Ads and PSAs: Copywriting for Visual Media

5

Before television, there was radio advertising and film advertising in movie houses. You still see local ads in some movie theatres before the program starts. So the principle of selling time between programming for commercial messages grew up with the visual media. A format that is probably unique to television was developed to deliver short visual commercial messages very efficiently and effectively in breaks between programs. The air time was sold to advertisers to generate the operating revenue and profit for the television companies.

Television provides access to the majority of homes and, therefore, to the largest audience. Before television, few people had dealt with the pressure to communicate product or commercial information in a rapid, attention-getting way that television needs. It was, and still is, very expensive to buy air time. Because television is the most expensive advertising medium, it has driven the writers and producers of commercials to refine their techniques so as to deliver a complete message in a small amount of time. The cost of this time far exceeds the production cost of making the message itself.

The short ad has become a kind of twentieth-century art form with a constantly evolving style. It has attracted much writing and directing talent from around the world, drawn partly by the money they can make and partly by the opportunity to graduate to longer forms. Ads are special because they are so short—usually under a minute. Everyone has seen them, which is not so true for some other formats.

Almost all television viewers have seen public service announcements (PSAs), which are messages that are broadcast for the public good. PSAs are sometimes paid for by sponsoring organizations, but they are usually furnished to broadcasters to fill any empty spots in the commercial break. This is one way in which television stations help the community to which they broadcast and fulfill an obligation of their FCC license to broadcast over public air waves. Of course, PSAs usually run late at night or in other less commercially desirable time slots. Not everyone can write a feature film script, but anyone can write a 30- or 60-second PSA, so it is a good place to start.

Copywriting Versus Scriptwriting

Let us distinguish between copywriting and scriptwriting. Copywriting includes print and media writing. National advertising campaigns on television are devised and produced by advertising agencies retained by the client company. Learning about this kind of writing and the business of advertising and public relations usually takes place in a specific track and specialized courses in communications studies. Although visual writing is involved in some kinds of copywriting, there are so many other issues involved in copywriting that it is better to leave those dedicated issues aside and deal with visual writing that happens to be part of copywriting.

However, small markets in the broadcasting world serve local clients who cannot afford an advertising agency. Somebody has to write these ads for the station’s clients. It could be a staff member, part of a unit that sells the station’s time, or it could be a freelance writer paid by the station to do this writing work when needed, or a local ad agency. We need to keep in mind that these kinds of local ads are made on small budgets, sometimes at cost, by the station selling the air time because their profit comes from selling that air time. They often have spare production capacity—a studio, cameras, a camera crew, and an editing facility. This means that the ad must be written for that budget range without slick effects or expensive graphics, without travel to expensive locations, and without expensive talent. It brings us back to the perennial challenge that every scriptwriter faces: to write creatively and invent original visuals within a tight budget framework. The same holds true for local PSAs, sponsored by organizations with no budget to spend on production.

PSAs are an excellent training ground for student scriptwriters. They are short and complete TV playlets. They require all the disciplines of scriptwriting. You can easily settle on a public service issue such as smoking, domestic violence, education, drugs, or racism. You know the issues. You can test your creative imagination. If you have a related production course going on, you might be able to produce your PSA. You can also take a familiar product and try to devise a TV spot for it. However, a lot of ads rely on specialized production companies to get pack shots or create computer-generated effects that might be difficult to duplicate in a college production setup.

Client Needs and Priorities

The PSA and the TV ad are works commissioned by a client. The client needs a solution to a communication problem that the writer must provide. We alluded to this discipline of the professional writer in Chapters 3 and 4. You write for someone or rather someone who represents the interests of an organization or a corporation. Later we will look more closely at another kind of writing for a producer of entertainment films or programs. The entertainment script is different from commissioned works because neither the producer nor the writer can know for sure what a good script is until it is produced, shown to an audience, and validated by box office or audience ratings. Commissioned programming doesn’t have an audience measurement expressed in terms of box office revenue. Successful communication can only be measured by quantifying audience responses as changes in sales or behavior.

Advertisers expect to measure the effect of an ad in increased sales. Otherwise, there is no business sense in spending money on it. A PSA often aims to change people’s behavior. It is much more difficult to garner information that positively proves the effectiveness of the PSA. Changes in behavior are much more difficult to achieve than changes in the buying choices of the public.

Writing for clients is often challenging and exciting precisely because you have a problem, know the desired result, and have to devise a solution. The seven-step method of Chapter 4 is an excellent way to approach these assignments. The process of analysis is really important for writing PSAs. Although you do not now have a client, you must practice writing as if you had a client to satisfy. Your creative ideas must do the job. One of the constraints of this kind of writing is that the length is fixed by the client. Because the resulting product is transmitted in commercial breaks, its length must be exact to the second, as that is how airtime is bought and sold.

