The CASE FILE series — to which SEMIOVOX has invited our semiotician colleagues from around the world to contribute — shares stories of things we were amazed and amused to learn, whether or not they proved useful to the client.

Very often less is more. I’m not talking about less clutter or price, here, but less quality.

Why would anyone want less quality? I am sorry to report that I have worked for products and whole categories where that is the case. Chips not only devoid of nutritional value but actually profiting from their junk status. Bland industrial beers getting the better of lovingly crafted brews — and not simply because of their cheaper price. TV content that thrives with audiences not merely despite, but in fact because of its manifest production deficiencies. 

As an unforgiving New Yorker cartoon has established, less is never truly more, because there is always a conspicuous “more” to compensate for the apparent “less.” The cartoon features two proud millionaires lounging in a huge minimalistic room and saying: “Only the rich can afford this much nothing.” 

When it comes to chips, beer, and other less-quality-is-more examples, I have typically succeeded at helping my clients to comprehend that they are in the (let’s use a euphemism) poor intrinsics business. In one of my first gigs as a practicing semiotician, however, I was hired to do a project on telenovelas, and I learned — at my own expense, literally, since my payment was withheld and I was banned from company premises — that clients need to be told such things very, very tactfully. Because no matter how low the quality of the product, corporate ego is always massive.

The project was troubled from the start by internal politics; I found myself performing a difficult balancing act. I was required to serve the interests of the team who sold product placements, which meant taking a stand against the shows’ producers, who felt (rather snobbishly) that this stuff was defiling the visual flow of their creative work. At the same time, I was required to help the shows’ producers push back against this sort of practice, because despite their snobbishness these commercial intrusions — for example, a cliffhanger episode directing viewers to a website with exclusive content sponsored by a bank — did in fact pose a threat to their shows’ narratives.

Anticipating animosity on both sides, I carried out deep interviews with all the major stakeholders (or so I thought at the time), a tactic I have since refined in order to present the analysis in the client’s, not the semiotician’s terms. 

After the interviews, the actual analysis tested every fiber of my recently acquired zest for pragmatics. Don’t be a snob, Alfredo!, I found myself repeating. Don’t focus on what you are not finding. If the genre is so popular there must be something the audience is actively doing in terms of interpretation. For less to be more, there must certainly be a “more” somewhere. Elusive stuff! I struggled to get involved in a very predictable drama with: excessive makeup (after what seemed an eternity of this, I found myself making delirious associations to Kabuki theater); implausible lighting (even the intimate bed scenes, albeit very starchy, took place under the most sterile lab illumination); ping-pong dialogues; flimsy sets; unbelievable (literally) acting; and the odd intrusion of a bottled beverage or athlete’s-foot cream (yes!, displayed and mentioned in the middle of romantic banter!) that would flicker for at least five seconds before what passed as action could continue. 

Desperate for an antidote to my own snobbishness, I found an insight by the Argentine semiotician Eliseo Verón that gave me respite: Descended as it is from the radionovela, the visual poverty of the telenovela is indeed one of its central assets. It’s an aural genre. Unlike movie semiotics where one is warned to pay attention to the action, in telenovelas everything happens around dialogue. So product placements do not, in fact, compromise the shows’ visual production… but they cannot be allowed to disrupt the dialogue-driven narrative.

I drafted a document full of verbatims from both sides that seemed to confirm Verón’s point. It closed with a short set of rules binding all stakeholders, or so I thought, in consensual peace. 

Fifteen minutes into the actual presentation, I had done most of the heavy lifting. With the aid of the famous Reese’s scene in ET, my first slides had established how product placement is not necessarily an intrusion but can enhance the action. The salesmen watched expectantly; the producers acquiesced. 1 to 0 for the salesmen. Next, it was the salesmen’s turn to concede ground. My slides stated that some sales can indeed be noxious — because, as opposed to regular ads, product placement involves selling not merely time but narrative relevance; so the salesmen needed to get involved with the right sponsors. Score tied 1–1. My analysis was working! There was even enthusiasm in the room, as the two opposing “teams” realized that they could all work together for a better, more profitable narrative.  

And then it all went sideways. 

Amid the newfound camaraderie, there was a sudden chill in the room. Faces turned as a tall, slim character in his early 60s, wearing a very stiff black suit, made his appearance. I had never seen this guy, nor heard of him; so I certainly hadn’t interviewed him. “Alfredo,” said the woman whom I had thought was leading the project, “Meet my boss, the commercial VP.”

I sensed from the way she had somehow become tiny that disaster was imminent. Still, put on a brave face and started bringing the newcomer up to speed. “Wait a second, young man” (I was young, at the time). “We sell time here, not your so-called relevance.”

To everybody’s horror, I told this legendary salesman that it was a well-established fact that a good salesman could be a brand’s downfall, because although selling to the wrong customers might be profitable in the short term, it would destroy value over time. “These academics! They come here citing their French books!” (He had asked for a reference, I had said that the branding expert Jean-Noël Kapferer was adamant on protecting brands from overzealous salesmen.) “An example, damn it, just give me an example!” 

“Take the case of the Cadillac brand…” I started. I sensed everyone recoiling in their seats. By the time I’d finished I knew for certain that this guy had recently bought himself a black Cadillac to match his black suits, but by then it was too late. “…The salesmen at GM made a killing selling Cadillacs to every pimp and rapper in town, and when they were done the brand was in tatters.”

So was my presentation as the commercial VP stormed out of the room.

CASE FILE: Sónia Marques (Portugal) on BIRTHDAY CAKE | Malcolm Evans (Wales) on PET FOOD | Charles Leech (Canada) on HAGIOGRAPHY | Becks Collins (England) on LUXURY WATER | Alfredo Troncoso (Mexico) on LESS IS MORE | Stefania Gogna (Italy) on POST-ANGEL | Mariane Cara (Brazil) on MOTHER-PACKS | Whitney Dunlap-Fowler (USA) on WHERE THE BOYS ARE | Antje Weißenborn (Germany) on KITSCH | Chirag Mediratta (India) on “I WATCH, THEREFORE I AM” | Eugene Gorny (Thailand) on UNDEAD LUXURY | Adelina Vaca (Mexico) on CUBAN WAYS OF SEEING | Lucia Laurent-Neva (England) on DOLPHIN SQUARE | William Liu (China) on SCENT FANTASY | Clio Meurer (Brazil) on CHOCOLATE IDEOLOGY | Samuel Grange (France) on SWAZILAND CONDOMS | Serdar Paktin (Turkey/England) on KÜTUR KÜTUR | Ximena Tobi (Argentina) on SLUM PANDEMIC | Maciej Biedziński (Poland) on YOUTH LEISURE | Josh Glenn (USA) on WESTERN SPIRIT | Martha Arango (Sweden) on M | Chris Arning (England) on X | Alexandra Robert (France) on TBD | Joël Lim Du Bois (Malaysia) on TBD | & more.

Also see these international semio series: COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | MAKING SENSE WITH… | COLOR CODEX | DECODER | CASE FILE