I still remember walking in front of the Dodge dealership in Summerside when I was just an early teen, and seeing a poster that proudly proclaimed: “You won’t find these on Ford or Chev!”

Wow! Until then I thought that in advertising you never made any comment about the rival company, certainly never, ever, mentioned their name. I consulted a teacher at my school, and he assured me that they were not breaking any rules, as long as what they said was actually true—you wouldn’t find those things on Ford or Chev.

I re-checked the poster the next time I went by, and sure enough, the items mentioned were things like “torsion bar suspension” that Ford and Chev did not use at all. I found the idea of that poster, at a time when opponents were almost never mentioned in ads, to be quite intriguing. Perhaps obvious stuff, but to me clever marketing. Only a few people likely looked in detail at what they were mentioning, but the hidden message was there—Dodge was ahead of Ford and Chev in its innovations. I’ve always been interested in language, and I’ve always carried an interest in how a society makes use of language at its apparent highest level—advertising!

I think if I had things to do over, I would have liked to be in advertising as a career, perhaps from this use of language, perhaps from the desire to sway people in one direction, or perhaps from the unique way it combines language, images, psychology, and often humor.

While TV commercials can be extremely annoying, particularly when they come at you eight at a time, I don’t know if I would be completely happy with a control or recorder that blanked them out all the time… I often like to see them (the fascination tends to wane the sixty-third time you see the same one, however).

Some are hilariously funny, some are very moving, and some are fascinating in the way they pull you in the direction of their product. Some are completely dumb and hopeless in their attempts to sway you, and fail miserably.

There is a certain value in just putting the name of the product in your mind, and many go that route. The ad might be funny, it might tell little, but if it sticks the name and appearance of the soap box in your mind enough that you will recognize it on the store shelf, then it might have successfully done the job.

Other ads might attempt to get you with information, apparent facts, and (supposedly) appeal to the mind of the enlightened shopper. It is in this area of the battle that every word is used with great care, and sometimes what is not said, or what is only implied is the final intent. If the viewer chooses to jump to pleasing, but not entirely correct conclusions, then the advertisers are quite happy.

Look, for example, at the current interest in healthy and nutritious food for the family. The selling is all in the wording. One cereal company loudly touts, “Made with Whole Grains”. Sure. The naïve viewer (and they hope that includes all of us) makes the assumption that these cereals (it looks like their entire line) are made from only whole grain. But the ad didn’t say, “made from”, it only said “made with”. There’s an obvious difference, since “made with” is like saying “traveled with” for all the meaning you might have pulled from that. “Made with” could, in reality, include the fact that whole grain was actually in the building at the same time. More likely, the truth is that some whole grain was in the process, perhaps a significant amount– perhaps not, with the slogan “made with”. It’s all in the wording.

When families buy bread, there has always been the difficulty that parents (at least some of them) might like the family to eat whole wheat bread, while children prefer pasty white bread, as soft and doughy as possible. So one bread company managed to tie into both camps at once— they produce what appears to be white bread (to please the kids), but “made with the goodness of whole wheat” to please the parents.

Now that slogan is all in the reading of it. At first glance, our emphasis is on “whole wheat” as the most significant words. Actually, the most significant word is “goodness”. Read it again with the emphasis on “goodness”. What the clever company has done with the help of their production and advertising staff is they decided what the “goodness” was in whole wheat, and added that to the normal white bread. In other words, they made additives that they judged were the useful things (the “goodness”) in whole wheat, and stuck them in the dough bucket to make the white bread. It’s all in the language.

Where commercials fail is when they are fantastically amusing, exciting to watch, but at the end of it, you don’t have a clue what the product was. There are a few of those around, and it’s always been a danger. Certainly one of my favorite commercials is the one with the freaky woman examining her low cash register receipt and trotting out to the car yelling, “Start the car! Start the car!” Hilariously funny with the characters used, but can you remember immediately what company is being advertised? Sometimes an ad can be too funny for its own good. Perhaps it’s just that I found it so amusing that I paid little attention to the company— the ad actually won a silver award for 30 second commercials!

Sometimes the company doesn’t realize an unintended message is conveyed. I recall the commercial for Sunny-D drink, a “fruit-flavored beverage” aimed at children, that starts with two early teens in the back seat of the family car, bopping mindlessly to strange music on their earphones, making the parents wonder what aliens they have produced. Enter the Sunny-D drink (no doubt made with the “goodness” of real orange juice), and the scene morphs to later, when the teens are looking like zombies, quietly sitting with unfocused eyes in the back seat. I don’t know what the intent of the advertisers was, whether to show that Sunny-D quieted them down, or they just wore out of their own accord, but the message seems to be that if you have your children drink Sunny-D, it turns them into zombies looking like they had just done some really heavy drugs.

Certainly it sometimes works, and works well. If you ever naively thought that commercials were of little value to companies, consider the 30 second ads for the pinnacle of advertising—the upcoming Superbowl game… average cost of 2.7 million dollars each, and some companies like Pepsi have booked several of them during game time. Each year viewers pay particular attention to these commercials, since if you are spending millions for 30 seconds of exposure, you better have something great to run.

I doubt if it will be as simple as “You won’t find these on Ford or Chev!”, but the intent will be the same.

Start the car!!!