The 20-, 30-, and 60-Second Playlets

Ads in the form of 20- or 30-second playlets are almost a new art form. They are a popular art form born of the television age and the need to compress visual messages into very short, very expensive time slots. The style and tempo of these ads continues to evolve at a furious rate. The style of camera work, directing, and editing is quite specialized. Some companies produce nothing but TV commercials just as some directors spend their whole careers making these mini-movies. From their ranks have come a number of feature film directors such as Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson, and Alan Parker.

Some TV commercials for national campaigns of major brands, based on millions of dollars worth of air time, have very high budgets. With bigger budgets than half-hour documentaries and budgets as big as a television half-hour episode, these productions are made on 35 mm film with production crews that sometimes rival those for a feature film. The local market spot for a car dealer or furniture store, however, is often cheap, down and dirty. Clearly the national campaigns are developed by advertising agencies whose copywriters develop the ads in collaboration with creative directors, art directors, and account executives. The copywriter is not a full range scriptwriter and also usually has to write print media ads. Although this book primarily serves the interests of scriptwriters, the visual thinking that underlies billboards and transport ads relates to both copywriting and scriptwriting.

Visual Writing

We think of writing as words end to end forming an exposition, but media writing, particularly television advertising, needs a visual idea. This is another layer of writing. The visual idea is what we refer to as meta-writing in earlier chapters. There is a difference between visual meta-writing and the writing found on a page of script for a visual medium whether in the mini-drama of an ad or a full length feature film. The scene descriptions contribute to a visual idea that transcends the screen moment and rests on many of those moments, hence meta-writing. It is an idea that informs and governs the written detail of the script. The dialogue, which is an integral part of the writing and exposition, is not itself visual writing but a necessary component of it. Radio ads need dialogue writing but not a visual idea. So visual writing is the idea as well as the description of specific images or shots. It needs what we will call a visual metaphor. Let’s look at an example.

How do you explain viruses, spam and computer security to the general public? AOL sells its internet service by emphasizing its virus scanning and spam blocking features. Here visual writing comes to the rescue. You need a visual metaphor. Two guys in a cafeteria line are choosing food. On their trays are a ham sandwich and a tuna sandwich. One asks the other why he would want just basic high speed internet service when he can get AOL’s high speed service with virus protection. The second guy doesn’t get it. To explain the difference, the first guy puts a dish cover over the tuna fish sandwich, then explains that going on line without AOL virus protection means you pick up loads of spam and nasty viruses. He ladles ketchup and other condiments over the ham sandwich as he describes the spam and viruses, and then asks, “Which would you rather have? AOL with virus protection,” as he lifts a plate cover from a clean tuna sandwich, “or basic high speed internet.” The other guy says, “I’ll have the tuna fish.” “You can’t; it’s mine,” is the reply as the loser is left with a ham sandwich covered with an inedible mess.

This shows us a way to visualize an abstract idea of internet security. Spam and viruses are hard to explain. Two sandwiches, one protected and one ruined by junk, works as a visual metaphor that organizes the whole communication. That kind of organizing visual metaphor is often the key to successful visual communication. So there is an equivalence between visual metaphor and meta-writing. They constitute visual writing.

Devices to Capture Audience Attention

Most of you have engaged in the subtle war between the viewer and the television advertiser. Hands up everyone who has hit the mute button during the ads, or gone to the bathroom, or gone to the fridge, or made a telephone call during the commercial break! This nullifies the advertiser’s effort and expense. Sometimes, either by accident or by choice, we find TV commercials entertaining or fun to watch. The challenge is clear. The advertiser has a lot of resistance to overcome. Now you are on the other side of the box. You have to be creative and capture the audience’s attention in spite of itself so that it pays attention to your message. Your device has to work for others. Measured by your own viewing behavior, no audience will give you any quarter. You live or die in seconds.

What are some of the ways you have noticed writers of these mini-scripts hooking the audience so that it will pay attention to the message? You can recognize definite strategies such as humor, shock, suspense, mini-dramas, testimonials, special graphic effects, music, and, of course, sexuality. These strategies are more elaborately developed in commercial advertising because for-profit companies have the dollars to spend on high-end production values. PSAs cannot command the same resources. They are made on lower budgets or created through the pro bono work of advertising agencies and production personnel. Working with a low budget is a creative challenge. Production dollars don’t automatically buy creative and effective communication. Some of the most ingenious PSAs are cheap but effective.

Consider how a PSA about a public issue such as gambling works. In this case, the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling needs to communicate to a population that suffers the destructive consequences of this kind of addictive behavior. How do you solve the communication problem? Let’s apply the seven-step method we learned in Chapter 4.

Define the Communication Problem

The population of compulsive gamblers includes gamblers who are isolated by their problem and do not see that they are not alone. They do not fully comprehend the consequences of their addiction or are unable to do anything about it. The Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling does not have a handy database of compulsive gamblers and cannot easily reach isolated individuals who need help to tell them about a confidential help line. The Council wants to reach out to a hidden population.

Define the Objective

The PSA alerts compulsive gamblers and those who know them to the existence of their addictive behavior and communicates an 800 number to call for help. An informational goal includes letting gamblers know that it is a common social problem. A motivational objective is to get gamblers to think about their problem and move them closer to changing their behavior. The highest goal is a behavioral objective: Gamblers will stop gambling, or they will at least call the 800 number.

