Making The Audience An Accomplice (2)

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In addition to the use of resonant symbols such as weddings and the construction of rhetorical questions for which the audience has a ready answer, advertisers also induce participation in the following ways:

1. Juxtaposing images that have no necessary relation to one another but that, when associatively linked, lead the audience to infer a relationship ("Have a Coke and a smile").

2. Employing double entendres that prompt the audience to fill in a second meaning ("My men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all"). Thus, for example, when Johns Hopkins Medicine took out an ad that said to US News, "Thanks to you, our condition remains stable," it invited readers Thomas Sabo Bracelets to ask what the five pictured issues of the newsmagazine could have to do with the stability of the medical complex in Baltimore. The answer is in the ad: "For the fifth straight year, US News & World Report ranked Johns Hopkins the #1 hospital in America."

3. Employing a phrase outside its normal context to induce the audience to ask how, if at all, ...
... that phrase can be applied to the product. For example, automobile dealers appropriate a phrase from the film The Godfather to assert, "We'll make you an offer you can't refuse." And Crest headlines an ad "Years of Crest Cavity Protection and Nothing to Show for It." In smaller print, the reason is given: "No cavities: It's what every mom wants for her kids. . . ."

4. Creating a questionable grammatical construction such that, in the process of untangling the statement's meaning, the audience draws a new meaning from the words. For example, an automobile ad claims that "we" not only make the car "well, we make it good."

5. Using explicit content that triggers unarticulated audience predispositions. In summer 1990, a black glossy insert in Advertising Age declared, "Playboy has put me in the hearts of 10 million men." The fold-in was designed to look like the Playboy centerfold fold-out. Anticipating a nude female centerfold, readers opened the page to find a three-page pullout, similar to Playboys in form but of a fully clothed businessman. The data sheet, also a carryover from Playboy, revealed that this was David Warren, president of Jordache. In the data sheet, Warren plugs Playboy. "Our previous print campaign didn't consist of major menswear publications. A big mistake. To correct it, we chose Playboy because it's got the largest readership among the men's magazines. And their reader is our customer: affluent, younger, contemporary with a disposable income. A perfect fit--pardon the pun."

6. Manipulating by suggesting that, unlike other ads, this one isn't manipulative. On the assumption that younger audiences are likely to see through traditional ad ploys, the ads of the 1990s are increasingly anti-ads. "We considered showing an NBA star drinking our soda," says a print ad for Sprite, "but we figured basketball players should stick to what they do best--endorsing sneakers." A television ad shows a glass of cod liver oil that looks like a glass of a caramel cola, as the announcer urges viewers to "drink what tastes good because television can make anything look delicious." The theme of the Sprite campaign asks the audience to reject ad claims and simply "Obey Your Thirst." 7. Using humor. Since the beginning of theorizing about communication, rectors have recognized that humor is a means of disarming an audience's defenses. The person who laughs at a scenario sketched by an admaker has granted the assumptions underlying the script. The audience member and the creator of the ad are in effect laughing together. In an e-business television ad for Hewlett-Packard's HP Net Servers, Kathleen Jamieson's son Rob, who writes ads for a San Thomas Sabo Charms Francisco agency, used humor to invite viewers to conclude that using the Hewlett-Packard product would ensure that their companies would secure needed supplies on schedule (see Figure 7.1). In the ad a person trying to secure martial arts uniforms over the phone instead gets bunny suits, bellhop uniforms, and nuns' habits. The humor in the ad is drawn from the incongruity created by having marital artists execute their moves in uniforms unsuited to their sport. When the sensei learns from this experience and uses HP Net Servers with Intel Pentium processors, he obtains the uniforms he needs.

By luring us into participating in the creation of the ad's meaning, the advertiser in-creases the persuasive power of the ad. But unless the message is repeated often, it is unlikely that we will be either exposed to or persuaded by it. The ad in Figure 7.2 is highly creative in its selection of means to induce participation.