Article Analysis 1-3

In 2008, David Wall constructed an article titled, It Is and It Isn’t: Stereotypes, Advertising and Narrative, where he attempts to demonstrate stereotypes work by projecting positive and negative fantasies through the visual media and connecting the stereotype with perceived social realities. In his introduction, Wall provides a great example of a 2005 British Labour Party ad featuring Conservative politicians Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin, both of whom are Jewish, depicting them as flying pigs. The Labour Party argued that the poster was designed to only link the phrase “when pigs fly” with the likelihood of the Conservatives being able to produce an economic strategy. Critics of the ad said it is at best insulting and at worst anti-Semitic for portraying the two Jewish candidates as pigs. Was the ad racially motivated, with the intention of appealing to an audience’s stereotype by portraying the two Jewish candidates as pigs, part of a continuum of anti-Semitic propaganda, or was the ad a simple depiction of a well known phrase where two politicians (who happened to be Jewish) faces were innocently superimposed on two pigs with wings to make a political point?

Wall goes into great depth in his article, revealing the human conscious and sub-conscious fantasies, and the power of stereotypes which he believes are rooted in our social reality. Stereotypes, like ads, according to Wall, “Target our deepest human emotions such as fear and desire, and they appear ‘real’ because they are part of a political, cultural, and aesthetic landscape-that separate spheres of which touch and merge at crucial points-that reinforces their believability. Difficult though it is to see beyond these horizons it is not impossible. We need to understand the enormous power possessed by the visual media to develop and promote stereotypes but also that the visual text can be assessed and analyzed in ways in which reveal the wider politics that produces it (p. 1048, 1049).”

The purpose of advertising is to persuade; the slogan and the image can be humorous or attention grabbing but the body is always to extol the benefits of the message and thus persuade the audience. When analyzing an ad one has to identify the key persuasive words and consider their effects on the audience. Ad campaigns often make use of stereotypes as a way of communicating a meaning. Sometimes the stereotype is deliberate and for comedic effect. Wall uses a good example of an Old Milwaukee beer commercial where two men open a beer and suddenly are met by the “Swedish Bikini Team”- a group of bikini-clad Nordic beauties-parachuting into their living rooms (p.1039). According to Wall, what the advertisers are relying upon with this “act of contextualized interlocution” is not an exchange of information but the manipulation of the roiling emotions of desire and anxiety (p. 1041). However, as Wall demonstrates, some images and messages in advertising reveal portions of our self-identity which comes from the images and messages in the advertising that surrounds us. These stereotyped images and messages can be potentially harmful, especially in political ads where there is continuous pressure to create ads more in the image of the audience’s motives and desires, while concealing the true “motives” of those making the advertisement. In politics, where mud is the weapon of choice, a return volley is always needed to counter an opponent’s attack, especially if the original attack was effective and, as in the “pigs” campaign ad, made an emotional appeal to the subconscious minds of the intended audience, but more so to the those of the Conservative party.

Some ads have their emotional appeal in the text, but for the greater number by far the appeal is contained in the art-work. This makes sense, since visual communication better suits more primal levels of the brain. If the viewer of an advertisement actually has the importuned motive, and if the appeal is sufficiently well fashioned to call it up, then the person can be hooked (Petra, M. & Sorapure, M., 2007).

Before an advertisement goes public, market research is done to know and describe the target group in order to exactly plan and implement the advertising campaign and to achieve the best possible results. The science of advertising and marketing is used to improve its effects. Knowing that advertising has an agenda setting function, it’s hard to imagine any well organized political campaign would not understand the potential for controversy if such a depiction is presented to the public. Advertising often uses stereotypic gender specific roles of men and women reinforcing existing clichés that have been criticized as “inadvertently or even intentionally promoting sexism, racism, and ageism… At very least, advertising often reinforces stereotypes by drawing on recognizable "types" in order to tell stories in a single image or 30 second time frame.” (Wikipedia).

The TV commercial is generally considered the most effective mass market advertising format. The most important element of advertising is not information but the suggestion, the emotional appeal to the subconscious of people. This, by altering the context in which advertisements appear things can be made to mean just about anything and the same things, can be endowed with different intended meanings for different individuals and groups of people. As Wall points out, stereotypes often have a “kernel” of truth as its center; there is nothing within these stereotypes which has anything to do with reality (p. 1041).

There were other examples of stereotypes that play out in society and were articulated and factually based in the article. Wall presented one example I disagreed with and would argue that he himself has made an assumption in which may have stereotyped Londoners who left the city from 1993-2002 as anti-immigration and racist. I don’t share in his opinion that the media is somehow complicit in generating and propagating “fear and panic through which all social problems are attributed to the corrosive presence of the ‘foreign body’ (p. 1046). Wall describes the stereotyping taking place in England, as it is propagated by the tabloid press, as that reason for the “wider panicky fantasies about the supposed negative consequences of immigration (p. 1046).” The assumption here is that the Londoners that left the city couldn’t have left for any other reason than that they were bombarded with racial stereotypes through mass media and from this onslaught of visualization, caused them fear and anxiety of losing their “Britishness” and left the city over a nine year period. Wall completely ignores the economic and social impact that mass immigration has on the host country’s resources. Instead, he compares both mainstream British political parties and their constituents to the country’s well know racist Enoch Powell, the ultra-right wing National Front leader of the 1970’s. This is an unfair comparison and one that may imply Wall’s own bias view on immigration and those that have a different view. The different view, it would appear in Wall’s eyes, to be cloaked in some degree of overt or sub-conscious form of racism.

In conclusion, the article is very effective in recognizing various forms of stereotyping in our society. We should learn to analyze what we see and hear and look beyond the smoke and mirrors and sleight of hands to dispel stereotypes as an acceptable form of culture. In that, as well as much of what was presented in the article, David Wall and I completely agree.

References

Petra cca, M. & Sorapure, M. (2007). Common culture: Reading and writing about American popular culture. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN: 0-13-220267-0.

Browne, R. B. (2005). Profiles of popular culture: A reader. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN: 0-87972-869-8.

Wall, D. (2008). It Is and It Isn’t: Stereotypes, Advertising and Narrative. The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 41, No. 6, 2008, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Wikipedia, Official web site. Advertising retrieved April 19, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising