This book is about advertising. It addresses through rich case histories how advertising has developed and changed over time. Advertising is an interesting phenomenon. It is clearly a form of media and communication, but it also identifies, often in the most creative way, how economic motivations work their way through our media forms. Moreover, perhaps more than any other media and communication form, advertising has had to adjust and insinuate itself into the new spectrum of how media works in the era of online and mobile culture.
In contrast to a great deal of recent scholarship in media and communication which has focused on change and transformation (see for example Merrin 2015; Gauntlett 2015; Turner 2015), our study looks for the longer trajectories of how advertising’s varied messages have been incorporated into culture. In the ever-changing media and culture-scape, it is vitally important to identify what has appeared in the past and how that patterning of media helps us understand what is developing in the present. All is not new, and it is important to not allow the overextended discourse of innovation to overwhelm our understanding of what parts of our cultural activity have a longer arc, have occurred in previous eras and have perhaps informed the constellation of newness that we allow to envelope our interpretations.
This book’s intention is to look backward in order to make sense of contemporary advertising and consumer culture. Through a series of “case histories”, Advertising and Promotional Culture explores how advertising has become a twinned discourse to modernity. This twinning to the future-oriented focus of modernity – to notions of progress, change, and transformation – describes how advertising has always been a way of communicating some sort of instability couched in terms of a pathway to a new level of satisfaction and fulfilment. We see this through concepts such as T.J. Jackson Lear’s therapeutic ethos, which posits that the quest for self-fulfilment is the motor of consumer culture, or Wolfgang Haug’s work on commodity aesthetics, which posits that seductive sensory appeals promise to satisfy unfulfilled aspects of the self.
Although advertising’s intentions are simple – at the most basic level advertising is the expansion of sales of good or services – the way that it achieves this objective through its various messages and its connections to the living people of markets is complex and reveals a great deal about the way particular cultures and societies situate value. Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories investigates these complexities through what we would call a deep structural analysis of the commodity sign: how a particular commodity form/product is expressed, promulgated, made new, and thereby integrated in some manner into the very fabric of everyday life. Histories of advertising usually point to it rivalling the oldest profession in terms of its ever-presence, but our work here underlines its increased deployment in the last two centuries. So, yes, a town crier advertising the pamphlets of the eighteenth century and the ancient realm of the agora and the bazaar are defined by competing voices connected to an array of products that are desgned to lure the consumer, but there is a qualitative difference in this earlier practice of what could be called forms of promotion and what now is understood as advertising. As much research has explored, the growth of advertising is wedded to the emergence of a consumer culture that some describe as a definable “anthropological type” of society (Leiss et al. 2005). The case histories in this book trace this development from the mid-nineteenth century in order to explore the key transformations from a producer-oriented to a consumer-oriented society. They identify the breakdown in the relation of both the production and distribution of goods and services that defined more traditional societies (a term that in and of itself generalizes to too great a degree the pre-nineteenth century relation to production). They also highlight how cultural meaning and communication become central aspects of consumption by the end of the nineteenth century.
As we discuss in Chapter 2, by the mid-nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution, which facilitated the “democratization” of goods, expanded the realms of choice and consumption available to the middle classes in both Europe and the United States. In this context, advertising developed as a form of communication and became an industry in its own right in order to make goods more appealing in a competitive marketplace. The production of desire became a central principle that guided advertising. While advertising agencies initially arose in order to help advertisers place their ads in newspapers and magazines, they quickly expanded to include copywriters to craft the persuasive language of ads, and then graphic artists to produce alluring images. The centrality of the advertising agency, and the range of functions and services it provides, has continued to grow into the twenty-first century as advertising has become integral to the way goods and services are distributed. The significance of this growth, expansion, and normalization of the advertising industry cannot be underestimated in its importance in understanding contemporary culture.
