Making The Audience An Accomplice

By Author: Adela
Total Articles: 74
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Verbal and visual commonality forms the base from which the advertiser builds the ad's claims. If the advertiser then can lure us into the role of accomplice in endorsing the product, the ad will succeed. To do this, the advertiser determines what content we are willing to invest in the ad and then creates a structure that links that invested content to the product.

The ad may do this with such devices as a rhetorical question, asking, for example, whether you deserve the luxury feel of a new car. Alternatively, the ad can invite us to complete a chain of reasoning unwarranted Thomas Sabo Charms by the evidence. This is what the Clinton-Gore campaign did in 1996 with an ad claiming that Dole-Gingrich would cut Medicare by $270 billion. The implication of the claim was that Clinton-Gore wouldn't cut it at all, which was not true. Although they were not as deep as the Republican cuts, the Democrats had proposed cuts as well.

The use of the word cuts was also misleading, not because of what was said in the ad but because of what was heard. The cuts proposed ...
... by the Republicans and Democrats were cuts in the rate of increase, not cuts in the dollars that recipients were already getting. Thus the ad invited the inference that Clinton would protect Medicare to a greater extent than he had pledged to do and suggested as well that the Republican and Democratic proposals differed more dramatically than they actually did.

Finally, by allying Dole and Gingrich, the ad implied that Dole was responsible for other proposals and actions by Gingrich that Dole had in fact thwarted when they came to the Senate, where he was the majority leader. Those taking the ad at face value might also conclude that Gingrich was running with Dole, when in fact Dole's running mate was former New York member of Congress Jack Kemp. It was possible to cast a vote for Dole and, if you lived in Gingrich's district in Georgia, a vote against the congressional leader.

Ads can also invite audience involvement in the forging of inferences by the use of visual images. This was the tactic used by the Republicans in advancing their most of-ten aired deceptive claim in 1996. In this claim, the announcer indicated that Clinton had passed the highest tax increase in history, while Thomas Sabo Bracelets the ad showed pictures of blue-collar workers. In one ad, the picture shows a short-order cook. The Clinton-proposed tax increase passed by the Democratic House had been the highest when unadjusted for inflation. Adjusted for inflation, however, the Reagan increase was larger. But the two were close. What was seriously deceptive about the ad claim was the inference it invited when it juxtaposed the idea of the tax increase with the picture of the short-order cook. The Clinton tax was largely on the upper 1.5 percent of income earners in the United States. If the short-order clerk fell into this category, he was probably in the kitchen to indulge a hobby, not to earn his living.