Appropriating Historical Persons and Events and Appropriating a Famous Phrase
The only widely accepted ritual employed to commemorate Presidents’ Day, honoring the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, is the Presidents’ Day Sale. To draw us into stores, advertisers reduce George and Martha Washington to cartoonlike hucksters. Actors in white “Washington” wigs hector us about unbelievable bargains and swear that, like George Washington, they would never tell a lie. Similarly, ads for Fourth of July sales urge us to “declare our independence” from everything from an old car to a malfunctioning air conditioner and Thanksgiving Day sales imply that what we have to be thankful for are the “fantastic buys.”
Another version of this tactic is employed in televised ads for Calvin Klein’s perfume “Obsession.” In the ads the fragrance Cartier Replica is associated with passages from the world’s great love stories, including Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. In one of the spots, a young woman is shown running her fingers over a man’s face as the announcer reads from D. H. Lawrence, “How perfect and foreign he was, how dangerous. . . . This was the glistening forbidden apple.”
Just as advertisers are eager to associate their products with positive moments in the past and present, so they are loath to develop associations with traumatic ones. During network coverage of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Procter & Gamble, Sears, Pizza Hut, and major airlines refused to place spots. As a result, NBC reported a loss of $45 million in ad revenue.
Companies appropriate the names of respected historical figures, such as Lincoln and Jefferson, to trade on the authenticity associated with those names. Service companies are more likely to adopt such names than manufacturers of more tangible products. Life insurance companies and banks are called Lincoln Life or Jefferson Trust, not because they were founded by Lincoln or Jefferson, but because the names themselves have residual credibility. Customers take the name, whether consciously or not, as a promise of the honesty and reliability associated with the historical person. Although the company may be only 20 or 30 years old, a name from the past suggests that it has been providing that reliable, trustworthy service for a long time.
We carry about with us a repertoire of phrases identified with important persons or occasions from the past. For example, when someone says “of the people, by the people, for the people,” we call up an image of Abraham Lincoln. Such phrases gain our attention by drawing from that common repertoire and proceed to make us accomplices in creating the ad’s meaning.
Each of the strategies we have identified, however, will backfire if the audience is offended by the linking of the product and the phrase, person, or event. The following two instances, in our opinion, overstep the bounds of acceptable use of the past and become tasteless. An ad for a light beer included a photograph identified as that of Goethe– the German poet, scientist, and novelist– on his deathbed. In the ad, Goethe is calling– as he actually did just before he died– for “more light!” By twisting Tag Heuer Replica Watches the last words of a great man into an appeal for a beer, the advertisers have trivialized his death and reduced an important historical figure to a huckster.
The strategy in a print ad for a motel is similar. That ad rephrased the invitation on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me you’re tired, you’re poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . . Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me”) to a come-on for the motel: “Give us you’re tired, you’re homeless, your weary, your thirsty.” The motel did not invite “your poor.” By reducing Emma Lazarus’s stirring words to an invitation to choose one motel over another, the ad misappropriated a phrase we respect, a phrase that forms part of our cultural heritage.
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