The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture

Emily West, Matthew P. McAllister, Emily West, Matthew P. McAllister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135095567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture provides an essential guide to the key issues, methodologies, concepts, debates, and policies that shape our everyday relationship with advertising.

The book contains eight sections:

• Historical Perspectives considers the historical roots and their relationship to recent changes of contemporary advertising and promotional practice.

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• Political Economy examines how market forces, corporate ownership, and government policies shape the advertising and media promotion environment.

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• Globalization presents work on advertising and marketing as a global, intercultural, and transnational practice.

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• Audiences as Labor, Consumers, Interpreters, Fans introduces how people construct promotional meaning and are constructed as consumers, markets, and labor by advertising forces.

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• Identities analyzes the ways that advertising constructs images and definitions of groups -- such as gender, race and the child -- through industry labor practices, marketing, as well as through representation in advertising texts.

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• Social Institutions looks at the pervasiveness of advertising strategies in different social domains, including politics, music, housing, and education.

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• Everyday Life highlights how a promotional ethos and advertising initiatives pervade self image, values, and relationships.

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• The Environment interrogates advertising's relationship to environmental issues, the promotional efforts of corporations to construct green images, and mass consumption's relationship to material waste.

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With chapters written by leading international scholars working at the intersections of media studies and advertising studies, this book is a go-to source for those looking to understand the ways advertising has shaped consumer culture, in the past and present.

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INTRODUCTION

Emily West and Matthew P. McAllister

Advertising and promotional culture are in the throes of rapid transformation and rethinking, both within the advertising, marketing and media industries, and in the minds of the scholars who describe, analyze, and critique these cultural forms. It seems that, everywhere we look, boundaries and categories that once seemed fixed and know-able are blurring and destabilizing. Practitioners and scholars are rethinking the boundaries between media content and promotion, promotion and advertising, advertiser and audience, community and target market. Advertisers have always sought to insinuate themselves into daily life, but transformations in media technologies, government regulations, economic incentives, and cultural values are opening up new frontiers. Branding and commoditization seem to penetrate our personal lives more than ever, as represented by discourses of personal branding and the exploding market in personal data generated by our online activities.

With chapters written by top scholars in the intersections of media and advertising studies, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture reviews, engages, contextualizes, and extends critical-cultural scholarship on advertising and promotional culture in this era of change. We aim to coalesce this new research agenda by bringing together in this book scholars from different critical perspectives, who nevertheless share similar concerns about new developments in promotional culture. The volume provides historical context, charting the origins of our current promotional culture, and sometimes highlighting how developments that appear “new” are not so new after all. The book's authors also provide scholarly context, locating their arguments and interventions in relation to key theoretical debates. In that sense, the volume aims to map this subfield to those readers who may be new to it, while also providing original analyses of emerging developments in advertising and promotional culture to those who are already familiar with existing scholarship. The chapters help us rethink conceptual categories and foreground how past work can help us understand current and future developments. The broad context to all the chapters is a critical one. Our purpose is not to examine advertising and promotional culture in order to improve its efficacy, but to better understand how it shapes our lives—including our values, communities, and institutions—and, if we conclude that these interventions are undemocratic or disempowering, to point to openings for making change.

Advertising and Promotional Culture: A Shifting Terrain

Promotional culture—including forms of advertising, marketing, and media promotion—is experiencing significant and even radical change in two broad arenas. The first arena involves the cultural and industrial dynamics of the practices of commercial and promotional media. Digital media, data mining and database marketing, integrated marketing communications (IMC), e- and m-commerce, and branded entertainment forms like product integration and advergaming are just a few of the relatively recent developments that have altered how corporations brand and market themselves, and how media systems are funded by commercial interests. Such developments have implications not only for advertising and marketing activities, but for how these cultural forms in turn affect the democratic and aesthetic vibrancy of our media.

The extent to which advertising and promotional media are in a state of flux is difficult to exaggerate. Traditional means of advertising—including through traditional media—are not only being questioned by marketers, but often with outright disdain. Advertising revenues have begun a radical shift away from certain forms of media. For now, television (broadcast and cable combined) maintains its dominance in advertising dollars; more than 30 percent of US advertising revenues went to television in 2010 (“TV's Share of US Advertising” 2011). However, rapid changes in the advertising market are afoot. The share of the US advertising pie by newspapers, for example, has dropped from 25 percent of total ad revenue in 1990 to 11 percent in 2008 (McChesney and Nichols 2010: 33). Other media, especially the Internet, are supplanting more traditional advertising venues. Advertising sales on the Internet increased 15 percent from 2009 to 2010, at which point the Internet's share of US advertising revenue surpassed that of newspapers (“IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” 2011). The explosion in online forms of advertising is connected, in part, to the popularity of social media like Facebook as a destination for advertisers. Indeed, we learned from Facebook's initial public offering that their advertising revenues had increased 145 percent from 2009 to 2010, and from 2010 to 2011 increased another 69 percent to more than 3 billion dollars (“Form S-1 Registration Statement” 2012).

