Advertising and Consumption: Reconfiguring European Society in the 20th century (original) (raw)
Advertising, the Media, and Globalization
Media Industries Journal
Advertising is a crucial media industry, not only in its own right but also because of the intermediary structural relation it holds between the commercial media on one hand and the consumer goods and service industries on the other. This can be conceived as a manufacturing-marketingmedia complex. However, the traditional business model that facilitated this relationship in the mass media era is now under challenge from the new forms of social communication afforded by the internet. Accordingly, such a fundamental transformation forces a critical review of how advertising has been understood. This essay explains how former approaches such as the semiological analysis of advertisements, the Marxist political economy of value, ethnographic studies of advertising practice, and the "cultural turn" in social theory have all been superseded to a greater or lesser extent by the reorientation of advertising within a broader conceptual landscape of consumer culture, and by contemporary theory and research on branding. Furthermore, attention is given to the historical globalization of the corporations that own the brands and the advertising industry's response, which has been to consolidate into a small number of global umbrella corporations that coordinate and manage a host of specialist divisions across the whole field of "integrated marketing communications."
Fears of Enchantment: Advertising Theory in Britain and the Making of a Modern Myth
Cultural History, 2023
This article examines the first emergence of theories of advertising in the psychological language of the nonrational mind in Britain. The theories appeared from the close of the nineteenth century in a new genre of advertising literature: books, essays, pamphlets, course offerings, and periodical publications dedicated to advertising. In dialogue with a forgotten 1911 novel by Oliver Onions, Good Boy Seldom: A Romance of Advertisement, the analysis considers the anxieties that attended the new theories, which attributed unusual power to advertising and therefore challenged perceptions of the capitalist economy as disenchanted and disenchanting. It also shows the efforts that professional advertisers made to reconcile their theories with views of consumers as rational, and of the advertising industry itself as a rationalizing force. Their efforts suggest a misinterpretation by Onions and critics of advertising that he foreshadowed, who portrayed advertising professionals as bold canvassers of the public psyche. In fact, they were insecure and uncomfortable with their terms of expertise, and developed them because mounting criticisms leveled at advertising left them little choice. Nonetheless, Onions captured the lasting power of this transformation. Despite their insecurity, early professionals created a myth still harbored today, that advertisers are masters of subliminal control in capitalism.
Advertising, the Media and Globalisation
The media industries are different from other industries because of their privileged place in social communication, and the extensive influence they are seen to wield upon public opinion, cultural norms and values, and the popular imaginary. This truism applies particularly to the advertising industry, for not only does advertising have a high visibility in the cultural environment, but it is the vital source of the revenue that supports and motivates all commercial media. It could even be said that advertising is the media industry which stands behind all the other media industries. However, research approaches of past decades have tended to concentrate upon the products of the advertising industry, that is, advertisements, and their cultural significance, rather than to penetrate beyond to the industry as such – its political and cultural economy; the relations between advertisers, advertising agencies and the media; and actual advertising practices. More contemporary research has focussed directly on these fundamentals, particularly in the context of globalisation and the complex transition from 'old' to 'new' media (Sinclair 2012). The very meaning of 'advertising' as we have known it is in flux, for the advent of the internet has transformed the character of advertising media as formerly understood. The comfortable relationship which has existed between advertisers, agencies and media throughout the golden age of mass media in decades past – in which the media would offer content that could attract audiences so as to sell access to those audiences to advertisers via the agencies – is a 'business model' which is now under severe pressure. The interactive properties of the internet, with the affordances of social networking and direct commercial transactions, have precipitated a shift in the balance of power between advertisers and consumers, just as they have caused the still-dominant advertising media of television and print to lose growth in advertising revenue in favour of the internet. Meanwhile, on the internet itself, emergent new business models compete for hegemony.
2010
The history of advertising, marketing and consumption is enjoying increasing attention among business historians as well as historians of British culture and society.2 By its very nature, advertising and consumption challenge and transgress disciplinary boundaries between economics, sociology, political studies and history. The study of advertising campaigns, advertised products and their consumers includes businesses, social attitudes, cultural values, and the political frameworks within which the activities of production, branding, marketing, shopping and consumption take place. Historians of advertising and consumption often face the problem of finding adequate sources to study their subjects. While archives of political organisations or of manufacturing houses tend to be well-organised and easily accessible, undergraduate and post-graduate students in particular have great difficulties in finding relevant archival material in order to pursue their subjects in the areas of market...
