Estimated time to complete this section: 10 minutes
Advertisements that you might find in local history holdings are responses to shifting circumstances, both within and beyond your community, such as business demands, media technologies, and cultural norms. Institutional advertisements function to build, develop, and maintain a corporate reputation without any appeal to sales. Political advertisements function to solicit support in the form of votes, financial contributions, or volunteers. Commercial advertisements function to persuade consumers to purchase a good or service.
Careful examination of these sources can aid in developing local history narratives that explore the relationship between communities and their institutions, politics, and economics.
3.1 Video
- Creative Memo on Lay’s Products, 1957 (Total Video Time = 7:48; video transcripts on page)
| Context: What are the contemporary circumstances of the advertisement’s creation? | -Who produced the advertisement?
-Where was the advertisement produced? -When was the advertisement produced? -Who is the intended audience?
-How does the advertisement reflect, reinforce, or challenge contemporary ideas? |
| Function: What is the advertisement trying to do? | -What good, service, idea, or institution is promoted in the advertisement?
-What is the overt message of the advertisement? -What is the covert message of the advertisement? -What medium (television, print, radio, web) is the advertisement in?
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| Strategy: How is the message communicated? | -How is the good, service, idea, or institution promoted in the advertisement?
-What objects, scenes, and people are featured in the advertisement? -Does the advertisement use famous people, places, or events? -How are the elements of the advertisement arranged? -How does the organization of the advertisement lead the audience through its argument? -How does the style of the advertisement align with cultural trends of the time period when the ad was produced? -How are images used to work with rhetorical appeals (appeals to reason, emotion)? -What tone does the advertisement’s text use to reach the audience (technical, informal, authoritative)? |
Adapted from Daniel Pope, “Making Sense of Advertisements,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/ads/intro.html, June 2003.