I’ve complained before about the trend of television advertisements to . Now, via Seth Stevenson’s ad review in Slate, I’ve come across a great term for it - “the myth of communicative transcendence” - as well as a semiotics website by Robert Goldman documenting and taking apart said commercials. What’s interesting about both reviews is that they reveal how the specific cliches of so many advertisements are tied to an equally cliched generating ideology (World of Humanity in Stevenson’s formulation, Family of Man in Goldman’s citation of Roland Barthes).
It’s not simply the case of the overuse of a given technique, in the mold of the jump cut of 1960s art cinema or the zoom shot of the 70s. However, the specifics are part and parcel of the formula, so let me reflect on the means of communicative transcendence:
Communicative simultaneity: One after one, actors face the camera in direct address (once a no-no for classical Hollywood cinema). Their repetition of the same words (even if inflected by accent or in different languages) suggests a simultaneity of communication. People across the world, or across the country are saying the same thing at once. This reached its utmost absurdity in the Nexium commercials, in which a litany of acid-reflux sufferers intone, “I didn’t know!”
Communicative convergence: Aural montages of convergence one-up those suggesting simultaneity. The actors speak one or two words each, yet the montage creates full sentences out of their testimony. The Nexium ad excels at this as well, with a series of utterances: “I am every man” “and every women” “who has suffered from acid reflux.” The effect is to give the impression that every person in the country/world is making the same utterance and that their communication is in harmony. The effect is only doubled by the everyman language of the dialogue.
Transgeographic montage: Whereas the sound montage of communicative transcendence stands out as the advertising cliche of the present day, some ads, such as IBM’s Linux series, use one voice to link stark edits of shots from around the world. The clear implication is that the philosophical insight of Victor Hugo or Henry Louis Gates transcends cultural boundaries in much the way that IBM’s open source straddles the forces of globalization.
Photographic montage: in addition to cinematic and aural montage, ads combine faces together, either through split screen (as in the AT&T ampersand commercials) or dissolve, as in a number of HMO commercials. Much like the Photoshop composites that fashion magazines make of ideals of beauty, here transcendence is a utopia of a future of multiracial, multicultural one-ness.
Image-dialogue counterpoint: IBM’s on-demand ads show that you don’t even have to use montage to achieve the illusion of communicative transcendence. One spot called Tipping Point counterposes rapid editing with rapid dialogue (crucially, the two do not overlap). “One hotspot, a blip. Ten, a novelty. Then the game of business changes. Billions of dollars fly through the air.” “Billions?” Billions.” Just as important is the contrapuntal editing, inserting shots (man with lap top, “Coffee + wifi” sign, hand holding PDA) that both illustrate the dialogue and seem to exceed the geographic confines of the cinematic space. Simultaneously, the ad implies, users are communicating silently while the actor talks.
It’s probably telling that the most original and effective use of image sound counterpoint have been a series of ads running against the grain of cultural convergence: Citibank’s credit fraud spots, with voices mismatched to the actors. Perhaps advertizing firms and their clients should take notice.
I wonder at the unflappable appeal of the cliches of communicative transcendence. The ads are almost an amalgam of Clintonian liberalism and Oprah’s Finding Your Spirit. Both, of course, have their fans, but their utopianism also brings out detractors. And, as Stevenson points out, the visual and aural shock of panglobal montage is far less effective when every other ad on TV is using the same trick.
I suspect that advertisers (companies and ad firms) see this approach as especially appealing to target demographics (liberal baby boomers, women won over by a soft sell). And it may be that the decisionmakers themselves respond to the ideology of communicative transcendence, particular since it ovelaps so with whirl-of-modernity visions of technology and globalization. After all, someone had to buy Friedman’s Lexus and the Olive Tree.
No comments have been added to this post yet.