Advertising

From : UFOs: Concealed Publicity, Marketing and Information
Unidentified Flying Objects
by Daniela Giordano

According to several current theories held by scientists (like the astrophysicists Allen Hynek of the U.S.A., and Jaques Vallèe of France), these unidentified flying objects would work on our society from the external (sightings, close encounters of various kind, etc.) and from the internal (commercials, movies, and TV) to produce an evolution in human thought. But when this has been said didn’t cause any outery.

The advertising medium is the most powerful tool for acting on the common mind, and it is legitimate to wonder how much of an influence it has toward the acceptance of the UFO phenomenon.

Well known, for instance, is the campaign of SKF, a leading company in the field of the ball-bearings, which advertised its product with a huge lighted panel at Madrid/Barajas Airport, in Spain.

Emblematic and full of suspense, the image shows a squadron of ball bearing, like UFOs – such as people reports, flying in formation against the background of a sky at sunset. In this case the information is cognitive, in the meaning it is presumed all understand the message and the related information inherent in it as taken for granted data.

An interesting campaign in the print media was planned by the Testa Pella Rossetti agency for CESAME, an Italian company leader in the sanitary fixtures. Here a group of whirling UFOs were inserted inside an unlikely bathroom. Additional information proclaimed: "They are not terrestrial."

The advertising message of the BANK OF ROME, characterized by the slogan "Close Encounters with Objects of All Kind", was issued to promote a special competitive bidding of value goods.

The image is centered on three "storied" UFOs hovering over a boundless corn field and projecting their shadows. Here the complex information includes many references: flying saucers, close encounters, crop circles and possible alien writing-quoting, in effect, all the main aspects of the UFO phenomenon.

Many of the companies quoted above have been the first, together with FIAT in the 1970s, to have used UFOs and aliens to promote their product in a period in which information on the topic was scarce, not very reliable or of doubtful origin for most of the audience in Italy. It can be said, therefore, that these companies have been indirect promoters of Ufological concepts and information.

In truth, these companies do not create the images or the advertising messages in the promotional campaign, but rather this work is done by the advertising agencies through the so-called creatives, who submit them for approval to their director and then to the owner or the executive director of the company for which they work.

It should be understood that, even if it is expressed in a simple way, the decision or the choice of a given advertising message is never the exclusive domain of a single person, but of a group of people.

From where, therefore, has come the primary impulse for the "sowing" of such ideas among the general public--since, apparently, the creatives are only the means? What mechanism starts in order that a group of qualified persons opt for this marketing choice of utilizing "alien" topics--which, among other things, has a noticeable cost on the budget of the company? Analysis and market surveys done to test the tastes or the expectations of possible consumers do not seem to justify this trend--at least in Italy. Perhaps at an unconscious level there are certainties of which the public is not aware?