Who Are We?

(Rhetorical Analysis of a Commercial)

Imagine an alien race has been collecting intelligence about Americans entirely through a single medium: television commercials.

Based on television commercials, what would this alien species know about us? Given the prevalence of ads for pharmaceuticals, they’d have to think we were awfully frail. We must also hold something called “beer” in extremely high esteem.

What if we take a closer look at a single television commercial and ask what it says about us as a culture? Sure, commercials are used to sell stuff, but they sell us stuff by reflecting aspects of our culture to us.

In every commercial, there is the surface text: “Buy this because of these reasons.”

There is also subtext. This is what’s underneath the text, the underlying cultural connections that help sell the product.

We read subtexts all the time without thinking about it as our subconscious semiotician kicks in. One of the things I had to learn when I moved to the South is that saying “bless her heart” about someone can actually be an insult. Social expectations dictate that you’re not allowed to insult someone directly, so it’s done through subtext. If you don’t understand the subtext, it can be very confusing.

One of the consistent subtexts of American commercials is that work is miserable and the only relief one gets from that misery is partying (when you’re young) or family (when you’re older).

A Corona Light commercial from 2012 named “Stan” is an example of the former.

In the spot, a young man who looks to be a relatively recent college graduate goes through his daily routine. A monotone singsong chant of “Stan, Stan, eat, work, gym, shower, beer, watch, sleep” plays as a series of still shots representing each of the words cycles through on-screen. Sometimes “bar” replaces “beer,” and he also occasionally dreams (accompanied by a picture of a sheep), but overall Stan’s life seems to be pure drudgery.

Until Corona Light shows up, and all of a sudden it’s all “bro hugs, costume party, girl, karaoke, dance-a-thon, photo booth, digit swapping, all night.” The pictures show Stan having fun, including with the same young woman in the photo booth, staying up all night after having swapped digits, suggesting perhaps Stan has found companionship.

The spot ends with the tagline “A Refreshing Change of Beer,” as though getting one’s beer right is the key to happiness.

Occasionally beer is seen as a reward after a hard day, but more often—as in a famous and award-winning ad for Bud Light called “Swear Jar,” in which office workers swear constantly in order to fill a “swear jar” with proceeds that will be used to purchase Bud Light—beer is the thing that liberates us from our terrible workaday lives.

While the commercials are advertising beer, they are also selling an idea that Americans are expected to actively dislike their jobs. Personally, I find this distressing. If at all possible, people should like their jobs, especially considering the fact that during a given week many of us will spend more time working than doing anything else other than sleeping.

This kind of cultural reinforcement becomes cyclical; the commercial text is born out of the culture and in turn reinforces the culture it was born from.

Your task in this experience is to engage in a process of observation, analysis, and synthesis in an effort to uncover what a single commercial says about American culture.

AUDIENCE

Your audience is interested in looking deeper into our experiences of the world and being shown something they didn’t initially recognize. They have seen the commercial at least once but don’t have it memorized or anything like that.

PROCESS

1. Choose a commercial.

I’m showing my age by calling them television commercials, since they’re now viewable anywhere videos are available. A thirty-second ad is best. It gives you enough material to work with, without being overwhelmed.

2. Process the text.

You should employ my not-yet-patented ROAS (react, observe, analyze, synthesize) method, which is also discussed in the “What’s So Funny?” experience.

React: Watch the commercial. How do you respond? Is it persuasive? Do you have an emotional response to the surface text about what they’re trying to sell you? What are you reacting to?

Observe: Look more closely and make specific observations. Most commercials have a narrative element in which they’re telling a kind of story. What’s the story of your commercial? What sorts of scenes and images are shown? Who is in the ad? What do the people in the ad look like? How would you describe them in terms of demographics (age, gender, race, etc.) and personality?

You’re looking for enough material to ultimately do your analysis and synthesis, which will take the form of an argument about the subtext of the ad.

Analyze: Put these observations together in order to answer some questions. Who is the ad targeting? Why? How do you know? What is important or valuable in the world of the ad? (The “Stan” ad values a generic kind of partying fun.) What would be viewed as good and bad in the world of the ad?