Define the Target Audience

The target audience demographic is difficult because it cuts across age, gender, and social class. The audience has to be identified by a behavior pattern. Many gamblers, like alcoholics, don’t want to acknowledge their problem. The psychographic of the audience is probably resistant. Many in this audience will have ways of dismissing the message, believing they have everything under control.

Define the Strategy

The audience has to recognize its problem in the powerful images shown in the PSA. The PSA must get their attention and get to their hidden thoughts and awaken a secret wish that all those losses due to gambling could be stopped. Use a strongly visual device that is emotional rather than logical in effect because compulsive gambling is an emotional weakness, not a logical choice.

Define the Content

Recognizable scenes of gambling dominate the 30-second PSA (see Figure 5.1). A montage is shown of close-up shots of rolling dice, cards being shuffled and dealt, scratch card numbers being revealed. This is accompanied by a voice-over (see Figure 5.2).

Define the Medium

Television is the medium of broadest appeal to the population at large, which includes the target audience. Television lends itself to emotional appeal and motivational messages.

Define the Creative Idea or Concept

The effective creative concept is to use a strongly visual device to make the emotional connection to the audience by turning back the clock. Footage of gambling action is run backwards while a voice-over articulates the wish that time could be turned back and losses undone. The visual effect of seeing the fantasy realized compels attention. This device of reversing time and showing action undoing itself is a visual effect unique to the medium. The voice-over drives home the message of how these images relate to the buried wish to escape compulsive gambling. You are not alone; more than 2 million Americans are in the same boat. There is an 800 number help line to call. Finish with an invitation to call and talk.

You see that the seven-step approach breaks down the problem and identifies the solution. You can read the script and see the PSA as it was produced on the accompanying DVD.

More on Ads and PSAs

In the short form of the television commercial, visual communication is critical. It enables a great many ideas to be compressed into seconds. Doing this requires visual thinking and visual writing. A PSA produced for the New England Home for Little Wanderers (shown in Figure 5.3) puts a 30-second story together that has to convey a dysfunctional home and domestic abuse. The visual metaphor, which also works for the sound track, is breaking glass. The shattering of a child’s life, his family, and his future is captured by a single image.

Another excellent example is the corporate TV spot for First Union (see the DVD). Let’s look at the context. Banking is regulated by state and federal laws and agencies. Formerly, banks were not allowed to have interstate branches, could not sell insurance, could not be stockbrokers, could not be merchant bankers, could not run mutual funds and so on. Now banks can combine financial services in these different areas and compete with other financial institutions. This has led to mergers and fundamental changes in the banking industry. The communication problem is that most people don’t know how to tell one bank from another and don’t understand the changes that are taking place in the financial world. Explaining financial matters to the consumer is difficult because most people are confused by financial products and intimidated by financial institutions. Companies large and small using different institutions for different financial services find themselves having to rethink their relationships and having to use new financial products such as derivatives to manage risk or so-called “junk bonds” to raise capital.

The objective of the First Union commercial is to get consumers and potential customers to grasp the change and see First Union as an island of security in a dangerous world and the solution to their problems—one-stop shopping for all of their financial needs. The strategy is to show the financial world as a surrealistic nightmare, then to confront the problem, and then to have First Union provide the solution. The metaphor chosen is that First Union is a mountain. This is a visual image also backed up by the voice-over, which in a series of ads ends with a variation on the statement “… come to the mountain called First Union. Or if you prefer, the mountain will come to you.”

It is axiomatic that the impact of the message here must be visual, not verbal, in essence. To do this requires images at the cutting edge, compositing cinematography, alpha channel effects and computer-generated images that capture the audience’s attention and set up and condense the message. In each of the ads, there is a visual narrative that makes sense on its own but is complemented by the verbal narrative, which functions on another level. The visual narrative is broadly emotional in impact. The verbal narrative is broadly rational in impact. Scripts of this kind almost always have to be story-boarded. Look at storyboards and view the video results for two First Union ads on the DVD.

For example, the visual metaphor of survival in shark-infested waters compels attention. The dorsal fin cuts through water with the financial wreckage of dollar bills and financial paper floating on it. The water is the runoff from a storm—a storm sewer that floods corporate boardrooms. The storyboard is 19 pages long for a 30-second commercial. With two or three key frames per page, the pace of visual flow is pushed to the limit. In contrast, the voice-over is measured and minimalist: “In the financial world … the one requirement … for long term survival … is to keep on the move. It is not a world for the hesitant or the timid.”

What more effective way to suggest corporate merger than to show two skyscrapers crashing together, or whole buildings being moved on huge caterpillar tracks? Such a visual metaphor exploits cutting edge computer imaging techniques. A scriptwriter could not put the image down on the page without some understanding of the techniques that are available. Ten years ago the technology probably did not exist to make this TV commercial. It is extremely difficult to tell how these state-of-the-art TV commercials were made. Visual writing creates content that flows from contemporary production techniques. Hence, visual writers must understand the repertoire of techniques available to the producer. Compositing 3-D animation, graphics, and live action take the writer to the limits of verbal description. Hence, the reliance on storyboards.

