TV Ads--Each Little Picture Sells a Story

When David W. Stewart fiddles with his television dial, he’s apt to be zipping past prime-time programming in hopes of finding another commercial.

“I go home and watch TV for the ads,” says Stewart, who for about a dozen years has been researching how advertising affects consumers, first in the ‘70s as research manager for a major ad agency and currently as professor of marketing at USC.

Stewart, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, is intrigued most with “nonverbal communication” in advertising--that is, everything except the spoken or written word--and the ways in which music, sound effects, artwork and body language help to create images that sell everything from canned peas to designer perfume.

He and Sidney Hecker of the Young & Rubicam ad agency in Manhattan gathered about 70 industry, advertising and academic types together last year to talk about nonverbal communication as an idea whose time is here. One result: a book, “Nonverbal Communication in Advertising” by Hecker and Stewart, published last month.

“Nonverbal communication is at least as important and, in many cases, more important than verbal communication in advertising,” Stewart believes, pointing out the degree to which it affects whether an ad projects an image that translates into sales.

“One of the classics” of image advertising, Stewart said, was the surreal, science-fiction MacIntosh computer commercial created by Chiat/Day, a Los Angeles agency, and aired during the 1984 Super Bowl. “There was very little there about the product,” he noted--no information about hard discs, only robots making “a powerful statement, the image of the liberator. Brilliant,” he said.

Only a year later the same agency (which subsequently lost the account) devised for MacIntosh what Stewart calls “one of the real stinkers” in American advertising annals. In this commercial a group of lemmings, furry-footed rodents, plunge in unison off a cliff. This was a textbook case, Stewart said, of art and image colliding.

“Nobody wants to be reminded that they’re followers,” he said, “and certainly not that they’re lemmings jumping off a cliff.”

He cited, too, a Chicago agency’s campaign a few years back in which the image of a harried housewife was chosen to sell upscale TV dinners. “These ladies didn’t like to be reminded that that’s the kind of life they led,” Stewart explained. “It bombed.”

Creative Gimmicks

It’s clear now, he said, that human beings process visual information more readily than that which they hear. What’s more important, he said, is “what people do with visual information.” Clever, creative gimmicks may grab consumer attention but may be so clever that they swamp the advertiser’s message.

Consider misplaced humor. Now, Stewart said, “humor gets attention, there’s no doubt,” but if there’s no fit with the product, “what people tend to remember is the humor and not the message.”

Nerds, as a species, are risky business. Stewart pointed to a recent Burger King campaign starring “Herb” the nerd, a campaign he said “Burger King doesn’t even want to talk about.” In Stewart’s view, Herb’s failure was foreseeable. He asks, “What did it mean? That nerds eat at Burger King? Nobody wants to be associated with that.”

On the other hand, the California Lottery, using a nerd character as a winner, has a winner itself. “In that context,” Stewart explained, “what people infer is that even a nerd can win the lottery “--and so can they.

Nonverbal communication can elicit emotional responses far stronger than those awakened by mere words, Stewart said, and whether the consumer buys or doesn’t buy depends largely on “the appropriateness of the emotion to the product advertised.” He suggested: “I’m not going to sob and have my heartstrings tugged by a toilet bowl cleaner.”

And even though it’s known that people feel good when they see an advertisement featuring an infant, that infant isn’t going to help sell motor oil, he said.

Moonscapes don’t have a lot to do with automobiles, but Ford has been betting that surreal moonscapes create images of uniqueness and contemporariness that will make buyers think favorably of Lynx when they go car-shopping.

Researchers have discovered that, universally, people are turned off by advertisements showing models wracked with headache pain or those in which a make-believe hammer is pounding a make-believe head. “Pain is unpleasant,” Stewart said, “and people don’t want to be reminded of that. They begin to associate that feeling with the product name.”

‘Warm, Fuzzy Feeling’

What the headache sufferer is more apt to respond to, he said, is an image that creates “a warm, fuzzy feeling” even though the advertisement presents very little factual information about the product.

In the “warm, fuzzy” category of hits, he points to the classic Mean Joe Greene commercial for Coke; Pacific Bell’s two oldsters reminiscing by telephone and Kodak’s “Golden Moments” campaign. Not only are these high-emotion advertisements, he said, but in each case there is a “perfectly appropriate pairing” of image and product.

Animals, such as a tiger in a tank (for gasoline), can create powerful symbolism. Merrill Lynch did this “very successfully,” Stewart noted, with a bull wandering through a china shop, “walking nimbly through an environment that was somewhat treacherous, fragile. . . .” For the record, he observed, “that was a real china shop, too. They rented it.”

Music Hath Charms

And music, apparently, hath charms to seduce the consumer, even in a world cluttered with audiovisual distractions. We’re not talking jingles. Stewart mentions the hypnotic effect of Shearson Lehman Brothers’ “Minds Over Money”--with its gradually escalating background hum that has been described by its creator at McCann-Erickson as “the sound of a thought.”

As television commercials get shorter and shorter, Stewart said, “about all you can hope to do is get people to remember the product, and maybe one major idea.” And studies have shown that music tends to “create a warm, pleasant feeling about the product. For a lot of products, that’s all it takes.”

