The Great Commercial Survey

2003-06-10

Everyone hates television commercials, right? Yet we all understand that they serve a purpose: Ads provide funds to our TV stations that enable them to continually bring us top-quality trailers that spoil the shows we want to see.

At best, commercials are a necessary evil, so we all put up with them. They've become as much a part of our televisual lives as shows pre-empted for sporting events, documentaries that show us snippets of the upcoming show just before the opening credits, and the three-bullet-point system (watch the news: regardless of how important or trivial something is, it can be summed up with three easily-digestible bullet points).

But lately I've noticed a few worrying trends with commercials. I've touched on a couple of these before, like the seemingly vast amount of irritatingly badly-dubbed ads. I've also noticed that there appears to be a rather excessive amount of ads for yogurt-type products - far more than for any other kind of junk food - and hair-care products.

So the idea came to me that it might be interesting to do a little survey... I decided that for one whole week I'd take note of all the television commercials I saw (originally, I was going to do this for a month, but I swiftly changed that after the first day: actually having to pay attention to the commercials was a lot more taxing than I'd expected).

I was more than a little surprised by the results.

However, before I get into the details, a few disclaimers. First, I only watched the usual shows and channels - I didn't go out of my way to see commercials (I'm not quite that sad yet). This means that I only noted the commercials that I would have been exposed to anyway. It also means that the time-of-day should be taken into account - I didn't see many commercials before seven in the evening or after eleven-thirty at night. Second, despite any opinions I express here, I'm not judging the companies or people behind the adverts, just the adverts themselves.

Anyway, I put the ads into categories...

	Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Total
Alcohol	3	7	11	3	16	4	6	50
Baby Stuff	1	4	6	0	5	1	0	17
Banks (incl. insurance, etc.)	1	4	2	4	6	1	0	18
Cars	3	2	0	11	3	1	6	26
Cosmetics (incl. perfumes, etc.)	4	6	13	8	21	7	4	63
Entertainment (movie trailers, CDs, etc.)	6	3	6	10	14	7	3	49
Information (drugs helpline, etc.)	0	3	2	1	6	1	2	15
Junk Food (incl. fizzy drinks)	6	16	17	3	25	10	4	81
Food	2	7	11	2	13	7	6	48
Phones (incl. mobiles)	3	2	1	4	4	2	5	21
Others	5	10	12	28	25	7	16	103
Totals	34	64	81	74	138	48	52	491

The categories are pretty much my own opinion: for example, what should go into "Food" rather than "Junk Food"? Are frozen burgers junk food? (No) Do tabloid newspapers count as Entertainment? (No) Does Slimfast count as food? (Yes) Do we include toothpaste in the Cosmetics category? (No). And so on.

So, there are 491 commercials in the survey...

12 were badly dubbed. This is 2.44 percent of the total; much, much lower than I'd expected. This could be because there were no ads for Kinder products and only a couple for Immac - sorry, I mean, Veet.

48 (9.78 percent) were what I consider to be pretentious. In general, that means lots and lots of arty shots that seem to be specifically crafted to make us think that the product is something other than what it is.

For some reason, there were far fewer ads for yogurt-based products or shampoos than I'd expected. This is a bit annoying, because it was the perceived over saturation of such ads that inspired me to do this survey in the first place.

I didn't count those "sponsored by" commercials that bracket some shows (like Skittles and Buffy the Vampire Slayer or O2 and Big Brother). If I'd included them, the final figure would probably be about 540.

I also didn't count trailers for other TV shows. If I had, they would likely have brought total close to the 600 mark; even more if I'd included the end-credits voice-over enjoyment-spoilers.

The top ten advertisers:

1.	Guinness	13	2.65%
2.	Budweiser	7	1.43%
3.	Citroen C3 Pluriel	7	1.43%
4.	Garnier Ambre Solaire	7	1.43%
5.	Hugo Boss	7	1.43%
6.	Rimmel Stars Lipstick	7	1.43%
7.	Smirnoff Black Ice	7	1.43%
8.	Heineken	6	1.22%
9.	Nivea Satin Sheen Moisturiser	6	1.22%
10.	Nivea Visage	6	1.22%

So what conclusions and observations have I taken from my wee survey?