We should step back and reflect on the underlying principles. Aristotle mapped out the basic techniques of persuasion in his theory of rhetoric. They involve either an appeal to reason (logos), an appeal to emotion (pathos), or an appeal to ethical values (ethos). Although there is a connection between what you learn in basic writing courses about argument and the techniques of visual persuasion, the persuasion is not accomplished by words alone. Images have a vocabulary and a grammar. Many devices and strategies are available for hooking audiences and planting the message. It is like the strategy of the flower in nature. Show bright colors, give off powerful perfume, and produce sweet nectar. Bees and other insects will be attracted by the color and aromas and feed on the nectar while coating themselves with pollen, which they will carry to the next flower so as to fertilize the plant. The clever message maker creates nectar or seductive qualities that attract the viewer who carries away the message whether he likes it or not, just as the bee carries the pollen away.

What are some of these devices? What follows is an informal survey of strategies of exposition that a scriptwriter can use to communicate in the television medium.

Humor

Most people are attracted by humor. If you watch an evening’s ads on television, you will find about half of them use some kind of comic device. Either the characters in the ad are funny in their behavior (a man behaves like a dog and his dog like a man, tossing the man treats for clever behavior), or the spoken lines have an amusing or clever turn. Comic conception can be expressed in visual graphics. Cats and dogs can be made to talk. Animation can create cute M&M characters or the Pillsbury chef. Morphing can change the expression of people’s faces or distort them for effect. Arms can be lengthened to score amazing slam dunks. Much of the humor we see is a form of exaggeration. Slapstick from silent film days continues to work in ads: dogs running away with toilet paper, physical struggles with equipment or materials.

Using humor in an ad carries a risk. The risk is not being funny enough for your audience. Bad jokes or unfunny humor can be a turn-off. Many corporate clients are nervous about humor as a device because they worry that their company or their product might not be taken seriously. Nevertheless, humor is a very effective way to disarm hostility and skepticism in a target audience. It appeals to both emotion and logic. Think of the Sprint campaign with Murphy Brown star Candice Bergen, or the MCI’s “Tweety Bird” campaign with Michael Jordan. The logical appeal talks price per minute of a phone call. The come-on to look and listen is the humor. Fun relieves tedium. Jokes or gags often work on a logical principle by challenging that same logic. If you can get the audience to smile, they will probably listen to your message.

Compare the humorous approach of the underdog Subaru Outback featuring the Crocodile Dundee character with the serious ads for Chevrolet and Ford trucks. The latter are about work and reliability and power. The former are about recreation. The strategy is appropriate to the audience demographic and the product.

Shock

Shocking an audience is a way of getting its attention. Shock can take many forms. It can be violent, such as explosions. It can be funny and unexpected, like the Taco Bell talking Chihuahua or chimpanzees dressed up as people drinking tea. It can be a truck falling off a bridge attached to a bungee cord, or a window cleaner on the glass face of a skyscraper who finds a long-distance telephone salesman winching down next to him. Whatever it is you do to shock, you have to follow your own act. You have to use the attention you get to good effect. Many people are good at getting attention but not so good at holding it. Consider the streakers at games. Taking your clothes off and running out into the middle of the field pursued by policemen and officials will get the attention of the whole stadium, but then what? You can be outrageous, surprise the audience, or do something unexpected, but if all the audience remembers is the device and not the message, you have failed. It is easy to shock but hard to fold it into an effective message.

Suspense

Suspense is a different way of getting an audience’s attention. Shock images often lead into suspense. What’s going to happen to the truck attached to the bungee cord? Comic suspense works as well as a balancing act or juggling or a character in a predicament. A villain jumps on the Subaru Outback truck to attack the driver. We get a 5-second suspense drama. Crocodile Dundee actor, Paul Hogan, always triumphs without effort as he drives the Subaru and tells deadpan jokes to the camera. Suspense means that the device makes the audience hold its breath until it knows the outcome. Suspense, like shock, is easy to start and hard to finish. The revelation at the end must justify the wait. We all experience feeling cheated by this plot device in certain movies of suspense that short change the audience in the outcome.

Drama

Can you tell a story in twenty seconds? Television commercials have got it down to an art. Quick cuts minimize the visual information and allow mini-dramas, mini-love stories, and mini-plots to unfold. There’s the entertainment story in which a brand of coffee serves as a focal point. A host or hostess makes noises in the kitchen like a percolator and serves up instant coffee. The comedy reinforces the message that you can’t tell the difference between fresh coffee and instant if you don’t know which is which. These dramas can become little mini-series so that audiences become intrigued about the next episode. Meanwhile, they get exposure to the message. A credit card gets a character out of a scrape like in an Indiana Jones adventure. Someone has a splitting headache or a migraine. An important life event such as a key assignment at work, or a wedding, or a date is barely manageable. A friend urges the person to take the brand name painkiller. The crisis is averted, and it’s smiles all round. The strategy is to mime little dramas typical to life and organize a happy ending turning on the use of the product.

