Abstract
This chapter focuses on an advertisement analysis from the author's previous narrative analyses. The advertisement analysis is based on the idea of “advertisement as a narrative.” In particular, this chapter first introduces the previous fundamental attempts for a study of advertisement narrative generation systems. This was planned as an application of a narrative generation study and has continued in advertisement analyses and in the design and implementation of experimental systems from two viewpoints: the macro framework and the methods introducing brands into advertisements. In the next, central part of this chapter, the author describes in detail the analysis of television commercial strategies based on three regular or ordinary strategy types and nine irregular or extraordinary strategy types. This study has been applied to the development of advertisement narrative generation techniques in the subsequent research. The last part of this chapter mentions the systematization's topic.
TopIntroduction
The objective of this chapter is to analyze how a brand, i.e., a product or a service, is introduced into the events in story-like television commercial works using real commercials. An event in a story-like commercial means an event that is developed through a character’s actions. Each brand corresponds to a symbol showing a product or a service and focusing on the semantic aspect of the product or service. An event is simply a set piece including action(s) and the necessary related elements, and it is different from a shot, which is a basic unit in moving films. Events are frequently constructed using several shots. However, shots can also contain several events. The direct objective of this analysis is to invent the algorithms and develop the knowledge systems that introduce a brand into an event in the advertising narrative generation system. These systems are used in the mechanism that constructs the advertising flow.
Although this study can be applied directly to the systems that support advertising planning and production, such analysis may also be able to be applied to other forms of advertising generation in the future. Advertising narratives seen in television commercials have mythic or folkloric characteristics beyond realistic narratives. A mixture of rhetoric regarding the relationships between an action and an object, and the rhetoric of metamorphoses of objects and characters, are also interesting for the mechanism of general narrative generation. Moreover, in the study of a story generation system based on the method of Propp’s narrative morphology, Ogata (2007) presented the concept of “narrative generation by destruction and reconstruction.” In this concept, ideas destroy and reconstruct existing narrative texts or narratology and literary theories to create new possibilities not seen in existing texts. This idea is related to the concept of intertextuality in the sense of the usage of existing texts (Nakashima & Ogata, 2006; Ogata & Nakashima, 2006). This advertising narrative generation is also an example of the studies regarding the destruction and reconstruction in the point that aims to develop the combinatorial generation possibilities beyond the simulative generation possibilities based on existing texts, though it uses existing advertising texts. In addition, a similar plan is seen in the idea of “liquidation and crystallization” presented by Akaishi (2006) and Hori (2007) in the context of creative aid in AI. The philosophical concept of “fluidity and fixation” by the author (Ogata, 2019e) is a broader concept that includes the above concepts.
The chapter’s configuration is as follows. First, BACKGROUND introduces many of the previous narrative analysis research by the author and describes the concept of “advertisement as narrative” that regards all advertisement works as contemporary, mythic, or folkloric narratives. This idea extends the range of advertising approaches of the author to the directions to broader general narratives.
Next, in APPROACHES TO ADVERTISEMENT GENERATION AS NARRATIVE GENERATION from two viewpoints of the macro framework and the brand introduction methods into advertising narratives, the author introduces a series of studies of advertising narrative generation in which advertising narrative analysis, system design, and implementation were continued in the positioning of an application of narrative generation.
RHETORICAL STRATEGIES FOR ACTIONS AND OBJECTS: A DETAILED ANALYSIS OF TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENT VIDEOS AND THE EXTRACTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF STORY-TYPE BRAND INTRODUCTION STRATEGIES is the central portion of this chapter and describes the developed advertising narrative analyses of the above methods in detail. The author classified the advertising rhetoric or rhetorical strategies in the following twelve types:
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R1: Rhetorical strategy of manufacturing process
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R2: Rhetorical strategy of purchasing process
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R3: Rhetorical strategy of core usage method
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R4: Rhetorical strategy of deviated use or defamiliarization use
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R5: Rhetorical strategy of no usage
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R6: Rhetorical strategy of a character as a narrator
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R7: Rhetorical strategy of defamiliarization of a character’s state
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R8: Rhetorical strategy of a character’s defamiliarization of the product usage action
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R9: Rhetorical strategy of defamiliarization of a product’s state
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R10: Rhetorical strategy of defamiliarization of the state of an object related to the product
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R11: Rhetorical strategy of the product as a subject
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R12: Rhetorical strategy of the defamiliarization of a background
Key Terms in this Chapter
Multiple Narrative Structures Model: This is a conceptual model by which a narrative text is multiply constituted, and the narrative generation process multiply executed. This is not a special narrative phenomenon, but the multiplicity is positioned as an essentially important concept for considering and designing narrative generation mechanisms in the author’s narrative generation study.
Integrated Narrative Generation System (INGS): INGS is a synthetic narrative generation system architecture integrating the previous studies by the author. From the broadest perspective, INGS is divided into two types of part, knowledge and procedure. INGS aims at a kind of narrative synthesizer that integrates a variety of narrative techniques, methods, rhetoric, and knowledge into an organic and dynamic generation framework.
Advertisement Narrative Generation: Advertising has been one of the most important targets since the first step of the author’s narrative generation study. Research into narrative analyses and advertising-specific narrative generation systems has continued since the first design and implementation of the proposed advertising narrative generation system. One of the reasons for this is that it is relatively easy to analyze and generate advertisement works because advertisement narratives compress rich narrative rhetoric and diverse narrative techniques generally in a short story or plot.
Rhetorical Strategies of Advertisement Narratives: In the context of the author’s study, this means strategies of how a product, including a service and company’s image, is inserted into an advertisement. In this sense, each advertisement is a narrative in which a product is strategically introduced or positioned. This chapter presents twelve categories of the rhetorical strategies for product introduction.