Questionnaire compiled responses

1) Age range

10-20 : 15
20-30 : 1
30-40 : 1

2) Gender

Male: 6
Female: 11

3) 'Roughly how much television do you watch per week?' (in hours)

0-5: 2
5-10: 10
10-20: 5

4) 'What channels would you say you watch the most?' (responses 1-4 reversed and added together to give scores e.g. No.1 choice given 4 points, No.4 choice given 1 point)
Top FOUR channels highlighted.

BBC1: 23 points

BBC2:8 points

BBC3: 14 point

BBC4: 0 points

ITV1: 14 points

ITV2: 0 points

Channel4: 42 points

E4: 35 points

More4:0 points

Five: 0 points

Music Channels: 16 points

Dave: 7 points

Sky Premier: 1 point

Horse and Country: 4 points

Living TV: 4 points

Virgin 1: 2 points

5) 'Mostly, what do you do when adverts come on?'

Keep watching: 1
Change Channel: 6
Go away, do something, come back: 10

6) "Do you think TV adverts at the moment are more 'creative' or more 'generic'?"

Lines divided into 8 incremental sections of 12.5% each (lowest is 'generic'). Determined number of marks within each section. Essentially calculated the percieved percentage of creativity in TV adverts.

0%-12.5% section: 1
12.5%-25% section: 0
25%-37.5% section: 2
37.5%-50% section: 1
50%-62.5% section: 5
62.5%-75% section: 4
75%-87.5% section: 3
87.5%-100% section: 1

7) 'On a scale of 1-5(1 high and 5 low), how important do you think originality is in TV advertising?

1: 7
2: 6
3: 2
4: 2
5: 0

How far do you agree with the following statements?

8) Adverts which are creative sell more products

Strongly Agree: 1
Agree: 14
Neutral: 1
Disagree:1
Strongly disagree: 0

9) Adverts that stick to tried and tested formulas are more likely to appeal to wider audiences

Strongly Agree: 0
Agree: 3
Neutral: 6
Disagree: 8
Strongly disagree: 0

10) Many 'original' adverts are actually similar re-workings of existing adverts

Strongly Agree: 0
Agree: 8
Neutral: 7
Disagree: 2
Strongly disagree: 0

11) Have you consciously bought a product after seeing it advertised on TV?

Yes: 11
No: 6

12) If 'yes' what products have you bought?
Products categorised into price bands, some poeple mention more than one.

Products costing £0-£10: 7 - consisting mostly of food products
Products costing £10-£500: 12 - consisting mainly of cosmetics, CD's DVD's and games, but also a mobile phone.
Products costing over £500 : 2 - Containing a laptop computer and apple iphone (expensive mobile phone)

13) Which three of these TV advertising strategies do you think sells products the most?
(Scored according to methods in question 4). Top FOUR strategies highlighted

Sex and Sexuality: 4 points
Celebrity endorsement: 13 points
Comparison to other products: 8 points
Unique selling point: 27 points
Jingles: 8 points
Slogans: 20 points
Special effects: 6 points
Music: 12 points
Quality of acting: 3 points.

'Memory Test' DVD quiz RESULTS

Quiz taken by 15 media studies students

Results logged as follows:

• Seen before: Number of people who had seen advert prior to screening
• Company: Number of people who recognised car company
• Make: Number of people who recognised model of car
• Slogan: Number of people who recognised slogan for that car
  

Advert 1: Honda FCX Clarity (Hybrid car) 'The Power of Dreams'

• Seen before: 8
• Company: 5
• Make: 5 (said 'hybrid', not exact model name)
• Slogan: 2
  

Advert 2: Nissan Quashqai 'Urbanproof'

• Seen before: 12
• Company: 7
• Make: 1
• Slogan: 1 (said something relating to 'urban'
  

Advert 3: Honda Accord 'The Power of Dreams'

• Seen before: 9
• Company: 12
• Make: 0
• Slogan: 1

Advert 4: Skoda Fabia 'Full of Lovely Stuff'

• Seen before: 13
• Company: 12
• Make: 2
• Slogan: 4 (said something relating to good/lovely things)

Advert 5: Audi RS6 'Performance from every part'

• Seen before: 5
• Company: 1
• Make: 0
• Slogan: 0

Advert 6: Volkswagen Golf GTI 'The Original, Updated'

• Seen before: 7
• Company: 0
• Make: 0
• Slogan: 2 (said something similar)

Advert 7: Nissan 4x4's 'Naturally Capable'

