COMM 150: Communication theory - another diagram and a couple of cigarette ads

Here's a better explanation of what happens when we communicate - transfer information from a "sender" to a receiver - in a handout on Message Systems and Communication Theory by David L. Simpson, an instructor at Chicago's DePaul University.

Simpson has a more elaborate version of the two-part transaction I drew on the board:

1. SENDER ---> (message) ---> RECEIVER
          <---------- (feedback) <---------

Simpson adds two extra features. One is noise - which we can define as the competing messages that might distort a sender's message - and the other is the receiver's intrepretation of the message. Both are important.

Let's look at Simpson's model and apply his theory to a couple of vintage cigarette ads in a feature headlined "Light up! 25 Great Cigarette Ads Through the Years" on a website called 10 Times One:

The first is an ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes that appeared in Life magazine, a mass-market news magazine that specialized in photojournalism, in 1935. Cigarette ads are always interesting, because they're designed to sell a product that people know that causes a range of fatal diseases. Even before the linkage between smoking and lung cancer was established, people knew it was bad for them. So cigarette ads have always specialized in hidden messages and mixed messages. Let's look at the ad for Luckies. Ask yourself:

1. Who's the sender? It's the company that made Lucky Strikes, right? If you want, you can read about them here, but you wona't have to for the purposes of this class discussion.

2. What's the message? Ads are fun to analyze, because the messages aren't always on the surface. Are there any beneath-the-surface "subliminal" messages here? (HINT: Do you recognize the guy with the red suit and fur hat?

3. Is there any noise? There doesn't have to be. In fact, a successful ad will have little or none. Our job as mass communications professionals is to minimize noise.

4. Who are the receivers? There can be more than one. Primary receivers here would be readers of Life magazine in 1935? As we look at it 75 years later, we're a secondary audience.

5. How would readers have interpreted the ad in 1935? How are our interpretations different? (If you look at other ads in the 10 Times One feature, you'll see ads that were supposed to be sexy back in the day, but now they're more likely to strike us as silly - or insulting.

6. Any feedback? Traditionally, feedback has been a problem. You can track sales, but you don't know if they go up or down because of the ad. This semester we'll study how the internet is changing that.



Here's another one, for a Russian brand of cigarettes called Kryte Papyroshi, and it's a very fine example of Soviet-era socialist realism design. But for us as secondary receivers, there's some noise here if we don't know Russian. One of the jobs of media professionals is to overcome noise. How much of the ad's message gets across to us in spite of the language? How much is lost?


Finally, if we get to it ... link here for an ad for a Japanese mobile telephone. It's subtle. It's creative. But does it communicate? The text is in a foreign language, but there's not much text. And it went viral worldwide. How does it communicate across language barriers? What does it communicate about the company that made the ad?