Imaging in Advertising

Verbal and Visual Codes of Commerce

Fern L. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135865214
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

The dominance of advertising in everyday life carries potent cultural meaning. As a major force in the rise of "image based culture," advertising spreads images that shape how people live their lives. While scholarship on visual images has advanced our understanding of the role of advertising in society, for example in revealing how images of extremely thin female models and athletic heroes shape ideals and aspirations, images circulated through lagnuage codes--or "verbal images"--in advertising have received less attention.

Imaging in Advertising explores how the verbal and visual work together to build a discourse of advertising that speaks to audiences and has the power to move them to particular thoughts and actions. In this book, Fern L. Johnson presents a series of case studies exploring important advertising images--racial connotations in cigarette advertising, representations of cultural diversity in teen television commercials, metaphors of the face appearing in ads for skin care products, language borrowed from technology to sell non-technology products, and the illusion of personal choice that is promoted in many Internet web sites. Johnson argues that examining the interplay of verbal and visual images as a structured whole exposes the invase role of advertising in shaping culture in 21st century America.

Chapter 1

Advertising images and discourse

We are long past a time when advertising was considered to be just one of many influences on culture—pushing its messages into the cultural mix, interrupting cultural spaces, distracting citizens from more worthy pursuits but yet not part and parcel with culture. Advertising today is part of the cultural environment, weaving in and out of our lives on a daily basis. Advertising, as such, speaks as one of the prominent discourses of our time. James Twitchell (2003) skillfully expresses the almost mythic qualities of advertising in today's consumer culture when he says that, “advertising is the folklore of a commodity culture” (p. 187). While long-standing concerns about the influence of advertising on commodity consumption (that is, with its impact in leading consumers to purchase and use certain goods and services and to view consumption as a critical cultural practice) continue to be an important research interest (see Scott and Batra, 2003), another significant concern about advertising implicates its role in culture more broadly. Advertising as ever-present in the cultural environment circulates images of cultural importance by contributing to socialization and honing attitudes and behavior. “Advertising is not just a business expenditure undertaken in the hope of moving some merchandise off the store shelves, but is rather an integral part of modern culture . . . [I]ts unsurpassed communicative powers recycle cultural models and references back through the networks of social interactions” (Leiss et al., 2005, p. 5). Some of these images are drawn from outside advertising while others are shaped in significant ways through advertising itself.

Advertising has gained cultural prominence because it is the engine of consumer culture. Consumer culture places extraordinary emphasis on goods as signifiers of worth and social identities, with product proliferation at its very core. In an essay recapping scholarship related to consumer culture since the 1980s, Eric Arnould and Craig Thompson (2005) point to its force when they say that, “consumer culture—and the marketplace ideology it conveys—frames consumers’ horizons of conceivable action, feeling, and thought, making certain patterns of behavior and sense-making interpretations more likely than others” (p. 869). There are other forces to be sure, and individuals do make choices from options they perceive as viable. Nonetheless, it is hard in this day and age to fathom identity outside the context of consumer culture.

Academic interest in advertising and culture has been heavily dominated by enchantment with the visual image and its primacy in the structuring of meaning. “Visual culture” has been a prominent concept in media studies for some time, which is not surprising given the rapid rise of visual media such as television and video recording in the twentieth century. The visual appeal of advertising cannot be ignored, but I believe conceptualizing advertising as steeped in “discourse culture” opens the lens wider on ways in which advertising works as cultural text. My interest in writing this book lies first in a desire to explore the types of discourse images presented in advertising, especially the role of verbal codes in the imaging process. Second, I am interested in focusing on advertising as a circulator of evolving ideological codes. In this regard, advertising figures as part of our experiences as cultural beings quite apart from the particular products that are being sold. How does the advertisement circulate its visual and verbal images within larger societal discourses, and what images are circulated? Katherine Frith in “Undressing the ad: Reading culture in advertising” (1997) makes the point that:

[T]he background of the advertisement is as important as the foreground because it creates the context without which there can be no meaning. Analyzing the cultural content of an advertisement involves interpreting both verbal and visual aspects of the advertising text to determine not only the primary sales message but also additional secondary social and cultural messages. (Frith, 1997, p. 4)

The secondary aspects to which Frith refers are more than secondary in today's barrage of advertising across media—print, television, Internet, mobile phone, Personal Digital Assistants.

Advertising as an enterprise is centered on establishing the “commodity-assign.” The verbal and visual images featured in advertising draw from a knowable world but then rework, magnify, simplify, contort or otherwise reshape and sharpen the salient signifiers. The logic of advertising relies heavily on ellipsis and inference, or the omission of items necessary to complete the text. The ellipsis draws into the ad unstated, complex sign systems that are meaningful in a cultural, ideologically coded context and left unarticulated, and must be inferred by the cultural reader. As Robert Goldman (1992) states it:

The commodity-as-sign operates when images are allied to particular products and product images are then deployed as signifiers of particular relations or experiences . . . [The] image is then arbitrarily attached to a product which has itself been detached from the customary relations of usage formerly associated with it. In this process, the product becomes equivalent to the discrete image . . . and begins to function as a sign of that image, so that when we think of the product we think of the image and when we think of the image we think of the product. (p. 18)

Guy Cook (2001) uses the term “fusion” to characterize the relationship of the signs in an advertisement to their more expansive, cultural sphere.

