TELEVISION ADVERTISING: ITS PART IN MASS COMMUNICATION

TELEVISION ADVERTISING: ITS PART IN MASS COMMUNICATIONAuthor(s): STANHOPE SHELTONSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 118, No. 5166 (MAY 1970), pp. 332-343Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41370591 .

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TELEVISION ADVERTISING: ITS PART

IN MASS COMMUNICATION

I STANHOPE

A paper S HELTON,

by F IP A

I

I STANHOPE S HELTON, F IP A I

a Member of Council of the Society > given to the Society on Wednesday 28th February 1970 ,

with Mrs . Mary Adams , OBE , Member y Independent Television Authority , in the Chair

The Chairman: It is a pleasurable duty to take the Chair for my friend, Stanhope Shelton, who has been an ornament to the advertising profession for many years. A duty because as a professional consumer and a Member of the Independent Television Authority I have a statutory regard for the interests of viewers, who consume not only programmes but the product advertised by television. And a pleasure because Mr. Shelton's lecture this evening is composed

largely of pictures - pictures selected by an expert with a professional understanding of the problems underlining instant TV communications.

Mr. Shelton was, until last year, a member of the well known firm of Ogilvy and Mather - an undertaking which he tells me has been going strong since 1851. Advertising is no newcomer, but tonight we are going to learn about one of its most recent techniques, the TV commercial.

The following paper , which was illustrated with film clips and stills , was then given *

The Mass a wider

title Communication,

range

of this

of

talk

knowledge but was

that originally

than needs

I Mass Communication, but that needs a wider range of knowledge than I

possess. I am certainly not the person to speak on such an important subject. If then I cannot speak to you as a learned authority on mass communication, let me at least try to describe some of the things I have noticed in my experience of one tiny section of it - that part called Television Advertising.

Communication means the conveying of ideas and information from person to person. This can be done by sound (mainly speech) or by pictures or by the written word. In recent times various electronic media have greatly enlarged the field of communication until - well within the lifetime of most of us here - television has come to take its place as the most powerful of all means of mass communication.

The rapid development of television in the last two decades has in this country coin-

cided with - dare one say contributed to ? - a period of vast social change.

There is to-day a new and widespread interest in the subject of mass communication. We are waking up to the fact that it is a powerful and little understood element in our daily lives. We begin to realize that television in particular is not only an exten- sion of man's power to learn and to enjoy but is also a new instrument of government and a new instrument of trading. I do not propose to discuss television in relation to education or entertainment or politics, but I should like to put before you some of the ideas I have formed about its function as an advertising, and therefore a trading, medium.

Raymond Williams says that part of the basic purpose of communication is to supply real information, to make judgements of quality, to share in human experience. Tele- vision advertising, while communicating a number of small ideas, does none of these

♦The subject and its presentation were essentially visual, dependent largely on moving pictures. In the adapted version printed here, it is possible to include only a token group of illustrations from these.

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MAY I97O TELEVISION ADVERTISING: ITS PART IN MASS COMMUNICATION

The Times Miss World 1969 pinned 32 million viewers to their sets for two hours

things. In television advertising communication is supported by - or subordinated to - only one thing: the drive to sell. And the immediate result is that we are one free TV Channel to the good. I have spent all my adult life in the advertising business. It is a live and driving business, essential to our economy, and I believe that it reflects the age much more than it moulds it.

Before television joined the advertising media, the turnover of the business, was £123 million. The turnover to-day is something like £353 million. Of that total, £122 million - 35 per cent - is spent on television. Nobody could foresee the extent and force of the new medium.

That means that round the globe nearly 3,000 million people watch television. In fact, the very latest figure given to me a few days ago was as high as 3,270 million. Every month that figure is increased by a staggering two million. Ninety-two nations now have

commercial television, and in every one of these countries the story reflects what has happened here - immediate impact, rapidly expanding audiences, enormous sales.

In this country the best proof of the phenomenal success of commercial television - the best general case history, so to speak - lies in the advertising expenditure figures for Independent Television: in 1955, £2 million; in 1968 £122 million. This was money spent by some very hard-headed marketing companies indeed. Such money is not invested so continuously unless there is some more than adequate return !

