The Dynamics of Advertising

Jackie Botterill, Iain MacRury, Barry Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134434930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

The authors suggest that advertisments, while important in our daily emotional self-management, are far more closely linked to the pragmatics of everyday life than their symbolic richness might suggest. Recent trends in advertisment content point to an important shift in our relationship to goods that reflects an increasing preoccupation with risk management.

Chapter 1

Introduction: ‘Dynamic and Sensuous Representations of Cultural Values’

We choose the phrase ‘the dynamics’ of advertising in order to speak of two things. One is the impact that advertising has on the individual—the psychological tensions and conflicts that may be activated, and the reliefs, hopes and pleasures which may be offered, in a brief encounter with an advertisement. The other is the part that advertising is playing in the process of cultural change—the stimulus or the resistance that particular advertisements may offer to certain trends, the part that advertising as a whole is playing in the complex developments transforming our culture.

The link between these two areas of dynamic tension and change, between the psychic and the social, is in cultural values. By this we mean the categories which people use when they are evaluating something, such as an experience they have just had, a consumer good on offer, or a communication of any sort. These values are used by us as individuals to organise our experience of ourselves, while they are also integral to large-scale processes of change in society.

We began with the assumption—which we think is amply supported by our data—that advertisements are suffused with cultural values. In poster form, they are one of the most prominent carriers of these values in public space. On TV and in the press, we think of the commercials as a ‘break’, and see advertisements as extra to and different from the programming and editorial material which is what we think we really watch and read. Nonetheless, advertisements form part of the continuous stream of words and images. They are as laden with values as the programmes and articles which they seem, at times, to ‘interrupt’. As the American historian Jackson Lears (1994) has said, advertisements have become ‘perhaps the most dynamic and sensuous representations of cultural values in the world’.

Advertisements are therefore an important focus for a study of cultural values, and for an attempt to answer the question of whether these values are changing, and if so in what directions. In seeing values as rooted deeply in both inner psychological life and global cultural trends, we are setting out a psycho-social approach to the study of culture and cultural change. As the reader will see, we develop what we think is an innovative and fruitful psycho-social approach, one based on combining ideas from British psychoanalysis with some from contemporary social theory.

Through this psycho-social approach to the study of values (or socio-psychoanalytic approach, we might equally say), we try to provide answers to some questions of importance to all those interested in understanding the nature of contemporary society. Is the move into what some call the ‘postmodern’ world involving deep changes in the values of our culture? If there is some change, in what areas and at what speed is it taking place? Where do we now find credible sources of authority? And in what general terms do we define our needs and wants—how do we now pursue happiness, or the mitigation of unhappiness?

It is our belief that the study of advertisements can contribute to the exploration of these complex questions. Despite their ephemerality, and their belonging to what many see as the trivial or ignoble business of selling branded goods, they command an influential place in everyday culture. Their influence is a testimony to what money can buy. The money poured into advertising secures it a prominent place in most people’s daily experience (hours of prime-time TV, acres of roadside hoardings, pages of glossy magazines, and so on), and also makes it likely that the messages broadcast from these hilltops of the information society will be well crafted. The creative and technological resources deployed in advertising are considerable; the dramatic power of some of the images is very great. An important part of the intense crafting process is the extensive research which is often involved in several phases of the marketing process, including pre-testing a number of possibilities, then post-testing the ones chosen to run. While some opinion in the advertising industry may be sceptical of the value of such work, the ratio of research to output is very high in advertising, and many other professionals would envy the extent to which advertising agencies can adjust their products in the light of feedback from research.

This is not to say that advertisements are necessarily effective in persuading us to buy the goods they promote; the commercial efficacy of advertisements is a separate issue from their cultural impact. A particular advertisement or campaign may have had no appreciable effect on sales figures, yet may have been very well known, or notorious, or may simply have added to the vocabulary or imagery available to a general public for use in conversation, daydreaming, and thinking about everyday experience. As part of the general pool of public symbols, it is available—as we argue later on—for use by individuals in their daily work of identity development and maintenance.

One important category of advertising is in fact based upon the assumption that whether or not advertisements directly affect consumer behaviours, they do act upon our general stock of perceptions and ideas about social institutions and social values. This is corporate advertising, where the purpose of the advertisement is to enhance the image of the corporation or of the general brand, not of any specific product. The purpose of this is either to influence social values (e.g. an oil or power-generating company seeking to influence ideas about the environment and what may or may not be damaging to it), or—more usually—to establish a connection between the company or brand and an already-established positive value, such as ecological responsibility.

It is also the case that some kinds of product advertising depend for their commercial effectiveness on having a wide cultural effect. Advertisements for expensive goods—prestige cars, designer sunglasses, gold watches and the like—are ‘aimed’ at only a small percentage of the population, if they are considered purely as appeals to buy. However it is sometimes pointed out that even though, say, less than 1% of the population is potentially in the market for a particular type of car, the advertiser hopes that many of the other 99% will register their advertisements, because the purchasers of such cars like to feel that others know the meaning of what they have bought.

