phenomenon at the base of the very

concept of advertising, namely that the sole exposure to a person, object, or event makes someone

favor it against a novel stimulus, and consequently that the more people are exposed to something,

the more they will tend to like it. In the case of advertising, the phenomenon, known as mere-

exposure effect, leads people that do not have strong feelings about a product to favor it as a

consequence of more frequent exposure as compared to other products, and therefore lead to

increased sale rates (McCullough and Ostrom).

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One last point I will consider is the concept of “creeping cycle of desensitization,” which

concerns advertising in general but especially relates to advertising that explicitly promotes a

consumerist ideology such as the Bud Light commercial. The creeping cycle of desensitization is

usually referred to as the idea that society accepts that media will portray increasingly extreme

realities, for instance in the case of violent or highly sexualized images, because viewers gradually

stops to consider such images as inappropriate or exaggerated. The idea is that as media push the

limits further and further, consumers grow more anesthetized to external stimuli such as media

messages. I believe that the expression “creeping cycle of desensitization” can also apply to the idea

that today consumers are so used to be surrounded by advertising, that they hardly notice its

presence. The example of the Bud Light commercial illustrates the attempt advertisers make at

catching people’s attention, and then at holding it by means of a combination of a hammering tune

and a number of repeated images edited in such a quick and fragmentary way that the audience is

almost hypnotized.

If one understands the creeping cycle of desensitization as explained above, it appears

worrisome that as marketers direct towards audience’s emotions, they are inhibiting consumers

from logically grasping a concept. However, it is also true that educated audiences are able to enjoy

the commercial as a form of art but will then figure out that there is a product behind the story the

commercial so smoothly tells. On the contrary, in the case of those commercials that focus on the

product through the strenuous repetition of the same concept, consumers will surely be more likely

to be aware they are being exposed to advertising, but they will also less easily forget about the

product itself. Therefore, the image of the commodity will continuously pop up in consumers’

minds at the time they need to pick one product among many, because the one product that had

been advertised will be more present than its equivalents in their heads, and the current ideology of

consumerism will be once again restated.

It appears clear that we live in a society that favors such ideology, and that mass media,

which pay their bills thanks to its persistence, will keep enforcing this system. Nonetheless,

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consumers are not, and definitely should not be, an inert mass of puppets that media – and

advertisers particularly – can control as they like. Consumers need to prove that Stuart Ewen was

wrong when he stated that the self is a commodity bought and sold by the media. In fact, it is

common knowledge that the purpose of advertising is to manipulate people to keep buying, because

that is the ground on which capitalism itself works. Yet, at the end of the day, no consumer likes to

be exploited by corporations that will become richer and richer through their manipulation of

individuals. Media literacy is fundamental in that it enables consumers to critically evaluate

advertisement and the industry that fuels it, understanding that they are welcome to sit back and

enjoy the show, but that they will have to do so responsibly.

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