Lecture 11: Persuasion and Propaganda

We operate with the notion that we have free will but decisions still mostly depend on persuasion. This is extremely prevalent within advertising as it is all about persuasion and manipulation. Whilst adverts do have to pass standards, and can’t lie, e.g. Lynx can’t explicitly say that their product will make girls fall in love with guys, they still can use persuasion techniques to make guys believe that. 

The Ancient Greeks believed in voting and achieving citizenship. In democratic and legal processes, they believed people should argue for themselves. In that era, Sophists were specialised in rhetoric (presenting a point of view in a persuasive way) and they would teach citizens how to argue persuasively.

Propaganda is biased/misleading information, often associated with psychological methods of influencing/persuasion. It often generates an emotional, not rational, response. This is true with adverts, which often use emotions to drive profits up. This is evident especially with Christmas adverts, with John Lewis becoming known for making emotional Christmas adverts. Maybe this is why the 2016 Christmas advert was so controversial/disappointing, because it didn’t make people emotional (cry).

Photography can both show the impact of propaganda and be used for propaganda, e.g. the Nazi rallies showing the masses of support they received could be used as propaganda as it could manipulate people into thinking it was the ‘right’ thing to do as so many people agreed with them.

Early research said adverts didn’t change how people thought, but rather changed choices. Moreover, they didn’t change what we thought but what we thought about. 

For mundane products, e.g. washing powder, it is interesting to note how adverts can change our perception on them. If someone chooses the most expensive object, it is because they think it is the best, if someone chooses the cheapest they do so because of value for money and if they choose the most well known, it is because they trust it. No one does actual research into the product. With further consideration, I can conclude that I only agree with this to a certain extent. This point implies that adverts don't have an impact on people's decisions with mundane products, and I disagree, as I think successful advertisements impact people on all products, no matter what they are. However, I do appreciate that with the example of washing powder, adverts don't tend to influence people more than the prices do, perhaps because of the poor quality of advertising that  tends to go with that product, i.e. the typical TV advert of someone, usually a woman, cleaning a surface.

I found it interesting that when these words are used in an advert, sales tend to increase (new, quick, easy, improved, now, suddenly, amazing, introducing). These all fit under the heuristic mechanism (a rule of thumb method for solving a problem). However, we should not dismiss the fact that even with that choice of vocabulary, if the idea behind the advert is not persuasive/creative enough, then sales will not automatically increase. 

There are two routes of persuasion:

1) peripheral: using heuristics, decision not supported by research

2) central: using research/careful thought

Out of these two routes, the first is generally the most popular, due to the fact that we are Cognitive Misers, which mean we don’t like to think about matters when we don’t have to. 

In the lecture we also discussed post truth politics, which is when emotions have a bigger impact than the objective facts. In ‘Propaganda’ (1928) Bernays says; “Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.”

I completely agree with this point as I think people often want to scapegoat other people for their problems, and that’s why people like Donald Trump and Hitler were able to get into power, due to the silent voters.  

With images, it is often not the image itself that is propaganda but the context of which it is presented, e.g. the copy alongside it, the time it was published, where it was published etc. This is of course true with advertising, as if an advert has both copy and imagery, then both aspects are needed to persuade the customer. If the copy isn’t there, then the advert may not work, as the imagery may not make any sense. However, with some adverts, the imagery is all the advert needs. For example this Lego advert:

Although this Lego advert had the word ‘Imagine’ on it, I don’t think it was necessary as the image was so strong. 

We also looked at Jenny Holzers work, specifically her Truisms piece. I found it really insightful as when you look at all the statements written, on face value they seem like truths yet when you look further into them, we can see that they all contradict themselves. Perhaps with propaganda, although on the surface it may seem believable, if people actually studied it then we wouldn’t be so susceptible to it. Perhaps if customers therefore also took the time to study adverts, and see what persuasion techniques were being used, and replaced emotional response with rational response, adverts wouldn’t be nearly as effective. 

Lecture 10: Outside Collett Dickenson Pearce

CDP was an ad agency founded in London, 1960-2000. Their exhibition of creative advertising included work from people who weren’t in the agency, such as our lecturer Janine Sykes.

Janine began her initial research with Ron Collins, an alumni of LCA, who was a successful art director and co-founder of WCRS, alongside Robin Wight. She then moved on to study another LCA alumni, Colin Millward, who according to David Puttnam was the ‘most influential creative figure in post-war British adverts

At the back of some print ads, found at the ‘History of Advertising Trust’ archives, are forms they filled out, showing how the ad agency worked in its purely analogue form.