Kids

Children, babies, and animals are always good for pathos. People respond to cute kids and cute animals. Temporarily, they stop using their brains and respond emotionally. Children aren’t only used for breakfast cereal. A recent ad for Delta, promoting their new nonstop flights, showed a little girl sulking because her daddy didn’t change planes in Chicago anymore and therefore couldn’t buy her a present.

One of the cleverest and most effective uses of a baby ever was achieved by Michelin in a television commercial. On screen are four tread marks from Michelin tires on a flat color background. The commentary makes the point that the main safety features of any car are the four points of contact with the road. Match dissolve to a baby sitting on the ground in the middle. Viewers are forced to use visual logic to put together two ideas. You want to protect the most vulnerable passenger any of us will carry—a helpless baby. The tire tread of your four wheels is your only contact with the road in all emergency situations. Your choice of tires is a factor in that safety. The sell is just the brand name on screen. The visual logic goes something like: (baby vulnerability standing for indisputable wish for safety) + (choice of tire is your choice of tread contact with the road) = (brand name Michelin). It is elegant, simple, and brilliant as a piece of visual communication. A variation was to put a baby inside an automobile tire smiling and gurgling happily. Again, the economy of the visual imagery forces the audience to understand the message through visual logic. This is a picture worth a thousand words. Visual imagery is nonverbal communication. Michelin’s ad communicates effectively through visual imagery. This is meta-writing at its best resulting in stunning visual metaphor. Simplicity is also a virtue in Michelin’s highly creative and inexpensive ad. Such visual writing is not limited to advertising. It is essential to powerful dramatic writing for the screen.

Testimonial

There are two types of testimonials: real and fake. Another way to categorize them would be to contrast celebrity testimonial with simulated testimonial. If you can find a well-known personality to endorse your product, you get the attention of your audience. The public will give you the time of day because of the famous name. Sprint used Candace Bergen because of her notoriety in the TV series Murphy Brown. This was followed briefly by Sela Ward because of the success of the ABC TV series Once and Again. Now Catherine Zeta-Jones performs a similar role for T-Mobile. Cosmetics, perfumes and beauty products often use an actress as a poster girl for their products.

Simulated testimonial occurs on television everyday in ads for pain killers and cold remedies. We have become inured to them, but they must work well enough because advertisers keep using them. A white-coated actor playing a doctor, speaking earnestly into camera, affirms the effectiveness of the drug. An anonymous but professional-looking man or woman usually walking along in a tracking shot, speaking into the camera, tells you sincerely how one pain killer is prescribed by doctors more than any other. The presenter mimics the role of a news reporter, expert, or anchor. Many ads for feminine hygiene products rely on simulated and acted testimonial by a suitably cast representative woman.

Real testimonial also has a place in this repertoire of strategies. Housewives testify that a given laundry detergent washes whiter than another. Or, submitted to a double-blind test, they just happen to pick the load of laundry that was washed with the advertised product. AT&T ran a series of ads that were based on real, spontaneous testimonial of people on the street saying that they preferred AT&T long-distance service. As the production company was filming, the lawyers were vetting the content and ruling whether the statements could be used or not. People in the shots used were paid and had to sign a waiver permitting use of the testimonial. This last example is an unscripted documentary technique. Most of the others are scripted ideas. Most of these devices can be used in longer corporate videos as we shall see in the next chapter.

Special Effects

Today, many of the images we see on screen are computer generated. The 1999 prequel of the Star Wars trilogy, The Phantom Menace, is rumored to contain at least 80 percent computer-animated images despite the presence of live actors. Industrial Light and Magic, the company founded by George Lucas, has been responsible for many of the extraordinary computer generated special effects in theatrical films such as Jurassic Park. Now there are so many software toolkits on PCs and Macs that can create stunning graphics and animation that contemporary scriptwriters can fantasize scenes almost without inhibition.

A good example is the First Union ads that make skyscrapers merge and collapse to make a visual metaphor for corporate merger (see the video on the DVD). The camera wanders in a surrealistic, computer-generated fantasy world, a futuristic urban landscape reminiscent of Blade Runner (1982), suggesting the predicament of the consumer trying to deal with the world of financial services. It is a visual statement about the alarming uncertainty of the financial world.

Palm trees and crabs can be made to dance on a tropical beach to advertise a cruise line. A fully formed Dodge is morphed out of a sheet of metal. As a rule, these special effects are ways of getting attention by challenging visual norms and defying reality. Once again, the device has to serve the message, or the audience will remember the effect and not the message.