Commercial television began in Britain in 1955 with an audience of only half a million people. By 1966 this audience had grown to over 46 million people, or 88 per cent of the entire population of the United Kingdom. To-day this figure stands at 51 million, which is heading towards the Full House figure.

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS MAY I97O

Television dominates the Englishman's evening hours. On average he watches between 4 and 4' hours a day. The prefer- ence at the moment is for ITV programmes, but that could easily swing to BBC - it depends upon the popularity of the programmes. A popular programme can com- mand an audience of over 30 million. One ITV programme recently held 32 million people in front of their sets for a full two- hour stretch. Television is a powerful medium all right !

Perhaps this is an appropriate point to issue a caveat. When I speak of the television viewer, of his habits and reactions, I think that some members of this audience will be quick to question my statements. You may find yourself thinking, '/ don't do that. My mind doesn't work like that. That's not the way it is at all.' You're quite right, of course. But the average viewer is another matter altogether. So please bear with me and exclude yourself if you can.

Now look at this simple and very successful commercial. It appealed to millions of those average viewers. Judge it in this light only. A television advertisement for 'Homepride' was then shown. In this country television communicates with practically everybody. No need even to be able to read. It reaches into the nursery, into the playpen, into literate and into near- illiterate homes, all with astonishing effect. It has changed eating, living, buying, even sleeping habits. Above all, it has changed learning habits. Going back for a moment to those children in the nursery, a recent re- search in America found that a contemporary child of 4 had an 'awareness level' equal to that of a 7-year-old child in pre-television days. Television turns mass communication into near-total communication. It reaches and enlarges nearly everyone's awareness.

And now what about the rôle of advertising in the general television scene? The influence of advertising - not specifically television advertising - is often exaggerated. It is recognized as a power of persuasion, and because they do not understand why and how it persuades, many people look upon it with fear and suspicion. We want to judge for ourselves. Television advertising particularly prevents us from judging for ourselves - in this sense we lose face with ourselves. Television advertising is to-day firmly implanted in millions of viewers' lives, and

while responding to it they often feel grades of resentment towards it. They don't understand how it works, but there it is - a public act, a matter of public interest. And it is their right to criticize it.

Let us try to find out a little about it, and see in what ways it may differ from other forms of advertising.

When television joined the advertising media, a new and subjective quality entered the field of advertising communication. It is something quite new and difficult to define, a fairy tale quality that involves the viewer personally. Because television advertising deals with your environment, your experiences - or wished-for experiences - it involves your participation without your being aware of it. It keeps the viewer watching, listening, thinking in a lazy way. He is enthralled, mesmerized if you like, and with no effort at all on his own part. No reading ; nothing so difficult or laborious as that. To most people the experience is satisfying. They enjoy the lazy personal participation, the all-embracing quality of the medium. They want as much of it as they can get.

When advertising was called in to provide an extra channel, surprisingly viewers did not noticeably object to the advertisements that they were obliged to accept along with the rest of the new free channel. Even when they disliked them, they accepted them as part of the overall television experience, and enjoyed their dislike. The advertisements, like the programmes, had this fairy tale hypnotic quality of personal involvement. It was all part of the new way of life, of that total television experience which was changing habits and even attitudes. Take a look at this early film made for the Egg Marketing Board. The film was shown. How that commercial made millions of female viewers coo, and at the same time increased the sale of eggs ! It was one of the first, of its kind, I think. ťCool' filming - leaving much to your imagination.

As for the economic results of television advertising, goods of certain kinds sold more quickly and in far greater quantities than had been expected by even the most optimistic of the advertisers. So the new channel quickly justified itself, both as a foil for BBC programmes and as a profit-making concern. In the early days it made a great deal of money for some of its backers but it gave members of the public more for their money

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Still from an early , highly successful Egg Marketing Board television advertisement

than one would have thought possible. It hit the advertising business with the gentleness of a hydrogen bomb. And I want now to talk about the explosive - or if you like the implosive - effect commercial television had on the advertising industry and on the television audience.

