Audiovisual Advertising

Narrative advertisements (i.e. ads that resemble short films that include characters, drama, and plot structure) are increasingly popular on TV and on the Internet. As in almost any film, music can play a vital role in the experience and impact of narrative ads. This chapter identifies psychological transportation as an important mediator between music and persuasion by narrative ads. Transportation refers to a strong emotional and cognitive involvement in the ad, a sense of being “lost” in the narrative. Previous studies show that transportation plays a mediating role in various aspects of persuasion, such as changing viewers’ beliefs, attitudes, and even behavior. This chapter begins with an overview of the literature on psychological transportation, focusing on its essential elements, moderating factors, and consequences for persuasion. The author then discusses the intriguing possibility that music plays an important role in promoting psychological transportation into narrative ads and reviews initial experimental evidence supporting this idea. Special attention will be paid to the role of “moving” (i.e. intensely emotional and chills-evoking) music, as it appears to be particularly effective in eliciting psychological transportation. Finally, the chapter closes with some enduring questions to be addressed in future studies.

“Have You Played Atari Today?”

Around 1980, home video game consoles began to transition from a luxury product for affluent technophiles into a mass-market entertainment product. Television advertisements were central to that transition, not least in that they helped shape a popular image of who plays video games. This chapter examines the prominent role of music in an influential early television advertising campaign for Atari, the leading maker of home consoles at the time. The music of the “Have You Played Atari Today?” campaign reached across gender and age demographics, positioning Atari’s products as fun for every member of the family. Although most ads of the series were unified musically through the use of the same extended jingle, each featured lyrics tailored to demonstrate the product’s appeal to various members of an extended family. Furthermore, the jingle’s musical hook eventually became a standalone sonic signifier for the Atari brand that endured for years beyond the initial campaign.

As Heard on…

The musical elements of political advertising change with the times. From songsters, contrafactum songs with lyrics that extoll one candidate or party and denigrate the other, to television and radio jingles and online ads, the aesthetics of the campaign mirror the media diet of the public. Early television ads imitated jingles of the day: They were simple, catchy, and repetitive. Both Eisenhower’s “Ike for President” and Kennedy’s “Kennedy” follow this mold. Johnson’s 1964 campaign breaks this mold with “Daisy,” an anti-Goldwater ad known for deploying the eerie sounds of nuclear war. Successive campaigns sought to use a similar recipe, employing cues from film scores and trailers to dictate the emotional content of the ad. Recently, online advertising has bloomed, including tribute videos and promotional spots made by citizens and submitted to the campaign, adding grassroots allure and authenticity.

“Once You Hear This, Act Fast”

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), in cooperation with the Ad Council, featured television commercials that served as public service announcements and fifteen-minute television civil defense advertisements that educated the public about civil defense protocols. Part of its mission was to educate the public in the event of the detonation of a nuclear bomb. This chapter surveys the styles of music used in the televised civil defense advertisements from the early Cold War. The music is distinctly different from what was normally heard on television at the time, often featuring distinct moments of atonality or musical stylings of “us versus them,” that is, American political songs alternating with distinctly Soviet-style music to convey the origin of the threat without directly naming it. These musical oppositions were employed to persuade people to pay attention to the important message onscreen, underscore the potential destruction of the bomb, and relay the importance of civil defense.

Loathsome Deutschtum?

Much has been said about the Nazi appropriation of Wagner’s music in the 1930s and 1940s. As early as 1933, Hitler transformed the Bayreuth Festival into a celebration of National Socialist ideology and propagated miniature Wagner festivals to celebrate his own birthday. Wagner’s music also resounded throughout the culture and media at large. What has been less understood and examined, however, is how this same music was also used in nonnarrative films, newsreels, government documentaries, and industrial and advertising films of the period. Here the appropriation of Wagner is more complex and problematic. Master Hands (1936), the critically acclaimed, feature-length industrial film sponsored by the American car company Chevrolet, is an excellent example. As several film scholars have observed, the film is an artistic advertisement for the American automobile industry that borrows heavily from Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. But the film’s score, a compilation full of Wagner excerpts, arranged by composer Samuel Benavie and performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, about which almost nothing has been said, is equally propagandistic. By examining the music for this industrial advertisement for Chevrolet, this chapter not only re-examines the reception of Wagner in the United States between the World War I and World War II but also examines the integral role his music played in the creation of American films of persuasion. It explores the use U.S. industrial filmmakers made of Wagner’s music as an audible signifier not for German fascism but to advertise for American democracy, industry, and capitalism.