Advertising is a purveyor of ideological codes and cultural patterns through the arrangement of discourse elements that are calculated to establish certain images. An ad has “meaning” by virtue of the verbal and visual imaging of its text, as interpreted by a spectator. The chapters in this book address specific instances of imaging in advertising. As case studies, each chapter analyzes a different way in which imaging draws on language, and each focuses on issues that have larger social and ideological characteristics and consequences. In some cases, the analysis closely examines the relation of verbal and visual codes, and in others, a broader analysis of the communicative form and potential of the ads is at issue. The type of analysis presented in this book features critical interpretative examination of advertising in relation to culture, especially to the linkages of advertising and codes of meaning that are the building blocks for ideology. As context for these chapters, I first address the concept of imaging in advertising and then provide a brief review of the type of work that has been focused on language (and discourse more broadly) in advertising.

Imaging in advertising

My approach to understanding the verbal and visual elements in advertising is part of a broader interest in what I term “discourse imaging” in advertising. In the chapters that follow, I am working with the idea that images and the processes of imaging engage verbal as well as visual codes. Most people tend to think of images as activated by vision—literally through the eyes or even the lens of the camera. But we also know that language evokes the visual when there is no eye to see or lens to capture a picture. The visual is typically seen as the quintessence of advertising culture, and the term “image-based culture” has come to mean visual dominance in culture. Most people do, in fact, describe their consumption of advertising as looking. We say that we “look” at ads, not that we “read” them (unless, of course, the person uttering the statement is a cultural critic who uses the notion of “text” to mean any presentation of connected signs). Sut Jhally (2003), for example, characterizes the image-system of advertising, and other visual media, as having two basic characteristics: “reliance on visual modes of representation and the increasing speed and rapidity of the images that constitute it [the visual representation]” (p. 255). Robert Goldman and Steven Papson (1996), in an excellent treatment of the signification process in advertising, discuss the “floating signifiers” that recombine in ways that disjoint expected signifier–signified relationships as leading to “image banks”—where image means the visual repository of signs—photos, logos, graphic design—put to the ends of selling and product or service promotion.

Yet, almost any advertising image we can think of takes its meaning at least in part from language. Even in ads that carry no verbal elements in addition to product name, that product name as a verbal element is central in the creation of the ad's meaning. The composition of perfume and cologne ads, for example, often consists of three elements: a visual image of the product in its bottle; a visual image of a person in some pose designed to evoke particular meanings; and the product name, which has been selected for its connotations, such as “Euphoria,” “Trésor,” “Armani Code,” “Clinique Happy,” “Ralph Lauren Hot,” “Ralph Lauren Polo Blue,” “Guess Man,” “Phat Farm Spirit of Man.” Even if “Happy” and “Hot” smelled exactly the same, their meanings would differ because of the connotations evoked by their names. The linguistic elements circulate with the visual images in and out of the larger cultural discourses from which they are drawn and that they impact. The verbal elements are all the more prominent in Internet advertising, where new, extended formats of brand extensions are popping up with greater and greater frequency. Some of the more elaborate Internet advertising provides the viewer with “talking pictures” that unfold in narrative form using multiple resources of language.

In considering the totality of advertising in the context of consumer culture and as a major vehicle of ideology, language, then, must be seen as integral to the images that flow from advertising. Language has the capacity to frame, either sharply or more diffusely, an idea or disposition. Indeed, the entry for image in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (Murfin and Ray, 2003) notes that, “At its extreme, image may be used to mean ‘idea’ “ (p. 210). Applied to advertising, we might say that consumers make sense of advertising by interpreting the interplay of verbal and visual representation within a meaningful cultural context to form some type of meaningful impression.

Advertising moved some time ago from product demonstrations and information to image-based displays that are often only marginally related to the products themselves, or that so substantially abbreviate product information that interpretation rests on the viewer/reader bringing to the ad a cultural discourse more fully developed than appears in the ad's presentation. We are rarely presented with extensive product information, except where required by law or where the product itself would not be accepted without verbal elaboration (for example, advertisements for pharmaceutical products). Some technology products are also advertised with extensive text, as are a few ads for cars. What we are presented with in most cases is an imaging process using carefully selected words and visual symbols. Although fixed within the print ad, commercial, or Internet segment, the moment of any advertisement is a process through which the elements constituting the images that are perceived are in relationship to the ongoing accumulation of cultural meanings and personal experiences of the advertising audience.

Why is it important to understand verbal and visual discourse images in advertising? Richard Dyer (1993) in his book, The Matter of Images, discusses representation in a way that helps us think about image.

. . . [R]epresentations are presentations, always and necessarily entailing the use of the codes and conventions of the available cultural forms of presentation. Such forms restrict and shape what can be said by and/or about any aspect of reality in a given place in a given society at a given time, but if that seems like a limitation on saying, it is also what makes saying possible at all. Cultural forms set the wider terms of limitation and possibility for the (re)presentation of particularities and we have to understand how the latter are caught in the former in order to understand why such-and-such gets (re)presented in the way it does. Without understanding the way images function in terms of, say narrative, genre or spectacle, we don't really understand why they turn out the way they do. (p. 2)

The point here is that the meaning of any image is always embedded in other patterns of cultural representation.