Unlike the cinema, to which at a super- ficial glance it would appear to be closely related, television transmits an image which is in every sense of the word 'shadowy'. Because you cannot physically see all the details, you set about filling some of them in for yourself. You may even find this a satisfactory experience because you are helping to create what you are seeing. You are not merely watching what is going on as a passive spectator; you are part of the action. The very lack of precision in the images you are seeing is possibly their greatest appeal.

Marshall McLuhan says, 'The viewer is the screen.'

If the same information content were brought to you in a newspaper, it is indisput- able that the effect would be different. In the

newspaper someone selects the facts and places them in a certain order - by the nature of type and the printed page in sequential order. You, the newspaper reader, by virtue of your training, read what is written, consider the thoughts expressed and take up an attitude towards them. You may choose to accept some of them and reject others. You are the critic . But this is not so with television. You are involved, whether you like it or not. You no longer stand outside. To some extent you invent what you see. It is not an organized sequence but an involving and instant experience which gives you no time to edit your thoughts.

Until you realize this, until you realize its difference in kind from the written word, you won't understand what television is all about. And the more people understand what it is all about, the less resentment is there likely to be of the persuasion it brings about.

It has been calculated that half a minute of television exposure is equal to about three minutes of live performance, in terms of impact and communication. I am told that Dr. Billy Graham, the American evangelist,

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converts for every one of his immediate audience who listen to him live, three members of the television overflow audience.

Confucius said that one picture is worth a thousand words. This is still as true to-day as it was in Confucius's time when so few could read. We are all of us trained from birth to cope with words. Verbal argument puts everyone, from the university don to the humblest housewife, in the best possible position to resist.

One of the most hyperbolic of advertising claims is that well known 'washes whiter than white'. If claims like this one, or like 'biologically cleaner' and so on, were printed in a newspaper, the potential buyer would be inclined to retort, 'That's unbelievable. Who are they fooling ?' Words lead to argument and argument can lead to rejection.

But no one is really trained, even to-day, to deal with pictures. It would be interesting to know how often a printed advertisement succeeds simply because, while the reader is wrestling with the verbal argument, the real message, conveyed by the picture, slips under his guard. Half-seen persuasion.

Let me show a US commercial where the moving image - the picture - slips under your guard and tells the whole story with exciting force. An advertisement film for Eastern Airlines was here shown . Unlike printed media - newspapers, magazines, leaflets, posters, which rely upon the printed word and static image - the television medium hits us directly through two senses, the eye and the ear. We take in the television message with instant comprehen- sion, without having to negotiate the indirect and artificial intervention of the printed word. The picture does indeed dominate the word in television communication, for it is through the eye - through the sense of sight - that most people receive their first and strongest impression of reality.

I am now going to show you a television commercial - it was made for American Kodak - to illustrate what I mean about taking in a story told mostly in pictures without much help from words but a little help from music. Here is the Kodak commercial, well made and appealing. I believe you will find yourself caught up in the fairy story element, accepting the message, asso- ciating yourself with the story, and becoming in some way part of it all. It is an advertisement made in images, and made in the

! images of your motives and desires. Don't I be on your guard. Relax, watch the pictures, j and think about it afterwards. The Kodak film was shown. And I now want to show another commercial - American but made by an English company. Here again you may agree that the story absorbs and involves you for a short 60 seconds from which you cannot escape. It takes up very little of your time. You are quickly back again with the news or the Westerns. But in those 60 seconds you have succumbed utterly to the little potted story and its message.

Condensation of the story - condensation of time in fact - is something I want you to look out for particularly in this Volkswagen film. It's remarkable how 60 or even 30- second commercials can, when expertly devised, pack in a whole dramatic story. Here is such a story. The words this time are important. The reasoning is impeccable. But without the impact of the pictures the commercial would not exist. The Volkswagen film was shown.

Let us try to discover what is the quality that can absorb us so gracefully, so imme- diately, so effectively in such a fraction of time. That Volkswagen film, I think, demonstrates the new subjective element which characterizes television advertising. A force to be reckoned with. Taking an unfair advantage, do you think ?

