This course examines the relation of advertising to society, culture, history, and the economy. Using contemporary theories about visual communications, we learn to analyze the complex levels of meaning in both print advertisements and television commercials. About the Course The course covers a wide range of topics, including the origins of advertising, the creation of ads, the interpretation of ads, the depiction of race, class, gender, and sexuality in advertising, sex and selling, adverting and ethics, and the future of advertising. The lectures will discuss theoretical frameworks and apply them to specific advertisements. Course Syllabus Week 1: What is advertising and where did it come from? Week 2: Am I being manipulated by advertising? Week 3: What’s in an ad beyond that which meets the eye? Week 4: How do ads get made? Week 5: What do ads teach us about race, class, gender, and sexuality? Week 6: Does sex sell? Week 7: What is the future of advertising? Recommended Background No background is required; everyone is welcome! Suggested Readings Although the lectures are designed to be self-contained, we recommend that students refer to the free online textbook ADTextOnline.org. Other free resources will be suggested for each week’s module. Course Format Most videos will be lectures with instructor talking. Each lecture will be illustrated with PowerPoint slides, print advertisements, and TV commercials. The videos for each week will consist of segments that add up to about an hour. Each week will have one quiz that will appear as stand-alone homework. All resources beyond lectures will be available online to students at no charge. Most of these will be from ADTextOnline.org. Others will be visits to the sites of ad agencies in the US and abroad, open access websites that deal with course topics, and open-access journal articles.
4.3 The Role of Research in Advertising
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En provenance du cours de Duke University
Advertising and Society
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How do ads get made?
Switching gears this week from looking from outside advertising at it, this week is devoted to the “insider” perspective on the making of ads. It looks at the various functional divisions of ad agencies (management, creative, research, and media) and the roles they play in producing an ad. It tracks the production of an ad from development of a strategy with a client company, the development of creative concepts, the production of ads, optional audience testing, and finally placement in appropriate media. Also discussed: brands and brand management strategies.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Professor William M. O'BarrProfessor
Cultural Anthropology, Sociology and English
Hello and welcome back to Advertising in Society.
We continue our consideration today of how ads get made.
I suppose by starting with a story, last lecture, I need to do it again today.
And I'll tell you just a brief one,
also, that I think illustrates a great deal about the world of advertising.
A bunch of us professors once we're sitting in a room watching ads and
talking to people who produce them and discussing the creative process with them.
And in one particular ad there was a scene in which a woman with a beautiful head of
hair drives up to a, a stoplight, shakes her head and
flashes her hair around, something I can't do of course.
And there's a man who comes up on a motorcycle beside her,
he's dressed all in black in his motorcycle outfit.
And when he turns his head to look at her, his visor comes down and
it covers his face.
Now, we spent some time discussing as professors what the meaning of this is,
for the man to hide himself from the woman.
And we asked the people who were talking to us about it
why they'd done that particular thing because it seemed a little scary to
some of the people who looked at it.
They were perplexed and didn't even remember the reason.
But they promised to find it out for us.
When it came back it had nothing to do with the man scaring the woman,
some sort of sinister plot, something like that.
It was simply the answer that they were running over budget when they
were making this particular part, of their series of commercials.
And they had to figure out some way to cut cost.
It turns out that in the world of advertising,
if you show an actor's face onscreen, you owe him money in terms of residuals.
If you don't show his face,
it's different in terms of what it cost to use his talent.
So this had to do with a completely strategic economic thing, and
not some sort of complex meaning that those of us who
want to read many things into advertising might see there.
I want to talk now about something that we might not think of at first as a part of
the creative process but indeed it truly is.
And that is way that research plays into the creative process at various
stages of the production of an advertisement or a TV commercial.
There are things that happen before the shooting,
there are things that happen during, and there are things that happen after.
And I'd like to talk with you a little bit about each of these.
Now before the commercial is produced there's some research that happens
to lay the groundwork before coming up with completed idea that will be shot.