• Seen before: 9
• Company: 5
• Make: 1
• Slogan: 0

Yearly ad spend minimum change over time

Source: Thinkbox.tv (Nielson Media Research) http://www.thinkbox.tv/upload/ppt/Yearly_Ad_Spend_by_Medium_20080304181700.ppt

All approximate according to badly labelled graph

TV advertising:
Variable
2003 : £3.65bn
2004: £3.90bn
2005: £4.20bn
2006: £3.75bn
2007: £3.90bn

Internet:
Steady growth
2003: £0.2bn
2007: £0.5bn

Press:
Steady growth
2003:£3.2bn
2007:£3.6bn

Direct mail
Declining
Hit peak in 2004: £2.3bn
Dropping 2007: £1.4bn

Some of the top 10 car adverts according to torquecars.com

VW Golf GTI

Peugeot 206

Citroen C4

Audi RS4 Quattro

Car Advertising. What about...

...looking at alternative and non-mainstream car advertising. I looked through the 'What a man's gotta do' book and couldn't find any chapters or much reference to cars in relation to masculinity, so maybe I could look at car adverts which (similar to my previous hypothesis) stray away from the mainstream in order to prevent making an advert showing the stereotypical view of a car driving around on sweeping country bends. Boring!

I'm not sure if this hits the spot with how broad or narrow the hypothesis is, but 'alternative/non-mainstream strategies' seems more broad than 'deploying masculinity' (masculinity could even fit into this topic), but is still narrowed by looking specifically at car adverts.

Advertising seems to increasingly stray more from tried and tested mainstream strategies than the programmes they are placed between, especially in commercials for cars where the scope for innovation is minimal. What methods do car adverts use to ensure that their product is noticed, in an industry where there is a fear of stepping too far off the line due to the risk of losing wide target audiences?

From this I could investigate:

• The 'Mainstream view' of car advertising
• Representing Masculinity
• Innovation, creativity and quirkiness
• Manufacturors creating an 'image' in their advertising (eg Honda)
• How car adverts develop ideas over time (see previous post containing videos from Vauxhall, Fiat and Volkswagen)

PRIMARY RESEARCH FROM THIS...

The Memory Test

Show clips from 'popular' adverts that contain no indication of make or model of the car to a viewing audience. Written quiz to test whether the methods used in the advert are effective at getting viewers to remember the product.

Questionnaire (how advertising affects your purchases)

Ask people whether watching adverts really makes you want to buy the car, or whether it has a different purpose (ie creating an image). Does a potential customer on a forecourt really buy a car from the advert's influence? maybe not. Does the image created by the advert have an effect? possibly...

Advert screenings

Screen whole adverts (including make and model), and have open discussion about its effectiveness, creativity and audience targetting.

Car advertising

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/rmb9801.html

Broaden the approach - look at the ways in which car ads target men by deploying masculinity in certain ways. These will include the creative ways which cofer a certain sense of being clever in the audience, but also things like individulaism, freedom from constraint, sexual attration etc. You might even contras such ads with ads aimed at women, such as the Clio, or the Yaris.

Extract from writer's comments on advertising at
http://www.planetbods.org/theshed/randomwritings/howto/adverts.live

How To... Make TV Adverts Without Really Trying

Getting Started

Beware! Imitate! Don't innovate! Clients aren't interested your ideas. The only things they care about is patronising their potential customers enough to flog them enough of their product.

Further inspiration can be found by watching digital television channels which have several hundred different types of advert, all of which are cheap and exactly the same.
So get out there and put your new found knowledge to work!

How Imitation can Develop Advertising

It seems to be that some advertisers are either copying or using techniques already apparent in existing adverts, showing that to some extent adverts are less original and 'alternative' to others. In fact, over time it appears that advertisers have developed upon ideas from previous campaigns to improve their adverts.

Examples below from 3 separate car makers (in chronological order):

Vauxhall Corsa 'Put the Fun back into Driving' (idea of racing around town, precision driving - as a game)

Fiat Grande Punto 'The Italian Job Remixed' (idea of racing around town with precision driving to show off car, plus re-mix style with car noises creating music)

Volkswagen Golf 'Enjoy the Everyday' (lost precision driving idea for 'real driving' but kept re-mix style to make music)

Next Steps

I have been thinking about how to carry out my research, and have decided to identify what 'mainstream' advertising is precisely, since I cannot look at how adverts depart from it if I don't know what it is.