The unfairness of course lies in the motive. It's your money they're after! And they work very hard and very cleverly to get it. Unfair or not, that is what advertising is about - what selling has always been about. And now that television is available to the salesman, he has in his hands the fastest, subtlest, most effective piece of selling machinery ever known.

'If a television advertisement becomes so environmental as to be unperceived, that's when it's really doing its work. Advertise- ments are not meant for conscious consump-

! tion.' Think about that realistic statement. Some of the films I am showing you are good examples of it.

Television took over very quickly. We got used to it without realizing that it was changing our ideas and our habits. What concerned us more was the stream of new things coming out of 'the box'. We were not interested in the new senses coming into play, even if we had heard and understood Marshall MacLuhan's statement that 'Such

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multi-sensory existence is bringing a return to primitive man's emphasis upon the sense of touch which is the primary sense because t it consists of a meeting of the senses.' !

Here and there, however, some of us may I have reflected on what a long way we have j come from using words by themselves as ! communicators. As a Fellow of this Society j recently said, 'It could be that words are j becoming a little old-fashioned, particularly as we are using them at the moment.' New ! forms of communication are, if not taking | their place, then certainly supplementing ! them to a point where they make a quite | different impression. ¡

Let us for a moment consider the four j major stages of communication through j human history. First there was the 'total oral pre-literate tribalism'. Then came the | codification of script that arose after Homer i in ancient Greece and which lasted for two I thousand years. Third came the age of print ¡ from ad 1500 to, say, 1900. (Notice the ¡ quickening pace of change.) And now, since ! about 1900, we have entered the electronic age. Not much conscious notice - or even official notice - is taken of the speed of that last change and the part it plays in our lives - nor of the pattern of communication. As far j as I know, communications as a subject plays j little part in the syllabus of our primary or i secondary schools. It should be studied, surely - and taught ? I know there are move- ments afoot to promote an awareness of it, but it's a bit too slow getting off the ground for my liking. The more that is known about modern communication, its speed and its influence, the more it will be possible to control it. And it will need control ! If I may quote one more McLuhan statement : 'Societies have been shaped', he said, 'more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communications.' You may not agree with this, but I am going to suggest that the electronic media, and in particular television, provide the most shape-forming experiences in human history.

Television has become part of our way of living. Every important feature of our lives is to a greater or lesser degree influenced by it. Its influence, particularly on our young, is very great - rivalling that of school or parents. Perhaps you'll remember seeing, a month or two back, that interesting programme, 'A Child of the Sixties', produced by Peter Morley, in the course of which Mr. Iain McLeod, I believe, commented: 'If it

doesn't happen on TV it doesn't happen.' We take television for granted, switching

on one channel or another, like pulling the curtains or turning on the light. The average viewer likes his set on rather than off. Favourite programmes get attention - but in between whiles, 'Might as well leave it on' (you'll hear them say), 'It'll soon be the News.'

The commercials slip in and out, not very much loved or noticed, but usually not very much resented either, and making their own impact. Viewers can sometimes be heard humming the familiar tunes or quoting the catch lines. 'You have to know what's going on, don't you ?' you may hear them say.

To many people television is a soporific, taken like aspirin, by the tired worker after a hard day. He doesn't enjoy what he sees, nothing so active; he doesn't particularly care. It takes him out of himself and becomes an indulgence for occupied laziness. 'I read it in the paper' has lost ground to 'I saw it on TV', irrespective of what 'it' is. Television continues to exercise its mesmeric power, which causes many viewers to identify with what they see on the screen, causes them mentally to join in what is being presented, to participate in the message. Here indeed is a medium which itself, more than the content of its messages, is shaping society.

