SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

i$4 I Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes The Semiotic Regimentation of Social Life I IJJ
regulatory activity as protecting consumers from false or deceptive advertisements,
thereby increasing confidence in the informational side of commercial
speech, they would surely reject my claim here that the regulative environment
works to disarm consumers through a false\semiotic ideojpgy. In fact, the Commission
demonstrated, in a 1978 ruling, a real concern that "the viewer's critical
faculties of classification and differentiation are drowned in patterns of imagery
and symbols" (cited in Richards and Zakia 1981:115; see Zakia 1986). The
important point to note is that this concern with "critical faculties" was voiced
in the context of potentially deceptive visual representations and not in the context
of language-based "informational" messages. But bringing symbolic images
under the purview of the FTC is only another way of putting the consumer in a
situation of false confidence that, now, even visual symbols are being inspected
for accuracy. This, then, would parallel the legal arguments made by corporate
interests that even "persuasion" in advertising is indirectly informational, because
ads promote entry of superior products into the market, enhance competition by
lowering prices, or stimulate product innovation (Fred S. McChesney cited in
Lowenstein 1988:123z). Should consumers ever become persuaded that the subtle,
symbolic, or connotative meanings of commercials have been approved by
regulators, then an additional piece of armor will have disappeared from their
already diminished interpretive arsenal.
The second recent-xrend-istrrat some advertisers are increasingly rejecting
the rhetoric of puffed exaggeration and the image-mongering of symbolic association
in favor of ad messages which refer directly and explicitly to advertising
as a communicative form and function. The 1990s may well be a new era in the
history of the metapragmatics of advertising. If in the first period consumers expected
the hard sell of puffery and protected themselves by caveat emptor, and
in the second period the assumption of referentiality promoted by governmental
institutions disarmed consumers faced with extensive verbal and visual nonreferentiality,
the third period can be identified as the age of the "meta-ad,"^that
is, ads about advertising. Meta-ads, I suggest, signal a renewed^frofrorrthe part
of advertisers to positively recapture their power to institute a generalized semiotic
regime for interpreting their ads. 6 Instead of passively assuming thaf consumers
are metapragmatically naive, meta-ads build into their overt signals, for example,
preference to previous ads for the same product, the behavioral
effectivenësTof ads, the truth value (or deception) of ad messages, the formal or
poetic features of ads, the act of experiencing ads, the the technical process of
broadcasting ads, and the institutional history of advertising as an industry.
In an ad for the American Express card, a man taking a shower is robbed
while the television in the background shows Karl Maiden warning viewers to
carry traveler's checks. In an IBM ad, a portable movie screen shows commercials
from the past ten years; a rose is tossed from the image on the screen into
the space of the present ad. An ad for the RCA camcorder shows the camcorder
making an ad for itself. A woman carefully reads the label on a bottle of Kraft-
Free dressing and fervently affirms its truth value. Joe Isuzu makes repeated ridiculous
claims about the price and quality of his cars, intentionally generating
an image of the classic huckster whose puffery is never to be believed. (As if in
dialogue with this ad, Lee Iacocca warns that "if Chrysler isn't a performance
car, then I'm Joe Isuzu.") Bo Jackson, dressed as a singer, walks off the stage
claiming "I'm an athlete, not an actor," and then passes through the television
screen showing the commercial for Nike shoes. An ad for McDonalds "fast-forwards"
itself to "get to the good part." John Cleese informs the viewer that
"those smart people at Magnavox have asked me to tell you about all these highly
intelligent [electronics] products in just fifteen seconds." A car phone installed
inside the Lexus automobile is set to automatically dial the Lexus sales office,
which answers "thank you for calling Lexus." Candace Bergen tells a couple
watching her image on their television not to use the mute button of the remote.
In what might be the ultimate non-ad, a farmer comes into a salesroom to look
at John Deere tractors and leaves without buying a new tractor, though he is
wearing a new cap with the company logo. Since meta-ads are all truthfully
"about" advertising (in the sense that all metapragmatic utterances are inherently
semantic), the viewer is led by this positively supplieilset of interprétants to overlook
the persuasive function being accomplished simultaneously. For as Boorstin
(1961:213) prophetically wrote over thirty years ago: "Advertising fogs our daily
lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths."