This film can be seen as a companion to Seaway to Europe (1972). Both films are clearly aimed at the promoting new service between Hull and Zubrugge that the Ellerman Wilson Line began in 1972. Neither film came with any information, and so the year has to be worked out, the service between Hull and Zeebrugge only lasted from April 1972 until January 1973. Obviously, at 24 minutes, Seaway to Europe was far too long to serve as an advert for either the cinema or TV, hence this film.  The...

This film can be seen as a companion to Seaway to Europe (1972). Both films are clearly aimed at the promoting new service between Hull and Zubrugge that the Ellerman Wilson Line began in 1972. Neither film came with any information, and so the year has to be worked out, the service between Hull and Zeebrugge only lasted from April 1972 until January 1973. Obviously, at 24 minutes, Seaway to Europe was far too long to serve as an advert for either the cinema or TV, hence this film.  The service of Spero, between Hull and Gothenburg starting in 1966, was the first roll-on-roll-off service of its kind operating out of Hull. This Spero is in fact the third one of this name.  For more information on  the Ellerman Wilson Line, and what happened to ‘Spero’, see the Context for Seaway to Europe.

 

The YFA has a reasonable number of films that may be classified as promotional – in the sense of trying to ‘sell’ the features or products that a company or organisation has. Often these films don’t differ that markedly between those that involve a commercial product, like for example Wimsol Bleach Factory (1951); or those for non-profit making organisations, such as A Question of Choice (1979), about homes for people with disabilities.  It may well be that lengthy expositional films for commercial enterprises are less common today, although one can see the value of them for the companies who make them. The more strictly advertising films, like the many in the Rowntrees Collection (now Néstle) held with the YFA, are far more straightforward.

 

The terms used here, of promotion and advertising, can be confusing. In the marketing business ‘promotion’ usually refers to a short term strategy, whereas ‘advertising’ is seen as part of a longer term strategy, and hence has to have a more direct and cohesive message.  But as one online marketing website states: “Promotion is a general term. It is so general, in fact, that most communications that are not strictly advertising (paid and non-personal) are characterized as promotions. But this distinction is blurry at times, so looking for a clear definition is useless. It’s better to just recognize that there are many types of promotions.” (Marketing Profs – References) It is in this more general sense that Seaway to Europe is described as ‘promotional’, as with other similar films on YFA. What they all have in common is a very targeted audience who are expected to watch a lengthy film.

 

The development of advertising goes back a long way: to handbills in the Elizabethan age advertising the wierd and wondreful sights to behold at fairs. In the following century the first periodicals carried regular adverts for their coffee house readers. Of course, advertising and capitalism grew up together hand-in-hand, but it wasn’t until the twentieth century that advertising really took off with a force. As one advertising man from 1915 puts it (quoted by Daniel Pope): “When the historian of the twentieth century shall have finished his narrative, and comes searching for the best expression [for] the spirit of the period, we think it not at all unlikely that he may select ‘The Age Advertising’ for the purpose.” (Pope, pp 3-4).

 

So too does advertising theory go back a long way, with pioneers like Daniel Starch in early twentieth century. And well before Spero was made one of the foundations of modern advertsising theory, the influential ‘Four P’s of Marketing’ (Promotion, Product, Price, and Place), was put in place by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960.  What emerges from all of this theory is that information about a product is usually only a marginal part of any advertising campaign. Two marketing experts, Larry Percy and Richard Elliott, have defined advertising in the following way: “Advertising is an indirect way of turning a potential customer towards the advertised product or service by providing information that is designed to effect a favourable impression, what we will call a positive brand attitude.” (References)

 

Advertising and marketing are of course huge business: the Outsell Report for 2008 estimated that the budget for advertising and marketing in the USA for that year to be over 412 billion dollars (even their latest Report will cost you $1,295!). For the same year Adspend puts the figure for spending on advertising alone for the UK (only 15% of all marketing costs), as nearly 27 billion dollars (10% down on the previous year). Of course, like any figures, these have to be treated with caution (other figures can be found), but whatever the actual amount is, it is a sizeable proportion of Gross Domestic Income. For the same year the UK budget for Developmental Aid was about 12 billion dollars.  

 

Yet most of the criticism that has come the way of advertising has been of its psychological, social and cultural consequences, rather than its wastefulness. One such critic, Ernest Taylor, charts some of the earlier version of these criticism in his book The Shocking History af Advertising (itself first published as early as 1952), complaining that, “the keenest brains are employed to sell fringe commodities that fulfil no urgent public need” (p. 10). This criticism has become especially focused recently on the way that children have been targetted – a criticism that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has joined in with.  In her more up-to-date, and much more theoretical, analysis of modern (and postmodern) advertising, Pamela Odin argues that advertising produces its own self-contained world divorced from the reality that produces it. In other words, in subtle ways, a world is created not unlike the fantasy virtual worlds of cyberspace, cut off from the social and ethical reality of our lives.  

 

This may seem a long way from our whimsical ad for ‘Spero’, where a “woman walks over and kisses her husband whilst the seated man exclaims, ‘some car ferry.’” But this episode exhibits the way that advertising moves with, and moves, the times: perhaps too openly sexist for today. With the greater sophistication of modern advertisements the same episode would probably be done more tongue-in-cheek. In making advertisements in a more ‘knowing’ or ironic way, as pastiche or spoof, modern marketers can more readily derail charges of sexism. It is this lack of (‘postmodern’) irony that gives so many old adverts their comic effects.

 

References

 

John Clarkson and Roy Fenton, Ellerman Lines, J & M Clarkson, 1993.

Brian Dyson, ‘The End of the Line: Oswald Sanderson, Sir John Ellerman and the

E. Jerome McCarthy, Basic Marketing: A Management Approach, Irwin, Homewood, Ill., 1960.

Lisa Firth (editor), Issues: Travel and Tourism, Vol. 156, Independence, Cambridge, 2008.

Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertsing, Basic Books, New York, 1983.

Ernest Sackville Taylor The Shocking History af Advertsing, 2nd edition, Penguin, London, 1965.

Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 2000.

The History of Advertising Trust

Marketing Profs

Larry Percy and Richard Elliott What are Advertising and Promotion

How much money is spent on advertising per year

Adspend

OECD Aid Statistics