Advertising has always been part of our lives and is necessary from word of mouth to large multinational campaigns. If we want to sell our product or simply make our business noticed, we have to know that we exist, it makes sense. It also serves as an income from the industries, media, or platforms that spread that publicity.
It is nothing new, the oldest advertising is registered in a papyrus found in Thebes from 3000 B.C. where the owner of an escaped slave offered a coin to whoever captured him, and in this papyrus, he also took the opportunity to talk about his business (Poveda, 2021).
The same works nowadays where the sneakers we’ve been looking at a couple of days ago pop up on our mobile app. Advertising in an increasingly audiovisual world has generated an overwhelming overload of commercials. This has resulted in online advertising blockers. This in turn has spawned programs that bypass the blockers. But where is all this going to end up? For instance, the video-on-demand platforms where they show thousands of movies, tv-series, and different entertainment formats have overruled the classic TV industry without any advertising most of the time. How is this possible?
There is advertising that has mocked all this war in the evolution of ads, advertising that does not work in a conventional way, if not quite the opposite, its power lies in subtlety making its message less incisive but much more effective. I am talking of course about the cinema, an industry that focuses on leisure and entertainment, alleviating boredom to keep us away from our own thoughts that can become so overwhelming.
Paradoxically, depending on what we see, we can relax or become even more distressed depending on what they want to make us feel. A great example is a warmongering cinema showing great battles where we barely see the face of the person who dies, they are ants, and we do not empathize. Or, on the contrary, an anti-war feature film, these ones put a face and name on each victim, making us a participant in the suffering, and taking to empathize with him.
China, Russia, and the United States of America are great powers that possess similar economic, geopolitical and military strength, but among all of them the USA may stand out from the rest. The main reason is that it has colonized the whole world with its culture through Hollywood.
Thinking of Hallowing as an almost worldwide fest or the habit of shopping centers away from the neighborhood commerce that we were used to, or why not, the fact that English is considered as the international language.
How could this happen without barely being noticed? Once again, movies are the answer.
There are departments in the CIA, in the Pentagon, or in NASA, which are in charge of analyzing possible scripts to finance them. Documents have recently been uncovered confirming that the United States government has worked behind the scenes on more than 800 major motion pictures and 1000 TV scripts. This means that when a Hollywood writer or producer approaches the Pentagon and requests access to military resources to help make his film, he must submit his script for investigation. If there are characters, actions, or dialogue that the Department of Defense does not approve of, then the filmmaker has to make changes to fit the demands of the military (Secker & Alford, 2017).
All this is not exclusive to the US of course, Sergei Eistsestein worked in favor of the Russian revolution with movies like Battleship Potemkin, and even Stalin himself commissioned a film from him. Or Leni Riefenstahl, documentary filmmaker of Hitler and Nazism. But this documentary and propagandistic cinema does not have the force of fiction (Derzyan, 2016).
When you watch a documentary you are already predisposed to be educated, you are looking for information regarding a topic about which you surely already have an opinion and therefore your mind would be more alert, this moves away from the strength of fictional cinema. The ability to express an idea through the narrative without any educational pretension, at least a priori.
For example, when Ian Fleming, a former MI6 (British CIA) secret agent, after the bad fame the British intelligence gained in the Second World War, created a rock-a-mason fictional character capable of surviving unscathed from any bombing with his suit intact called James Bond (Concostrina, 2018). The power of fiction is such that American film production continues to use it to continue talking about the communist danger in horror, science fiction, or war films. Genres that allow it to spread a state of alert and at the same time, spread the American way of life.
But we are not going to be so naive as to think that simply with the power of a good narrative we can be easily influenced. Or at least not as the only method. What if there was something else? Probably even high-educated people with talented skills developed that are above average and with a high percentage to stay away from getting influenced simply by a well-constructed script will fall into this one. Small fragments of a second where an idea is shown that is barely perceptible to the conscious but not to the subconscious.
Fascine and place. When movies manage to bring us as viewers to a state of dramatic climax, we will be open and unaware, ready to let go. That’s when the idea is placed. It is the art of making us believe that the idea was solely and exclusively ours (Marimón, 2018).
But what is certain is that subliminal messages are not something recent. Ingmar Bergman, considered one of the great filmmakers of the beginning of the century and with a strict Lutheran education, put a frame of a penis that barely lasted a thousandth of a second in his films.
This brings me to the question:
Why doesn’t Netflix have advertising?
Or any of the other platforms. Is it enough with the ridiculous amounts that they ask for subscriptions considering their vast catalog?
Do not misunderstand. Of course, there are works of art that seek to make you reflect or expose a social reality or simply make you hang out. But most of the time there is an extra subtext. Maybe from now on consider watching the films always with an eye on the hidden purpose of it…
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Bibliographical References
Marimón, J. (2014). El montaje cinematográfico. Del guión a la pantalla. Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona.
Poveda, M. (2021). La invención del primer anuncio. Revistas Científicas Complutenses, 15(2), 2-3.
https://doi.org/10.5209/pepu.73218
Concostrina, N. (2018). Pretérito imperfecto: Historias del mundo desde el Año de la Pera hasta ya mismo. La esfera de los libros.
Secker, T., Alford, M. (Jul 5, 2017). Documents Expose How Hollywood Promotes War on Behalf of the Pentagon, CIA and NSA. Filmsforaction.org. https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/documents-expose-how-hollywood-promotes-war-on-behalf-of-the-pentagon-cia-and-nsa/Derzyan, T. (March 14, 2016). Cinematography as a Tool for Political Influence. Enlightngo.org. https://enlightngo.org/language/en/post/8152