Public Information or Advertising? a Critical look at Campaigns

"I don't think that the campaign concept works. It is not possible to conceive of a real-life situation with so many non-specific recipients. That is fiction. Campaigns are not as great as the communication agencies think they can make them. But there's a lot of money in them. There's no money in my point of view" Charlotte Nielsen

Charlotte Nielsen seeks to uncover the basic conditions for the campaign as a communicative situation, and as a psycho-linguist (languae psychologist) she believes that every text involves a real-life reception situation and not just an abstract one. It is this real-life situation that shold be examined.

"Sure it is clever to be able to address a lot of people all at once and have them remember what you said. But I question whether Diffusion is the same as communication (...) If you assume that a poster or a folder is communicating, simply because you distrbute it, you are on thin ice - from my perspective, which is based on an inegrational communication view. Integrationism offers a new, integrated view of communication. The ´orthodox communication views´ are problematic to work with, because they are not reflected in consumer statistics and effect evaluations that the campaign planners themselves are not in charge of. My approach is to describe the preconditions, the ´myths' about communication, in order to be able to act rationally. Form and content are interrelated. We have to seperate the wheat from the chaff - to tell substance from hot air" Charlotte Nielsen

Charlotte Marie Bisgaard Nielsen is MA in language psychology, art history and Spanish. Wrote the thesis "Sprog, der ikke kommunikerer" (Language that does not communicate) about communication in public campaigns (2002), external senior lecturer in Methods within the field of language psychology at the department of Nordic Philology and language psychology at the University of Copenhagen, 10-12th grade teacher, co-editor of "På sporet af Sprogpsykologi" (In search of language psychology) (Frydenlund 2005), a practice marveller and an artist 

Udgivelsesdato: vinter 05/06