The commercial’s not over until the fat lady sings.
At least that’s the case in a new British-made Fiat TV spot, which offers the impression that the viewer accidentally turned on the BBC and discovered an opera in progress, complete with subtitles.
A tenor is singing in Italian about his lost love, a huge soprano who soon arrives on stage in a red Fiat. The tenor and his compatriots, still in character, sing a few admiring comments about the car, and then they all drive off.
Classical music in general, and opera in particular, are becoming pervasive in TV advertising.
Consider recent campaigns by Tott’s Champagne (Puccini’s O Mio Babbino Caro from Gianni Schicchi), British Airways (Verdi’s Va, Pensiero from Nabucco), Kentucky Fried Chicken (Bizet’s prelude to Carmen), Sony (Puccini’s Mi Chiamano Mimi from La Boheme), Chanel (Ponchielli’s Suicidio! from La Gioconda), Cheer (Catalani’s La Wally), United Airlines (Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue), and Lee Jeans (Mozart’s Rex Tremendae Majestatis from the Requiem).
“Ever watch horror movies without the music?” asked Bill Miller, who wrote the Lee commericals for the Minneapolis-based Fallon McElligott agency. “They’re not scary. Your ears tell you what your eyes are looking at. That’s the key. We’ve learned in a lot of stuff we’ve produced … that the music colors it, tones it. Classical music is another spice in the cabinet you use when you are producing something.”
The particular flavor classical music or opera imparts to a TV commerical is inevitably related to the high-culture associations classical music has endured for hundreds of years.
“People who like classical music are very, very consumed with quality,” said John Galasso, the creative director for Basso and Associates, an Orange County, Calif.-based advertising agency. “Even if you or I do not like classical music, we recognize, or even aspire to, the kind of quality it represents.”
Among Galasso’s clients, Meguiar’s Car Wax has taken a shine to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. “On a TV commercial, one shine looks just as good as another,” he said, “so you have to find some way to distinguish your product.”
When the orchestra sounds Beethoven’s famous “fate” motif at the beginning of the Meguiar’s commercial, a garage door opens and a car inches forward. While the music of Beethoven plays, the wax is applied. No narration. No captions appear on the screen until the commercial’s end. There is only Beethoven and a Chrysler LeBaron (with all the identifying markings removed) polished to a mirror finish.
The elite qualities ascribed to classical-music listeners are more than an empty stereotype. Demographic studies show classical listeners are a cut above, in terms of education and personal finances.
“The most common characteristic of the classical-music listener is very high education,” said Ray Nordstrand, president and general manager of WFMT in Chicago, the largest classical-music syndicator in the United States and one of America’s premiere commercial classical radio stations.
“Following that is a preponderance of professional or executive occupations, high incomes and high net worth — the highest of any type of music listener, according to all the research. The median income for classical listeners is in the $50,000-and-up area,” he said.
The classical type breaks down — much to the delight of Nordstrand, classical record companies, and now advertisers — with the false notion that classical music is the domain of the elderly.
“The thing that is most interesting is there is a nice spread of ages. There’s not much below 25 or 30, but from 30 on through 55 or 60, it’s fairly stable, unlike rock, which is skewed to the very young, or ‘beautiful music,’ which is skewed to the very old. Classical has a very strong spread.
“If I were an airline, or a wine company, or someone whose audience had those characteristics, I would think classical is a very good format to use in advertising,” Nordstrand said.
Advertisers, however, are discovering classical music and opera can work with products whose potential market may be the very opposite of the accepted classical audience. The Lee commercial using Mozart was conceived to reach an audience that is more comfortable with MTV than Mozart.
“A man and a woman are meeting in a Laundromat, and we wanted to intimate that there was something happening, that they had somehow struck a chord, had found a harmonic that made them fit in this crazy, discordant world,” Miller said. “There is a lot of stuff happening. Doors to the washing machines are banging, dryers are humming. There are fire engines going by and other people are getting in the way.
“The music offers the continuity that strings this love story together. It’s the glue that makes it possible for us to open the spot in a few seconds and essentially plant the idea that something really important is going on; something is happening on a serene level. If you saw the same scene without the music, it wouldn’t read romanace at all. Maybe it would be comedy.”