Sexuality

Sexual innuendo is probably the oldest technique of all. Every new medium has exploited erotic interest, whether the early moving image peep shows (Edison’s Kinetoscope, then the rival Mutograph), interactive CD-ROMs (Virtual Valerie), or the Internet, where so many web sites purvey pornography. In the advertising world, sex sells. Is there an ad for perfume or aftershave that doesn’t imply that the product will attract the opposite sex like flies? The same goes for most fashion advertising. Beer and soft drinks get on the sex bandwagon too. A strong seductive technique of persuasion is the look straight into the lens. Another technique you recognize is the big close-up of lips, or the framing of some part of the female body—looks, smiles, batting eyelashes. Somebody has to write this stuff into a script. What we see, however, is the finished product, which has been produced and directed. The director has interpreted the script and talent has interpreted the role, but the intention is clear: to get audience attention by appealing to their sexual interest.

As I’m writing this paragraph, the television is on. An ad comes on for an herbal shampoo. A woman whose car has broken down is stopped at a gas station. She asks the mechanic under the hood where she can freshen up. He throws her a key. In the washroom, she washes her hair (fat chance!). Pack shot! As she washes she starts to cry “Yes, yes, yes.” Dissolve to brushing out her dry bouncing hair as she emerges from the rest room. “Yes, yes” becomes louder. The mechanic looks up, bangs his head on the hood. The radiator spurts steam. Get the allusion? She asks if the car is ready. He says it will be a little while longer. Pack shot with a title: Herbal Essence—A totally organic experience. Get the pun? Notice the rip-off of the film, When Harry Met Sally, in which Meg Ryan simulates an orgasm in a restaurant? Somebody wrote this ad with the sexual strategy in mind. The shampoo confers sexual power on the woman who uses it. Many others have followed in the same vein.

Recruiting the Audience as a Character

One common and effective way to use the television medium is recruit the audience as a character in the spot. Television and video work well in close-up. When talent looks straight into the lens and addresses the audience, a direct connection to the viewer is made. The artifice of the camera creates a psychological effect that approximates someone speaking to you personally. Many spots are written so that a character speaks confidentially to the audience. It is the exact opposite of the fictional film technique, which depends on the actors never looking into the lens. In fact, the illusion of the film story would be instantly destroyed. Exceptions are certain comedies that deliberately use the technique of an aside to the audience, which derived from the theatrical device of a character speaking to the audience much used in Shakespearean and Restoration comedy. Ads frequently use asides and very often rely on a to-the-lens address.

Mixing Devices and Techniques

It is not difficult to see that many ads and PSAs combine more than one of these strategies. You can be sexy and funny. Special effects can be a means of creating humor. Television is a powerful medium and it is not surprising that commercial organizations quickly worked out ways, helped by public relations practitioners, of establishing a presence and making use of the power of the medium in ways other than paid television advertising.

Infomercials

The infomercial is a relatively new television format that has grown up with the emergence of cable television channels. It is another way for a channel to make money. Companies or enterprises pay for the time, which is cheaper than the broadcast channels that make money selling spots in network programming. You’ve all seen them. They masquerade as interview or talk shows, in which a guest or guests are talking to a presenter about a product or service. There are real estate schemes, get-rich-quick seminars (“I guarantee you will make money out of my scheme”), exercise devices, cosmetics, diet plans, you name it. They are periodically interrupted with buying breaks in which the 800 number comes on screen with the credit cards that can be used to purchase the service or product. While some of this dialogue can be improvised as in a talk or interview show, the format itself has to be scripted.

Video News Releases

The video news release is another result of the proliferation of television channels. It is the video equivalent of a press release in print. Companies create a news story related to a product that is professionally produced and distributed free to TV stations in the hope that they will insert it into the news. Many smaller markets are short on material and find that a professionally produced story about a new pharmaceutical drug embedded in a story about scientific research into cancer fits nicely into a science reporting category. The fact that this particular manufacturer’s new drug is featured as part of the story is acceptable if it is not too blatantly promoted. It is not advertising. It is a new form of publicity planted in news-like stories. A lot of this type of writing is given to journalists because it resembles journalistic writing. It mimics the objectivity of the news story and utilizes the same techniques of to-camera presenters and documentary footage.

Billboards and Transportation Ads

Billboards are a form of visual communication for commercial purposes that has evolved with the increase in consumer ownership of automobiles. Of course, people riding on surface public transport also see city billboards, as do pedestrians. Large surfaces such as the sides of buildings become canvases for outdoor ads that have developed a style and technique appropriate to the medium. The primary determinant of how a billboard works is its method of delivery. Delivery of the message depends on drive-by duration. You do not see crowds gathering around billboards, as the dominant audience of billboards is the motorist or passenger of a motor vehicle. The sight line from the billboard to the viewer exists for a matter of seconds as the vehicle drives by.

This fundamental context for reading billboards and posters leads to several logical axioms about billboard copy writing:

• the message has to be comprehensible within seconds

• there has to be a strong visual idea behind the billboard

• text takes too long to read and has to be limited to large phrases

• the visual idea can work independently of text

• messages use strategies of humor and shock, just like TV ads

• successful campaigns become series (Got Milk?)