Advertising and the Way Forward
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2020
In this editorial for WPCC's special issue on 'Advertising for the Human Good' editor Carl Jones outlines a few milestones demonstrating advertising's potential via mass media for motivating progressive behaviours in the public. Matching corporate social responsibility ideals and reflecting the social concerns of millennial consumers and audiences is becoming increasingly important for brands and even governments. Whilst existing publications in academic and professional literature raise concerns over the links between capitalist consumerism and advertising, articles in this issue highlight different examples of practice or approach that have the potential to motivate progressive behaviours in various cultures. These include ambient advertising, neuroscience, brands' cause donations, decolonisation and social modelling on the one hand, and anti-racism, recycling, sustainable tourism and choice of advertising talent, on the other. This editorial observes how the evolved practice of advertising can work within different ideologies, with the objective of generating advertising for the human good but also how change may need to come from within advertising and society generally as attitudes change over time.
Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories
Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories, 2018
This key textbook traces the development of advertising from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, providing connections with the past that illuminate present developments and point to future possibilities. Chapters take a variety of theoretical approaches to address four main themes: how advertising imagines the future through the promise of transformation; how tribalism creates a sense of collective identity organised around a product; how advertising builds engagement through participation/presumption; how the blurring of advertising, news, art, education and entertainment characterises the attention economy. P. David Marshall and Joanne Morreale expertly trace these themes back to the origins of consumer culture and demonstrate that, while they have adapted to accord with new technologies, they remain the central foci of advertising today. Ideal for researchers of Media Studies, Communication, Cultural Studies or Advertising at all levels, this is the essential guide to understanding the contemporary milieu and future directions for the advertising industry.
2. Advertising and Modernity: A Critical Reassessment
2021
This chapter aims to deconstruct the category of modernity by confronting a prevailing abstracted view on screen advertising with the contingencies of its archival history. Taking as a case study the 1960s 'cola wars' and the marketing of cola soft drinks, the chapter shows how this competition between Pepsi and Coke related to stylistic innovations such as montage sequences, and what relevant mid-level finds can be made regarding one specific Pepsi campaign of that era without indulging in overly general arguments about modernism or modernity.
Cultural Values, 2000
This paper sets out to review the role accorded to advertising in recent critical work. This work, I suggest, has been underscored by an 'epochalist' concern to map distinctions in the form of the culture/ economy relationship between the contemporary era and earlier periods. Significance has been accorded to the particular transformative potential of advertising and this is often related to research which emphasises the increasingly symbolic, persuasive and pervasive nature of advertising. In what follows, I make three central propositions. Firstly, I argue that writers on advertising share a number of concerns particularly about the effect the evolving nature of advertising has on the relationship between people and objects and between culture and economy. Secondly I suggest that these writers share with certain other critical theorists a very particular approach to the definition of key entities like meaning, culture and economy. These very particular definitions are pivotal to the epochalist explanation of advertising's role in the transformation of the culture/ economy relation. Finally, I attempt to show, through a brief look at historical uses of persuasion in advertising, that the problem with epochalist theory lies in a tendency to overgeneralise a wide range of specific forces.
The central inquiry of this monograph is how advertising practitioners in Britain and the Netherlands viewed television advertising - and especially its content - in the years before and after its launch: from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s in Britain and from the early 1960s to the early 1970s in the Netherlands. The coming of the new medium offered advertisers new opportunities to reach their public, but it also forced them to find a new rhetoric. How did the views of practitioners regarding television advertising content develop in the first ten to fifteen years after its launch? Did they change, and if so, how can these changes be explained? By studying its early historical development, this monograph seeks to add to our understanding of the phenomenon of TV advertising in general. The discourse among advertising practitioners on the content of television advertising forms its heart. This publication is the result of the HERA research project Technology Exchange and Flow (TEF).