We are moving here to discuss the nebulous yet powerful aura of the ‘brand’. In this era of identity, many deep psychic and social forces are organised around identities of various sorts. In commercial culture this trend has been reflected in the growing importance of brand and corporate identities. One aspect of the research reported in this book is a study of how brands are gathering places for important values, and of how the competitive ‘conversations’ that we can see going on between brands in their advertising can be a contribution to the play of values in culture as a whole.

Our view of advertising in general is that it constitutes a kind of public conversation, an exchange of symbols, images, words and phrases. Although at one level it is a one-way communication—from advertisers and their agencies to us the public—in another, deeper sense it is a place where popular culture is in communication with itself, and is therefore being both reproduced and changed. The advertising agencies’ role is to attend closely to the multifarious sights and sounds generated daily in popular culture, in its specifically national forms and in those global aspects of it which arrive on the national scene, and to pick out those which seem to be helpful in the construction of an advertising message. These chosen elements are then fed instantly back into the popular culture, perhaps with a different nuance, or combined with different elements, or in some other context which adds to or inflects their meanings. Given—as we noted above—the loudness and the skill with which advertisements speak, this circulation of words and images plays a significant part in the constant negotiation and sharing of meanings which comprises popular culture. In this respect it should be clear why advertising professionals are seen as being amongst the new ‘cultural intermediaries’, people whose work involves the production, transmission or mediation of meanings, whether carried by words or images.

We do not underestimate the extent to which advertising’s role in the conversational process has been a negative one, in that the meanings which it has picked out for confirmation and enhancement have often been elitist, sexist or racist ones, or have valorised the selfish or the superficial. The advertising industry, like other parts of the modern marketing apparatus, has on the whole exhibited an extraordinary tunnel vision, such that it has for much of the time been able to judge itself only by its commercial objectives or by its own limited notions of aesthetic excellence, even though its practitioners have been aware that—to modify a notorious statement by Margaret Thatcher—there is such a thing as society, and that they are a part of it.

So in describing advertising as a public conversation, we are not seeking to sanitise its image. Some of the voices which have been heard in that conversation have been self-satisfied, and on occasions some may have been ugly and divisive. We do however want to place it firmly in the contexts of popular culture and social change of which it is an integral part, and we are critical of those traditions of thought which see it as an essentially malign force imposed from without on a public who are inevitably degraded by it. We do not hold a brief either for the industry or its traditional critics, but are attempting to develop a complex understanding of public communication in which the assessment of advertising will be multi-dimensional.

Overall this book has three main aims. One is to review existing work on advertising by social scientists and cultural theorists. We provide a critical summary of much of this work, identifying those approaches which seem to us to be more adequate to the task of understanding the complexities of advertising. We consider the existing work in relation to some current debates about contemporary social change, particularly about the nature of what some writers have called ‘postmodernity’, or what others including ourselves prefer to call ‘late modernity’.

The second aim is to set out a new approach to understanding advertising, based on a psychodynamic analysis of how advertisements are actually ‘read’. This approach is part of a broader understanding of cultural processes, especially in relation to popular culture, and of how they are related to the psychic lives of individuals. Our work on advertising is one component in the development of a ‘psychoanalytic sociology’ of contemporary culture.

Thirdly we describe some particular research into advertisement content, using a new method of content analysis based on a psychoanalytic approach to cultural values. We offer some reflections on what our findings tell us about some recent cultural trends. They suggest that no matter how dense and vibrant with signs and symbols the late modern world has become, material goods and practical services, and the uses we make of them, continue to have deep significance in the construction and maintenance of personal and social identities.

The combination of these aims has resulted, we hope, in a book that will be of interest and value to all students on courses studying popular culture, media and communications, the sociology of postmodernity, and the emergent field of psychoanalytic studies. Since it has grown out of our own work in the interdisciplinary field of psycho-social studies, we hope that it will also be of potential interest to interdisciplinary students and scholars who are not working specifically on issues concerned with advertising or public communication but for whom our efforts to integrate psychoanalytic concepts with social theory might provide some useful models for developing interdisciplinary understanding.

Another divide we have sought to bridge is between, on the one hand, the qualitative, interpretive methods favoured both by psychoanalytically-influenced approaches and by cultural studies, and on the other the quantitative methods which are the traditional approach of the social or psychological scientist. We have developed methods for quantitatively assessing the presence of certain psychological formations, an undertaking which many people working within the psychoanalytic tradition on which we are drawing would probably regard as invalid.