I have looked at a textbook in relation to the initial developments in advertising:

'British Television Advertising - The First 30 Years'
Edited by Brian Henry
Published by Century Benham Ltd 1986

AN EXTRACT:

" Between 1956 and 1959 expenditure on television advertising more than quadrupled, in the latter year exceeding the total revenue of all the national and London evening papers, which itself had just reached a record peak. It was not only the volume of television advertising but it's content and style, however, which captured public attention - the slogans, the jingles, the packs, the images, the straight captions, 'as advertisied on TV', familiar outside the home. This was 'marketing' as distinct from selling, and it involved trying to have on hand and to make available 'what the consumer wants'."

Thinkbox

Industry Adverts plus data on target audience and campaign objectives etc

http://www.thinkbox.tv/

Thinkbox is the television marketing body for the main UK commercial broadcasters - Channel 4, Five, GMTV, ITV, Sky media, Turner Broadcasting and Viacom Brand Solutions. We work with the UK marketing community with a single ambition: to help customers get the best out of television.

http://www.thinkbox.tv/

The hypothesis

The use of alternative narrative devices and representations in advertising. Why depart from the mainstream?

In a media world where everyone is scared of moving away from tried and tested genres and formats, ie a commercial media environment where financial success rests on attracting the advertising pound, why is it that the commericals themselves often seem to depart from the mainstream? How come commercials sometimes seem more innovative than the programmes produced to attract them?

Sean

Statistic Tables

Viewing figures, yearly advert spends etc etc

http://www.thinkbox.tv/server/show/nav.38

Possible Questions

1) What strategies of advertising are there, and which are the most effective?

2) What strategies do the most successful adverts use?

3) Does quirkiness make a good advert, and if not, what does?

4) How does the advertising industry promote products successfully?

5) How do 'iconic' and 'original' adverts gain their success?

Each of these questions can look at the ideas around the ways products are advertised, whether art is involved in any way, as well as if people who watch them consider them to be 'iconic' or 'original' (possibly through screenings followed by a questionnaire)

Advertising as Art

http://www.tate.org.uk/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=18167

Here is a thread posted on the Tate gallery website discussing the value of advertising as an art form. This could be a good point to mention when writing about strategies adverts use to captivate audiences.

A selection of posts from the thread, and the initial question (*my comments in bold and red):

mk00
Posts: 5 Registered: 12/5/04
Can we class advertising as art? Posted: Dec 5, 2004 12:46 AM

This is an age old question. But i just have to ask it. What does everybody think? What about the evolution of pop art? Can we in many ways say that it evolved from advertising or one that challenges in a way? Can we say advertising has the same aesthestic purpose of art? - does the pupose of creating the advert mean that we class it differently?


S_Champken
Posts: 2 Registered: 12/16/04
Re: Re: Re: Can we class advertising as art? Posted: Dec 17, 2004 2:36 PM in response to: mk00

Roland Barthes writes in his essay The Death of the Author

The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire`s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh`s his madness, Tchaikovsky`s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it.

In my opinion this could relate to advertising aswell. Van Gogh made beautiful art because he was mad, or Van Gogh made beautiful art and he was mad, or Van Gogh made beatiful art and went mad, or Van Gogh`s beautiful art reflects his madness..........by knowing that Van Gogh was mad make his art any more or less valuable?

Brands such as nike or addids create aesthetically beautiful designs in there advertising. I believe it is completely irrelevant why these designs are made or the theme or message it conveys, that it simply is an aesthetically beautiful design makes it art.

This writer appears to have the belief that art is anything aesthetically beautiful, regardless of its message or motives. This is a somewhat imprecise observation since much 'art' displayed in galleries is far from beautiful (Tracy Emin's 'My Bed' etc).

Does this mean an advert to be deemed 'artistic' must be beautiful? Many iconic adverts do have a visually pleasing aspect (the Guinness advert you posted Sean could be percieved as 'beautiful'). This then begs another question, isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder? Is it then, financially viable to make an advert 'artistic', when potentially it could only appeal to a narrow market?

andreatheamazing
Posts: 2 Registered: 5/24/05
Re: Re: Re: Re: Can we class advertising as art? Posted: May 24, 2005 10:35 PM in response to: S_Champken

I feel that you make a good point. But i think that this than proceeds to raise questions about how we measure "Value"in the art world. It is obvious that in advertising it is measured by dollar signs, Is this how we now measure art as well? Is a 200 million dollar painting "more effective" then a ten dollar one? Art is a creation for the subject creating it. So in efforts for the those who wish to understand the peice it is a logical extention for them to investigate into the creaters life (such as Van Gogh) His insanity may not add value, but may add understanding or appriciation. Is this not how we should measure the value of art? Is that not the only difference between art and advertising? Also, you raise issues of Branding-- which i feel is the ideological extention of advertising. I can see room within the Art world for advertising, but not for branding. I can not deem these things "beautiful", i find them destructive and consuming of the space which art once filled-- the public gallery is now the sponced gallery and with that comes certain guildlines for a purpose which is good for buisness, and not good for art.

