CDA Analysis of an Advertorial from the Music Industry - Case Study Example

Campaign Analysis Table of Contents I. Introduction 3 II. Analysis 4 A. Corpus 4 B. Text Analysis 6 Framing 6 2. Backgrounding/Foregrounding 8 3. Omission 9 4. Presupposition 10 5. Discursive Differences 10 6. Collocation 11 III. Additional Research for the Reconstruction of Campaign 11 IV. Discursive Practices 11 V. Social Practices 12 VI. Conclusion 12 1References 14 I. Introduction This paper undertakes a CDA analysis of an advertorial from the music industry. The chosen campaign is Spotify’s #thatsongwhen campaign that entailed featuring ordinary people telling their own stories tied to certain songs. The campaign was undertaken in partnership with Ogilvy & Mather together with David. This campaign is being executed via videos of mostly young people narrating their stories in front of the camera while the music tied to those stories play in the background. As the campaign notes, the idea is to tie Spotify’s music streaming services to the most personal aspects of the lives of people, and to connect with people in a deep way in the process. The idea too is to differentiate Spotify from the big music labels that make use of big celebrities in order to push music and their products. In this Spotify campaign the focus is on ordinary people and their intimate and personal stories. There is a preference too for alternative media, such as social media platforms and the Internet, to highlight the pitch of Spotify as a technology firm rather than a music company in the mold of the traditional labels. The focus of the campaign moreover is the United States, as well as Germany and Great Britain (O’Leary 2014; Spotify 2015). The first part of the paper is an advertorial that comes with a graphic to complement the advertorial, and the second part performs an analysis of the advertorial text making use of the CDA tools outlined in the instructions, namely framing, backgrounding and foregrounding, omission, presupposition, discursive differences, and collocation. The paper also presents additional research pertaining to the reconstruction of the campaign, and the discursive and social practices aspects of the campaign (Wayvs 2014; Jorgensen and Phillips 2002, pp. 60-95). II. Analysis A. Corpus The people in the advertorial are fundamentally ok. They are having a good time, and their memories tied to a favorite piece of music are positive, fun, joy-giving, and reflect coolness on the part of the people narrating their stories. The hash tag #thatsongwhen is a prompt for people to tell stories and then to associate those personal stories with a piece of music. This takes off from the way people normally get to remember things that happened in their lives when they hear certain songs. There are various ways by which this advertorial tries to connect with its audience of music lovers and ordinary people. The development of the advertorial is a natural parallel to the way ordinary people tell stories when they hear songs. The people are portrayed as revealing something about themselves, being vulnerable, and this can trigger empathy and a sense of wanting to take in the person into one’s confidence. On another level the advertorial development portrays ordinary people with good stories to tell as cool people, as having had that moment of fun or coolness in their lives that they can narrate, and that the advertorial takes those stories and their music seriously. The ordinary Spotify listener is the hero and the star of the show. Still on another level the advertorials elicit a response from the viewer, and that response is to listen to Spotify and have the same kind of fun as the people in the advertorial. This means searching for their favorite too and trying to recall important fun and cool events, even sad events too, important events that the songs can effortlessly surface from memory (Watson 2015; Ghosh 2014). The typical advertorial is just 30 seconds long, and plays out on YouTube and embedded and shared on social media platforms and online media coverage of the campaign. In this particular advertorial, the narrator is a young Asian man in his 20’s, seated on a couch, groomed and relaxed. He tells the story of when he was in fourth grade, and having a crush on a girl. The music associated with the memory is ‘Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls’. In this ad he makes a cassette tape copy of the music and presents it to his crush, who just laughs. That memory is forever identified with the song, according to the Asian man. He laughs, and the ad ends with the Spotify icon and the hash tag #thatsongwhen. Looking at the advertorial in more detail, the narration of the story is set in the present, and there are two versions of the Asian man, one his present self seated at the sofa laughing at the bittersweet memory of his first crush, and the other the young boy whose heart was crushed when his love offering was basically ignored and laughed at. The young girl is Caucasian, and the setting is a school where presumably both the boy and his crush went. The ad goes from that memory relived as if it were the present, and back to the grown up young Asian man who is more assured of himself, and viewing his childhood with some fondness and happiness (Spotify 2014; O’Leary 2014). Image Source: Spotify 2014 B. Text Analysis 1. Framing There are several frames by which the ad presents and makes its pitch to viewers. One frame used is that of the ordinary Spotify listener as hero, as fun-loving and cool person with an important story to tell about a song that is important to him or her. This is the key frame by which the ad tries to connect with people. This is opposed to the frame used by a typical music label, for instance, where the