Selling “David Bowie”

In his 1987 “Creation” advertisement for Pepsi, David Bowie alters the lyrics to the hit “Modern Love,” inserting “Now I know the choice is mine” into the chorus. Though the change echoes Pepsi’s own “Choice of a Generation” tagline, it also illustrates the oddity of Bowie’s choice to move into commercials. At this point, Bowie was a wildly popular and financially successful musician, on the heels of hits Let’s Dance and Tonight: This move to ads was a strategic choice rather than a necessity. Beyond monetary considerations, why bother to embrace high-profile advertising now? This chapter argues that commercials, like music videos, costumes, and interviews, served Bowie as a vehicle for reinforcing his star image on a very public stage. In ads from 1968 to 2013, Bowie embodied his current persona, entering people’s homes through their television as well as their radios. This chapter will analyze his 1987 Pepsi spot (“Modern Love”), 2011 Vittel ad (“Never Get Old”), and 2013 Louis Vuitton short (“I’d Rather Be High”) to illustrate the consistent shaping of public image Bowie executed through advertising.

Exploiting the Frontier

In writing about music and advertising, Nicholas Cook (1994) has observed that music, when applied to a commercial, “transfers its own attributes to the story line and to the product … making connections that are not there in the words or pictures; it even engenders meanings of its own.” Thus, while the music gives meaning to the commercial, the visuals can also give meaning to the music. Western music, whether from popular song, films, or television shows, carries with it additional significance in the realm of advertising. In these instances, the combination of visuals with Western music adds to the overall subtext of both, hypertextualizing both the music and the ad. This chapter provides an overview of how the Western’s music has been applied to advertising, examining how the dynamics have changed as the filmic genre developed from simple “shoot-em-ups” to psychological dramas, and how audiences have responded.

“All Those Homes Beyond the Microphone”

Radio programs called barn dances employed music and friendly address to insert advertising into rural forms of sociality. Rather than merely trying to cultivate goodwill or engage in hard-sell tactics, these variety programs sought to cultivate a mediated friendship that made advertisements helpful suggestions rather than rude interruptions. Barn dance radio was so intertwined with broadcast advertising that early country music during the 1930s can be understood as a subset of the advertising industry rather than the music industry. Although they could not personalize each message, the friendly environment created through music, advertising copy, and on-air patter encouraged listeners to imagine broadcasters as “radio friends,” and thus personalize broadcast messages to themselves.

“Search and Destroy”

Punk rock, as a movement within popular music, sought to differentiate itself from prior forms of commercial rock in both sound and attitude. Anti-corporate and anti-consumerist in orientation, punk’s guiding maxim of “do it yourself” was about taking control of the means of production and shifting the musical form outside of the nexus of capitalism. This chapter examines the resultant effects and contradictions surrounding the use of punk music in television advertisements from the 1990s to the 2010s. The advertising industry initially kept their distance from punk until after the self-appointed architect of punk style, Malcolm McLaren, began writing original music for ads in 1990. From Iggy Pop seducing Royal Caribbean customers to The Clash hawking Jaguars, punk has proven to be a lucrative way for advertisers to connect to a demographic group who define themselves as anti-consumerist.

Sound in the Context of (Multi)Sensory Marketing

There has been a recent surge of interest in the multisensory aspects of advertising from both scholars and practitioners. In part, this development is attributable to the growing realization that the senses do not operate independently, but constantly interact with, and influence, one another. This surge, however, is also partially attributable to technological innovations that are enabling advertisers to design increasingly sophisticated multisensory advertisements and experiences. This chapter reviews the growing body of research illustrating how music and, more broadly, auditory stimuli interact with the other senses in the context of advertising. Taking a multisensory perspective, the discussion will focus not on unisensory auditory studies (which have been discussed at length elsewhere) but instead on those studies that have examined interactions or links between multiple senses (i.e. audition and taste, audition and vision, audition and touch, audition and smell).