RMA Thesis - Eloise Pasmore O'Pray - 6271332

Abstract

This thesis investigates a phenomenon that I discovered in the British Film Institute archive: only a few years after commercial Television was launched in Britain in 1955, viewers stopped providing their full attention to commercials. In this thesis, I map out how the problem of inattention developed in the period of 1959 to 1962 based on extensive research in journals of the advertisement industry. I then conduct a comparative analysis of twelve commercials that were made in the mid-1950s to the early-1960s, as this was the period before and during which the problem of inattention was discussed. The commercials that I analyse were made for the brands Mackeson stout and Heineken beer. They were produced by the Dutch Production company Joop Geesink Dollywood Studio. This is a tiny sample of thousands of ads from this artistic collection, of hand-crafted puppet and animated commercials, that are preserved at the Eye Film Museum Netherlands, and of which I have viewed about two hundred. The reason why I analyse these commercials is to observe the impact of inattention, by assessing whether it affected advertisers’ production strategy. In order to understand what exactly Geesink’s production strategy was like before the problem of inattention, I apply Roger Odin’s theory of Semio-Pragmatics. I do this because Odin created ‘levels’ and ‘modes’ that are useful for applying to media, in order to understand how the media communicates and is experienced. I apply this theory to help me understand how Geesink approached advertising, which I argue was by using characteristics of entertainment, like fictionalisation. I then conceive four sales techniques, to compare whether Geesink’s use of them changed from before inattention was discussed and during. Overall, I shed light on the huge yet under-researched Geesink collection, whilst contributing to our understanding of the history of early television advertisement in Britain.