Research Methods ARD505

This is my dissertation proposal

Animation In Advertising

For my dissertation I am going to be discussing the role of animation in the advertising industry, and the advantages and disadvantages of animation in advertising and commercials. The main aim of advertising is to persuade their audience to either buy a product or service. Advertising goes back as far as the Egyptians where they used papyrus to create posters and spread messages, since then it has continued to grow and expand throughout the world taking on new techniques and methods as it goes. One technique or method that has become quite common among advertising has been the use of animation. Animation when used for advertising and commercials has many more benefits than live action. However animation may not always be able to cater to and help sell a product effectively, and so live action would be used instead.  

There are many advantages when using animation to create commercials, many more advantages than when live action is used. For example, the animator has complete control over the whole commercial; you haven’t got lots of different people doing different jobs running around everywhere to keep organised and up with the deadline, as commercials are needed to be turned around quickly and effectively. There are no limits when it comes to locations, in animation any location can be created for the commercial whether it’s a realistic setting or a completely new world. Not only can animation be used to create an imaginative world, to be fun and humorous but also to inform, show scientific demonstrations and explain mechanics and how products work. With live action, locations may be limited due to cost and time.

“The costs of animation advertising are also predetermined which allows a development team to operate without the possibility of unexpected errors or costs on a film set.”

-Aaron Marquis

 There are many ways that animation saves on costs, these can be things such as renting equipment, locations, paying actors, insurance and the production is simplified. Because animation is an almost instant editing process there is no need to reshoot any parts of the commercial, unlike in live action. As the advertising industry becomes more and more experimental with their commercials a bigger gap is created for more animation to be used. I feel that there is one big example of how animation in commercials can be a big advantage and this is that it can make the commercial timeless. Animation stops the advert from becoming out dated by changes in fashion etc and makes it possible to be long running. There are some examples of this where adverts have been long running for several decades such as Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger and Snap Crackle and Pop. I remember seeing these characters on the TV when I was little in the 90’s, however Tony the Tiger made his debut in 1951 and can still be seen on TV screens today! Animation as a medium is very versatile, another great example of its advantages is that an animated advert can be edited and adapted very easily to the point of making it interactive.

“It’s important to take advantage of the way that communication is being revolutionized today, and animation can be a big part of it.”

-Vanity Numbers

By making it interactive it can be used in social media advertising by putting it at the beginning of a YouTube video and putting links on it to Facebook and Twitter. This makes the audience of the advert much wider than by just having it play in breaks between programmes on certain channels on the TV.

As well as advantages there are also some disadvantages. Apparently Procter & Gamble (P&G – a leading consumer product company known for beauty and health to home brands  such as ‘Olay’, ‘Pampers Nappies’, and ‘Herbal Essences’ etc) have done some research that shows that animation is not as persuasive in adverts for soap and food. For example they made two different adverts for Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. One was a cartoon of a chicken who was rejected because he wasn’t good enough for Campbell’s soup and another of close up shots of the soup and the various parts that made up the soup such as chunks of chicken, noodles etc. They then asked a group of women what they thought of both, they found the cartoon chicken advert funny and very entertaining but said that it wouldn’t make them want to buy the soup, however they found the second advert with the close ups very appetising and would definitely want to buy it. From this P&G believe that humour isn’t highly successful in advertising, especially for their products, and they feel that animation is greatly used for humour, however I would have to disagree. There are many examples where this isn’t true.

There are two main areas when using animation for adverts, animated characters and informative animation.  Animated characters in adverts come out as neutral and unbiased, unlike if a celebrity was to be used. Celebrities have their histories and are known for doing certain things, having a celebrity in an advert can either be highly successful or something could go wrong. For example Gary Lineker in the ‘Walkers’ crisps adverts is highly successful and has been long running, however ‘Iceland’ used to have Kerry Katona as their celebrity and stopped using her when headlines of her using illegal substances was made public. Animated characters can have a greater appeal to a larger audience, and allows companies to create a mascot and brand their product. For example the rabbit in the ‘Air Wick’ advert does such a good job if anyone was to see that rabbit somewhere they would immediately associate it with Air Wick, and so there wouldn’t be any need to spend so much money employing a celebrity to do it instead.