1. Of the 48 pretentious ads, a total of 28 are for alcoholic drinks; Guinness (13), Budweiser (7), Bulmers / Magners (3), Powers Gold label (5). Guinness ads tend towards the smug and ethereal, Budweiser's ads - lots of big horses running around in slow motion - seem to be from the "Drink this and you'll be nearly as good as an American" school of thought, and the truly terrible new Powers ad is telling us that their amber liquid is the only thing that will make our lives worthwhile. And I'm not even counting the ads for Smirnoff Black Ice, which aren't so much pretentious as they are condescending.
   
   I don't drink, so I have a different view of this sort of thing to most people, but it seems to me that the message the alcohol pushers are hinting at goes along these lines: "If you don't drink our stuff you're not a real man."
2. The great advertising dichotomy is apparent in the Guinness ads: As far as I know, it's one of the best-selling drinks in the world, yet they still need to advertise very heavily. Or perhaps it's one of the best-selling drinks because they advertise so heavily. Likewise with any large brand name: Coke, McDonald's, etc. I find this interesting, especially in light of the pretentiousness of Guinness's ads. What, exactly, is the point of the ad that shows us two minutes of some guy exploring the Antarctic? This guy later becomes a publican, they tell us. So? What's that got to do with his former career as an explorer? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to show him as a kid in school or at any other stage of his life?
   
   An aside: Am I the only one who's noticed that most seasoned Guinness drinkers just pour the stuff down their throats as fast as possible, as if they're doing their best to avoid actually tasting it?
3. There's a couple of ads that are pretty clever, but for each clever ad there's about twenty that are massively annoying. My least favourites, not including the pretentious ones: The Fanta ads where the demented idiots attack orange-coloured things (the implication being that they're so much in love with the day-glo fizzy water that they lose their senses at the sight of anything resembling it), the "Knowing what it really means to be Irish" Mastercard ad (actually a very clever concept in itself; there's truth in the ad's observations of The Wanna-be Irish, I just can't make the connection between Mastercard and Ireland), the Citroen C3 Pluriel ad with the kids changing the car from one style to another (it's badly-dubbed and stupid), and - bottom of the barrel - the ad for Low Low (a kind of butter substitute, apparently) where they do their best to equate the product with gold nuggets or something. Stupid, stupid, stupid... And sadly not stupid enough to be good.
4. Of the 491 ads, only three actually had anything that appealed to me, and all three were movie trailers. This makes me wonder two things... A. Am I so distant from the desired demographic? B. Where are all the ads for stuff I like?
   
   Advertising obviously works, otherwise there wouldn't be any. But if I'm in any way representative of the average human, then only a very small number of ads will appeal to any one person. This makes me think that perhaps the prime goal of advertising is not so much to sell the products directly, but to create in us an awareness of the product; make it part of our lives to increase the concept that the product is indispensable.
   
   And that leads to another thought: if product awareness is so important, why do products occasionally change their names? Recently Immac (a name which in the UK and Ireland is probably synonymous with hair removal) became Veet. The manufacturers are taking a chance with this: they're sacrificing a very established brand name for a short-term burst in publicity. If this sort of thing is done well, it might work, but surely there's only so many hairs waiting to be removed? Are they of the opinion that more women will decide to use hair removal creams because of the new name? To be honest, this completely baffles me! It was pretty much the same thing when Marathon bars became Snickers - okay, so Snickers was an established name in the US, but I can't see that that was a good reason to change the name.
   
   Though on the other hand, many years ago there was a confectionary bar called Nunch which was later changed to Star Bar. Nunch was a particularly stupid name, I always thought, and Star Bar was a much cooler name, but I can't imagine that sales increased enough to justify the cost. I didn't buy the bar any more frequently once the name changed.
5. The list of top ten advertisers tells us a lot: they want us to believe that we need more alcohol and cosmetics in our lives... But let's take the view that one can in theory live a perfectly happy life without alcohol, junk food, cosmetics, phones, cars and entertainment, and that one can stuff one's money under the mattress and avoid any financial institutions; that removes around 300 ads, leaving us with about 190. For the moment let's discount ads for food... That leaves about 140. Of those, a good number are for products that many people could do without at a push; medicinal stuff like hay fever sprays and indigestion remedies, pet food, D-I-Y and gardening products, household goods like washing powders and anti-bacterial sprays, and so on. A large number of the remaining ninety or so ads are for newspapers, supermarkets, airlines, holiday destinations, that kind of thing. This leaves us with a bunch of ads for "feminine products", toilet paper, toothpaste, educational establishments and one ad for denture adhesive.
   