For example, a client may give to
the advertising agency some research that they've done that shows how
their product has been sold in different months and over the years.
And thus, they might end up with graphs and charts like this that talk about
the trends and give some sense of not only how much they sell,
but some ways that help us understand who the consumers are.
Then their consumers may be broken down into groups and
interviewed in situations like this.
Typically focus groups that consist of six or eight people and a moderator.
This one is taking place in Tokyo, but it could be anywhere in the world,
where the moderator sits at the table and
talks for a couple of hours to people who use the product.
And from this is garnered various kinds of information about how they use it.
Including perhaps, even some of the language that they use and
maybe ideas that will ultimately feed to the creative process.
Now, the company may also provide various kinds of categories and
pie charts and information of one sort or another.
This shows more and more about who the people are, who currently buy the brand.
Now something else that's happened and feeds deeply into the process is
the distinction that has been made for the last two decades between demographic and
psychographic factors in terms of thinking of the consumer base.
Advertisers know that not all consumers are the same,
that there are different categories of people who buy brands.
And that some brands may appeal to people in one category may,
maybe more than they do in another.
Now classically, what had happened throughout much of the 20th
century is that consumers were divided up into demographic categories.
Say, men between the ages of 18 to 25 who smokes cigarettes.
And then the, the profile of that set of people would be understood and
it would be fed into the advertising process.
So demographic studies of consumers mean dividing the consumer base up
by such things as age, sex, ethnicity and race, educational level, and income.
Now that has been supplanted in recent years by a different way of
dividing the consumer base up into what is called psychographic graphics.
And this instead,
is instead of thinking out of the consumer in terms of those classic categories.
It means dividing a consumer base by their outlook on the world,
of how they are different from one another in terms of what they like,
what they prefer, the way they like to live their life and
this usual means in practice then dividing the consumer base up by lifestyle and
values as espoused to demographic categories.
In other words, they are psychographic categories.
Now to illustrate this even further, I want to talk specifically about one of
the psychographic systems that is used in, in the creative process and thinking
about different categories of consumers and who a commercial might be directed to.
I'd like to use one of the, the systems that is perhaps best known.
It's what's known as the VALS system.
And here is the chart they use to
show the different categories that they divide the world up into.
You'll see that, in this case, dividing the American world up, produces a set
of categories that are not at all like the demographic ones I described before.
There's no 18 to 35 year old men, but rather categories of people
who are called things like thinkers, achievers, experiencers, and so on.
Now these categories are distinguished from one another
along a couple of dimensions.
First of all they are distinguished by the things that motivate them and
you will see that there are some who are listed being very idealistic,
some are achievement oriented, some are concerned about self expression.
And there are then other distinctions that are important here and
there, this is the issue of
the level of resources available to people to buy things in the marketplace.
There is some people with a lot of resources and
there's some people with much more limited ones.
And so it,
what you'll see here in the main categories in the center is the idealistic
versus the achievement interested people versus the self expression folk.
Are divided further into the categories of those
who have more resources to spend and those who are more limited in
their budget somehow fully they can participate in the consumer experience.
I, I'd like to show you now how we can look at each of these categories and
see how it can be connected to the way a commercial is constructed and
the way that customers are talked to.
Let's begin with the category that's called Thinkers in the VALS system.
These are people who are motivated highly by ideas.
They tend to be well educated.
They tend to work in professional occupations.
They're content with their careers, their families, their station in life.
They are highly informed about the world and about national events, and
they are concerned about such things as functionality, value,
durability of products, and so forth.
Now in thinking about what kind of items,
what kind of categories these people might be interest in,
we can look at a car ad that is written really thinking about people like this.
So I'd like you to watch the following ad, and I think you can see in it
how these issues about the way that these folks called thinkers look at
the world are reflected in what's said in this television commercial.
[MUSIC]
>> Hm, I guess it is easy being green.
>> The 36 miles per gallon Ford Escape Hybrid.
