WEEK 7 - "Visual Narrative and The Media: An Extraordinary Commercial"

I still remember we were shown to this particularly-striking advertisement last year, when we were doing AC-1201 Introduction to Communication, where one of the many presenting groups used this ad to help exemplified their presentation.

I say ‘striking’ because the ad stayed in my mind even after all these while – and I’m pretty sure it stuck in the mind of other fellow Media students as well.

Why is this so?



Yes, it is a Thai advertisement for Pantene. Now, compare this ad to a typical Pantene commercial:



Why is the Thai advertisement seemed to be far more intriguing than the traditional advertisement?










The remarkable difference between the two advertisements is: one was telling a story, while the other was stating ‘factual’ information.

The story-telling Thai ad is adapting a structure derived from a theory called Narrative Theory. Narrative comes from the word ‘narrate’ and according to Lamarque (1994), any narration “involves the recounting and shaping of events” (p. 131). And the story-telling Thai ad did just that – a series of events were shaped and arranged making the events into a storyline.

According to Huisman, the basics of narrative theory include:
1) speaking subject – producer of text, and is related to “narrator”
2) subject of speech – the first-person pronouns in the text
3) narrator – also the producer of text if the text is known to be a narrative
4) focalisation – story is mediated from some perspective; “focaliser” is the person who is telling the story from his/her perspective
5) temporality – simple chronological sequence
6) duration – steadiness of speed in the narrative
(2005, p. 13)

In the Thai advertisement, the focalisation is on the deaf girl, thus making her the focaliser. Events in the ad such as a young girl listening to an old man playing a violin on the street, the young girl walking down the road with a car blaring behind her, a screaming teenage girl and so on, will not make any sense if it is not due to both the temporality and duration of the ad. These events were cleverly arranged into a chronological sequence with the right amount of steadiness of speed, giving just the right sense and feeling to the story.

When compared to a much more traditional Pantene commercial, audiences will be far more fascinated towards the Thai advertisement because of its ability to break away from a typical beauty-product advertisement’s structure of using a model and stating information of how the product works, by structuring it and expressing it into a story.

According to Huisman (2005), narratives are “ways of structuring and representing lived experience” (p. 27). And Lamarque also notes how story-telling helps us to make sense of the world (1994, p. 150).
The creative, story-telling Thai ad therefore gives a much more significant impact to its audiences in a way that the audiences are able to recognise the ad as a story and are able to familiarise themselves to the story. As a result, the ad is restored in the audiences’ mind even after a long time – just like what it did to me.


Reference
Huisman, R. (2005). Narrative concepts. In Fulton, H., Huisman, R., Murphet, J. and Dunn, A. (eds), Narrative and Media (pp. 11-27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lamarque, P. (1994). Narrative and invention: The limits of fictionality. In Nash, C. (ed), Narrative in culture(pp. 131-132). New York and London: Routledge