Sell & Spin: Media Meditation #1

I’d never been interested in a career in advertising until very recently. I discovered this newfound interest while taking an advertising course at Champlain College. Through this class, I’ve realized that advertising is a unique and complex process that requires an enormous amount of creativity and dedication. Something that I’ve found particularly interesting advertising’s history and how it’s developed over time.

So, after learning of this media meditation assignment, I decided to do my first media meditation on a documentary we watched in my advertising class entitled Sell & Spin: A History of Advertising. I was able to find this film in segments on YouTube, so included below is the first ten minutes, just enough to give you a vague idea of what the film’s about.



The Brain:
This film engages primarily the limbic and neocortical parts of the brain. The limbic is engaged through the use of images and music used throughout the film, while the neocortex gets engaged because we must listen and process what the narrator and interviewees are saying. Also, because this documentary focuses specifically on advertising and its role throughout history, it relates directly to our discussion of how many media messages were exposed to each day versus how many we consciously retain. Every advertiser knows that in order for an advertisement to be effective, it must successfully break through the “advertisement clutter” that consumers face on a daily basis.

The Eight Trends:
This program represents a huge epistemological shift. I could have found much of the same information from this film in my advertising textbook, but instead the class was able to watch it watch it in the form of a documentary. As a result, we were exposed to many more visual examples of advertisements then we would be if were to only study the book.

A technological shift is also evident due to the fact that I was able to find at least segments of this program on YouTube. This means that anyone with access to the internet can watch this documentary.

The availability of this program on YouTube also represents a personal shift. YouTube lets its members not only watch videos, but also rate and comment on them. This allows people to offer their opinion on a video, and also helps potential viewers determine if a video is worth watching.



Because this program can be watched via the internet, it represents an aesthetic shift. Because many cell phones now offer internet service, people can watch this documentary on their iPhone or other handheld device at anytime and anywhere.

Also, the segments of this program available on YouTube have been posted by a single individual, not the company that made and produced the film, which I’m fairly certain (if I remember correctly) was the History Channel. The fact that this individual posted the segments instead of the History Channel raises copyright questions and, in turn, represents a political shift.

The political aspect of this program’s availability on alternative media platforms leads us to consider an economic shift. Because individuals can watch this video on YouTube, it has the potential to take viewers away from the programs television airing. I’m not exactly certain how this might affect the television company’s income since both cable and internet must be paid for, but it definitely has the potential to impact a program’s ratings and polls.

The Seven Principles:
Reality Construction-any media production attempts to construct a carefully thought out sense of reality for its audience. Because this film is a History Channel documentary I, as a viewer, am under the impression that the information they are showing and telling me is factual. This is mainly because I consider the History Channel to be an accurate and reliable source of information, however, someone with a less favorable view of the History Channel, or maybe just advertising in general, may think that this program is merely trying to justify advertising’s role in our consumer culture.

Like reality construction, all media experiences use production techniques to influence the ways we think and behave. Because this is a documentary, it relies primarily on interviews, testimonials, and visual images to convey its message.

Media experiences entail intended and unintended value messages for the viewer. Because I see this as a documentary that is focused on factual information, I think it’s hard to determine the values messages that the producers of the program intended for the audience, however I would say that it portrays a slightly more favorable view of advertising than it does negative.

Almost all media experiences are products of the commercial industry. This means that most of the media we’re exposed to on a daily basis has commercial motives based on ownership. The History Channel is owned by A&E, “a U.S. media company that owns several TV networks on cable and television” according to Wikipedia.

Individual Meanings-all individuals take away their own meanings from media experiences. Personally, this documentary showed me the value and importance of advertising’s role in our society, however as I mentioned earlier, people who have other preconceived notions about advertising may not take away the same message that I did.

Emotional Transfer-as our toolsets say, “Commercials and other multimedia experiences operate primarily at an emotional level and are usually designed to transfer the emotion from one symbol or lifestyle onto another.” This was especially true of the advertising examples that they used in the film. In the early days of modern advertising, advertisers had to first create a problem, and then come up with the solution. To do this they often developed issues involving social anxieties such as body odor, or halitosis. Below is an example that focused on housewives’ fear of their husbands leaving them during the Great Depression.



Persuasive Techniques:
Because the focus is on advertising, this documentary discusses almost all of our 29 persuasive techniques, a few of which I've discussed below.

All of us associate certain symbols (or brands) with certain companies which help us distinguish that company's product from another. Symbols have proven to be a vital aspect of advertising throughout history.

This film mentions hyperbole when discussing the earliest forms of newspaper advertising. Daniel Pope of the University of Oregon says "Local retailers or merchants would announce the availability of their goods. They might throw in a superlative or two to encourage people to come and shop." Clearly hyperbole has worked as a form of persuasion in advertising since its earliest days.

Repetition is also mentioned by Juliann Sivulka when she says of advertisers "One thing they would do is repeat a message. This was the forerunner of early advertising slogans as we know them today. They would take a one line message and repeat it, and repeat it, and repeat it."



Also, in the third segment (at about a minute and 50 seconds in) we see an ad for Lucky Cigarettes that offers simple solutions. The ad simply says "To keep a slender figure no one can deny...Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet." This line implies that keeping a slender figure is as simple as switching cigarette brands. We also see simple solutions when the documentary focuses on an ad that says "Cleanliness brings happiness and good cheer." Listerine is also mentioned which was advertised as an easy and simple solution for halitosis.

The documentary itself uses scientific evidence when they reference the 3,000 commercial advertisements that were exposed to daily and also when Juliann Sivulka says "This ad ran in the Ladies Home Journal and it so insulted some 200 some readers that they canceled their subscriptions. Yet in the same year the sales of Odo-Ro-No went up 112%."

This film also makes great use of timing. At times, usually when the music is playing, we just see a rush of advertisements in quick succession. However, whenever an advertising campaign is being discussed in detail, they make sure to slow down so the viewer has time to examine, read, and process the ad being discussed.

This program also relies heavily on testimonials from experts on advertising and its history, featuring various professors and officials from colleges and universities around the country who clearly know what they're talking about.