Advantages Raised from The Lack of Fit between Encoding and Decoding in ‘Djarum Super’ Advertisement

Two men are riding an off road jeep in the wild. There are big trees and bushes and mud. It seems that the car is working hard to get out of the mud. The driver’s figure is not clear. The audience can only see his face behind the windshield. The figure of the man sitting next to the driver is more eye-catching. His position is closer to the audience. He wears a T shirt in similar color to his shorts, and unbuttoned shirt in lighter color. He also wears glasses and cap. His right hand is holding the top of the windshield, while his left hand is clenched indicating “yes, we can!” and his face shows enthusiasm with his mouth open like yelling “wooohoooo…!!”

The above scene appears in a big billboard in a crowded street in Jakarta, Indonesia. Down in the left of the picture there is a big printed interactive text saying: “MY LIFE, MY ADVENTURE”. On the top of the billboard we can see a logo with bigger printed text saying “DJARUM SUPER”.  “WWW.DJARUM-SUPER.COM is printed in small fonts down on the right and at the bottom of the billboard there is a text written in Indonesian saying “MEROKOK DAPAT MENYEBABKAN SERANGAN JANTUNG, IMPOTENSI DAN GANGGUAN KEHAMILAN DAN JANIN” or “SMOKING CAN CAUSE HEART ATTACK, IMPOTENCE AND PREGNANCY AND FETAL DISORDERS” in English. Yes, the billboard is an advertisement of the brand DJARUM SUPER, a cigarette product. What message is the producer trying to deliver in this advertisement? What’s the correlation between off-road track and cigarette?

It is widely approved that cigarette brings negative effects on health. However, cigarette industry in Indonesia contributes a lot to the national revenue. The industry absorbs a large number of manpower, from the farmers of the tobacco to the workers in the manufacturing until the distribution by small enterprise retailer, not to mention the revenue gained from the advertisement. According to Forbes Indonesia (2010), the richest men in Indonesia make their wealth from cigarette based industry. This evidence shows that cigarette industry leads in the country. The facts bring ambiguities in government’s policy making. Instead of applying purchasing restriction to the consumers, the government created regulation of which includes the rules in advertising cigarette. Two of the rules in presenting advertisement of cigarettes as stated in Government Regulation of The Republic of Indonesia Number 19 Year 2003 (Peraturan Pemerintah Republik Indonesia Nomor 19 Tahun 2003 tentang Pengamanan Rokok Bagi Kesehatan, 2003) are (1) must not demonstrate or describe in the form of drawing, writing or both, packs of cigarettes, cigarette or people who are smoking or lead to people who are smoking; and (2) must not state that the product being advertised is cigarette. These rules then become a great challenge for cigarette producers in delivering the message in ads. How is it to deliver the message to the audience if the producer is not allowed to mention or describe the product?

Those rules create a large gap between the producer and the audience. This gap has the potential to cause distortion. As Hall (p. 53) says: “What are called ‘distortions’ or ‘misunderstandings’ arise precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange.” Apparently this potential of distortion doesn’t become barrier for the producer. Instead, the producer chooses to fill the gap by providing “false consciousness” to the audience. This is how they take advantage in this lack of fit.

Cigarette then is associated with masculinity and bravery. The producer tries to encode smoking with masculine figures, people who have strong and shaped body, people who like adventure, who are brave to face challenges, who are smart to overcome every problem. The ad showing men struggling to conquer the wild track provides connotation meanings as stated above. It’s like the ad is trying to say “Hey, this is Djarum life. Your life is your adventure. If you deal with Djarum, then you are a real man”. It seems that Djarum Super is targeted for male consumers. It makes sense because based on the statistic published in www.nationmaster.com, the smoking prevalence for males is 58.3 % of adults, while females is 2.9% of adults (Indonesian Health Stats, no date).

There is a contradiction between what’s presented in the picture and the text warning on health issue. However, this contradiction doesn’t affect much since the message of being masculine is much more dominant that the small text written at the bottom of the text.

How do the audiences decode this message? The oppositional positions use their logic a lot. The message of cigarette’s bad impacts existing on the society dominates over the pleasure of smoking. There is one thing that might be noted from this segment of audiences, some of them probably never smoke at all, so that they have no idea what smoking is for beside wasting money and burning lung. They don’t think smoking is cool and there’s no need to try. The negotiated position might accept the idea that smoking is cool, yet they still consider the bad effect on either health or finance, or might be both. They want to look masculine too, so maybe they smoke occasionally, like when hanging out with friends. The dominant position must share a large portion from the total targeted audience considering the statistic of smoking prevalence. They fully agree that smoking is masculine, and they underestimate the warning which is also mention on the ads.

The fact that smoking is addictive cannot be set aside. It means that most people continue smoking because they have been addicted. However, to be addicted needs a process. And this process cannot be separated from the intense penetration of the advertisement itself. The small number of females in the smoking prevalence statistics shows what kind of norms prevailing in the society. It is not common for women to smoke, but it is tolerable for men to smoke. The masculine image of smoking has been broadly accepted. The ‘meaning’ of cigarette in the society has been emptied out and refilled by the advertisements, like Jhally (p. 73) said:

“The fetishism of commodities consists in the first place of emptying them of meaning, of hiding the real social relations objectified in them through human labor, to make it possible for the imaginary/symbolic social relations to be injected into the construction of meaning at a secondary level. Production empties. Advertising fills. The real is hidden by the imaginary.”

Cigarette advertising definitely refill the meaning very well. The massive advertisements are able to hide the poisonous substance contained in the smoke by presenting masculine imaginary of smokers.

References:

Forbes Indonesia (2010), Indonesia Boasts Record 21 Billionaires, accessed 1 April 2011, <http://forbesindonesia.com/downloadFI2ENG.php>

Hall, Stuart (1993),  “Encoding/Decoding” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During. London: Routledge.

Indonesian Health Stats, accessed 2 April 2011

Jhally, Sut (1998) “Advertising as religion: The dialectic of technology and magic” in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, ed. Lan Angus and Sut Jhally. New York: Routledge

Peraturan Pemerintah Republik Indonesia Nomor 19 Tahun 2003 tentang Pengamanan Rokok Bagi Kesehatan  (2003), accessed 1 April 2011