Publisher's Synopsis
Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, grade: 2.0, TU Dortmund (Institut für Anglistik), course: Popular Culture: Theories and Practices, language: English, abstract: In September 2000, during the presidential election campaigns in the United States, a citizen of Seattle watched a political commercial on television. In the beginning, the commercial appeared like a usual ad in which the spokesperson commented on George W. Bush's concept concerning prescription drugs and its advantages and at the same time criticised Al Gore's concept about prescribed medication. The viewer had the impression of something being fishy about the spot. The next time he saw it on tv, he recorded it to a tape and replayed it at a very slow rate. Indeed, something was unusual about the ad: When the spokesperson said: "Gore's plan about medical prescriptions: Bureaucrats decide", the term "RATS" appeared for a fraction of a second on the screen - normally below the threshold of perception. The attentive viewer informed Al Gore's team about this, who proceeded to inform the press. Bush's team denied the possibility that anyone had purposefully inserted the term "RATS" into the election spot and proclaimed that this had happened accidentally. Commercials are part of our lives. Every day, the average American is confronted with 300 - 400 adverts. Advertisement creates employment and transfers impressions about the promoted product to its recipients. Thus, advertisement has to be subliminal and obvious at the same time. Advertisers exploit people's attitudes and try to change the viewer's self-perception. My thesis is that commercials create wishes that did not exist before or at least did not exist in the same way in the viewers' minds. They use subliminal and obvious messages to attract interest for the presented object. In the following paper, I will focus on how commercials work. Using a selection of different