We are sure, though, that it is necessary to find a new approach to the gathering of evidence about the impact of advertising, and about many broader issues concerning cultural change. Academic debates about the nature and significance of the postmodern tend to oscillate between the unrestrained play of high theory on the one hand, and the offering of vignettes about contingently-chosen cultural phenomena (observations which an author happens to like or to find significant) on the other. We have sought to create a ‘middle ground’, that is a large but focused body of systematic evidence, drawn from the close scrutiny of over 2500 advertisements. While based methodologically on conventional social science research methods, this approach is addressed to the major theoretical issues of the day concerning the nature of contemporary culture, and is also enriched by an intuitive approach to case studies which form an important supplementary kind of evidence.

There are basically two ways of embarking on a systematic study of a culture. One can either examine its texts and artefacts, or talk to its subjects. Most academic studies of advertising have tended more towards the first method—they have studied advertisements themselves, or the recorded history of the advertising industry or the writings of its practitioners. In the work reported here, we have remained primarily oriented to this method. Amassing good samples of old advertisements can be very difficult, and, as the commercial value of old images becomes more widely recognised, can be expensive. On the whole, though, text-based research is less costly than setting up a large number of interviews. However, we have begun in this study to introduce where possible some measure of the second, ethnographic type of method. A complete research strategy needs to incorporate both, and having developed here a method for analysing what is presented to the public we will in any future work be giving more attention to the study of the appropriations of that material by individuals. Commercial studies of advertising have tended heavily towards this second approach, mainly by the use of focus groups to assess public perceptions of and responses to particular advertisements. Another bridging aspiration of our work was to make some connections, if possible, between academic and commercial understandings of what advertising does. More specifically, the divide to be crossed here is between commercial work on the one side and the studies of advertising conducted in social science and cultural studies departments on the other; academic work in marketing and business studies departments of universities may be closer to the concerns and techniques of the commercial researcher.

Some work of recent years in cultural studies, especially semiotics, has made an impact in the commercial research field, but it is our perception that there is very little exchange across this divide. There are good reasons for this. Although much data is collected by commercial researchers which is potentially of value to academics (e.g. the focus group is a simple tool for the production of huge amounts of ethnographic data), it is acquired at considerable expense by companies who then probably see it as a commercial asset and are unwilling to release it. When, after a period of time, its commercial sensitivity has declined, there is the question of the retrieval costs—who, even if asked, is going to take the time to dig the records out, check them and present them to academic researchers?¹

It is even less surprising that there has been little influence or input in the other direction, from academia to commerce, because the agendas of academics are typically very different from those of practitioners. Even when academic work is not premised upon assumptions highly critical of the whole business of marketing, it is likely to be looking for a very different kind of significance in data—for what an image or a statement tells us about society, rather than about the efficacy of a particular advertising message in influencing consumer behaviour.

However the practical efficacy of a message is determined at least in part by its place in the cultural web of meanings, and the study of social trends has an accepted place in the backroom operations of marketing. So we have sought to try out our approach to the analysis of advertising messages in commercial contexts. Two occasions on which that has been possible are reported on, in Chapters 8 and 10. We were eager to learn more about the contexts in which commercial research is conducted, and how its findings are used, and curious about how our own ideas would be received by marketing professionals. In a longer-term perspective, we would see the strengthening of socially-responsible marketing practices as a feasible and desirable goal, and we hope that well-rounded academic studies of advertising might make an input towards that end. Once the necessity or inevitability of something like advertising is accepted, then it is important to ask which values are being circulated or celebrated in advertisements, and whether advertisers face having to choose between those most likely to be commercially effective and those most likely to contribute to a better society. Our belief is that such choices are not logically necessary, and that in late modern society a large pool of broadly positive social values is available from which advertisers can select the commercially optimal ones.

At the same time it must be said that the tasks of commercial research are clearly distinct from those of academic research per se, and our commitment in this book is primarily to developing an understanding of advertising which can contribute to the overall understanding of contemporary culture. Within this framework, we were able to gather some data in commercial contexts which we think can be used to that end, and to use our general experience of commercial research to inform our theorising.

Some readers will be not be equally interested in all three of the aims outlined earlier. The following guide to the structure and contents of the book will hopefully help to indicate which chapters will be of most interest to different readers.

Chapter 2 provides a brief overview ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: ‘Dynamic and sensuous representations of cultural values’
• 2. The historical dynamics of the advertising industry
• 3. The history of advertisements
• 4. The academic critique of advertising
• 5. The dynamics of cultural change: Commercial culture in the age of identity
• Colour section
• 6. The psychodynamics of advertising
• 7. Psycho-social categories for the study of everyday life
• 8. Driven by passion? Car advertisement content 1950–1998
• 9. Going to market: Banking and the advertising dynamic
• 10. The democratisation of credit
• 11. Conclusions: The re-emergence of the rational consumer
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index