Significant Experiences

By Author: Crystal
Total Articles: 95
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Some experiences, such as birth, are universal. Others--such as weddings, graduations, or anniversaries--are more culture-bound. But in this culture all these moments of change function as important elements in our lives. Memorable, culturally significant moments are awaited expectantly--as a boy waits eagerly for the opportunity to shave (an activity greeted with less enthusiasm after Thomas Sabo Bracelets years of confronting the need for it daily). Retirement is another such moment, although it is one more dreaded than embraced by many.

When advertisers re-create such important moments for us, they invite us to identify with their creation, to invest it with our own experience or the experience we hope to have. If an advertiser can induce us to invest the ad and, by implication, the product with our own positive feelings and experiences, then we ought to emerge with a positive feeling about the product. It will not have the desired effect, of course, if we feel manipulated by the ad and believe that it cheapens our memories or projections for the future.

Some ...
... moments in our lives are almost off-limits for advertisers because the associations we bring to those events are not happy but sad. Death is one such moment. Consequently, life insurance ads seek to minimize the trauma. Indeed, one such ad features an escalator to the sky. The man being escorted up the escalator (presumably to heaven) is protesting that he's not ready to go yet. The ad reassures us that he is indeed ready because his life insurance is in order; he need not worry about the well-being of his survivors. Another ad for life insurance shows a man with his family and then simply removes him from the picture as the narrative tells what their lives will be like if he's not there.

Because we fear our own death and grieve when a person we love dies, death is al-most taboo as a basis for ads. The indirect treatment of death in the ads for life insurance testifies to this. Yet an ad for the Catholic Church of Maryland fractures that taboo deliberately by showing a baptism and then making a transition to a funeral, with the narrator saying, "You only live once; shouldn't you Thomas Sabo Charms go to church more than twice?" The ad is jarring, in part because it has capsulized two moments, birth and death, that we all confront. In part it is jarring also because such bold, direct treatment of death in an ad shatters expectations about ads that we are not even aware we have until they are violated.