My cousin owns a trophy business - let's say she somehow had the same sentiment as this fellow. Would I ever expect to walk into her store one day and see her holding up this sign? Probably not.
What is the deal with these ads? What a strange and unnatural way for an advertiser to make a character “speak” to us! What happened to speech bubbles or putting the quote somewhere else in the ad? I got to thinking about situations where we WOULDN’T be surprised to see someone using a sign to communicate, and this helped me get to the bottom of what weirds me out so much about these ads.
Let’s look at another one:
Where are these hands coming from? Imagine the body they would be attached to. The position of the hands and the sign indicate that this person is holding the sign like a fast food tray, with the text facing him/her. So, Wells Fargo, are you telling me someone really wrote this sign to him/herself and is looking down at it, pondering its "funny" message?
And one more:
OK, so we have husband and wife, wife with hand on tummy, the contents of which are about to "expand" this family. And they're going to expand their house, too, some day! My sister-in-law is expanding her house and just expanded her family with a second baby, but she sure didn't tell us about it by standing with her partner and holding a sign.
I’ve never seen someone convey these kinds of sentiments in sign form. So, when IS it common for us to see people holding up word-containing signs? Here are the reasons and contexts that come to mind, each followed by a consideration of what the people in the Wells Fargo ads might be doing.
1. Inability (biological or situational) to communicate verbally - A person who is unable to speak holds up a piece of paper on which they have written a message. A hitchhiker holds up a "CALIFORNIA OR BUST" sign - he can speak, but he cannot stop every car and ask for a ride verbally. A lady standing next to a TV camera tells David Letterman what to say because the two cannot talk simultaneously on camera.
- So are our friends in the ads communicating out of necessity because they cannot speak? Not likely - I don't think I've ever seen a person in a Wells Fargo ad who was differently abled, and I would bet that they would create an ad of a person in a wheelchair before they launched an entire campaign directed at people who are unable to speak. No other signs of a situational inability to speak are detectable in these images.
2. Avoidance of verbal repetition - A man sitting on the sidewalk holds a cardboard sign with a handwritten request for spare change. A chauffeur at the airport holds up a sign saying "A. Bradford" because it is not OK for him to ask every single person walking out of the terminal if he is A. Bradford.
- Are these people tired of telling their friends these little tidbits of financial news? Is the happy couple sick and tired of telling people about their future home and family expansion? Are they standing at their front door holding this sign so anyone who happens to walk by will be sure to know this news? Seems unlikely.
3. Increased visibility of message - A protester carries a sign on a stick to increase the chance that her message will be received. A man in a parka rocks an arrow-shaped sign back and forth, pointing to a new housing development (although one could also argue that the man is part of the sign in this case).
- Are the ad characters trying to make their message more visible? Well, it seems a little silly that these people would go to such lengths to get these trifling messages out to the whole world. I mean, how many people really care that this couple is expanding their home and their family? And I doubt Mr. Trophy wants to make it known to his whole clientele that he feels like he isn’t achieving anything right now.
4. Message enhancement - Instead of simply chanting out loud "End the War," a protester carries a sign with non-linguistic symbols such as bombs and drops of blood. A scantily clad woman walks across the scene of a boxing match with a sign saying "Round 2" because it's so much more fun than having some guy say it over a microphone. When my aunt arrived home from a trip to Botswana when I was 8, we waited for her at the airport with a big poster saying "WELCOME HOME" because it made her return seem bigger than our own voices could.
- Well, this is the only place I see a tie-in with these ads. How are these messages enhanced by the fact that they are written on signs? I don't see any non-linguistics symbols that make the message more exciting. But, like my aunt's "WELCOME HOME" sign, the sign seems to magnify the importance of the statement.
This is what strikes me as so odd about these ads. The signs in them only minimally serve any of the functions that the human+sign combination typically does. They serve only to magnify a message that is really quite trifling!
Design-wise, however, this technique makes both the person and the text central to the ad, and avoids the need for a (possibly juvenile-looking) speech bubble or the awkwardness of laying text over the image. The sign-holding solution gets around this, I feel, but makes the ad look weird and unnatural as a result.
I admit I am simplifying some things here, including the distinction between a person out in the real world holding a sign, and a picture of a person posing with a sign. These are quite different; I’m interpreting the ads as the former and not the latter. This distinction may be the topic of a later post. I’m also pretending that the camera really has caught these sign bearers candidly (as we're meant to assume) and that they aren’t just hired models.
Any other ideas why Wells Fargo would employ this technique to reel in customers? Do these ads strike anyone else as awkward? Any other reasons why one might choose to communicate through words on a sign?
I’ll keep thinking about it. In the mean time, I’m going to go stand in Union Square with a sign that says “Someday, I will understand Wells Fargo’s advertising campaign.”
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