Recently, a group of fellow students and I finished an upper level audience research course in which we conducted a survey in an effort to determine how best to design a public transit advertising campaign for what demographic groups.
We divided our intended (target) audience according to gender, geography, transportation preferences
and attitudes and asked them which advertising design aspects appealed the most to them.
For example, we gave survey respondents a limited list of "advertising themes" from which they were
then asked to identify those that appealed to them the most. Our research assumed that those advertising characteristics which were preferred the most by particular demographics, should, in turn, be integrated as a focal point into resultant advertising campaigns.
Its a fair guess that our research could provide clues as to what particular demographics favoured and didn't favour (among the themes and advertising characteristics we identified).
Ultimately our research did provide us with some definite indications of what groups favoured what advertising characteristics (i.e. urban men favoured environmental issues advertising, while suburban men favoured cost-competiveness-based advertising).
However, given this kind of specific direction, all the other issues involved in selling a relatively unsexy (to some) service like public transit are still unresolved.
When audiences are already used to ironic advertising (i.e. the recent Coca Cola ad featuring American Idol Critic Simon Cowell emphasizes the hip-ness of self-aware celebrity endorsement advertising, but still wants you to buy coke anyway) how best to sell them social-issues or socially conscious products and service such as public transportation.
While concluding the presentation of our research, we were asked whether we would advocate or consider the "culture jamming" approach to our campaign.
(A short segway into culture jamming is included below for those who wish to read it)
[Coined by San Francisco band Negativland, and popularized by organizations such as adbusters, culture jamming celebrates the possibility of active public engagement with the "one-way-direction" of advertising. Culture jammers take a dominant media message, and add to it, so that a different meaning is created. Instead of Nike's "just do it", we have "just don't do it". From (dutch royal) "Shell" to "$hell" is another example of how a supposedly "one-way" channel of meaning can be operated upon and used to create additional and often contrary meanings. (Hartley, John "Communication, Cultural and Media Studies", 3rd ed. US: Routledge, 2002)
Its a hijacking of intended advertising meanings, undertaken to "reclaim public space" which has been lost and usurped by commercial advertising.
However, the strategy is executed to varying degrees of creativity, insolence and success. Some "jams" are excellent, and expose the lie in corporate goodwill efforts and the like. Others are just property damage. Whether a jam is succesful or not really depends on who is viewing the jam, and who it is perpetrated against. Certainly, the world needs jamming to reduce the trouble-free consumption of mainstream advertising messages. Amid a world of consumption and avarice, a well-executed jam is like a breath of fresh air, a break in a potentially soul-destroying homogeny. ]
But culture jamming is not as new as it once was, and like many visual forms of communication, it gets old. Like the old 'honest' straight-selling advertising techniques of the 1950s and 60s, culture jamming has its limits. Its sort of like a political 'attack ad'. It has the potential not only to demean the opponent of the jam (i.e. Nike, Shell, Disney) but the cause of the activist/jammer as well.
In the context of public transportation advertising, whether it would be effective to "jam" car advertising as a way of promoting public transportation seems a risky venture. It could be effective, even extremely humorous if done correctly, but if it is too evangelistic and black and white, then it may come across as a sophisticated form of self mockery and ironic camp instead.
For example, an advertisement which uses the formula of a Chevrolet/Ford/GM truck commercial, complete with eroticized splashing mud and construction worker montage could make for an extremely effective 'jam': "1000 horsepower, 32 cylinders, best safety record in its class, come on down and experience the thrill of the open road in a new 52 seat B.U.S. ...arriving at a route near you."
In my view, a bad advertisement is, for example, one that might make the link between environmentalism and bus use explicit in such a literal way as to be completely forgetable. Good advertisements should recruit the sensibility and decoding intelligence of audiences. Audiences see so many formulaic ads (i.e. anything from Wal-Mart or Standard Life Insurance's montage of a bunch of people saying "you can trust me, I will be there for you... etc) that they are much more likely to consider a well executed jam selling something which unlike most advertisements
1. Is advertising a service that is good for the world (i.e. environment) , and not just a corporate bottom line.
2. Executed in such a way as not to be too literal, and beat the audience over the head with the intended message.
There are so many variables and possibilities to consider in constructing an advertisement, it is almost impossible to say in advance of reception (when an audience sees the ad) whether a particular design will be more or less effective.
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