Classical and Vignette Television Advertising Dramas: Structural Models, Formal Analysis, and Consumer Effects

This article identifies and analyzes two types of television advertising dramas: classical and vignette. Drama criticism in theater, film, and television is the source used to identify the elements of advertising dramas-narration, plot, story, and character-and to propose models of the two different types. The two models are employed in an empirical analysis of an advertising sample. Consumer effects of classical and vignette dramas are proposed in terms of the attribution theory of persuasion and the elicitation of empathy versus sympathy responses. If the television commercial could be shown to be drama, it would be among the most ubiquitous and the most influential of its forms and hence deserve the attention of the serious critics and theoreticians of that art.... A comprehensive theory, morphology, and typology of drama is ur-gently needed. ESSLIN 1979, p. 96 T he presence of drama-one of the three major lit-erary genres used to classify fictional works-has been noted and discussed in a variety of marketing, consumer, and advertising phenomena. Its influence on the academic and practitioner literature is such that models from modern dramaturgy-the theory of dra-matic performance-have been adapted as a theoretical basis for studying symbolic meaning in a host of mar-keting and consumption-related contexts (Levy 1959). Many of these contexts have themselves been labeled dramas: notably, products (Durgee 1988), price ne-gotiations (Sherry 1990), consumption activities (Leiss, Kline, and Jhally 1986), holiday rituals (Wallendorf and