“These new age mascots have a lasting appeal and lend a whole new dimension to the brand, as competently as any celebrity.”

-Jagran Josh

Many animated characters can be long running, for example as I mentioned before, Tony the Tiger, Snap Crackle and Pop but also the Pillsbury Doughboy has been used since 1965 and Direct Line’s red telephone since 1993 until 2010. Another great character is the Energizer Bunny, he started in the late 1980’s and has kept making various appearances since.

The second main part when using animation in adverts is informative animation. Not only can animation be used to be entertaining, attention grabbing and fun but also informative. “To inform is often to persuade.” (Vanity Numbers, 15^th March 2012). I have found that many people assume that animation is cartoons such as Disney and never think about those Gillette razor adverts where using animation the blades are shown demonstrating how they glide over the skin slicing off any stubble hair. There are many informative pieces of animation used in adverts and commercials informing us on various things. For example, animation can be used to show the audience how the product works, like how a drain cleaner removes all the scum out of the drain and clears it, how the blades in a lawn mower works and demonstrate how the tread on a tire grips the surface. Another way that animation can inform is by showing the audience processes that are too big or small for photography, for example the action of a dog’s flea collar on fleas and how fly spray affects flies and wasps. There’s also how mechanics on a product works like new combustion systems on cars, the structure of a tire and a self cleaning oven. The anatomy of a product can be demonstrated like the assembly of a cereal bar and ingredients in a smoothie. And so this shows that animation is not only used for humour and to catch the audience’s attention but also to inform and demonstrate things about the product that the audience wouldn’t otherwise know.

In conclusion I propose to explore the advantages and disadvantages of animation in advertising and compare it to live action adverts, exploring the variation on costs, the processes of creating both an animation and live action advert and exploring limitations with both mediums. I will also be looking at how effect animation is compared to live action when trying to sell a product and how memorable it is. I will also explore how useful the audience finds the informative animations showing them how products work etc. I will explore the most popular and successful advertisements and break them apart to understand and explore what made them so popular and successful. And to find out if they were popular were they also successful and if they were successful were they popular. I will explore the use of animated characters, what their roles are and how they are used to brand a product. I would also like to look at the variations on locations and imagination used and how far imagination has been taken within commercials.

“Remember, to animate means to bring to life. And that’s just what animation can do for your advertising campaign: bring to life, give motion, and make it fly, or really just about anything else one can imagine.”

-Vanity Numbers

And finally I would like to explore where animation within advertising and commercials is going, what its future looks like and where the possibilities may go.

Bibliography

Websites

Aaron Marquis, Advantages of TV Animation Advertising

http://www.ehow.com/list_6670171_advantages-tv-animation-advertising.html [Electronically accessed 10th March 2012]

Animation In Advertising

http://www.jagranjosh.com/articles/Animation-in-Advertising-1294299888-1 [Electronically accessed 10th March 2012]

Chan Yun Yoo, Kihan Kin, Patricia A. Stout, (Spring 2004), Assessing the Effects of Animation in Online Banner Advertising: Hierarchy of Effects Model

http://jiad.org/article49 [Electronically accessed 10th March 2012]

Television Advertisement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_advertisement [Electronically accessed 10th March 2012]

Vanity Numbers, (5^th March 2012), Why Consider Animation in Advertising?

http://www.customtollfree.com/toll-free-blog/why-consider-animation-in-advertising [Electronically accessed 10^th March 2012]

Advertising

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising [Electronically accessed 26th February 2012]

John Straiton, (2006), Animation and Advertising

http://www.animationfestival.ca/podcast/EP04_straiton_small.pdf