usual focus is on an artist, the celebrity behind the song. The framing here shifts the attention away from the song and the celebrity artist and moves it towards the listener, who is also the Spotify subscriber. This listener is put on a couch, made to relax, is presented in the best possible light. The hipster man who was fired from the job is portrayed as the cool office worker who does not mind that he becomes a drifter again. He is composed under pressure and is comfortable with the uncertainty of being laid off work. The young boy who is crushed by the apathy of the object of his devotion to his love offering, a music tape, is now a grown-up man looking back fondly at that time in his young life, prompted back to that time by the music ‘Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls’. The Asian man is a hero, a kind of romantic who is now composed, now doing well in life apparently, well-adjusted, and being cool and mature about his childhood experience. The recollection is not painful or embarrassing, but rather bittersweet, and paints the young Asian man in a very positive light as a well-adjusted and still a romantic at heart. Here the framing is unmistakable too, that Spotify puts the Asian man, a minority member of American society, front and center as the hero of the show. There is a subtle framing message here, that Spotify respects all races, and is in a way race-blind, because the Asian man is portrayed as in a position to court and possibly win over the heart of a young Caucasian girl. He is socially sanctioned in this way to cross race barriers, which to Spotify does not exist. This Asian man is a cool guy to be respected, and to be seen as a human being with a cool taste in music, and with a cool story to tell (Spotify 2014; O’Leary 2014). The music too is framed here not in terms of the quality of the music or whether or not the music won an award or is a hit or not. Some of the music in the advertorials are mainstream pop that appeal to a younger audience, while some, such as the ad for the young Asian man, are older music that are tied to older generations, but those take a backseat to the way the music is framed in terms of how they elicit certain memories. The memories and the listeners are the points of focus of the advertorials, while the music itself is just an aid to remembering, and to bringing out the best side of the people narrating their personal anecdotes in front of the camera. In this way the music is portrayed as just an aid to remembering and to eliciting positive memories and emotions, and here Spotify takes the same position as the music, framed as things in the background while the listeners, the audience, take center stage and are lavished all the attention and respect (Spotify 2014; O’Leary 2014). 2. Backgrounding/Foregrounding The listener and his or her story are put in focus, as has been discussed in previous sections of this paper. This is deliberate and is the result of a strategy to put the audience and the ordinary subscriber of Spotify in the spotlight as the star and hero. The narration of the story takes the majority of the attention, and the depiction of the story makes up the bulk of the video ad too. The story in the end and the emotions that are tied to the story are put in the foreground. The ads are about the memories and the implications of the public sharing of that memory for Spotify audiences. What is clear too from the ad is that the listener, in the end, and his experiences, are what count, and the music itself, being just in the background, is just a tool for eliciting the memories and the story telling. Moreover, the music is the choice of the star of the ad too, and adds to his or her coolness and happiness. The ad does not start with a piece of music, which then prompts the narrator to share an experience tied to the song. The ad takes off from an experience that the narrator shares from his or her past, which then prompts an association with a piece of music. This is an important foregrounding detail. Even in the choice of music it is the narrator that is in control. One can liken this in the real world to the Spotify skipping tracks or choosing the track in the first place, instead of Spotify feeding music to the listener, in the way that conventional radio does. Here the narrator is really in full control, and he is in the spotlight/foreground. On the other hand, as has been touched on in previous sections of this paper, the music and Spotify, the artists and the celebrities behind the music, are all in the background, and in some cases altogether omitted (Spotify 2014; O’Leary 2014). 3. Omission In the typical ad for this campaign there are several omissions, chief of them being, in many instances, the artist behind the song. Some members of the audience can deduce this of course from the background track, but when the artist is mentioned, it is usually just in passing, and in some ads the artist is altogether missing. This is a flipping of the conventional focus of music labels and other companies on celebrities and artists to push products. Here Spotify seems to be creating a kind of wedge or interface between them and the artists, something that has parallels in real life too. Of course among the controversies surrounding Spotify is that some artists claim they don’t make enough money from the streaming service, and that in effect Spotify cripples their ability to make money. On the other hand, from the perspective of the listener, here there is a deliberate shift in focus away from the usual star of the show, so to speak. This is not an ad about an artist where the listener is a passive member of the audience. Here the focus is on the audience, as if the spotlight has been turned away from the stage and put to work into highlighting the individual listener. In many cases the stories begin with the stage and the act missing altogether, omitted from the story. One walks away from the ad with n prompt whatsoever about who the artist is, except if the person watching the video knows who. By omitting the artist the ad can proceed to maximize the time for the ad to lavishing attention on the narrator of the story, and in conveying rich details about the memory or experience that the audience can walk away with and possibly act as a prompt for them to listen to Spotify themselves and be the hero of their own listening experiences too (Spotify 2014; O’Leary 2014). 