Analyzing Music in Advertising

Television Commercials and Consumer Choice

Nicolai Graakjaer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317671893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

The study of music in commercials is well-suited for exploring the persuasive impact that music has beyond the ability to entertain, edify, and purify its audience. This book focuses on music in commercials from an interpretive text analytical perspective, answering hitherto neglected questions: What characterizes music in commercials compared to other commercial music and other music on TV? How does music in commercials relate to music 'outside' the universe of commercials? How and what can music in commercials signify? Author Nicolai Graakjær sets a new benchmark for the international scholarly study of music on television and its pervading influence on consumer choice.

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315770277-1

This book is based on two premises. First, insufficient scholarly attention has been devoted to the interpretive text analysis of music in advertising. In this book, interpretive text analysis refers to the qualitative examination of textual structure, that is, text elements and the relations between elements. This examination does not include a systematic focus on the reception and uses of music in advertising, for example, in the form of an interpretive phenomenological analysis of actual listeners. Second, interpretive text analysis offers relevant and necessary insights into processes of musical signification in advertising, that is, the issue of how music can be interpreted as contributing to the construction of meaning. Thus, this book focuses on music in advertising from a text analytical perspective and aims to improve understanding of the significance, structures, and functions of music in advertising. “Music in advertising” includes all uses of music in market communication, including various media settings, such as radio commercials, television commercials, web banners, websites, telephone waiting lines, computer-based presentations, stores, and brandscapes. This book focuses primarily on music in commercials (i.e., audiovisual films promoting a product or service aired on television and paid for by an advertiser), although it will also include analytical perspectives on music in television, web ads, and stores.

With this purpose and perspective, I intend to address a lacuna in the research. As I illustrate in greater detail in the following, there appears to exist a discrepancy between the existing knowledge of music in advertising and commercials and prevalence and significance of this type of music. This discrepancy has been observed from various perspectives by many scholars. For example, “[music in advertising] is … an area in dire need of development” (Kassabian, 2013b, p. 100), and from the perspective of music in television, “substantial work remains to be undertaken for scholarship to obtain an understanding of how the musical realm beyond normal programming functions in television” (Deaville, 2011, p. 22). Thus far, searching for information on how to understand music in advertising from an interpretive text analytical perspective returns a relatively scarce, uneven and fragmented body of research; see Graakjær & Jantzen (2009a) for a review. With this book, I hope to remedy this situation.

From an interpretive text analytical perspective, the following questions are examined: How does music in commercials relate to music distributed prior to and outside the specific setting of the commercial? How does music in commercials compare to other forms of music in television and in advertising? How does music in commercials relate to visual and (other) auditory elements of commercials? How does music in commercials contribute to processes of signification? What are the typical structures and functions of music in commercials? In answering these questions, this book is primarily intended for university students, researchers, and lecturers in marketing, advertising, consumer behavior, and media and communication studies departments. In those contexts, this book can illustrate that music is a significant element of marketing and a specific type of communication that can be fruitfully examined from an interpretive text analytical perspective. This book may also be of value to students, researchers, and lecturers in musicology departments. In this context, the book can illustrate that music in commercials is well suited for exploring the persuasive effects of music beyond the well-known qualities of classical and popular music, such as the ability to entertain, edify, and emotionally cleanse an audience. Moreover, although this book does not systematically offer insights into the processes of production or reception of music in commercials, it is hoped that it can also be of interest to producers of (music in) commercials and to scholars in the tradition of experimental research (see the following discussion). Producers are invited to apply the presented analytical perspectives to evaluate their own—and their colleagues’—practice and to reframe analytical perspectives as design options for productions.¹ Experimental researchers testing the effects of music in commercials on the responses of actual viewers may be inspired by the analytical approach presented for refining the ways in which music is treated as an independent variable. Given that “music can be hugely beneficial for advertising, but only when its role has been carefully thought through” (Millward Brown, 2008, p. 3), this book aims to illustrate how the role of music in commercials can be carefully examined. Considering the target groups mentioned, this book does not presuppose that the reader is familiar with music theory or has the ability to read music.

1.1 Music in Commercials—Prevalence and Importance

A number of indicators should be considered when assessing the prevalence and significance of music in commercials. To assess the prevalence of music, a delineation of music is necessary. For this purpose, I briefly present a typology of sounds. Because this typology is inspired by the subject of this book— that is, music in advertising with a special interest in commercials—it does not pretend to be universally applicable to the sounds used in other genres or soundscapes (Schafer, 1977). There is no universal definition of music (see, e.g., Nattiez, 1990), and the following must be regarded as a practical starting point for the present study, inspired by the recommendation that analyzing sound(scapes) entails that “some system or systems of generic classification will have to be devised” (Schafer, 1977, p. 9). With reference to such classification, such an analysis can “discover the significant features of the soundscape, those sounds which are important because of their individuality, their numerousness or their domination” (Schafer, 1977, p. 9). Theoretically, this perspective is inspired by researchers such as Leeuwen (1999) and Traux (2001), and it consists of a tripartite classification that includes speech, music, and object sounds. Thus, the typology differs from other available typologies that do not, for example, highlight the importance of music as a particular type of sound, for example, the typology of “natural, animal, technical, and human” sounds in Augoyard and Torgue (2006, p. 5).

In this context, music is defined as the sounds that conform to current norms of “music” by presenting, for example, a “clearly identifiable rhythmic and harmonic structure,”² as suggested by Bjurström and Lilliestam (1993, p. 36). Musical sounds are normally produced by humans via designated musical instruments or via human voicing (e.g., singing or rap-ping); however, nonmusical sounds (see the following discussion) may be “musicalized,” that is, ordered according to a identifiable rhythmic structure that may be uncommon for that particular sound type but is common from the perspective of current musical norms. Conversely, sounds produced by humans via designated instruments are not necessarily musical (e.g., when the sounds of musical instruments are “de-musicalized” and do not conform to norms for musical structuring). The implication is that the rhythmic “musicalized” barking of a dog in a commercial should be considered music—for example, a dog barks two notes over a descending interval of a major third in a commercial for the Danish supermarket chain Netto (a sample from my April 2008 volume of commercials)—whereas the sounds produced by the destruction of a violin should be labeled a (nonmusical) object sound. “Speech” is the sound of a human’s vocal and verbal intonation, and in commercials, speech typically originates from...