The ad consists of four automobiles on a crossing, featuring the company logo and slogan "The Beetles". The originality of the campaign is not exactly in the elements that form the image, rather than in their specific arrangement. The slogan ads the final touches, building new levels and meanings. From a semiotic point of view, advertising messages are a subject of interest as they reveal how attitudes and opinions are formed in the audience. The ability to decode communication means, used by companies in the era of consumer culture, turns out to be an efficient method for spotting problems and trends in society as a whole.
VW Beetle's ad in point can be examined on several levels: firstly there are the formal principles the photo composition is organized according to. The most significant objects - the automobiles, are logically put in the front and largest when it comes to size. The bright colors opposed to the dark background of the street helps focusing the attention of the viewer.
Secondly, it's the distinction between denotative and connotative plan, as in the Barthes'* model. Following this approach, all we see in the photograph - the objects (automobiles, houses, street, crossing), background, colors, etc. is the literal message of the picture. On denotative level we distinguish objects as such due to conditional signs like shape, color, size and proportion. The connotative message, on the other hand, builds over the denotative one, adding a secondary, symbolic meaning to the basic one. The way the cars are arranged on the crossing, the street behind them, the archive look of the photo, the slogan, basically everything we can call context of the image adds a new meaning to the advertisement. It suggests an obvious association with the famous Beatles photo by Paul Cole, where the four are crossing Abbey Road in Westminster, London and which later on came to be the cover of their 1969 Abbey Road album.
The identical composition of the ad, the place of the photoshoot and the colors unambiguously point towards the popular image of The Beatles. Let alone the almost identical verbal message (The Beetles vs. The Beatles). On the literal level the speech answers the question "What is this?" It helps us identify the elements of the composition and the composition as a whole itself. On connotative level, though, the linguistic message directs the viewer into interpretation, rather than just identification. The presence of a verbal message (the slogan) does not allow for multiplication of interpretations or their deviation, thus making the meaning of the ad easy to understand, yet not obvious enough to underestimate the viewer.
Of course, a person that does not know The Beatles or haven't seen their famous cover, used as a prototype, would hardly make the associative connection between the two. "The effect of mass communication means is defined more by the qualities of the audience, rather than by the contents of these means. It is accepted that one and the same communication will have different effect, depending on the age, gender, intelligence of the viewer, on the political situation, social environment, subculture belonging even momentary mood..."**
What can be deduced so far: The ad is made with a strong reference to the seventies, therefore the target of the ad obviously aims at people from the hippie generation, ones that still live in the freedom spirit of the sixties. The whole communication of the VW Beetle models is directed at positive people, to those who do not take theirselves or life too seriously and like to have fun. We should not forget the fact that the VW company, as well as the well-known Beetle brand owe their success to the ad campaign from these years, whose most recognizable symbol were The Beatles.
A decade after the end of WWII, the Beetle's ads set a new style in the communication with the audience. By then, ads were predominantly informative and way too "puffy" and unrealistic. DDB, VW's first ad agency decided to try a new type of communication, based on the emotional connection with their customers. While all other advertisements were boring and patronizing, these new ads relied on a friendly tone of voice and a sense of humor. Too exaggerated messages, promising things the products cannot deliver were replaced by the connection between the product qualities and the brand value, which makes it attractive and desirable. It suddenly turned out that the audience could be influenced by psychological methods, thus creating strong socail models for it to follow and identify with. It also turned out quite profitable.
The image and roles each of us adopts in our social life become a resource, easy to exploit by large companies (like VW) which start crafting and proclaiming lifestyles of their own.
This is quite noticeable after WWII, when the development of TV rapidly sped up the process.
The Beatles and their music, being the most significant symbol of postmodern free spirit, consumer culture and the autonomy of the personality, become an ideal prototype for the 2000 VW ad. In that aspect, we can perceive VW's ad as an icon (see Charles Peirce's general theory of signs and their division). This principle and predominantly the idea behind "icons" as a semiotic notion, was later disputed by Umberto Eco, who considers such images based on resemblance, as replacement stimuli, a.k.a "hypo icons". It's interesting how Eco views symbolic functions and their effect inspecting an image with a beer mug: "It was obvious that the image did not have neither glass, nor beer, not condensation; that's why I suggested that the image reproduces some of the conditions for perceiving the actual object. Where I was perceiving the object, I would have been impressed by the effect of light on the glass, there were color contrasts, that created similar effect in the image. Therefore, even though I understand that what I see is not a glass, but the image of a glass, the perceptive methods I use to perceive something are the same I would have used to perceive the real object... "***
In that aspect the audience would not be able to perceive VW's ad unless there were pre-established ideas about what a VW Beetle and Westminster streets looked like. It would also be impossible to perceive the objects in the picture as a metaphor of the famous British band and their album cover in particular. In a short, the ad would not be understood at all if the audience it was targeted at wasn't aware of the symbols that constitute the "Britishness" of the advertisement. Which brings us to the idea that even though the ad wasn't made for the UK market exclusively, the spread of common symbols and concepts in consumer culture goes beyond borders and ages. The more cultural references images and advertisements use, the more powerful the communication and the more stronger the bond between company and audience.
*Barthes, R. - New Critical Essays, 1990
**Noelle-Neumann, E. - The influece of massmedia, 1992
***Eco, U - Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, 1999
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