This post raises issues with budget as well, a successful piece of art (and therefore advert) may not have to cost a lot to shoot?...

I'm having trouble...

...coming up with an idea for an hypothesis about advertising as art.  Here is what the Exam Board Specification says about advertising within the Critical Research unit:  

Advertising

Research into advertising, marketing and sponsorship.

Issues such as the nature and purpose of advertising - selling image and lifestyle. Issues of

ideologies, values, messages and meanings. Consumer cultures. Product placement. Niche

and mass markets. Audience targeting. Social demographics and product mapping.

Marketing strategies. Case studies of particular campaigns. Audience reception of

advertising. Relationship between media institutions and advertising"

You will need to be very careful in formulating an appropriate research area here.  Perhaps something developed along the lines of "the use of art references in advertising".  But it's not quite right yet...

So...

...if some advertising tries to make grand claims for itself (ads as mini films of artisitic merit - see my post below) then perhaps looking at advertising in the cinema would be productive. Pearl and Dean (ba ba ba-ba ba-ba ba-ba bububub) has looked at this:

http://business.pearlanddean.com/cinema_research/ad_length.html

Sean

Advertising as art

I've been thinking about this.  There's something interesting about all the awards for ads - it's as though ad execs want to sort of justify what might be seen as their rather grubby profession (all about getting people to want things they don't need) by making it into a sort of "art".  Perhaps there's some mileage into exploring this a little.  The ways that the advertising industry conceptualises itself.  Not sure how this might develop but have a think about it.  Of course, crossover from advertising to film happens quite a bit (Ridley Scott is a well known example).

Here is an obvious example of the ad as art film.

British Television Advertising Awards

British Television Advertising Awards
Selection of some adverts shortlisted for BTAA awards 2008 - Origninality and creativity measured by awards won?

1) John Lewis 'Shadows'

2) Guinness 'Tipping Point'

3) Cadbury's Dairy Milk 'Gorilla'

4) Big Yellow Self Storage 'Tide'

5) Sony Bravia 'Play Doh'

Initial question and compiled information from handout from Sean

Why are certain adverts deemed 'ingenious', 'creative' and 'original'?

A study into the strategies used in most adverts to fulfil their purpose, and what 'iconic' adverts are doing differently

Your first ideas

Advertising

Are the strategies of advertisers successful?

The main purpose of an ad is not necessarily to sell the product – see the notes I gave you already.

I like the idea of looking at ads that you consider to be “original” needs more working through. Maybe you should consider it as one strategy amongst others?

Reading – there has been lost written on advertising – perhaps you could look at the chapter on Advertising in Media Studies: the Essential Introduction (see me for it).

Your proposed primary research (the “memory test”) will only be appropriate for some advertsing strategies, but it is a good place to begin. I think your ideas for primary will develop as you do your secondary research (reading).

STRATEGIES IN ADVERTISING - WIKIPEDIA

Strategies in advertising

Generic Strategy:
A generic strategy simply attributes a product to a purpose; this is a rather obsolete method of advertising which was used mostly in the 1940’s.

Example: ‘Beef, It’s what’s for dinner’ (1940’s advert)

Pre-emptive Strategy:
This form of advertising makes a generic claim stronger by emphasising a certain fact (which may or may not be typical of the type of product being advertised).

Example: ‘Adnams, Beer from the coast’

Unique Aspect Strategy:
This technique involves a product being proven to have a Unique Selling Point (USP), and therefore making it better than rivals.

Example: ‘Dettol kills 99.9% of bacteria on hard AND soft surfaces’

Positioning Strategy:
This method was developed in the 1970’s and involves a product being compared against a rival, or an unnamed ‘leading competitor’.

Example: Duracell Batteries ‘Duracell just keeps going, compared to ordinary alkali batteries’

Brand Image :
In a similar way to creating a positive corporate image, some adverts attempt to encourage positive emotions towards a product, rather than create a rational need or want for it.

Example: Trident Soft gum sends you into a ‘soft’ fantasy world.

Endorsement :
This involves a celebrity or important person recommending or endorsing a product.

Example: Kellogs Optivita endorsed by Aldo Zilli (celebrity chef)

Resonance Advertising :
Resonance advertising is where a product, or the characters in the advert relate directly to the target audience, allowing them to relate their lives in some way to those in the advert.

Example: Give blood campaign ‘If it wasn’t for this man, my brother would have died from a ruptured spleen’