Something that I found really interesting in the lecture was the cigarette adverts, as we don’t tend to see cigarette adverts anymore, due to their controversial nature.  Just as now there are advertising restrictions (e.g. can’t advertising smoking at all), more legislation was being made then as well. So, advertisers marketed cigarettes in quite a surreal way. As Frank Lowe put it; ‘We had to do something nobody would understand, because if they don’t understand it they wont be able to object to it.’ I think it’s really interesting and innovative how they managed to find this creative solution to the problem. For example, the ‘Raining Cigarettes’ ad (1980), which was clearly influenced by surrealist artist Magritte. It is interesting to see how cigarette advertisement had changed due to the new legislations. Whilst they used to be quite aspirational, with subtle art direction such as golden hues spread throughout the whole image, and decorative pieces on the table, it moved to being more bold and surreal. For example, in the ‘Flying Ducks’ (1977) advert, they were more creative/surreal by having the three ducks mirror the three cigarette packs, and having the bold saturated colour making the golden cigarette packs stand out more. Interestingly, there was no copy as it was a visual solution to the legislation.

CDP released many famous ads, including one depicting comedians Pete and Dud, to advertise a camera. I like the ad as it draws you in because its use of celebrities was not in an overly powerful way. It focuses on the camera, not on a celebrity story. I also like their other ad that featured two Labour Party rivals taking photos of each other, in a bid to get some good publicity, with the copy ‘they obviously felt like shooting each other’. I think the copy is witty and memorable due to the use of the homograph word of ‘shooting’.

The Vogue advertising is also quite clever, as it relates to fashion and the state of the economy simultaneously. The copy is witty as it suggests that people will have to be more ‘tight’ with the money due to the 1972 unemployment rate rising above one million. It’s interesting to see a fashion magazine take a political/economic stance, and it made me wonder if the cover even needed the imagery, or whether the copy would have been enough. I think the copy on its own does still work, but as it is a fashion magazine, the imagery of the belts on the woman fits better.

Janine also showed us her piece, called ‘A living room with an outsiders view’. I really liked her piece as it highlights that in the 1970s most adverts were shown on the TV, with no means of skipping the adverts. So in some retrospect, adverts were more forced onto people than in today’s society. In Janines piece, she had an ashtray and cigarette adverts on the walls, which shows that smoking in front of children/at home was more normalised, as were cigarettes ads. Just as society has shifted from realising the dangers of smoking, so has advertising. Now, most people try not to smoke in front of their children, and smoking adverts are banned.

The advert ‘Hand built by Robots’ for Fiat, although a successful campaign, did confuse me as in Italy there were protests about robots taking their jobs in the car industry, and the TV advert clearly shows that robots are making the cars. At first, I thought they were celebrating this fact which seemed very negative to me, however upon further discussion with Janine, I realised that they weren’t celebrating that issue, but were just showing how their cars are made in a very matter of fact way. Perhaps they were indicating that just as they don’t lie about who/what makes their products, they don’t lie about their quality either. 

Lecture 9: Photography as Evidence

In this lecture, we discussed the use of language in photography, such as whether we should replace ‘truth’ with ‘evidence’ as ‘truth’ may be misleading, because photography can lie to people. As M.Riboud explained, “the idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only record details, small fragments of the world.” J.H.Lartigue disagrees, stating “Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” I personally agree with M.Riboud as photos are constantly being staged. I think this is supported by the invasion of Iraq, which was greatly influenced by the misinterpretation of a photograph, which supposedly showed weapons of mass destruction.

We watched a TED talk by Taryn Simon, who investigated people who were wrongly convicted of crimes due to the misinterpretation of photographs. For example, in one case a woman looked at a photo of a suspect and rejected him as a possibility as she said he was too old. So, the police snuck in another picture of that man, but when he was four years younger, which consequently led to her positively identifying him as her attacker. The photo had become the memory – the lines were blurred. In another case, a woman was shown a photo of her attacker causing her to drop all the chargers as she said the photo had influenced her memory making her biased.

Errol Morris spoke about the elephant outside the frame, meaning that we can exclude/include whatever we want in our image, which manipulates what the scene actually is. It opens up the debate of whether photographers should observe from far away and not touch anything. All photography is posed as you choose what you want to include in the shot. You don’t see the before or after. The only way we can truly see what we’re looking at is to investigate.

Links to Advertising

Just as M.Riboud explained, photography is all staged, and to a certain extent, so is advertising. For the most part, TV adverts and Billboards have to be planned in extreme detail, however there are exceptions. For example, ambient advertising is harder to stage as it relies on the reactions and participation of the audience. Similarly, some TV ads are harder to stage if they don’t include actors/staged scripts. For example, the Hotel Febreze advert, which used ‘real’ people who were pulled off the streets, blindfolded, then asked to describe the scent of a filthy room treated with the fabric freshener.

http://www.nytimes.com/video/business/media/100000000889874/febreze-commercial.html