Excerpt from Common Culture: Reading and Writing About American Popular Culture. Ed. Michael Petracca, Madeleine Sorapure. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1998. Advertisings Fifteen Basic AppealsJib FowlesIn the following essay, Jib Fowles looks at how advertisements work by examining the emotional, subrational appeals that they employ. We are confronted daily by hundreds of fads, only a few of which actually attract our attention. These few do so, according to Fowles, through something primary and prim itive, an emotional appeal, that in effect is the thin edge of the wedge, trying to find its way into a mind. Drawing on research done by the psychologist Henry A. Murray, Fowles describes fifteen emotional appeals or wedges that advertisements exploit. Underlying Fowless psychological analysis of advertising is the assumption that advertisers try to circumvent the logical, cautious, skeptical powers we develop as consumers, to reach, instead, the unfulfilled urges and motives swirling in the bottom half of our minds. In Fowless view, consumers are well advised to pay attention to these underlying appeals in order to avoid responding unthinkingly. Emotional Appeals The nature of effective advertisements was recognized full well by the late media Philosopher Marshall McLuhan. In his Understanding Media, the first Sentence of the section on advertising reads, The con- tinuous pressure is to create ads more and more in the image of audience motives and desires. By giving form to peoples deep-lying desires and picturing states of being that individuals privately yearns for, advertisers have the best chance of arresting attention and affecting communication. And that is the immediate goal of advertising: to tug at our psychological shirts sleeves amd slow us down long enough for a word or two about whatever is being sold. We glance at a picture of a solitary rancher at work, and Marlboro slips into our minds. Advertisers (Im using the term as shorthand for both the products manufacturers, who bring the ambition and money to the process, and the advertising agencies, who supply the know-how) are ever more compelled to invoke consumers drives and longings; this is the continuous pressure McLuhan refers to. Over the past century, the American marketplace has grown increasingly congested as more and more products have entered into the frenzied competition after the publics dollars. The economies of other nations are quieter than ours since the volume of goods being hawked does not so greatly exceed demand. In some economies, consumer wares are scarce enough that no advertising at all is necessary. But in the United States we go to the extreme. In order to stay in business, an advertiser must strive to cut through the considerable commercial by any means available-including the emotional appeals that some observers have held to be abhorrent and underhanded. Fowles I Advertisings Fifteen Basic Appeals The use of subconscious appeals is a comment not only on conditions among sellers. As time has gone by, buyers have become stoutly resistant to advertisements. We live in a blizzard of these messages and have learned to turn up our collars and ward off most of them. A study done a few years ago at Harvard Universitys Graduate School of Business Administration ventured that the average American is exposed to some 500 ads daily from television, newspapers, magazines, radio, billboards, direct mail, and so on. If for no other reason than to preserve ones sanity, a filter must be developed in every mind to lower the number of ads a person is actually aware of-a number this particular study estimate at about seventy-five ads per day. (Of these, only twelve typically produced a reaction-nine positive and three negative, on the average.) To be among the few messages that do manage to gain access to minds, advertisers must be strategic, perhaps even a little underhanded at times. There are assumptions about personality underlying advertisers efforts to communicate via emotional appeals, and while these assumptions have stood the test of time, they still deserve to be aired. Human beings, it is presumed, walk around with a variety of unfulfilled urges and motives swirling in the bottom half of their minds. Lusts, ambitions, tendernesses, vulnerabilities-they are constantly bubbling up, seeking resolution. These mental forces energize people, but they are too crude and irregular to be given excessive play in the real world. They must be capped with the competent, sensible behavior that permits individuals to get along well in society. However, this upper layer of mental activity, shot through with caution and rationality, is not receptive to advertisings pitches. Advertisers want to circumvent this shell of consciousness if they can, and latch on to one of the lurching, subconscious drives.In effect, advertisers over the years have blindly felt their way around the underside of the American psyche,