[MUSIC]
>> Believers, by contrast to the ones we just considered the thinkers,
are conservative folks who are fairly conventional.
They tend to value family, religion, community and nation.
They are very predictable in their behavior, very loyal to brands.
These are the folks who go out of their way to buy American products
whenever possible.
And they respond to the linkage of brands to fundamental American values.
And you can see all these things happening in
the next commercial where these traditional values, the Americanness and
so forth are played up in terms of the way the commercial is constructed.
[MUSIC]
This is our country.
This is our truck.
The all new Chevy Silverado.
>> Now all that stands in contrast to yet
another group of people who are referred to in the VALS system as achievers.
These are people who are motivated by the desire to achieve.
They tend to be highly successful people.
They work because it's a sense of duty to them, but
it also provides material rewards and prestige.
These folks value predictability.
They like to buy reliable, durable, stylish products and
they like brands especially that reflect their level of achievement.
And, you can see that also in the following television commercial that this
is an ad directed to people who are very concerned with the brand that
will reflect the fact that they are people who have achieved things in their lives.
And those achievements include financial resources that allow them to buy
more expensive cars that reflect again their sense of who they are.
We've never looked back.
Never stopped
pushing forward.
Because the race that really matters,
the race with ourselves, is never over.
The strivers are people who also seek to achieve, but
the place a very heavy emphasis on the opinion and approval of other people.
These folks often lack self confidence.
They look to brands to help define themselves and
help them fit in to society.
They buy expensive items if they can afford them, but they often settle for
lower budget alternatives.
And they frequently end up saving money for expensive items.
So you can see that happening in the following commercial where
expense is a factor.
What other people will think about you when you own this particular kind of car.
But the fact is that owning it was, is still a marv,
sense of achievement for the person who is the owner.
>> Introducing the totally new Jeep Compass for just 15,995.
It's freedom in a whole new dimension.
>> My contrasting with these earlier categories are further ones,
included experiencers.
These are people who seek variety and wide experiences in their lives.
They are the folks who favor the off beat and risky.
They're avid consumers.
They like to buy things, to own things.
And they often buy things on the basis of whims, appearance, and trendiness.
And if you look at the following commercial, you'll see that that's exactly
what's been talked about here, that this is something different.
This is something that is risky a bit, and it's certainly different from the usual.
So here is our commercial directed to experiencers.
[SOUND] And by contrast to all of this,
we can see a category of the VALS
system referred to as makers.
These are people who enjoy do-it-yourself projects.
They're, they tend to be self-sufficient and practical folks.
They demand and buy safe and reliable products.
They're always looking for good quality at lower prices.
The men in this category are interested in cars and
repairing their cars, taking care of them, doing projects around the house.
And the women may be interested in things like cooking, sewing,
household projects, and so forth.
Usually the makers that do things and you can see this illustrated in this print ad,
where this man is working with tools he bought at Lowe's,
on his car in his home garage.
And this is what he likes to do.
This is the kind of person he is.
And these kinds of folks, again standing in contrast to some of
the other categories, markedly in terms of how they look at the world.
These folks are appealed to through projects and categories like this.
Now the system also includes two other categories of people.
One of them are the, the innovators, and the other are the survivors.
And they contrast remarkably with one another because
the innovators are the highly successful people who are in control of their lives,
they have abundant resources.
They spend lots of money, and
they buy expensive items that reflect their personal lifestyles.
And on the other end of the continuum are survivors.
These are people who really are on severely restricted low budgets,
who must shop for the least expensive products and brands they can afford.
These are the folks who go to places like Wal-Mart,
who really seek a value for money.
And often don't have much of it to spend.
Now, sadly in terms of the way all these things work in a consumer oriented
society, is these people are often typically ignored by advertisers for
the simple reason that they don't have much money and therefore,
not much clout in the marketplace.
On the other hand, the innovators have a lot, they have a lot of money to spend,
and they are much sought after as consumers,
because of their ability to expend their resources.
So these are outliers, but one in one direction, one in the other.
