Examining Our World: An Advertising Story
We often hear about the effect humans have on our environment.
We don’t often talk about the effects our environments have on us.
In each of these settings, in every moment of our existence, we impact our environments. Just as they impact us. And no, I’m not talking about the human impact on climate and the earth here. That’s for another day or maybe another narrator. The impacts I’m talking about are the attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral effects we experience by engaging with our physical surroundings.
At any given moment and day, we are exposed to countless stimuli. We only actively recognize, acknowledge, or even perceive a fraction of them. While our brain is capable of processing 11 million bits of information every second, our conscious minds can only handle 40 to 50 bits of information per second.
To overcome this discrepancy between stimuli exposure and human processing limitations, our brains automatically filter out irrelevant or redundant stimuli in our environments through the neural process of stimuli gating.
Yet, we are constantly bombarded with exposure to stimuli and actively perceive and respond to the stimuli in our surroundings.
Research has demonstrated correlations between the lengths and types of exposure to things with liking or affinity. Mere exposure effect from psychology seeks to explain this heuristic tendency of the preference for the familiar. As we become familiar with things, whether products, people, locations, or otherwise, we tend to naturally develop preferences for them.
Advertisements are one common and abundant form of stimuli within our environments, especially in cities and urban areas. Marketing and advertisement messages continually surround us and, frankly, can even overwhelm us.
Even before online marketing came on the scene, an executive for a New York advertising agency noted in the early 2000s that “we never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere. Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”
Our exposure to stimuli, especially advertisement messages, has exponentially increased over the past several decades. In US cities in the 1970s, market research firms estimated that people saw between 500 and 2000 ad messages daily. By the early 2000s, city dwellers saw approximately 5000 advert messages per day in what was then referred to as an environment of sensory overload. Consider now that those statistics only captured advertisements within physical environments and across film, television, and radio.
Once we include advertising messages from online marketing, our exposure jumped to almost 10,000 ads per day by the year 2015.
Marketing campaigns and advertising messages have truly become ubiquitous.
Even before today’s ubiquitous advert environment, marketers had to be creative and thoughtful in how they promoted content and products to potential consumers.
One research consultant stated that people simply don’t pay attention to ads. So for a product to get noticed, it has to be integrated into an environment less overtly. For marketers, “It’s the holy grail for a brand to be integrated into the actual content” or the environment itself. This requires brands and marketers to become hyper-aware of how to naturally incorporate the product or idea they’re looking to promote to consumers in a manner that doesn’t feel like an advert or fails to garner any attention and simply fades into the background.
Product placements in film have long tried to straddle the line between overt advertisement and sly, seamless content promotion.
In a humorous rebellion to this concept, the movie “The Truman Show” awkwardly promotes blatant product placements within the staged life wherein Truman exists.
The movie, of course, incorporated these over-the-top and clunky, ill-placed ad promos to help build the plot for Truman’s discovery that he was living in a fictious, staged reality show. However, there are also countless examples of shameless ad placement promotions across TV and film.
Film product placements date back to 1896, when the first recorded product promotion appeared in the movie “Washing Day in Switzerland.”
One year later, another product promotion became the first advertising film introduced for copyright at the Library of Congress.
Around this same time, master marketers and businesspeople from around the world were experimenting with creative new promotional means and techniques.
One such master marketer and businessman was Henry B. Plant.
Plant, a steamship and railroad tycoon and Florida transplant, sought to promote his integrated transportation system that connected the nationwide rail system with the southern states and south Florida ports. A key location within the Plant System of railway, steamer, and steamship lines was Tampa, FL.
With Tampa pegged as an ideal terminus location, Plant had to find a way to make this isolated, southern city an attraction. As these efforts got underway in the 1880s, Tampa’s population was a quaint 800 people, and the city was virtually devoid of tourist attractions.
Plant worked with architect A.J. Wood to create the pivotal attraction needed to put Tampa on the map and make it a destination for tourism and business alike. Thus, the Tampa Bay Hotel was born.
Per Plant’s direction, Wood’s 1888-1891 career-making masterpiece stood in striking anomaly with its surroundings. Its memorable architectural elements, grandeur, and unmatched uniqueness carried by its Moorish revivalist styling that includes cupolas, domes, verandas, horseshoe arches, and minarets were equally shocking as they were beautiful.
The sight alone of the fabulous 500+ room resort inspired intrigue and drew visitors from all parts of the country. In a bid to appeal to the well-traveled, wealthy, elite, and influential, the hotel’s orientalist styling and décor sought to promote and embrace a sense of luxury and elevated social status. The Orientalist or Moorish revivalist features, especially the minarets, cupolas, and gingerbread woodwork were used to promote the hotel, and Tampa, FL, as exotic destinations.
Tales of Alhambra and Arabian Nights mystified many and planted seeds of desire for experiencing exotic lands. By bringing elements of Alhambra to life in the Tampa Bay Hotel, visitors could witness the grandeur of a Moorish palace while enjoying maximal comfort and entertainment after just a short duration of travel.
Early Tampa Bay Hotel advertisements used its incredible features as selling points. Press promoted the exotic nature of the hotel, Tampa, and Florida and marketed them as must-experience locations with an inviting climate. Deliberately devoid of any cultural or religious symbolism, the hotel’s “Moorish minarets and crescents” were promoted as brilliant spectacles to be observed, especially by their reflection in the sparkling water of the Hillsborough River below.
When the hotel was built, the minarets stood 10 stories tall and were the highest visible points within their near and distant landscapes. This made these features especially prominent within the visual landscape and in people’s minds as they were exposed to them.
Over time, the Tampa Bay Hotel’s minarets were imbued with unique symbolism for their place in history, visual appeal, and ability to draw and unite people and communities.
Flashing forward, the University of Tampa, whose campus is now the site of the former Tampa Bay Hotel, coined its student newspaper “The Minaret” in 1933 and has been publishing weekly since then. Beyond the newspaper title, the university and its students claim a strong connection to the minarets, noting their allure and pride in sharing their campus. UT fully adopted the minarets, and so has the rest of the city.
In fact, Minarets are commonly touted as the unofficial symbol for the city of Tampa.
The symbol of the minaret has pervaded Tampa. Tampa businesses, non-profits, neighborhoods, and entertainment have products, places, names, or events touting the minaret name or shape.
The evolution of the minaret can be pondered across many stories and levels. In what became a strikingly memorable adornment on a flashy piece of architectural advertisement, the minaret has taken on new symbology and influenced those exposed to it, whether directly or indirectly and either actively or inactively.
Maybe in the end, humans affect or stimulate our environments to affect us. The stimuli we place into our surroundings become the stimuli others are exposed to. Through this exposure and engagement with that stimuli, our perceptions are formed based on our prior experiences and interests. Though these perceptions are also affected by action and cognition, they influence our attitudes, thinking, and behaviors.
As we move through our environments, we constantly impart stimuli to others and consume stimulants placed by others. We can employ rhetorical listening techniques to heighten our consciousness of our effects and exposures and to cognitively and behaviorally situate ourselves within our surroundings from an empowered position of awareness.