The billboard illustrates very well the difference between informational, motivational and behavioral objectives. Clearly, information which is mainly text dependent has a limited place. Although behavioral objectives can work and billboards can deliver 800 numbers to act on, the primary objective is going to be motivational. Billboards are interesting examples of visual communication because of the severe constraints imposed on their content, which must read in an instant. Their message has to achieve an extreme economy in audience capture and communication.

In 1999, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America commissioned a study to measure motorists’ response to outdoor advertising using special “ShopperVision” eyeglasses that document the actual seeing experience of a passenger’s perspective.¹ The study shows that the following elements are important and register with an audience as follows in descending order of importance:

• Bright/cheerful colors 30%

• Uniqueness (movement/extensions) 26%

• The color ‘yellow’ 18%

• Catchy/clever/cute/humorous 14%

• Personal relevance 14%

• Familiarity/repeat exposure 12%

• Product illustration 12%

If a campaign deploys more than one medium, like the “Got Milk?” campaign, it allows billboard design to trade on the print ads and exploit the familiarity and repetition. A print ad can use more text because the page can be studied. In the billboard, the image predominates. The milk moustache becomes the main visual idea coupled with celebrity. So two strategies are combined. First, there is repeat exposure across media which helps. The humor is important. All kinds of celebrities are, in a sense, brought down to the level of you and me. The visual makes a great common denominator. The image of the milk moustache makes a wordless statement.

Again, Apple’s “Think Different” campaign use a celebrity value in its print ads and billboards. However, they are not like the “Got Milk?” celebrities because they are, more often than not, historical celebrities. They are creative geniuses, usually unconventional, not necessarily beautiful. Because they did not follow convention or the crowd, they were innovators, inventors, thinkers, scientists, and artists. The visual statement is, “Here is a genius who changed human history.” They are not using Macs; indeed, most could not have. The association implies that people like these tend to choose Macs; this is communicated visually. They thought differently. The ad invites you to do the same. Buying a Mac and using a Mac by association links you to genius and originality. This kind of visual elision between thoughts that compresses a syllogism into a single glance has to rank high as visual communication. It is more than just a picture; it is a train of thought. Of course, the text, “Think different,” is itself a verbal and grammatical embodiment of the picture. So they are apposite. One is a clue to the other. “Think” is a verb in the imperative mood. Adjectives (“different”) do not modify verbs despite the vernacular misuse of the language in phrases such as “I did good.” The correct expression would be, “Think differently!” So the deliberate grammatical mistake underlines the message, which expresses the maverick and unconventional mind.

Although visual writing is generally narrative, this narrative needs key moments and key images that compress the meaning into a single glance. Most good films have such moments. Even corporate communications, as we have seen, depend on this visual poetic device which is the equivalent of a figure of speech. It is called metonymy. Apple’s Mac stands for originality, for creators, for those who think differently than the crowd. The viewer is a character or a player in the ad. A key component of the ad is the viewer’s recognition, or the viewer supplying a missing link. It is the visual compression of a statement: if you know who Maria Callas (a famous opera singer and artist) is, you are part of a certain elite. If you recognize Einstein or Bob Dylan, you are part of that elite that thinks “different.” That elite uses Macs. It is part of the same world. You could argue that it is the opposite of “Got Milk?” “Think Different” is exclusive; “Got Milk” is inclusive. The one is for the few; the other is for the many.

As you drive into or out of Boston on the Mass Pike, you see a number of billboards. The one that most merits our attention is dedicated to gun control. It is not a normal billboard, but the side of a long building. The messages always contract and compress verbal and visual meaning once again in apposite ways. The ad that comes to mind consisted of a statement in large letters, “Bullets Leave Holes.” At the end of this phrase, we see a series of frontal shots of kids. One of them is an outline blank hole where a child was. The verbal cleverness in the double entendre on “holes” matches the visual image and gives it value.

Another example of ingenious visual communication found in downtown Boston concerned an anti-smoking campaign. The billboard is the approximate size of a room with the dimensions marked on the billboard. The text message is: “Secondhand smoke spreads like cancer.” The double meaning of “spreads” anchors the visual idea that is instantaneously understood, that the way cigarette smoke diffuses throughout a room is a potential cause of cancer for non-smokers in the room. The image is the smoke, which is the cancer spreading. The power of this idea is that the audience fills in the blank billboard with the visual—a room with furniture and a smoke haze. The audience has been coopted to create its own visual. This is a very effective strategy because each viewer has an individual personal image, which is more powerful than a generic image that the advertiser might try to create.

The billboard and signage industry is the domain of the copywriter rather than the scriptwriter. The copywriter is going to have to work closely with a creative director or a graphic designer so that the very few words allowed on the billboard achieve concision, bounce off and complement the visual. The text stripped out would probably mean very little unless it were a company slogan or motto with an independent existence. However, there is little writing that precedes the design in the form of concept or needs analysis because agencies probably use an artist or graphic designer to draw roughs and then pitch the concept verbally at a creative meeting. This is really meta-writing or visual thinking that underlies the creative idea.

