The obvious ploy of this ad is of course the link to doctors, who presumably wouldn’t smoke unhealthy cigarettes. The “T-Zone” blurb reinforces that message, as does the cosy middle-class ambience of a well-dressed mother (note the hat) with her well-dressed and intelligent daughter (her plaid skirt hints at a school uniform) facing an avuncular doctor dressed in medical whites and with reassuring grey at the temples. This is a doctor with experience. The books ranged behind the mother tell us he’s well-educated as well as kindly. A doctor to trust.
The ad copy is careful to say exactly what the surveys found, that the most-named brand was Camels. The copy doesn’t give us all the survey data, though. It doesn’t, for example, tell us how many doctors said they didn’t smoke. It doesn’t even tell us how many doctors named Camels, because a smallish number might suggest that many other brands were also popular, or that most doctors didn’t smoke at all. But it does tell us that 113,597 doctors were asked. A reassuringly large, and above all precise number.
The ad is a nice example of how to use images, words, and numbers to create an impression. That the impression may be misleading or false is not, of course, the advertiser’s fault. After all, there isn’t a single false statement anywhere. If the reader of the ad comes away believing that Camel cigarettes are healthy, well, you can’t control people’s thinking. Can you?
Advertising is applied poetry and fiction in the same sense that engineering is applied physics and chemistry. Reading a poem or story creates an imagined experience. So does reading an ad. Watching a story on film or TV creates an imagined experience, too. So does the commercial that interrupts the program. Narrative art controls the reader’s attention. So does an ad. Done skilfully, the ad creates an experience that will prompt the viewer to choose the product the next time they are shopping.
No comments:
Post a Comment