In media studies, the nature and significance of representation is associated most directly with the work of Stuart Hall. In what is considered a landmark essay on race and ideology, Hall (1981) identifies language as the central resource for elaborating ideological resources, and major media forms and institutions as a primary source for defining ideology. The role of media in circulating ideology—both by reiterating and transforming its themes—is especially central, says Hall, because media produce “representations of the social world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work” (p. 31). This proposition about ideology and media can be applied to the specific medium of advertising. Through language and visual images, advertising packages discourse codes that grind out representations of the social world but can also disrupt, redirect and accelerate how the social world is conceptually configured. To take a prominent example, advertising in the US has for some time been a central force in the abundance of discourse codes that represent thinness as the ideal female body image and as central to the conception of (White) female beauty. The avalanche of fashion ads on the one hand and ads for diets, diet aids, exercise programs, and body alteration on the other keeps this image system alive despite the growth of critiques of this negative system of representation. The analysis in Chapter 4 demonstrates how advertising is more recently cementing the image of a wrinkle-free face as normative—not just aspirational—for middle-aged and older women. More and more, the message is that women should and must deal with their facial aging. Advertising also repetitively reaffirms racial polarities, especially the polarity of Black and White, even if new elements of racial configurations appear from time to time. Advertising does not act alone in these ideological trajectories, but it is central because of its day-to-day prominence in the cultural environment. Advertising presents a broad range of “public symbols” that have the potential to guide individuals “in their daily work of identity development and maintenance” (Richards et al., 2000, pp. 2–3). Who we are—individually, as members of groups and categories, as a society—is intimately tied to the image system communicated through advertising.

Defining discourse

The emphasis I am placing on verbal imaging in advertising is not intended to minimize the larger pool of discourse imaging elements. Rather, this emphasis serves to bring the significance of language to the forefront of our understanding of advertising as a cultural process. Advertising, taken as a whole, is itself a discourse, meaning both that it is articulated with conventions of practice and that it uses particular discourse elements to structure its meaning potential. To examine what the discourse of advertising entails, we need specific concepts and terms to guide our work. For this purpose, a working definition of discourse and several key features of discourse are presented here as a way of introducing the case studies that follow.

The most significant move in claiming the importance and not just the techniques of discourse, specifically language, in advertising was Judith Williamson's 1978 Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Williamson argued, “advertisements . . . provide a structure which is capable of transforming the language of objects to that of people, and vice versa” (p. 12). Working within a semiotics perspective, she skillfully unraveled what she called “correlation,” or the way in which advertising links two things “not by the line of an argument or a narrative but by their place in a picture, by its formal structure” (p. 19). Her work stands as a landmark in the study of discourse and advertising and, without question, represents the most sophisticated semiotic analysis available.

Discourse can be defined in a number of different ways. Linguistically, discourse is distinguished from isolated words and sentences, which are elements of discourse but not discourse itself. Discourse occurs when there is a meaningful stretch of speech or written text. Linguistically, discourse is unfolding, for example, when people exchange greetings, engage in conversation, or participate together in a meeting. Specialists in discourse analysis refer to these as examples of “language-in-use.” Discourse could also refer to a written text, such as a “discourse on immigration reform” or even a love letter.

Another perspective on discourse comes from the field of sociolinguistics and is centered more on the resources used to communicate and how those resources function and have impact in their social context. This definition of discourse draws both on language and on systems for nonverbal communication and visual representation. When patterns of discourse are developed sufficiently so that they are well recognized in a society or group, they can serve important ideological functions. There are always a number of different and quite specific patterns of discourse functioning at any one time in a culture. Jim Gee (1992) provides a sociolinguistic explanation of discourses that shows the complexity of language in its cultural context:

Each Discourse involves ways of talking, acting, interacting, valuing, and believing, as well as the spaces and material “props” the group uses to carry out its social practices. Discourses integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes . . . Discourses are always ways of displaying . . . membership in a particular social group or social world. (p. 107)

Discourses also build up to create social knowledge and to regulate social behavior—a perspective on discourse developed extensively by Michel Foucault. In this usage of discourse, language and all that goes with it create meaning but also limit meaning. Discourse construed in this manner is the central defining system for culture, into which the individual is subsumed and socialized.

An approach called Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been developed in recent years to decipher and explain how discourse works in society, especially to establish and maintain power relations. CDA is not, thus, limited to analysis of discourse but rather extends to critical analysis of the interlacing of discourse with political,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables and Transcripts
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Advertising images and discourse
• 2 Smoke and mirrors—Circulating racial images in cigarette advertising
• 3 Keeping race in place—Multicultural visions and voices in teen advertising
• 4 Different tropes for different folks—Advertising and face-fixing
• 5 Madison Avenue meets Silicon Valley—Technology imprints on advertising
• 6 From Barbie to BudTV—Advertising in the Fifth Frame
• References
• Index