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STUDIES IN CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION

General Editor: John Fiske

ADVERTISING

AS

COMMUNICATION

IN THE SAME SERIES

On Video Roy Armes

Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience

lain Chambers

Understanding Radio Andrew Crisell

Introduction to Communication Studies

John Fiske

Understanding Television

Edited by Andrew Goodwin and Garry Whannel

Understanding News John Hartley

Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

Henry Jenkins

The Ideological Octopus: An Exploration of Television and

its Audience Justin Lewis

Case Studies and Projects in Communication

Neil McKeown

An Introduction to Language and Society

Martin Montgomery

Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies

Tim O’Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders,

Martin Montgomery and John Fiske

Communications and the ‘Third World’ Geoffrey Reeves

Television Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth

John Tulloch

Film as Social Practice Graeme Turner

A Primer for Daily Life Susan Willis

ADVERTISING

AS

COMMUNICATION

Gillian Dyer

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1982 by

Methuen & Co. Ltd

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of

Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please

go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 1982 Gillian Dyer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by

any electric, mechanical or other means, now

known or hereafter invented, including photocopying

and recording, or in any information storage or

retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Dyer, Gillian.

communication)

1. Advertising

I. Title II. Series

659.1 HF5821

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Dyer, Gillian.

Advertising as communication

(Studies in culture and communication)

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Advertising. I. Title II. Series.

HF 5821.D89 1982 659.1 82–8134

ISBN 0-203-15834-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-02781-0 (Print Edition)

ISBN 0-203-17730-4 (Adobe ebook Reader Format)

Advertising as communication. —(Studies in culture and

For my parents, Bertram and Gwen Dyer

CONTENTS

General editor’s preface xi

Preface xii

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1

What is advertising? 2

Commercial consumer advertising 3

Mass communications 7

Public relations 8

1 The origins and development of advertising 11

Mercuries and newsheets 11

An ‘all-deafening blast of puffery’ 24

The break-up of the column lay-out in newspapers 25

Slogans and catch phrases 27

Bubbles 27

Suggestions for further work 31

2 The new advertising 33

Organizing the market 33

The rise of popular journalism 34

‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?’ 35

The never-never 36

The nerve war 38

The home front 41

Note 44

Suggestions for further work 44

3 The new media 47

Post-war developments 47

Television 48

Commercial television 48

Commercial television and the BBC 50

Diversiication 51

viii Contents

The pattern for the future 52

The press 53

Advertising sponsorship in the press 54

Advertising as a publishing authority 55

The crisis 56

Note 57

Suggestions for further work 57

4 The effects of advertising 59

Effects research 59

Market research 60

Sociological research 61

Advertising’s effectiveness 63

Cultural effects 64

Images 65

The consumers 66

Notes 67

Suggestions for further work 67

5 What do advertisements mean? 69

Approaches to the study of meaning 69

Lines of appeal 73

Approaches to form and content 74

Props and settings 83

Analysing photographs 84

Content analysis 85

Notes 88

Suggestions for further work 88

6 Semiotics and ideology 91

Semiotics—concepts and methods 93

Iconic, indexical and symbolic signs 98

Syntagmatic and paradigmatic sign relations 100

Denotation and connotation 101

Codes 104

Notes 108

Suggestions for further work 108

Contents ix

7 The language of advertising 111

Words have feelings 111

The tone of voice 112

The role of advertising language 114

Language and the law 117

Key words 118

Figurative language 120

The ‘absence’ of language—calligraphy 124

Suggestions for further work 124

8 The rhetoric of advertising 127

A theory of rhetoric 127

Visual rhetoric 129

Suggestions for further work 149

Conclusion 151

Appendices 155

References 177

Bibliography 181

Index 185

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

This series of books on different aspects of communication is designed to meet the needs of

the growing number of students coming to study this subject for the first time. The authors

are experienced teachers or lecturers who are committed to bridging the gap between the

huge body of research available to the more advanced student, and what the new student

actually needs to get him started on his studies.

Probably the most characteristic feature of communication is its diversity: it ranges from

the mass media and popular culture, through language to individual and social behaviour.

But it identifies links and a coherence within this diversity. The series will reflect the struc-

ture of its subject. Some books will be general, basic works that seek to establish theories

and methods of study applicable to a wide range of material; others will apply these theo-

ries and methods to the study of one particular topic. But even these topic-centred books

will relate to each other, as well as to the more general ones. One particular topic, such as

advertising or news or language, can only be understood as an example of communication

when it is related to, and differentiated from, all the other topics that go to make up this

diverse subject.

