Alternatively, maybe the simplest explanation is the best: the people sponsoring the ads want to encourage their audience to live a good life (as they define it) and appreciate others who do the same. Of course, that idea of a "good life" happens to reaffirm lots of consumerist, individualist, and - yes - heteronormative values that happen to serve the sponsors' political and economic interests.
This is the impression I get from the ads. I think the organization is truly interested in inspiring its audience to more consciously adopt in their daily lives the family-oriented, be-kind-to-your-neighbour, small-kindnesses-mean-a-lot values depicted in the ads.
Those values (all values) have a political component. That's inescapable. So, yes, there are likely connections between these ads and the more direct political statements made by the same people. But I'm not convinced that the ads are intended to be political statements in and of themselves.
But then, they don't have to be intentional to be political statements, do they?
And I tell you, they are frigging effective. I got crying after watching a couple of them, and just kept on going.
But that's true of plenty of other "feel good"-type ads for specific products (just think of MasterCard's "priceless" campaign, or all the jewelry store ads I hear on the radio). The direct effect is to get people thinking more about family, about romance, about values. An indirect effect is that some of them will then buy stuff that they wouldn't have thought of otherwise.
Most good advertising today works this way. Advertisers don't sell a product. They sell a feeling, or a lifestyle. I think the shift began around WWII. If you look at print ads from the 20s or 30s, they're little more than catalogues of the products' attributes: "This hat has x yards of lace"; "Our snake oil will cure the following list of ailments". Lots and lots and lots of text. Maybe one picture, and that picture was of the product itself.
By the time the US joined the Second World War, ads were beginning to be more emotionally-based, especially for food and clothing, and especially in magazines and department store catalogues. The change in fashion really helped here, too. It was easy to associate particular purchases with the war effort, when the products themselves were reflective of war.
In the 50s, most advertisers were consciously making the link between lifestyle and product. They really upped their game here. I find this period really interesting, because it's when we see the forerunner to the type of advertising we have today, where the primary aim of the ad is to sell a need or a feeling, rather than a product. Once the audience buys into the need or recognizes the feeling, the product sells itself. And the ambitious overhaul of American society fit nicely into that kind of advertising plan. If you look at ads from this period (and most of them were directed at women, who were supposed to be the ones doing the shopping while the husbands were off at work), there's much less text than before the war, and the pictures feature people doing stuff, with the product in the background. What's being sold is the lifestyle that comes with the product, not the product itself.
Thinking about that makes me wonder... If I were in advertising and had a really big budget to work, one interesting strategy would be pairing up two seemingly separate campaigns: one warm and fuzzy and totally unaffiliated with any specific product, and the other a more traditional product promotion bit. Then match up the ads: have the explicitly commercial billboards appear just down the way from the warm and fuzzy ones. Have the broadcast ads run sequentially, or during the same commercial breaks. The warm and fuzzy ad gets you thinking about family and love and so forth, and then the jewelry store ad reminds you that you've got an anniversary coming up and can do something to express those warm and fuzzy thoughts.
I don't think it's necessary to lay the groundwork. Why do that, when you can just pull a thread from a set of symbols that already have cultural currency? This is what most advertisers currently do. The trick is to associate the product so closely with particular values that the product becomes part of the symbolic structure that denotes those values. Only a handful of products get there. The rest just hook their wagon to the moving train.
Teddy bears are associated with childhood innocence. There's no need to run a set of ads reaffirming the symbolism of teddy bears before incorporating that symbolism into your ads. The symbol is already strong enough to stand on its own. All you have to do is show a kid dragging a teddy bear, and bam! you've got innocence. If a particular brand gets to become teddy bears (like how Kleenex has become tissues), then they've got gold. But you don't have to
be the teddy bear to make use of teddy bear symbolism.
Ad placement is already a big deal. Ad agencies hire people specifically to figure out which tv programs and billboards are best for particular types of products, and which other products will be sold alongside their own, so the context is already present. And most magazines are little more than catalogues of products themselves. It's not by chance that an article in Cosmo about the best fashion finds under $50 feature actual products. The companies have sent the magazine samples, and very likely have contracted to buy ads. That's why they're featured. There's no need for the companies themselves to create the milieu in which they'll be sold. The media do that for them.
Oh, advertising is insidious stuff, I tell you. It's culture, branded and photographed and ready for consumption. I get a kick from people who tell me that they're immune to it. Ha!
