Magic is a theme, which introduces discussions of the role of advertising in modern society. Marketing is not just a method of selling goods; it is a true part of the culture of a puzzled world.
If the use of person supplies leaves the section of human need unsatisfied, the challenge is made by magic, to link this spending with human wishes to which it has no real reference. You do not only buy an object, you buy strength, attraction, success, ability to have power over your environment.
The magic unclear the real sources of general satisfaction, because their discovery would involve extreme changes in the whole common way of life.
The author devotes an entire chapter to consider the relations between advertising, alchemy, spells, genies and the Crystal ball. Magic is not a single unified referent system, but a process, a mythical means of doing things, a transformational system. Magic is a pivot around which misrepresentations may be produced; it always involves a misrepresentation of time in space or space in time. Time is magically drawn into space (for example the crystal ball: an object that contains the future, and where space is magically produced out of time by making things appear out of nowhere through the processes of alchemy and spells. And in the center of these magical processes is the subject you, the buyer and the user of the product).
Nowadays we are all users and not creators because consumer products and modern technology provide us with everything ready made removing the need for any action or effort done by us. Ads are used to the only thing that we can do, buy the product or incant its name. This minimal action created a “ magic spell” element: from a little action, we get great results. And of course that action is our buying.
Magic is the production of results disproportionate to the effort put in. Meaning that all consumer products offer magic, and all advertisements are spells. The ads assume a system of transformation where the results appear with miraculous quality. The more amazing results advertisements offer us, the more these come within the non-explanatory system of magic.
Magic fills the gap between action and result. We can see that sometimes products themselves are seen as producers, but the process of this production is always an absence since magic is instant and doesn’t work materially. The magical result of buying a product is the function of turning consumption into production. The end of the ad (to make us buy) is turned into a beginning (it initiates the miraculous events).
We are allowed to be producers only by being consumers. And thus we can then buy the product, which will produce the magic result (beauty, love…)
Our act of buying and saying the products name is thus a spell, which provides a shortcut to a larger action, performed by the product. Just like nowadays, we can see a shortcut through pressing buttons in mechanical actions and they perform a greater action.
This is how magic works; this is its promise in advertising. It gives instant results with little effort. But of course we are not in control of the results of the magic practices, the result is already determined by the magical product, and by the words we are told to use: the spell.
A87: Looking to this ad we can see a lot of objects signifying two unseen presences: there is the woman whose letter is partially revealed and the man who has sent the gift and will receive the letter. “ …the last time we met...” and “ I would like to see you again soon” are both narrative possibilities left open for conjecture.
The woman knows what is written while we do not. But what we have in common with her is the knowledge of the magical powers of the box. It has brought the man into the room. And not only she has opened the magic box first but she has also written the letter before proceeding to the other present. The black magic box is forever unwrapped and about to be opened. It’s the presence of the other, unwrapped box that produces a movement in the ad, between what is closed and what is open.
Now magic produces effects in time and space: it transforms one thing into another (placing the man in the room). We construct the characters of the narrative and fill in the blanks of the story through magic.
The ad and the box are both things that can be known. The box can be opened when buying it, the ad can be interpreted to reveal what is absent. And this absence is both spatial and temporal, and the past and future events that are both emerged into the box. So we cut across time and space to find out the secret of the black magic box.