As advertising developed from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, several functions emerged that are still relevant today. We will see in our discussion of patent medicines, as well as other case histories we explore in the book, that much early advertising focused on the product and offered the consumer a reason for buying. Although advertising was clearly a discourse of persuasion, in a cultural milieu marked by the growing authority of science and medicine, advertising claims were often linked to the rational discourse of science. The re-expression of science through advertising often produced bizarre and overly bombastic claims that appeared in cigarette advertising as much as cereal promotions, drawing on the original puffery of patent medicine advertisements.
Beyond the seemingly rational reason for buying, advertising also communicated some aspect of the future via its persuasive tenor. Throughout its more than 150-year-old history, advertising has operated as an affirming discourse of the near future, a way of incrementally changing the status of the individual for some form of improvement. Because advertising’s fundamental work is on transforming a potential consumer into a purchaser of a product or service, individual advertisements often herald what the individual can achieve through possession, whether the literal health benefits of a patent medicine or the symbolic attributes associated with a brand image. As we explore advertising’s transformative discouse of the self throughout the book, one of our central themes concerns how advertising both creates and promises to fulfil desire for self-transformation through some form of consumption. As we move from brands as material symbols of production to brands as configurations of aesthetic, emotional, and social qualities, we see how they become resources for the construction of personal and social identity.
While advertising promises individual fulfilment, it simultaneously addresses the desire to belong. Klingman (2006, 56) writes, “a brand is both a personal and social identity, an expression of who we think we are and with whom we want or expect to be compared”. Similarly, as Thorstein Veblen’s original work in the early twentieth century on the “leisure class” and the cultural game of emulation first analysed (Veblen 1970), the desire for recognition and status, displayed through commodities, was essential to the formation of consumer culture. Advertisers’ techniques were designed to draw on the cultural codes of reputation and prestige and somehow insinuate their product into how those codes were maintained or replicated. Reputation and prestige, however, are transformable codes. By the latter half of the twentieth century, rather than differentiating consumers by hierarchies of class, advertisers began to segment markets into increasingly niche groups of consumers defined by taste and “lifestyle”. Prestige became associated with an array of goods for youth subcultures that bore no relation to the styles of the economic and cultural elites. For example, hipster style established a wholly different repertoire of prestige, from the choice of dress to the patterns of cosmetics that helped define what was significant and valued. While jeans were once a durable working-class staple, frayed, shredded, or torn jeans became hipster fashion statements that could cost hundreds of dollars. What is key here is how prestige, status, and value become determined by structures of emulative belonging.
In contemporary consumer culture almost every activity becomes a signifier of one’s lifestyle and identity, so that consumers both express their desire for belonging and achieve recognition and social status through their shared affinities for products and brands. We refer to these as brand tribes: groups of consumers who share interests and tastes based around a product. In a global economy, consumers become members of a clan who are linked by brands rather than nation state. Members of a brand tribe do not buy products as much as they buy signifiers of a lifestyle or identity in order to increase social recognition and prestige. This new tribalism is another of the central themes that motivates our work.
Further, advertising from the nineteenth to twenty-first century has increasingly worked to engage consumers through participatory experiences. In the early stages of industrialization and mass production, consumers would seek out products and advertising would provide information about their attributes and benefits. But in a marketplace of competing, often similar, products, advertisers recognize the need to foster brand loyalty and connection through some kind of investment of the self. Testimonials and endorsements provide one kind of participatory experience, while trade cards for cigarettes and department stores, or box tops from cereal packages, also encouraged consumers to actively engage with a product. Similarly, it is a truism that consumers who build their own IKEA products feel more atttached to them than if they had been purchased already assembled. We examine the different forms of participation in early advertisements as they move towards the co-creation of meaning and the eventual blurring of the lines between consumer and producer, so that we end with the prosumer who is simultaneously a producer and consumer of meaning. Members of tribes express their identities through brands, but simultaneously help to produce and amplify the brand’s meaning by participating in brand experiences – whether purchasing a branded piece of apparel, posting a message on a brand’s website, liking a brand on Facebook, or even sending a viral video on to a friend. Consumers and brands mutually constitute one another, though we note in Chapter 12 that practices of brand management channel the production of value in the service of the brand. Throughout the book, we return to this theme of participatory engagement as it has evolved from the nineteenth century to the present.