So we've seen that before the, commercial is made, a variety of background research
is done, including things like deciding which group of people psychographically,
or perhaps which groups of people are being talked about as the consumers.
And therefore how the ad should be constructed around this knowledge.
So this research about linking the psychology of the consumer,
the psychographic profile of the consumer to the consumer base, is
often a very important piece of research that feeds to the creative process.
Now, during the production of a commercial, research often needs to
be done on things that come up as questions that need to be answered.
I actually saw this happen when I was at an ad agency was
the research folks were given the project of finding within a couple of days,
all the images that they could of John Wayne, the famous cowboy figure,
because they wanted to draw an image of an American cowboy.
Another example might be researching quickly the history of pasta
because a copywriter wants to emphasize cultural traditions in a print ad.
This slide illustrates a typical kind of research question that might come up.
I once saw this happen actually again in an ad agency.
The deal was that the creatives were setting a television commercial in
the coin laundromat.
So they sent out some folks from the research side of things to watch people,
in a variety of laundromats, see what they do, and quickly write a report on it.
So that when the commercial was produced, it could be as realistic as possible.
So, research plays a very important role in the creative process.
Feeding in this kind of information as the creatives are working on it,
producing the specifics of what they want in it.
And all this is the kind of stuff that happens later.
The psychographic profiling of consumers happens earlier.
So they're different kind of research done at different stages in the process.
Now, in many contemporary ad agencies the term planning has replaced research.
Planning is defined as representing the perspective of
the consumer in the advertising process.
But I think for our purposes we can think of it as the creative team,
the people who are working to produce the commercial will typically
include someone whose job it is to know as much as possible about the consumer.
And at every stage of the process to speak up on behalf of the consumer and
represent the folks who use the product.
So that becomes a part of the overall creative process as well.
And instead of applied research as classically it used to be called,
it's frequently now called planning as a part of the creative process.
Now after commercials or
print ads are made, there are often various forms of research that is
done afterwards to determine the effectiveness of an advertisement.
Now there are two big questions that advertisers want to know the answer to.
The first is, do consumers remember the ad?
Of course, if they don't remember it then it doesn't work.
And secondly, are they persuaded by the ad to take some action?
Because if they remember it and aren't persuaded to do anything about it,
then it doesn't work either.
So both these things need to happen.
That consumers remember the ad and secondly that they're persuaded by it
to act on the information that they learn through the ad.
And that's has to do with the fact that the model that's being used in
advertising of thinking about how consumers behave in the marketplace,
is illustrated by a situation like this.
This is a wall of shampoos.
You meet all these brands.
How many of them are there?
30? 40?
50?
There are lots and lots of them.
Do you remember something about one of these brands?
Were you convinced by what you'd heard?
Would you like to try it?
Or are you just faced with the fact that there are all these brands and
you might reach out and pull this one off because you like the bottle or
the color is pretty or something of this sort?
So the objective is to think of the consumer as behaving in
a marketplace where things are like this.
Many, many options are,
are provided, but can the consumer recall the name of a brand?
And were they persuaded to take action on the basis of what they had learned
through the advertisement?
Now sometimes other kinds of research that occur after a commercial is made is
to do various kinds of interviewing to ask people questions about what they recall.
It's a way of figuring out, do people remember and were they convinced?
So it's it's, it's recall information.
And so you see here, this woman with a clipboard interviewing people and
asking them questions like this.
And that's the kind of thing that might often happen.
Now all of this in one sense is not strictly about creativity but
it's intimately tied to the creative process.
Research and creativity go hand in hand because there are things that need to
happen before, during, and
after to provide the information and the assistance that the creatives need
to effectively communicate selling messages to the consumers who are likely
to buy and use the product and brand being advertised.
Now again I'd like to suggest that you read up,
in more detail about what we've talked about today.
And you can find a unit on ADText which is strictly about research, that
contains this and much more information on the subject of research and advertising.
This course is a collaborative venture of Duke University and
the Advertising Education Foundation.
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