Synthesize: This is what will happen as you draft. You should feel like you have a bunch of raw material, but you might not be sure how it all fits together. That’s good. Think of your synthesis like you’re building a house and your observations and analysis are the building materials.

The only wrinkle is that you’re building the house without a full blueprint. If you’re an outliner, you might want to do some of that work here.

3. Write a discovery draft.

Using the raw material, write your synthesis, which uncovers the ad’s subtext for the benefit of the audience. While you’re writing, you should be engaging in audience analysis, asking yourself what questions they will have and then answering them at the appropriate moments.

It makes sense to start the piece with a description of the ad that helps increase the audience’s familiarity with the text. After that, what do you think you should tell them to help them appreciate your message?

4. Process your draft.

What’s your message? Where is it? Do you have sufficient evidence to support your argument and analysis?

What audience questions does each paragraph or section answer? List them. Does the flow make sense?

5. Revise.

Here’s where your attention to the audience really matters. Are you telling them something about the ad that isn’t immediately apparent? You want the sensation of pulling back a veil and allowing them to see the subtext, which was always there but they didn’t recognize until you showed it to them.

If you recognize that you’ve discovered something about the ad you didn’t know before, you’re probably going to do the same for them.

6. Edit, polish, title.

Are you describing the ad with as much precision and concision as you can manage? Will the audience be able to appreciate it, even without having necessarily seen the ad?

REFLECT

Once you’ve gone through this full exercise once, you may find that you can read the subtext of ads much more quickly, even in real time, as you’re watching. See if this happens. Watch the ads with more intention, more closely. What is really being sold? How are they selling it to you?

Do your newfound powers change the effect ads have on you?

What messages about our culture are being reinforced in these texts?

WRITING IS THINKING

The base unit of writing is not the sentence or the word; it is the idea.

The base unit of writing is the idea, because writing is a process of thinking.

Words and sentences only come into play as the material we use to express our ideas. Believing that sentences are primary would be like saying the key to good art is the paint in the tube. In the absence of the idea, there are no sentences to be made, just like the paint is useless unless an artist has sufficient inspiration.

If we consider writing as thinking, we see that all parts of the writing process are properly defined as writing, even if we are not actively putting words on the page. I am often writing when I’m walking the dogs or in the shower. When I am in the midst of a difficult project, I will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and realize I’ve somehow been writing in my sleep.

Often the specifics of the sentence are the very last thing that takes shape. If you are struggling over a sentence to little avail, it may be that you’re not done with the thinking yet. If that’s the case, you can do what I do: put in a placeholder that says, SOMETHING LIKE THIS, BUT NOT SOUNDING SO DUMB.

Try to be a little nicer to yourself than I am to myself, though. Recognize that because writing is thinking, we have to be forgiving of ourselves when the right ideas don’t arrive on a timely basis.

And of course the best words and the optimal sentences to express an idea depend significantly on the rhetorical occasion, particularly the audience. The same idea may be expressed in many different ways, each tailored to a different audience.

We should also recognize that because writing is thinking, the arrival of an idea may cause us to return to an earlier part of the writing process. An idea may occur that seems to need support from a secondary source, putting us back in research mode briefly before we return to drafting. We often write our way into new ideas, which may require a new draft as we realize the assumptions we started a draft with have changed.

When we are thinking at the top of our game, we are creating knowledge, something that did not exist before we brought it to life and that could only come into existence through a unique intelligence—the writer.

To me, this is the best part about writing, the feeling that at any given moment I may teach myself something I didn’t know before. It’s like finding a little bit of treasure squirreled away inside your own brain you didn’t know was there until your persistence and dedicated thinking revealed it.

Sometimes this happens right after moments of great frustration, as the words seem to fail, but it was never a problem with the words. I just needed to unearth the idea.

It can be tempting to try to think through an entire piece of writing before starting to put words on the page, but this is a trap. The writing itself will always reveal something hidden.

You will know when you are writing, even if words aren’t piling up, because you will be thinking.