But what about that strange thing that j causes viewers to participate in the message, j that fairy tale spell which we keep coming back to ? It applies to programmes as well as to advertising, but for examples I shall take two commercials. Let me show you them. The first is serious, for some chocolate sweets. The second, humorous, is for a Sunday newspaper. Both involve you with sound and picture as you submit to the message. Both start out to tell a nice little story which increasingly draws you in. One relies chiefly on words, the other on pictures. The films were shown. These films were made for what advertising men call the A Class of television viewers (the most affluent). Here is a film made for the much bigger В, С and D classes. Once again people are drawn into the situation,

I entangled in the story, and with it goes a lot j of warmth and assurance. ! An advertisement film for Findus frozen food was shown. These three films were made quite recently

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From a prize-winning Observer commercial

and were designed, taking advantage of that fairy tale element, to create a climate for persuasion, to put you in a mood when you might be persuaded to buy the product. Believe me, the plan usually succeeds.

Samuel Johnson said, 'In an advertisement it is allowed of every man to speak well of himself.' I should like to extend this quotation: ť ... to speak well of himself and to create a climate for his reception.' This is what a lot of successful television advertising does. It builds, by means of a host of known sensitive reactions and counter-reactions, an ambience - a climate for the reception of persuasive argument.

Take a look at this commercial - beauti- fully made - selling a headache remedy. I hope it won't give you a headache, but if you have one, or suffer from headaches, the climate of reception created by this film might well put you in the mood to buy the product next time you saw it on sale. A commercial for an aspirin was shown.

Some people consider that these little story impressions - compressions if you like - handled by artists, verge upon the minor arts.

You may guess at the thought and pains and inventiveness that went into the direction and production of films like these last four. Months of work, agonies of argument, very strict budgets. And they all end up in a little pill box like this, a film can. The content, which has cost so much in time and endeavour, lasts for just 30 or 60 seconds. And then the pill is out of its box and begins to work; sometimes in the most indirect ways; here's another example of our pill at work. A Schweppes television advertisement called ť Demolition ' was shown .

Of course I have chosen to show you well-made commercials rather than examples of those which are inferior in technique, boring in content and, in short, unsuccessful in achieving what they set out to do. I can hardly show examples of these without being offensive to their makers, which I certainly don't wish to be. I know the heavy odds against a commercial managing to be exciting, successful, original. There are many inferior commercials about and I'm sure they have irritated you, too, but I honestly think that their numbers are getting fewer.

ЗЗ8




Still from, a television advertisement for Schweppes

In recent months I have watched thousands of commercials from many different countries and I believe that to-day, in this country, our average standard is higher than anywhere else in the world. In short, we make fewer poor commercials than we used to do, and every month that goes by sees the percentage of chaff in our wheat growing smaller. The advertising industry, which has set its own code of standards, is morally obliged to re-examine itself constantly so as to speed up the process of eliminating these irritating second and third-rate commercials. The greatest obstacle to this of course is the desire for profit - quick profit - which can be obtained from commercials of low aesthetic and moral merit.

The second generation of television viewers will soon number millions of people for whom television has always been part of life - perhaps even that part which has done most to create their awareness of the world. This level of awareness may even be usurp- ing the place of education. An illiterate or semi-literate population can enjoy the bene- fits of sophisticated television communication, and particularly so can the young 'forming' person who is so susceptible to

atmosphere. This is a condition exaggerated by TV. Here were shown a series of stills depicting the Beatles , the Rolling Stones , mini-skirts , a group of Hippies , a pop painting and an elegantly dressed youth . Could the young trend setters - the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, the protesters, the designers, the drop-outs, the hippies, the pop painters - have spread their influence so quickly without the aid of the small screen ? Could looks and attitudes and habits have been transformed within these very few years? Could music and styles and tights and maxis and freedom and protest and introspection - total new expression - all have established themselves almost over- night without the instant communication of television ? I doubt it. It's not that times are changing. They have always done that. It is the tremendous pace and universality of change that are so significant to-day. And television must bear a large share of responsibility for that.

