Advertising

1
Advertising

• When I'm watchin' my TVand that man comes on to
  tell mehow white my shirts can be.Well he can't
  be a man 'cause he doesn't smokethe same
  cigarrettes as me.I can't get no, oh no no
  no.Hey hey hey, that's what I say.I can't get
  no satisfaction .
• Rolling Stones

2

• It could be argued that advertising is the most
  influential institution of socialization in
  modern society it structures mass media
  content it seems to play a key role in the
  construction of gender identity it impacts upon
  the relation of children and parents in terms of
  the mediation of and creation of needs it
  dominates strategy in political campaigns
  recently it has emerged as a powerful voice in
  the arena of public policy issues concerning
  energy and regulation it controls some of our
  most important cultural institutions such as
  sports and popular music and it has itself in
  recent years become a favorite topic of everyday
  conversation. Sut Jhally, 1990

3
Do you think a multibillion dollar industry could
possibly have no effect?
4

• Advertising is the main weapon that
  manufacturers use in their attempt to produce
  an adequate consuming market for the products.
  To this end advertising works to create false
  needs in people (false because the are the needs
  of the manufacturers rather than the consumers).
  Sut Jhally

5

• Advertising is a discourse between people and
  objects.
  
• Advertising is the way that markets are produced
  for consumption.
  
• Advertising creates false needs in consumers
  (Recall the Galbraith reading)

6
The Symbolic Meaning of Goods

• Objects have long had both use and symbolic
  meanings.
  
• Goods are a means of social communication.
• Relations of power and privilege are embedded.

7
The History of Symbolic Goods

• Rituals were a means to fix the symbolic meaning
  of goods.
  
• Historically, many societies had only those with
  prestige and those who simply subsisted.
  
• How does the Consumer society alter these
  tendencies?

8
Meaning is No Longer Fixed

• The object has been functionally
  decontextualized.
  
• The definition of an object of consumption is
  entirely independent of objects themselves and
  exclusively a function of the logic of
  signification.
• Consumption occurs within the context of brand
  names.

9
The Floating Signifier Effect

• The appropriation of meanings for advertising
  promotes what is termed the floating signifier
  effect (Baudrillard, 1975) or the shift in the
  use value attached to objects such that any
  meaning or quality can be associated with any
  object.

10
Advertising

• Objects lose any connection to their practical
  utility.
  
• The control over symbolism rather than production
  becomes paramount.
  
• Consumption is relative, rather than absolute
  activity. Satisfaction, therefore, is also
  relative.

11
The Experience of Consumption

• Pleasure
• Comfort
• Disappointment

12
Consumption Takes Place in a Social Context

• Advertising shows us the mediating role that
  commodities could play in relations to
  individuals and expectations.
  

13
What is Freedom?

• Free Market becomes the only type of freedom.
• Free choice in the market becomes an experiment
  in arbitrariness

14
Communication and Satisfaction

• Goods act as both communicators of social
  ideas/power and satisfiers of needs.
  
• The act of consumption itself has come to
  represent what goods once did.
  
• Hence, the act of consumption as a means of
  communication leads to a certain amount of
  satisfaction.

15
Susan Bordo

• Advertisements work as gender ideology.
• Exploitation of womens insecurity
• But the act of consuming also relieves the
  anxiety it creates.

16
Empirical Example- The Adman in the Parlor

• Magazines used fiction, advice, letters etc. to
  instruct consumers in the right and necessary
  forms of production.
  
• Creates a moral base to consumption.
• How does this happen today?

17
Selling Rebellion

• Rebellion As a marketing gimmick is not real
  rebellion.
  
• A commercial notes the exploitation of the common
  worker with impressive statistics.
  
• Are they even real?
• The Commercial is for Universal Studios Orlando
• Kilbourne- alcohol and cigarrettes

18
Coding

• Goods as a means to let others know who we are.
  Goods are sold to us as a means of social
  differentiation.
  
• Baudrillard argues that individual desires are
  disguised expressions of social differences in a
  system of cultural meanings that is produced
  through commodities. Fashion is a code, a set of
  infinitely variable sets of social differences.

19
Implication

• If consumer culture is premised upon the
  production of difference through commodities,
  then the system is extremely resilient.

20
The Move to Specification Market Segmentation

• Viewing a heterogeneous market as a number of
  smaller homogenous markets in response to
  differing product preferences.
  
• Key marketing development.
• Required ability to sample population.
• Some demographics count more than others.

21
Lifestyle Advertising

• Marketing a lifestyle that is associated with
  specific products.
  
• Communicates with market segments
• Gets the right message to the right people at the
  right time

22
Three Trends

• Market Segmentation has led to three interrelated
  trends
  
• 1) Shift from product focused to user centered
  marketing (since the products are often
  indistinguishable)
  
• 2) Increase in narrative and dramatic forms that
  stress benefits to the consumer rather than
  product characteristics
  
• 3) Decline in amount of hard or explicit
  information presented about a product.

23
Its Not a Direct Message

• Meaning is created through the audience. Its an
  active association you make.
  
• We constantly recreate the meanings of
  advertisements

24
Gender and Advertising

• Gender Wars (Men are from Mars, women are from
  Venus)
  
• Women are treated as objects/children
• Desire- men want women, women want chocolate

25
The Codes of the Marketplace

• We depend upon the meaning that they provide for
  the definition of our own social lives.
  
• They depend upon our knowledge of referent
  systems for the operation of meaning.

26
Marketing Ideologies- Propaganda

• Hermann and Chomsky- Manufacturing Consent.
• Propaganda Model- workings of the media serve to
  mobilize public support for the special interests
  that dominate the state and private activity, and
  that their choices, emphases, and omissions can
  often be understood best by analyzing them in
  such terms.
• -focus on inequality in wealth and power, and its
  multi-level effects on mass media interests and
  choices.
  

27
Ingredients of the Propaganda Model

• 1) The size, concentrated ownership, owner
  wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant
  mass media firms
  
• 2) Advertising as the primary income source of
  the mass media
  
• 3) The reliance of the media on information
  provided by government, business, and experts
  funded and approved by these primary sources and
  agents of power
• 4) Flak- as a means of disciplining the media
• 5) Anticommunism as a national religion and
  control mechanism
  
• Being replaced by Anti-terrorism today.

28

• Walter Lippman- refers to the special importance
  of propaganda as the manufacture of consent.
  
• Regular organ of popular government.
• What is unreported?

29
The Homogenization Hypothesis

• Bagdikian (1997)- combination of ownership
  concentration and growing horizontal integration
  that the absence of competition in the media
  industry leads to homogeneous media products.
• By 1998, only 22 American Cities had two or more
  competitive daily newspapers.
  

30
Advertising and the News

• Advertising continues to exert a powerful
  influence on the news media.
  
• -Does it dictate the content of our news?
  Certainly to some degree, but not unilaterally.
  
• News usually depicts advertisers products and
  their broad interests in a favorable light.
  
• Reporters and editors may not see themselves as
  defending their advertisers interest, but they
  are fully aware of the economic role of their
  major advertisers.
• Stories are repeated.

31
Terrorism in Televised Fiction

• Terrorism is placed firmly within a criminal
  rather than a political or economic framework,
  and it is exclusively defined as violent.
  
• Legitimates the states use of violent
  countermeasures by arguing that exceptional
  threats to the social order require exceptional
  responses in which consideration of civil
  liberties, democratic accountability, and due
  process, are held in abeyance in the interests of
  efficiency.