Soc172a Advertising and Society

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Soc172aAdvertising and Society

• Lecture 7
• Advertising and Culture Looking Beneath the
  Surface

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Two Approaches to Studying Advertisements

• Content analysis
• Quantitative and quantitative/qualitative
• Can tell you what ads contain
• Semiotic analysis
• Qualitative
• Can tell you what ads mean

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Semiotics

• the language of signs
• Based on ideas of linguists Ferdinand de Saussure
  and Roland Barthes
• Sign signifier (concrete) signified
  (abstract)
• What is signified has a denotation (manifest
  meaning) an connotation (latent meaning)
• C. S. Peirce (American philosopher)
• Described 3 types of signs
• Icon
• Index
• Symbol

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Semiotics (cont)

• Content analysis can tell you the denotations
• Semiotics can tell the connotations
• Should use both to fully understand an ad
• i.e. Erving Goffmans Gender Advertising show
  us a great deal about how we culturally construct
  gender in our society

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Culture

• A set of shared meanings
• Beliefs, values, practices shared by memebrs of a
  community or a society
• We pass on culture through the stories we tell
  about life (Gerbner)

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Types of Culture

• Jib Fowles on pop culture and advertising
• Advertising can be seen as
• A subset of pop culture
• As pop culture
• As a parallel institution to pop culture
• As the art of culture (Schudson)

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Types (cont.)

• High Culture
• The culture of ideas
• Middle Culture
• The culture of things
• Low Culture
• The culture of people
• Other Folk culture, youth culture, etc.

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Cultural Capital

• French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu distinguishes
  between
• Economic capital (wealth)
• Social capital (class and status)
• Cultural capital
• Education
• Sophistication of taste esp. in consumption

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Cultural Capital and Advertising

• High advertising
• Complex, sophisticated imagery
• Found in high brow magazines, etc.
• Low advertising
• Simple structure focus on product
• low brow placement
• Middle advertising
• Compound has elements of low and high
• Often interesting and/or humourous

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Cultural (cont.)

• Class distinctions in advertising
• Ads reinforce stratified positions in society

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Reading Culture in Ads

• Culture is a code for understanding the meaning
  behind messages
• Images and music are also messages with meaning
• breeching experiments (H. Garfinkel)
• Griselda Pollock and gender reversals
• A form of breeching experiment
• To uncover hidden sexism in ads

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Gender Reversal (cont.)
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Analyzing Cultural Content in Ads

• Surface Message product info
• Underlying Message
• Info about cultural roles and values
• Products are out cultural signifiers
• Levels of meaning (Judith Williamson)
• 1. Explicit or surface meaning
• 2. Advertisers intended meaning
• 3. Cultural or ideological meaning

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Looking at the Levels of Meaning
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The Seven Deadly Sins in Ads How Advertising
Normalizes Sin

• Pride
• Greed
• Gluttony
• Envy
• Anger
• Sloth
• Lust

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Subliminal Advertising

• When a signal or message is embedded in an ad,
  below the normal limits of perception.
• Indiscernible at a conscious level, but allegedly
  can affect the subconscious.
• Do advertisers use it?
• Does it influence us to buy?
• Pratkanis says no, Key says yes.
• Subception exists (when we notice at a
  subconscious level but are not consciously aware
  of it) but no evidence that we are motivated by it

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• See more at
• http//www.subliminalsex.com/

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Subliminal (cont.)

• However, advertising is effective because it
  draws on the symbols and meanings of our culture
  to persuade us.
• We are motivated by associations we make when we
  subconsciously decode the underlying messages in
  ads.
• This could be called subliminal advertising