Not so long ago - say nine to ten years - the maximum footage of news film was about 2,000 feet a week. At the present time it is

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The Times ' Looks and attitudes and habits . . . transformed 9

some 15,000 to 20,000 feet a day! So much material is available. And it's all so quick. Stringers go out and get the stories, no matter where. With their hand-held cameras they've little to impede them. They go into battle, into volcano craters, into earthquaked homes from Turkey, to the Seychelles. They get their reels rapidly to an airfield and fly them home, where at once they are pro- cessed, edited and sent by direct line to the broadcasting centres, sometimes while you are actually seeing the pictures. So much; so quick; so terrifying. And the speed and organization of news services grow greater all the time. I want you now to look at these snippets of news film, achieved in this way, and lent to me by the remarkable and splendidly organized ITN film library. Each

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one of these bits of news swept aside the ordinary and the accepted, and all were quickly accepted as ordinary in their turn. A series of news clips followed , showing the assassinations of John Kennedy and Lee Oswald, scenes from Vietnam and Sharpville , Apartheid objectors , the Beatlesy the Aberfan disaster , the Grosvenor Square protest , an incident in Detroit , starvation in Biafra , the death of Martin Luther King , the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia , the first man on the moon and an African killing scene . Very moving pictures. You probably saw them on your screen. You reacted* and then tucked them into that useful mental wallet we all possess, as something strange that is no longer new, a strangeness leading to new




expectation as soon as it is accepted. You accepted them - and then in fact you expected more and newer - almost at once. It is on the back of this modern charivari of novelty, and expectation of further novelty, that the commercials are carried.

The commercials follow the real events and in their turn kick up the speed and expectation of more novelty to come. The compressed fairy stories can quickly turn into tales of fantasy, horror, dream worlds, violence. We are indeed reared on novelty. We are less and less capable of surprise. The commercial I am going to show you now shocked American viewers when it was j first shown. But it was only a beginning - a ¡ pace setter. See what you think of this first j time out. j Here was shown a film about reactions to the | birth of a child afflicted with cerebral palsy. j In the last decade we have seen not only j class and cultural changes. We have had j organ transplants, moon landings, the pill, ! violence on an unprecedented scale, the j computer. . . . And television - straight and j commercial - puts it all before us, while we wait for more and more and more.

In the United Kingdom (and in those | ninety -one other countries in the world with j commercial TV), it is between all these j happenings that are slipped the little films | called commercials. These in their own right do everything they can to involve you in a devised atmosphere conducive to persuasion. But so does the whole television display. It too builds up an atmosphere of reception through expectation. In doing so, it intensi- fies, I can't help thinking, the climate of reception for the commercials themselves.

The work of many specialists has been brought to your attention this evening - let me call them as a school 'The Compres - sionists' - the 'compressionists' who made those half -minute persuasive fairy stories in their tiny pill boxes. Such people depend on their ability to take advantage of rapid technological development, particularly in the field of electronic communication. New art forms are emerging, and one must hope that the fine artist's freedom to work on his own terms will be preserved in the midst of such complex, highly technical and rapidly changing situations.

But here is a group of artists of another kind - actually part of that commercial machinery, working to new ends and certainly keeping pace with the quick -changing

technological situation within their field. To-day new ideas must flow fast - I think they do when one compares the present with pre-television days. For it is television (including its commercials) that is keeping us abreast of what is happening and may I suggest - for good or ill - keeping up our pace. There followed an Andy Warhol film advertising ice cream. I have shown you various examples of television advertising, trying to place them in their setting as part of mass communication. I have shown many films you must already have seen, but I hope some have been new to you. The inclusion of a number of American films was partly for this reason and partly because the best of American production - though certainly not the average - is somewhat in advance of what we are doing here. I have tried to show you what it is in a зо-second commercial that persuades, and I have stressed the persuasive power of the picture in contrast to the written or spoken word.

I have called the contents of the tiny pill box a minor form of art. The great mass of mediocre commercials I have touched upon perhaps too lightly. The advertising industry, like the television programme planners, has a heavy responsibility in these days of fierce technological development combined with great permissiveness and uncertainty. Advertisers should never let up in their efforts to improve their use of this most influential and persuasive medium. Sales- producing machinery alone is just not enough. Quality should not be made to suffer in the interests of profit-seeking.