4. Presupposition Here there are several presuppositions. One is that all Spotify listeners are cool, with interesting stories to tell, and that those interesting stories have music tied to them. Another presupposition is that music in general is a positive force that elicits good, happy, uplifting memories. A third presupposition is that when a person listens to music, the technical and artistic merits of a song take a backseat to the emotional and experiential dimensions of the music. The experience and the emotions are what matter and the art value and the artist themselves take a secondary importance. Individual ads have their own particular presuppositions in this campaign With regard to the ad about the experience of a young Asian man chasing after a girl in fourth grade, a presupposition is that Spotify listeners are able to make sense of their childhood experiences and can recall even bittersweet and embarrassing experiences with happiness and a sense of calm. Another presupposition is that in general, the Spotify world is race and color blind, and the Asian man is given the same amount of respect and has access to the same social opportunities as any other race in America (Spotify 2014; O’Leary 2014).. 5. Discursive Differences Here the style of the narrator is relaxed and informal. The background of the narration too is informal, with the music intimating at something personal, deeply held, and connoting a profound experience. That profound experience has deep emotional undercurrents, which the ad tries to bring to life. A more formal style will not work here, and will go against Spotify’s aim to forge a personal connection with the audience (Spotify 2014; O’Leary 2014). 6. Collocation Visually we see from the ad that there are strong associations between in general, positive feelings and attitudes towards the experience, and the music experience itself. We see in the advertorial about the Asian man for instance, that the music is tied with the girl, with the happy recollection, with the word experience and hearing the music intertwined (Spotify 2014; O’Leary 2014). III. Additional Research for the Reconstruction of Campaign Materials that cover the advertising campaign in both their technical details and relating to the positive critique of the campaign have been utilized for this paper. Those research materials cover aspects of the campaign relating to actual advertorials, critiques of the success factors of the campaign, and what the campaign successfully achieves e.g. eliciting the desired response from the audience in terms of positively engaging with Spotify’s music streaming service, while taking the focus away from musical preferences, artists, and the technical and artistic merits of the music (Watson 2015; Ghosh 2014). IV. Discursive Practices There are many ways to interpret the discursive practices for this campaign. The focus on social media and online channels tie back to Spotify’s deeply technological roots. The choice of YouTube as a key vehicle to show the videos, and the use of a Twitter hash tag in #thatsongwhen, again are ways by which Spotify both attempts to screen audiences to those who are technologically-savvy, and to guide its audience too to those online and social media channels as preferred means of interaction. The choice of the medium and the content too are deliberate ways to garner new audiences and new users from this target market of people with the social media and online skills to access Spotify’s content and marketing messages (Watson 2015; Ghosh 2014). V. Social Practices As discussed to some extent in earlier section, the campaign flips some social conventions on its head as those relate to music consumption and production. Here the flip is in making the listener the hero of the musical experience, whereas the music and the artist take a back seat and become merely aids in the production of joy and the recollection of memory (Watson 2015; Ghosh 2014). VI. Conclusion The preceding analysis provides some unique insights into the underlying messages, aims, and strategies of Spotify’s #thatsongwhen. From the perspective of the CDA framework, the picture that emerges is one where Spotify leverages its technological and brand assets to bypass the traditional artist-centered modes of advertising music and create a flipped reality where the audience and his experiences, with the emotional and deeply personal connotations of those, taking center stage. This deliberate strategy enables Spotify to reach its audience directly, and to make the Spotify service something that connotes experiences and deep emotions, a vehicle for connecting on a very personal and compelling way with the average listener (Watson 2015; Ghosh 2014). 1 References Ghosh, S. (2014). Spotify launches first UK TV campaign. Marketing Magazine. [online]. Available at: http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1319923/spotify-launches-first-uk-tv-campaign [accessed 5/15/2015]. Jorgensen, M. and Phillips, L. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. Sage Publications. [online]. 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