Today, advertisers are using music initially to get people’s attention, hoping they’ll hang in for the message. Music sets in motion “all kinds of flashbacks,” he observed, but inherent in this is the danger that viewers will simply drift off on their memories. Again, Stewart said, integration of music and message is the key.

Campbell’s Soups struck out, in his opinion, with dancing girls atop soup cans. “Cute doesn’t work with food,” he said. “Now they show you the big chunks and the steam. That’s why you buy soup. It’s not clear at all what dancing girls on the top of a soup can had to do with anything.”

This is the decade of the VCR, a fact that has not gone unobserved by those who sell deodorants and cars and floor wax. Today, Stewart said, “The buzzwords are zipping and zapping”-- zipping, as in fast-forwarding through commercials, and zapping, as in deleting the commercials.

The challenge to the people who create the ads, Stewart says, is to produce visual images that are “so intriguing you want to slow it down to watch.”

As networks lose market shares to rented movies and cable networks, it will be harder and harder for advertisers to reach mass markets all at once. But they will have better opportunities to target specific audiences. “This Old House,” a cable show for home fixer-uppers, hooked up with Weyerhaeuser, the lumber people.

Commercials linked to films for home viewing (Pepsi and “Top Gun” broke the ice this year) will probably proliferate, Stewart said. Viewers may be resentful, he noted, but “there is resentful, and then there is resentful. Ask them, they’ll say no. (They don’t want it.) But people are not going to stop buying a particular product because it happens to be the front of a movie.”

More Lonely People

One of the growth areas in contemporary society is loneliness, and cable networks, with their home shopping shows, as well as catalogue advertisers, are well aware of this. “More people are living alone,” Stewart said, “and that tends to increase impulse shopping. There’s nobody to say, ‘Don’t do that.’ It’s shopping as a substitute for companionship.”

He attributes the popularity of the home-shopping TV shows to the need for those at home to feel “there’s somebody there talking to me.”

One challenge to the people who create visuals is the increasingly multi-ethnic makeup of the media audience. “Not all nonverbal symbols are necessarily interpreted the same way” by everyone, Stewart points out. For example, where Anglos associate white with purity, Asian Americans may associate it with death.

Changing American mores and values are also reflected in advertising of the ‘80s. In the ‘60s, Stewart noted, “the penultimate car was the VW Beatle. We were frugal, ecologically minded. If I drove a VW Beatle, that’s what it said about me.” Thus, the wildly successful minimalist campaigns created by Doyle Dane Bernbach to assure consumers that VWs lasted forever and changed little.

“Today,” Stewart said, “driving a Mercedes is, for most college students, a status symbol.”

Materialism Is Back

Weddings were out in the ‘60s; today, weddings are in. Babies are now a status symbol. Materialism has staged a thumping comeback. Now, Stewart said, “If I’m going to show people I’m successful, what must I have? . . . a Rolex, a BMW.”

Dewar’s, figuring that images of affluence and success will sell Scotch, came up with its “Dewar’s Profiles,” wherein the rich and/or famous give testimony to their life styles and drinking styles.

But this approach simply won’t work on something as mundane as laundry detergent, Stewart said--”Nobody sees me use that” and Brand X will do nicely. “And it’s hard to make something a symbol of success if everybody uses it,” as in deodorants.

Cigarettes are a dilemma unto themselves. Today, Stewart said, cigarette smoking “has lower socioeconomic status. We don’t identify cigarettes with the very successful business executive. Nobody would believe that. And blue-collar smokers are not going to buy cigarettes they see their bosses smoking.” Thus, campaigns such as Marlboro’s featuring the rugged outdoorsman.

Studies show that most people do not object to sex in advertising if there is a clear relationship between sex and the benefits offered by the product--for example, perfume. “What they object to,” Stewart said, “is the gratuitous use of sex. Here I am, selling a milling machine and I have this scantily clad model.”

Another thing that doesn’t sell in the ‘80s is the notion that women’s ultimate goal in life is to have spotless linoleum and dust-free end tables. “As more women have gone into the work force,” Stewart said, “it’s OK to be a little less clean. Women now have lots of other sources of identification. Simultaneously, men are doing more of the shopping. Now we’re trying to figure out how to sell a man a toilet bowl cleaner.”

Advertisers will have to find messages that are “appropriate to the way men perceive their role in the household,” Stewart said. Food manufacturers, among the first to recognize the dual role of husbands and wives, are now showing couples cooking together.

Which of the current crop of advertisements would earn an A+ in Stewart’s class? He mentions again Pacific Bell’s two elderly gentlemen, whose continuing story intrigues him enough that “I really look forward to the next ad.” He mentions Glendale Federal’s campaign with the tag line, “When you say jump, we ask how high.” Observed Stewart, “In this market particularly, people complain bitterly about the services of financial institutions.”

And he mentions the California Raisin Advisory Board’s dancing raisins that sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” That one, Stewart said, “has to be given high marks simply because it’s hard to do anything with a raisin.”

And, which campaigns would garner only a D+ in his classroom? Stewart demurs, explaining, “Agencies write me and say, ‘Explain yourself!’ ” But it’s OK to mention mention Burger King’s nerd, he said--”Everyone agrees that was a real dud.”