Dr. Darling in his recent Reith lecture said that population and pollution were the two greatest problems of our age. I should like to add as a third great problem, Mass

j Communication. Someone must take res- i ponsibility for it more seriously than it is [ taken now, and must find out how to shape i our optimism to our behavioral require- j ment s . By using and developing communica- I tion services strictly for the passing of real j information and by exercising gentle but firm control over all the rest, by refusing to let affluence surpass quality and by giving communications as such a primary rather than a secondary place in our order of living, it is just possible that, with enormous effort, we could in our lifetime see a new and better pattern of values emerge.

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DISCUSSION

The Chairman: We are all indebted to our lecturer not only for the pictorial skill with which he has illustrated his theme, but also for the sentiments of his conclusion. Clearly one of the j most significant things he said was that tele- j vision advertisements are dependent, carried j along by everything else which appears on the I screen, and that inevitably viewers' satisfaction or dissatisfaction over programmes is of prime interest to advertisers. There are many ways of discovering viewers' reactions, some of them highly technical, others which use the statutory committees and organizations set up for the purpose. And there is always Parliament and the Press. And specialized Lobbies. But there is little direct communication between viewers and providers. This situation must be remedied and will be remedied by members of this evening's audience.

Mr. C. H. Robinson: My feeling after listening to and watching this fascinating lecture (and remembering George Orwell's 1984 ), is that the time is rapidly coming when control of what is produced on television must be streng- thened. It is such an influential and persuasive power, and it can be used for the wrong ends. I should like to hear Mr. Shelton's views on the best way of achieving a proper and moderate control.

The Lecturer: If anybody could com- ment on that, it would be our Chairman. The Independent Television Authority has a code of advertising standards and practice that is full of what you must not do and what you should try and avoid, and I consider that already a very successful form of control, although people do break the rules and get round these things by what the Americans call 'weasel techniques'.

The Chairman: I would prefer to hear what the audience think on this question. I have here copies of the TV Code of Advertising Standards and Practice, a document which lays down official regulations for advertisers. Perhaps Mrs. Alma Williams would like to say something about the work of the ITA Advertising Advisory Committee ?

Mrs. Alma Williams: This Committee (i.e., Advertising Advisory) is undoubtedly in existence but it is not properly used. When I go to meetings and speak to people I find that they just don't know whom to write to in the event of a complaint about advertising. So I should very much like it to be widely known that this Committee works from a very tight code of practice, and has offices in 70 Brompton Road, SW3, which welcome comments from the public. The Committee gets few complaints, as Mrs. Adams remarked earlier; but are we to assume from that that people are satisfied ?

Apart from the need for control I should like to mention the need for education. It is sig-

nificant that the Consumers' Association came into being simultaneously with commercial television. I am involved personally in the con- tinuing development of education in schools, whether for young children or those at sixth- form level, in grammar school or comprehensive. And the study of advertising is beginning to be part of normal curriculum routine.

The Lecturer: I touched lightly upon teaching in schools. I was referring not so much to teaching students how to appreciate advertisements, as to teaching them about communication. Not nearly enough of this is being done. Everybody knows that communications systems are influencing us day in and day out, particularly electronic communications, and yet it is very seldom taken as a serious subject in schools. If young people knew something about it they would be in a much better position to judge it later in life.

Mr. D. E. Riley, в sc (Retired Principal): I appreciated this lecture very much, but I am a little disturbed by the omission of one area of education which to my mind is more important even than schools - and that is further education for technician apprentices. I am not thinking of university graduates. What we in this country have neglected for over twenty years is that main body of young people whom I normally refer to, for want of a better name, as the ordinary man, the people who will be technicians, etc. There is in further education now, at that young person's level, a subject where topics such as the subject of the lecture tonight are discussed. It is known as General Studies.

One of the difficulties of the subject has been that while we can always discuss newspaper and magazine items we cannot obtain, for discussion, examples of the advertising shown on television, at the time when we wish to discuss them. Can you, Madam Chairman, enlighten me as to how I and my colleagues can get these things ? I completely agree that we need education in this field. There are people in the colleges who can do this, but they lack facilities in terms of television as distinct from newspapers and magazines.

