My methodology is much closer to literary analysis. It resembles the approach used by a fellow student of literature, Kenneth Burke, in The Rhetoric of Religion . I take the line as a given, then try to create a context in which it makes sense. I hope the verbal descriptions help you imagine what they were like. The immediate context for any commercial consists of other commercials.
Viewers apparently remember and compare commercials.
That supposition underlies Frank Deford's 1984 scrapbook on the Miller Lite commercials. Many television commercials, for example, are loaded with images of ways to be. A commercial of this kind from the summer of 1987 shows vivid, masterly scenes of idealized family togetherness. Parents, children, and grandparents move together in a miniature drama of family closeness. They smile, they move close to one another, they look at one another with glowing fondness.