News/Research

Justin Berner at the NYU-Columbia Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Conference

07 Jun, 2017

Justin Berner at the NYU-Columbia Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Conference

This spring, we were pleased to offer several grants to help support our students in sharing their research at the premiere conferences in their field. Below, Justin Berner reflects on his experience at the NYU-Columbia Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Conference this April at NYU, New York. He presented his paper “Waking up to a World in Color: Spanish Television Advertisements during La Transición.”

In his own words:

Originally written for Professor De Kosnik’s fall 2016 seminar, “Making Sense of Cultural Data,” I presented my paper on Spanish television advertisements in the late 1970s and 1980s at the NYU-Columbia Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Conference held at NYU this April under the theme of “Happiness: Politics, Aesthetics and Anxieties.” Based on a data set of 200 commercials, the objective of the paper was to attempt to understand what visual characteristics were both prominent and novel in advertising during the years of social and cultural awakening following the prior four decades of authoritarian dictatorship.

While the original plan was to, like the television itself, distract my audience by projecting select commercials behind me as I spoke, the presentation’s unwieldy file size only allowed the first few slides to show before freezing the provided laptop. Regardless, the presentation was received well and thanks to the commentary and questions afterwards I gained a better understanding of how the paper can be better situated within a broader discourse of Spanish television and media studies. While Spanish television advertisements and the medium itself underwent long-delayed changes during the transition to democracy, many of these changes (especially the adoption of color) had existed prior in cinema and others were much more representative of the adoption of American advertising techniques and aesthetics; thus, preparing this paper for publication, I now am investigating why these trends – especially the adoption of an American, postmodern visual aesthetic – rose to prominence in television advertisements during this period in Spain’s history.