hypnolibertarian

Let’s pick apart one of the most common commercials: the series of AT&T commercial that seems to run twice an hour (at least) on almost every channel in the world.  I’ll describe one of them, but the rest are similar.  A sweet couple is moving into a new to them, but old and fairly scary looking house.  An old woman, thin, gaunt, tells them they are in a “Dead Zone” where calls disappear — forever!  The dad says, “But we have AT&T.”  And we see the guy with the glasses, with an army of folks behind them.  “You’re good.”  And the woman says to them, a bit spitefully, “Well, you have crabgrass!” and stomps away.  Then the usual text, “Avoid dead zones.  Call AT&T.”

This commercial works well on multiple levels.  The first is the obvious one: humorous, a takeoff on ten million horror movies and TV shows, a little flip at the end, gets the name in and the message so people understand it.  Top marks.

However, there is also a semi-conscious thing going on, which we recognize every time we look for it, but the commercial runs so often we just tune it out — and the companies depend on that, believe me.  The more you “tune it out” consciously, the more the message goes past the conscious mind into the unconscious.  The semi-conscious message is clear: things are incredibly horribly disastrous unless you choose AT&T.  Dead zones: eeeek!

The more unconscious message is unconscious only because it is a series of images that have culturally known responses; it’s not that hard to spot.  The beginning of the horror movie brings the harbinger of evil.  Oh, no!  Next someone has to be killed, of course.  However, the hero comes to save the day (early).  So we feel, unconsciously, not only relaxed from the slight charge but grateful to the guy who makes it all better.

None of this is rocket science; that we’ll take in a future commercial.  But we must not underestimate the three levels working together.  The more the commercial is unnoticed, the more the latter two levels work to create “good feelings” about AT&T.

Let’s compare Sprint commercials.  We have one with the CEO promising lots of good things: big deal.  And we have one that creates bad feelings if you don’t use Sprint (humorously, so as not to leave a bad taste in the mouth) but never resolves it (now that I think of it, that may not even be Sprint).  The worst thing Sprint ever did was to get rid of the Muldar in the black coat.

The message?  Commercials, both company and political, work on multiple levels.  The best ones are small examples of brainwashing: tension, release, savior (see Sargent, “Battle for the Mind” for a more complete description of brainwashing theory specifically.)

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