   This data tells me that only a tiny fraction of ads are for things that people really need. At first, this might seem shocking: the manufacturers are going crazy trying to get us to believe that we can't live without their product! But when you think about it, that's the whole point of advertising! In fact, we can take that a little further and wonder why a manufacturer would bother to advertise things that no one can do without - toilet paper, for instance. It's not like people are going to buy more toilet paper than before just because they've seen an ad for it. We'd buy toilet paper even if there were no ads at all.
6. There's a growing trend in advertising that I find extremely amusing (give it time: I'll soon find it very annoying): It's what I call the Captioned Qualifier. I'll give you an example... Slim woman on screen: "I tried all sorts of diets but none of them worked until I found Skinnynow!" Tiny caption: "Can help you lose weight only as part of a calorie controlled diet." Well, duh!
   
   Of course, the Captioned Qualifier has been around for years... "Serving Suggestion." What!? You mean that this box of cereal only contains cereal? But that's not fair! The picture shows a bowl, a spoon, a jug of milk and a cartoon chicken!
   
   (Some years ago I bought a bag of peanuts, and on the front of the bag was a drawing of a pile of peanuts with the words "Serving Suggestion" written underneath. I still can't figure that one out. Were they trying to say that we don't have to pour the peanuts out of the bag, and that - if we feel reckless enough - we can eat them out of the bag a handful at a time?)
   
   You get the Captioned Qualifier a lot when some big company is being floated on the stock market: "Share prices can go down as well as up." Oh, can they really? I've gotta say this: if anyone is dumb enough to invest in the stock market without knowing that share prices can go down, they deserve to lose their money. Do we really want people that stupid to be in control of large sums of cash?
   
   So, the Captioned Qualifier: you can get away with saying pretty much anything on screen as long as your caption tells the truth... And even then, you need to know how to interpret the captions: "Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up the payments" (what you're really doing is making a bet with the financial company that you can keep paying, and you're putting up your house as your stake). "As part of this nutritious breakfast" (photographed on a table next to some wholemeal toast and a glass of orange juice). "From the producers of..." (we have no faith in our movie, therefore we'll make a tenuous link to a better movie and attempt to ride its coattails).
   
   This last one - credibility by association - has fascinated me ever since I saw a copy of Roger Zelazny's novelisation of the movie Damnation Alley with the words "From the publishers of Star Wars" emblazoned across the front cover. Let me clarify: Aside from the same publisher, Damnation Alley has got nothing to do with Star Wars. Even though I was only twelve or thirteen at the time, and probably the most naïve person in the world, this didn't fool me. Okay, yes, I did actually read the book, but that was because in those days I read every science fiction novel I could get my hands on.
7. I can understand the need for manufacturers to announce their products. I also accept that they need to use gimmicks to make their ads stand out from the norm - and this is not an easy thing to do, because even though I spent a whole week paying strict attention to the ads and not automatically hitting the Mute button, there's still a very large percentage of ads that I can't immediately remember what they're for. This often triggers a spontaneous outburst of "Cars! No, jeans! Perfume! Cereal!" and so on, until the ad comes to an end and I suddenly remember - because they tell me - that it's for holidays in Hungary.
   
   Or let's look at it another way: during the survey I saw the Citroen C3 Pluriel ad seven times, and I've seen in a few more times since, but I still wouldn't be able to recognise one of the cars if I saw it in the street.

To sum up: As mentioned above, advertising wouldn't exist if it didn't work. But it doesn't seem to work on me, so on whom, exactly, does it work? Are there really hordes of gullible, directionless people out there? No, of course not (I hope).

My conclusion is that advertising works not by so much by making us crave the products, but by making us aware of them. After all, we're hardly likely to buy something if we've never heard of it and don't know what it is... So a cereal manufacturer will saturate us with the name of their new cereal so that when we actually see the cereal on the shelves we'll be familiar with the name and might then pay attention to it, and perhaps consider buying it.

From the point of view, it all sounds like it takes a hell of a lot of money, time and effort to introduce a new product to the market. Perhaps, in recognition of this effort, we should support the manufacturers and buy their products.

Or we could take a different approach, and say, "this ad bugs the crap out of me, therefore I will never buy any of this company's products."

Regardless of which approach we take, it's easy to be impressed by huge advertising campaigns, but we should strive to bear in mind that these aren't done for our benefit. The whole purpose of advertising, when you get down to it, is to make more money for the manufacturers.

They don't do it to improve the quality of our lives; they do it to improve the quality of their lives.