The complexity of digital forms of advertising is indicated by the categories of promotion that the Internet Advertising Bureau tracks: Search, Display Advertising, Sponsorship, Lead Generation, Rich Media, Digital Video Commercials, Classifieds, Email, and Mobile Advertising (“IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” 2011). In fact, the word “advertising”—signaling a traditional spot ad bought as a separate and delineable textual category from non-advertising content—may soon be antiquated, hence the juxtaposition of the term “advertising” with the more all-encompassing and flexible “promotional culture” in the title of this book. New forms of promotion radically blur distinctions between commercial and non-commercial media symbols. Digital venues for purchasing—such as e-commerce websites—merge promotional spaces with retail spaces. New ways of measuring advertising effectiveness—including behavioral-based “pay-per-click” or “pay-per-search” models introduced by the Internet—challenge the traditional “cost-per-mil” exposure estimates of the past. “Below-the-line” forms of unmeasured media spending, including target marketing, viral marketing, and sponsorship, increasingly combine with more traditional forms to create a coherent and widespread branding message that leverages the new 360-degree media environment. The websites of trade journals such as Advertising Age and Adweek offer daily updates on this current era of change for advertising and marketing. This Companion seeks to capture these transformations in process, but also contextualize them in historical and scholarly traditions that help us make sense of them.

A Critical-Cultural Approach to Advertising and Promotional Culture

A second arena that has seen change is the critical-cultural scholarship designed to understand and critique these developments. In response to the continued prominence and growing visibility of consumer culture throughout the world, an interdisciplinary cluster of scholarship, sometimes labeled as Critical Consumer Studies, has developed to understand the nature of modern consumerism. Scholarship about promotional culture has been generated in the fields of sociology, political science, information technology, history, marketing, cultural studies, and of course media studies. The trans-disciplinary outlets The Journal of Consumer Culture, established in 2000, and the Consumer Studies Research Network (http://csrn.camden.rutgers.edu/) speak to the interest in marketing and promotional culture throughout the academy. Media studies is a key disciplinary locus for this growing area, given its interdisciplinary roots and influences and its ability to approach the study of marketing communication both as a cultural symbol system and a political economic force in media industries. A significant expansion of work on critical-cultural approaches to promotional culture has thus been underway. Grounded in past scholarship on how advertising has historically shaped media and consumer culture, this new work is looking to innovative theories and methodologies that respond to the ways that advertising and promotional culture are changing.

Critical approaches to advertising and commercial media, like critical media studies generally, have tended to focus on two main areas: advertising as a cultural system, and advertising as a funding system. In the former, we see work that looks at issues of representation in advertising (particularly aspects of identity such as gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality), and the degree to which advertising offers individualized and commodified solutions to social problems. In the latter, the role that advertising plays in the political economy of the media has been detailed, and the way it shapes and constrains the messages and functions of media critiqued. Recent work builds on these traditions, but questions the distinctions between conceptual categories such as economy and culture, advertising and non-advertising content, identity and commodity, and producers and audiences of promotional messages.

Categories and New Connections

This Companion is organized by categories that will be familiar to students of critical advertising scholarship. Media history, for example, was an early focus of mass communication and journalism research and continues to be an important element of departments self-described as media studies. While many of the chapters in this volume historicize the phenomena they engage, the section on Historical Perspectives focuses on advertising, branding, and promotional practices from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The chapters help us denaturalize the present by tracing the contingent way in which the precursors to our contemporary promotional culture unfolded. For example, Cross examines the emergence of advertising appeals to early generations immersed in the nascent consumer culture of the 1890s to 1930s and reviews how changes in manufacturing, distribution, retail, media, and promotion encouraged ways of consumer thinking conducive to these changes, not unlike what we are experiencing in our digital era. Meanwhile, Hearn compares contemporary practices of self-branding to nineteenth-century forms such as cartes de visite, photographic cards that were collected and exchanged. The carte de visite was a marker of the “respectable self,” a form of public presentation that arguably is concordant with today's use of social media. Stole's chapter traces how an emerging consumer politics in 1930s and 1940s America was defeated by the rise of the public relations industry, a rise that was tied to changes and anti-activist responses in the advertising industry, highlighting the historical connections between these two promotional realms. These authors thus illustrate that advertising phenomena and trends that we experience as “new” have strong continuities with developments from long before. In this vein, Popp's periodization of advertising's visual representations of travel demonstrates how travel and tourism have shaped the consumer imaginary in different ways from the late nineteenth century to today, ways that influenced consumer culture even beyond tourism marketing. As these historical accounts argue to various degrees, while the precise manifestation varies according to historical and social context, the constant is the impact of capitalist logics on our culture.