So we see that visual writing is critical to an advertising copywriter’s arsenal. It applies to transportation posters and to full page print ads which often work like posters with a key phrase that unlocks an image. The visual has to be strong to attract the reader flipping through pages of ads to get to the articles in a magazine. This way of constructing messages as a kind of informational and motivational sandwich is very effective and is essentially the same mode of imagination that informs the work of the scriptwriter. The kind of writing we are trying to develop—compressed, elided, visual—is common to copywriters in an advertising world, or scriptwriters in a corporate or entertainment world.

Advertising on the World Wide Web

In 1996, there was little or no advertising on the internet. In 2006, advertising is a problem. There now exists a battery of new ways to reach audiences by inserting messages into web interaction, from animation to pop-ups, to click mapping that tracks the browser. There is a new form of digital signage that puts messages on the desktop of web users via their ISP or their internet portal, in relation to their browsing choices. Writing web copy has to reflect a new medium and how it functions.

Advertising on the web has many advantages. It is cheap to produce and can be updated quickly and easily compared to print and television. It can get the viewer to respond by providing interactive cues to click on something that is either fun, instructive, or logical that will produce a result, answer a question or show you a product. The links allow the ad to occupy very little real estate on the desktop but link to client web pages where an unlimited amount of detail can satisfy any level of consumer curiosity. The traffic can be measured by clicks and hits on web sites, a much more precise measure than ratings on television or circulation of print media. In the latter media you do not have any measure of how many viewers see or read read your ad other than the ratings and audience share. This is a guess, whereas web hits can be counted.

Web portals are businesses that need to build significant value for customers. Their objective is to get people in front of their content. To do this, they have to personalize sites, browsers, and portals to flatter the user. Search engines, formerly simple utilitarian tools, are evolving so that searching becomes embedded in other activities such as downloading music, viewing pictures, reading articles and collecting information. The next generation of search engines will learn your interests and habits.² Association of products and services with personalized search engines will provide more efficient advertising. You can see this strategy working by using the Google search engine. Product placement increasingly provides a click through link to take you to a web site to buy. Paid-for click advertising becomes a major source of revenue.

Copywriting for the web will undoubtedly change so that the advertising will be structural rather than text based. The function of advertising, which is to deliver a message about a product or service to an audience that potentially needs or wants it, will be served by delivering the surfer to the relevant site. The message will be enacted based on embedded intelligence in the browser gathered from the way you use your browser rather than offered to an audience for response. You don’t need to respond to a particular message because your responses, at least your range of responses, are already known. You see ads that correspond to your interests.

As advertising on the internet increases in quantity and interactive complexity, copywriters and creative directors will have to comprehend interactivity and begin to conceptualize campaigns that integrate with internet services and interactive content on websites and interactive entertainment media. These are discussed in Chapter 15.

Formats

Applying visual writing techniques to commercial messages involves the whole gamut of devices and strategies that are available to the medium of moving pictures, whether video or film. Advertising and promotional budgets often allow writers and producers to exploit all the special effects and all the technology of the medium. The most adaptable format for the writer is the dual-column format. It is much easier to communicate very precise, split-second timing of shots, effects, and voice-overs by lining up numbered shots in parallel so that the producer knows exactly what to shoot and the editor knows exactly what to edit. To communicate to clients who may not be able to read the dual-column format easily, storyboards serve the important function of visualizing the key frames for the client so that the image can be related to voice and effects. The storyboard, however, does not describe all of the detail of the shot as well as the dual-column script can. Camera movement has to be described, as do transitions and effects. The dual-column script is sort of like the architect’s blueprint, whereas the storyboard is somewhat like the architect’s sketch of what a building will look like. The client needs the sketch; the builder needs the blueprint.

Conclusion

Ads and PSAs are highly concentrated mini-scripts that embody many of the techniques of longer form entertainment scripts. They require visual writing and rely on strong visual communication. They are an excellent training ground for beginning writers. Many of the techniques discussed in this chapter apply to longer forms of video communication that are needed by corporations and organizations to promote, sell, or market products and services. They are also used for training, education, and self-help. These applications are dealt with in the chapters that follow.

Exercises

1. Watch PSAs on television and analyze how they work by writing down the seven-step thinking behind them. In other words, reverse engineer the ad.

2. Call up a local advertising agency or a local public service organization and ask them what public service announcements they are working on and offer to write one.

3. Pick out an advertisement or PSA that really holds your attention. Analyze how it works. What is the creative strategy that keeps you watching and therefore being exposed to the message?

4. Write a storyboard of an existing commercial or PSA that you know. Try out the software program Storyboard Artist.

5. Pick one of the strategies or devices described in this chapter and use it to write a TV spot or a PSA. For example, use a shock effect in a PSA on drug or alcohol abuse, use sexuality to sell a healthy diet, or use humor to promote racial tolerance and diversity tolerance.

6. Write an infomercial for the business idea of an on-campus laundry service.

7. Write a video news release for a new birth control drug in the context of research into human reproduction.