On Reading a Video Text

Robert Scholes’ essay, “On Reading a Video Text” is focused around ideas on media advertisements and the different techniques that professionals use to sell these products. Scholes supports his claims about ads and their techniques by giving a classic example of an 80’s budwiser commercial. The commercial is focused around a man that umpires baseball. The man gets a call to umpire in the minors and in his first game makes a controversial call, which doesn’t impress one of the coaches. At the end of the day while sitting in a bar, a budwiser is brought over to the umpire from the coach in forgiveness. The commercial ends and all comes together with the classic slogan, “You keep America working, this bud’s for you.” Scholes claims that from a few brief scenes we construct a fairy tale life about this umpire. In his article he writes, “We draw upon a storehouse of cultural information that extends from fairy tales and other basic narrative structures to knowledge about the game and business of baseball” (Pg 1). What Scholes is saying here is that when viewing a commercial we automatically pull together a story of a guy jumping through the ranks of umpiring and constructing our own version of the American dream for this individual. By the assumed display of hard work and determination, Americans buy into the umpire’s story and by buying into his story they buy into the product as well. This is the “fairy tale [and] basic narrative structure” that Scholes is talking about. This is one of many techniques that Scholes bring into light about the techniques advertisement and marketing professionals use to real us in on an emotional level to sell their product. Scholes goes on to state, “it is necessary to recover from the surrender to this text, and it is also necessary to have the tools of ideological criticism” (Pg 4). Scholes suggests that it’s imperative to look past the fairy tales that are cleverly depicted in commercials and use ideological criticism to analyze them. Ideological criticism is analyzing how beliefs actually work, instead of accepting and going with the flow of others. Scholes believes that it is crutial for us to own this skill because it keeps us from constantly boarding the advertisement train with everyone else. It keeps up grounded with our own beliefs on what society means and what is important, without being sold and told that through video text. Scholes gives many great examples of how videos texts pull us in and subliminally insert stories and dreams so we accept their product. Using certain techniques the author is convinced that we have the power to look through these skills and see the products for what they truly are.