Political economy—a critical approach to the study of media economics and its relationship to social institutions and democracy—is also an important tradition in media studies. Clearly, as a major revenue source for media, advertising is especially relevant to this research perspective. The section on Political Economy tracks how market forces, new business practices, and government regulation (or the lack thereof) contribute to transformations in advertising and promotional culture. Spurgeon focuses on regulatory responses to brand integration—where promotional messages are integrated into media content—in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. What is considered acceptable blending of advertising messages into media—and the justifications for limiting (or enabling) such intrusions—varies by culture or nationality. Hardy considers cross-media promotion and synergy, noting that large-scale media conglomerates will often routinely use their subsidiaries to promote their other subsidiaries. His chapter gives special attention to the case of News Corporation in Britain, a corporation dealing with serious upheaval in the 2010s. Turow's chapter explains how commoditization of the digital audience is shaping the online media environment, with particular attention to how it influences media buying, which in turn influences what kinds of digital content are produced. The future of traditional media as well as digital media is contingent upon this string of influences, he argues, with troubling implications for the autonomy of media content creators.

The chapters on Globalization work to internationalize the volume beyond an exclusively Western or Global North focus, and demonstrate the tensions created by advertising industries, which are so often transnational entities, attempting to function in diverse local contexts. The chapters by Sinclair on Latin America and Kim and Cheng on the East Asian context address these questions at the level of industry. Sinclair considers the advertising industries in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, tracing the relative strength of both global and local advertising companies in these countries. Kim and Cheng's chapter tracks the penetration of transnational advertising agencies into East Asia since the 1970s, analyzing the present-day situation in relation to theories of globalization. Meanwhile, Chásvez approaches the question of globalization and advertising at the level of labor, in terms of the nationalities represented in what is known as Hispanic advertising in the United States. Aronczyk broadens the frame in this section to consider the role that branding and promotional culture play in shaping the nation itself, through an analysis of the “nation branding” of Libya prior to the revolution of 2011.

The study of media audiences is also a long tradition in media studies. Clearly, the concepts of media audience and consumer groups are key to understanding the role of media advertising and promotion in the consumer economy. But, as with many traditional advertising and media concepts, the wisdom of using the nomenclature of “audience” for the targets of advertising is in question; the term can conjure a mass passively receiving a previously produced, finite advertising message, which does not accurately describe the circulation of much promotional content today. Cohen's chapter addresses the audience as a concept by updating the argument that “watching is working” to the social media age, an argument with roots in the work of Dallas Smythe but with new relevance given the prominence of digital and interactive media. Alperstein's chapter also destabilizes the notion of the audience for advertising as he tracks how people's engagement with celebrities via social media like Facebook and Twitter allows for brand messaging that is more akin to a friend's recommendation or “buzz” than traditional mass-mediated advertising. Stokes's chapter on direct to consumer drug advertising considers the value of data collected online from consumers to drug companies, as well as the regulatory and ethical implications of digital forms of drug promotion, using infertility marketing as a case study.

The remaining four sections address an array of social and political issues that arise when taking a critical perspective on advertising and promotional culture. A major question that scholars have traditionally asked about advertising is the degree to which it serves as a vehicle to construct images of groups both in marketing research activities (as implied by such terms as “lifestyle marketing”) and as representations in texts. It is perhaps in these later chapters that we see, then, the most obvious focus on advertising and promotion as symbolic and textual systems. Such work does not focus on whether ads and promotions are effective at selling (although such goals often factor into the larger purpose of the chapter). Rather, these chapters ask what are the cultural implications of how promotional texts construct our identities, our institutions, our lives, and even our long-term viability as a species.

Building on the legacy of such important work as Erving Goffman's Gender Advertisements (1979) and Judith Williamson's Decoding Advertisements (1978), the section on Identities explores how particular social identities are constructed through the industrial practices and representations of promotional culture. Scholars have historically paid particular attention to the identities of gender and race. Three chapters attend to these social identities. Duffy examines interactive marketing that targets “real women,” asking what the limits to consumer empowerment are in these digital contexts. Are we seeing major shifts in gendered empowerment in user-generated advertising, more of the same, or a complex set of circumstances with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic elements? McAllister and Kumanyika consider examples of media content that blur the boundaries between entertainment and marketing in their exploration of hypercom-mercialized sports commentary and the branding of sports broadcasts, and the implications of these texts for gender ideology. They argue that the construction of objectified, sexualized femininity and hegemonic masculinity becomes intensified when the highly gendered worlds of advertising and sports blend in sponsored texts. Boulton reports on racial and gender inequalities in the advertising industry, arguing that the casual racism and sexism depicted in the advertising industry of the 1960s in Mad Men left a legacy that still operates in the industry today. Elliott's chapter turns our attention to the child consumer, as she considers how food packaging—an important but understudied form of promotion—constructs both childhood and healthy eating. As marketers try to maintain sales, and simultaneously market food as both fun and healthy, she asks how we might understand a sugar-infused cereal like Froot Loops touting itself as both fibrous and flavorful.

Advertising pervasiveness involves more than just the “advertising-is-everywhere” critique, but also how mentalities of marketing are introduced into different social domains. In the section on Social Institutions the chapters highlight how the logics and practices of promotion are adopted in a range of sectors: politics, education, music, and housing. Warner turns our attention to the state and the political realm, where the discourses of governing and the discourses of marketing have become almost indistinguishable. Can we have any sort of claim for a significant public sphere in an era of the non-ending political campaign, she asks. Banet-Weiser considers how brand culture has infiltrated higher education, and in particular the ro...