Finally, advertising functions in all of its diversity as an attention-shifting form of communication, an element that perhaps is its most enduring characteristic. A billboard on the side of the road is designed to draw your attention. Similarly, a television commercial, if it is cleverly constructed, pulls you away from the programme you are viewing into the 30- or 60-second narrative orbit of its advertised product. An attractive model in a fashion magazine likewise draws your eye into a closer study of the hair product or cosmetics being depicted.
Online culture with its pre-content ads and its pop-ups serves as a remarkably similar form of distraction and attraction to these earlier forms. Because advertising is by design and focus all about attention, its past forms of attracting our eyes not only define contemporary advertising in many ways, they also help us understand other dimensions of the attention economy (see Goldhaber 2006). For example, even the presentation of news, which has traditionally been considered a discourse whose primary aim is to inform rather than persuade, is increasingly similar to the discourse of advertising. Major online news sites currently focus on producing “click-bait”, which are small, attractive, image-rich, and alluring stories to pull the online reader into further stories. Similarly, information moves in what are now called “listicles”, where “facts” are organized into top-10, best and worst lists for any type of content. Social media serves as a further passage to the news as Instragrammers, Pinteresters, Facebook wall and feed climbers, and Twitter users attempt to attract attention with phrases such as “if you are only going to read one story today, read this”, or “you are not going to believe this story”. Like advertising, these rely on techniques designed to attract the attention of “friends” and “followers” who, when interlinked, define the new audience and the new market of online culture. Both advertising and promotion inform this new culture of attraction and provide the basic interlinked communicative techniques of both distraction and attention. We explore this final theme by examining how advertising seeks to capture attention by blurring the categories of advertising, news, art, education, or entertainment. In so doing, advertising, to borrow from the infamous words of Guy deBord (1967), “has attained the total occupation of social life”.
Organization of Chapters
This book makes the past of advertising and promotion legible in the contemporary moment through a comprehensive reading of its forms of communication. Advertising and Promotional Culture: Case Histories takes 11 case histories of advertising and promotion and explores in-depth the way that they form the meaning of the product itself – its sign value – and have informed the organization of advertising as a nineteenth to twenty-first century privileged discourse.
Each of our cases positions the significance and importance of various approaches to advertising differently: collectively, the case histories allow us to address many theoretical positions and weigh their value in making sense of advertising in contemporary culture. Our case histories provide parallel and overlapping maps of how advertising and the advertising industry works. Thus, you will find that our case histories are not contained by a single campaign. For instance, our study of cigarettes in Chapter 4 maps the advertising industry’s relationship to selling tobacco over more than a century and then isolates one of its most provocative campaigns in the 1990s. We have also made very direct choices about our case histories so that they are designed specifically to explain the position of advertising in the larger fields and operations of promotion and marketing. These various promotional pathways appear in our case history of Annoying Orange in Chapter 12, but also in the ambient approaches to advertising privileged in selling cereal to families in Chapter 5, a case that studies 70 years of presenting a range of products. Similarly, our study in Chapter 11 of Dove’s efforts at social activism also points to how advertising campaigns are rarely contained within the text, images, and graphics of display ads and commercials.
Each of our case histories is structured for two related purposes. First, through individual case histories we have tried to stitch together a valuable reading of advertising from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Thus, you will see that in general, the case histories at the beginning of the book – the development of patent medicines and the birth of the department store, the marketing of Camel cigarettes, and the ambient advertising of children’s cereals – have origins in the nineteenth century and then move into the twentieth century. The case histories of Volkswagen, IKEA, and Nike that follow describe the rise of multinational corporations in the mid-twentieth century, though they also have precursors and have continued to advance well into the twenty-first century. The final group of case histories – which explore presidential politics, self-branding, commodity activism, and the YouTube prosumer – are analytically focused on the contemporary as advertising has become inextricably related to identity.
Our secon...