The Chairman: Many experiments are taking place in this field. You can get information of the kind you ask for from the headquarters of the Independent Television Autho- rity as well as from the BBC. There is also the Open University headquarters at Milton Keynes.

The Lecturer: May I just add that one of our needs is for teachers who understand communications. Here again, our schools are much behind the times.

Mr. Brian Palmer (K/M/P Partnership): Mr. Shelton referred to the instant communication of television, and particularly to its power

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in selling products. Would he agree that by j speeding up the communications process commercial television has also made the death of inadequate products take place much faster than it would otherwise have done ?

TheLecturer: Only certain kinds of goods do sell on television. The very high-priced goods, like motor cars, you never see. It is the small-priced product that seems to get over far more rapidly. Any number of products are tried out by manufacturers and advertisers on television, and if they flop, you never see the advertising any more. There are endless test campaigns going on all over the country in different television areas to prove these things, and many trial products fail. Television is good at sorting that one out.

Mr. James F. Shaw (Thames TV): In America the largest advertiser on television is General Motors, I believe.

The Lecturer: All I know is that advertising of cars in this country has not proved successful. I left advertising last year and now hesitate to get into this kind of discussion.

Mr. Anthony Pugh: Has advertising a responsibility to lead public taste in terms of the sort of devices it uses, or should it follow public taste ? If in fact 90 per cent of the population have certain tastes in common, should we, on commercial channels, follow their inclinations ? The last examples of commercials Mr. Shelton showed were good examples of intelligent commercials, but they were for the intelligentsia.

The Lecturer: It is an enormously expen- sive business to lead taste in this particular field - and who is going to waste money leading taste when taste is already created ? Once upon a time there was a washing powder that was doing some most amusing and clever advertising. Suddenly the sponsors found that it wasn't at all to the public taste in America, so they changed to a taste that everybody seemed to love in America and which has been running in this country ever since - interviewing people in streets. It goes for sweets as well as washing powders. Ask people a silly question and you may get a stupid answer, but you usefully make your point.

If I was an advertiser I would never try to lead taste because I would have shareholders who would ask me why I was wasting their money. This is greed again. Greed will always put down quality.

Mr. John Latham: If we are going to think about control aren't we going to create a certain frustration all the time ? And isn't one of the ways of controlling to decontrol the direction ? In television now there is an immense amount of over-control in the organization of programmes.

The Lecturer: When I used the word 'control' towards the end of my paper I did not mean it in the sense of 'must' and 'must not'. That is the kind of control that is really not much good except perhaps through the Police Force. Control is a very subtle thing, and in communications I believe it should be exercised without its looking like control. I gave you some examples of wrong influence in those news clips, and I cannot say more than that. I think control of that kind of thing is needed, and I think it will happen within the next five to ten years; I hope sooner.

The Chairman: The control we look for- ward to is control by informed public opinion extracted through parliamentary and government action.

Mr. H. G. Theobalds (Independent Tele- vision Authority) : I think there is quite a lot of difference between control of programme matter and control of advertisements. It is accepted that an advertiser is out to sell his products, and the whole control machinery is set up to ensure that the ordinary consumer is not misled to any material degree. The machinery stems from the Television Act itself, which set up the ITA and gave the Authority overriding power to ensure that no advertisement should be transmitted which could mislead to any material degree. The Authority has to assist it, as you heard earlier, an Advertising Advisory Committee with repre- sentatives of the consumer interest; it also has nominees from the medical profession and the advertising industry itself.

I do not think the control machinery is such that it stifles creative instinct. We see something like 8,000 television advertising scripts a year, and of that number in only about 10 per cent of cases do either the programme companies or the Authority itself require advertisers to make some change. As to the finished advertising films themselves, including some of those we have seen tonight, only about 2 per cent require some change to bring them into line with the Code of Advertising Standards and Practices.

The Chairman then closed the meeting with renewed thanks , which were expressed also by the audience , with acclamation.

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Documents

TELEVISION ADVERTISING: ITS PART IN MASS COMMUNICATION