A picture paints a thousand words How a boy covered in seaweed sells Internet access Just because human cognition is intelligence-driven potential is exactly how humans themselves can be manipulated by advertisements. The intricate and species-specific ability to draw conclusions from thinly gathered arguments is our Achilles’ tendon when it comes to mass media. It is our curse and our blessing. For instance, it does not take very much for an advertising company to design a convincing sell for the product being pitched. A recent ad for Verizon DSL showed a mother in the kitchen, say, preparing dinner. Her son tramples down the stairs completely soaked, covered in what appears to be seaweed. We learn that he’s been on the Internet, surfing sites on deep sea dives. As he gets a glass of water, a revelation occurs to him as water starts to drip from the ceiling. Of course, he left the connection on! It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the message of the ad. Verizon’s Internet connection is so effective and transcendent that you actually get transported to the sites you surf. I can only imagine what would have befallen the boy had he been researching cardiac surgery. But the fact that people can get this message (whether they believe it’s effective or not) is a major feat of human cognition. As of yet, no species other than ours has been proven to understand relativity in the way the ad exemplifies. A chimpanzee, one of the fairly cognizant primates, does not relate a story to his relatives about a rainstorm three days previous. He has no signals in his language and he has no function for storytelling in his brain. But is the chimpanzee better off when it comes to the manipulative media? If the chimpanzee were able to sit through the Verizon ad and then reflect on it, he would scoff at the concept of a computer able to transport a surfer into the ocean to see the HTML code come to life before his own eyes. Clearly, so would we. But unlike our chimpanzee, humans can see beyond the black and white to draw iffy grey conclusions. How is this effective as an advertising tool? No one believes the boy was taken into the depths of the sea. But I’m sure, as we all are, someone subscribed to Verizon because of the bridge their mind took from the concept of seadiving to its tenuous connection to quality Internet service. As an aside, one could argue that the data provided during the commercial, such as connection speed, services provided and above all price are more effective than the visuals. One could then ask, why bother with the seaweed and drippy ceiling then? It’s analogous to the chicken-and-the-egg conundrum to postulate whether language or relativity allows for this. “Visual metaphor” is the concept behind Verizon’s success. They are by no means the only company to do this. In fact, any successful ad campaign must rely on the viewer to cross the bridge between the perceived reality (a wet boy covered in seaweed) and the intended message (a substantial Internet experience). Car ads are the most subversive when it comes to their message. Granted, they provide some real data to back up their implicit statements; I’m ignorant to the notions of horsepower, torque, viscosity, engine litre-capacity and the rest, but they must disclose something. We watch a professional driver weaving a car along a precipitous highway (with the message beneath, “don’t do this!”), and we are supposed to assume that this subsumes a quality automobile. Why doesn’t this advocate more the talents of the driver, since any Joe Schmoe could never handle the curves like that. He and that fancy car would dive right into the fjord below. But visual metaphor is an extension of the ability of language to convey implicit, relative statements that are not directly stated. For instance, “my friend is a toothpick.” Well, clearly, he’s not. But one is able to cull from my statement that he is short (toothpicks are small), or he is boring (toothpicks are wooden, and that means stiff), or he is thin (toothpicks are narrow), et cetera. Improbable the selection may be, language allows for this relativity that is easily transferred to all domains of cognition. Not all advertisements use true visual metaphor though a similar perception-to-reality bridge is often crossed. Notorious Abercrombie & Fitch have used visual stimulus to sell clothing that has little to no connection to the quality of the clothes they sell. Half-naked men, seaside beach houses, and college-style fraternity parties have been the conditions of choice for advertising, proving in the case of unclothed boys that sex does, in fact, sell; sales in the gay community are phenomenal. But how is this effective advertising if the clothing’s quality or value isn’t being schlepped? Something in the human brain, besides just sexual stimulation, convinces people to buy this product. A&F has been around since 1892 and yet only within the last ten years has gotten national attention. Savvy marketing is to blame; GAP and Old Navy sell the same clothes, and relatively cheaper. But A&F stock prices peaked in 1999 (this was before a flap over allegedly racist T-shirts and the recent salvo concerning dress code) and sales continued to rise, 11% in the last year. (At this point, visual gimmick is hardly the reason for good sales, but it certainly was a nice start.) Resisting the ability to allow visual metaphor to work is difficult for humans. If human cognition did not allow advertisers to transfer metaphor from language, then most campaigns would suffer. Companies need people to believe in statements and slogans in the absence of tangible quality testing. Rarely do shoppers get the opportunity to try something hands-on before they buy. Food, drink and household goods are easy to sell with simple bait-and-hook advertising. We all need to eat. But automobiles, Internet service, home appliances and other “un”necessities cannot be so quickly pitched. And that’s where visual metaphor can play its role. Watch any car commercial, you’ll see how much visual information you have to convert from real perceptions to assumed vehicular quality and performance. Kids’ attention spans are cluttered by food products, so the need to express quality above and beyond the product is getting more common. Capri Sun beverage is being advertised like an injection of super power. In television advertisements, kids playing soccer suddenly become ferocious athletes due to the addition of Capri Sun into their lives. Just imagine, it’s sugar water with pep! Such brawn is not possible under any circumstances. You may perhaps become an effective athlete by drinking a beverage, but never instantly. Even the most popular sports beverage Gatorade is on shaky ground when that company’s advertising implies that drinking the product equates excellence on the sports field. Still, it cannot be inferred that people buy products solely because of unfounded advertising claims. But abusing the potential for the human mind to draw conclusions from loosely perceptual bases is a successful tool in marketing. Be it language that allows visual metaphor or metaphor has been something lent to language is not what matters. The fact is, it can happen. It is a hallmark of our cognitive evolution as it is the means to advertising success. J. Everett R.