About this piece

We are delighted to present the first in a series of “Emails from America” contributed by Lee Lawrence, a journalist and documentary film-maker based in Washington, DC.

Email from America
by Lee Lawrence

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Lee Lawrence became a globe-trotter and linguist at an early age. She attended French schools in Spain and Italy before returning to the USA for higher education, studying for a Bachelor’s degree in Religion at Princeton University. Lee subsequently returned to Europe, working in PR in Belgium and later as a freelance journalist in Yugoslavia where her husband had a US Foreign Service posting. This was followed by a spell in India, where her husband had a further posting. In collaboration with colleague Terry Nickelson, Lee is currently producing a documentary focusing on the role of US military chaplains and examining Church-State tensions at the heart of the military chaplaincy. See www.inhisserviceandyours.com/

'Seeing' accents

One of the first things I learned about working with moving images rather than print is that, yes, the quality of the images matters. But sound is key. So I started listening – to movies, TV shows, and, most often of all, to commercials. This last is, after all, the most ubiquitous of genres, inescapable in its relentlessness, not to mention volume. Many ads in the US seem to blast out of our TV sets at higher decibel levels than the programs they are interrupting (this is legal, by the way – see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/ – but no less obnoxious) and the fact that advertisers milk every available decibel only serves to confirm that it is sound that matters most.

No surprise, then, that advertisers excel at using sound to manipulate us, one of their principal tools being the human voice and its inflections. A familiar technique is to use unidentified but easily recognizable celebrity voices to add the authority of fame to sales pitches for everything from investment banks and oil companies to the latest osteoporosis treatment. And then there is the disembodied voice that belongs to nobody we know but that wields power over us with its accent. In our age of political correctness, television commercials offer one of the few areas of public life openly ruled by stereotypes.

Think about it: most of us aren’t looking at the screen during the commercials. We’re fixing ourselves something to drink, checking our email or dashing down the hall for a bathroom break (which explains the bit about hiking up the whole volume, does it not?). So when all we hear is something like “The YouNameIt is the car for me,” the words had better spark an image and, more than that, an entire message.

To the American ear, Jamaican accents speak of easy-going fun – I could have my back turned to the TV screen but, if someone were to talk about their YouNameItCar in a Jamaican accent, my mind would surf the lilting cadences and know the car sported a splashy paint job and had the power to conquer sand dunes.

A British accent uttering the same sentence, however, would fill me with respect for the luxury of an automobile gliding up the drive of a stately home, sleekly elegant, beautifully crafted, and well worth a preposterous price tag. Uttered in an Australian accent (and, yes, many if not most Americans can indeed tell the difference), the same sentence triggers visions of a rugged, jeep-like contraption with an exposed metal frame that doubles as a beer-bottle opener. No worries, mate – and no matter that the Aussie renting his voice might harbor an allergy to hops and keep his subscription to the Sydney Opera tucked in the pocket of his tux.

Interestingly enough, some accents rarely feature. Though advertisers have lately added German accents to their repertoire, usually coming from the mouth of an automotive engineer (as you might expect), I have yet to hear the accent in a disembodied voice-over. I have either missed it or advertisers worry the stereotype might backfire unless they manage it with visuals.

Turning back to the Australian accent, one of our icons of class and elegance is none other than Aussie-inflected Nicole Kidman – yet I have never heard an ad that uses her voice alone in the way that, say, ads for cars and banks use the voices of Donald Sutherland or Sean Connery without identifying them. Whenever I hear Ms. Kidman’s Australian accent, her image also fills the screen. And I cannot help but think that this is because advertisers don’t trust us to hear an Australian accent and “see” the slim, urbane Ms. Kidman. In one ad she sits primly in an overstuffed armchair, stretching her mind thanks to a Nintendo game. Now you can’t tell me that showing me images of the game and relying only on her voice will create the association they are aiming for – quite frankly, even the combination of voice and visual is not enough to convince this consumer that a hand-held Brain Training game with Rock, Paper, Scissors is the best way to stay mentally agile – I mean, what happened to reading books? No, we hear an Australian female voice and, our love for Ms. Kidman notwithstanding, the image that fills our brain is that of a bouncy-haired sheila with broad shoulders and muscular calves – indeed, the very one who runs across the sandy beach in the Aussie Hair Care commercial.

In fact, when it comes to ads, we seem to like our stereotypes straight up, not mixed like bad metaphors. We still associate, for example, Spanish accents with tacos and sombreros – not bees and nose sprays. That’s right. Ads for Nasinex nasal spray feature a doe-eyed bee speaking with a Spanish accent. Why? Because the advertisers were after the star power of Antonio Banderas. What they got instead was a lot of puzzled folks. Check out the blog traffic on the subject – you’ll be amazed, and it will confirm, once again, that sound in ads is key and a mighty tricky business.

© Lee Lawrence, 2008