The series, then, has two main aims, both closely connected. The first is to introduce

readers to the most important results of contemporary research into communication

together with the theories that seek to explain it. The second is to equip them with appro-

priate methods of study and investigation which they will be able to apply directly to their

everyday experience of communication.

If readers can write better essays, produce better projects and pass more exams as a

result of reading these books I shall be very satisfied; but if they gain a new insight into

how communication shapes and informs our social life, how it articulates and creates our

experience of industrial society, then I shall be delighted. Communication is too often taken

for granted when it should be taken to pieces.

John Fiske

PREFACE

This book is meant to provide some basic ideas, concepts and material for the study of

advertising. It draws on work from a number of fields but revolves around the core concept

of communication. Much of the book is in the form of a survey of existing material, and

the second half in particular deals with questions of method and how to study advertise-

ments rather than with extended examples of analysis. I hope that this provides enough

groundwork for readers to pursue some of the issues raised in more depth, and especially to

‘decode’ one of the most ubiquitous and tenacious forms of communication and ideology

in society. Advertising influences our thoughts, feelings and lives; we need to be aware of

how it operates and equip ourselves with information and ideas on how far we think it a

necessary and useful form of social communication. I hope this book contributes in some

way to that project and will help people become more aware of the images and values

perpetuated by advertising, and the forms and structures which carry and determine what

they mean.

I would like to thank Julie Staniforth and Christine Barker for their excellent typing,

a number of friends and colleagues who have helped with suggestions and ideas for this

book, in particular Helen Baehr and David Child for their involvement and support. Clare

Richardson kindly lent the newspapers from which the annoucements in chapter 1 were

taken. Tim Bell of D’Arcy MacManus and Masius, and George Harrison of the History

of Advertising Trust, also provided help with historical material and went to a great deal

of trouble on my behalf. Special thanks should go to John Fiske, the general editor of this

series, for his helpful advice and patience. I would also like to acknowledge a debt of grati-

tude to my parents for their general encouragement and interest in my work.

Gillian Dyer

1982

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publishers and I would like to thank the following for their permission to reproduce

material: A. & F.Pears Ltd for plates 4 and 5; the Imperial War Museum for plate 6; Hamlyn

Publishing Group Ltd for plate 7; Cadbury Typhoo Ltd for plate 8; Arthur H. Cox & Co.

Ltd for plate 9; Jøtul Norcem UK Ltd for plate 10; Pendleton Woolen Mills and Danecraft

International for plate 11; the International Gold Corporation for plate 12; Renault UK Ltd

for plate 13; Lever Brothers Ltd for plate 14a; Philips Industries for plate 14b; Van den

Berghs for 14c; Colman’s Foods for plates 15 and 22; Birds Eye for plate 16; R.J.Reynolds

Tobacco International, Inc. for plate 17; Rowntree Mackintosh Ltd for plate 18; Norman

Craig & Kummel Ltd for plates 19 and 20; Kraft Foods Ltd for plate 21; John Walker &

Sons Ltd and Parim Ltd for plate 23; Brandmark International Ltd for plate 24; White

Horse Distillers Ltd for plate 25; Record Pasta Foods Ltd for plate 26; Young & Rubicam

Ltd (International Distillers and Vinters Home Trade Ltd) for plate 27; Jacques Durand for

table 1; the Advertising Association for tables 2–9 and Appendix IV; Campaign for tables

10 and 11. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, where this has not been

possible we apologize to those concerned.

INTRODUCTION

Every day and for most of our lives we see and hear many advertisements. Even if you don’t

read a newspaper or watch television, and walk around the streets with your eyes down, you

will find it impossible to avoid some form of publicity, even if it’s only a trade display at a

local store, uninvited handbills pushed through the letter box or cards displayed in the win-

dow of the corner newsagent. We usually take advertisements for granted because they are

so pervasive, but many people, not least among them the advertisers themselves, claim that

they are one of the most important influences in our lives. Not only do advertisements sell

goods and services, they are commodities themselves, ‘the most ubiquitous form in which

we encounter commercial photography’, according to a critic of advertising, Judith Wil-

liamson (1978, p. 57). In a sense advertising is the ‘official art’ of the advanced industrial

nations of the west. It fills our newspapers and is plastered all over the urban environment;

it is a highly organized institution, involving many artists, writers and film directors, and

comprises a large proportion of the output of the mass media. It also influences the policies

and the appearance of the media and makes them of central importance to the economy.

Advertisements advance and perpetuate the ideas and values which are indispensable to a

particular economy system. Advertisers want us to buy things, use them, throw them away

and buy replacements in a cycle of continuous and conspicuous consumption.

Some advertisements are silly, inaccurate, misleading, or just plain irritating. On the

other hand, we have probably all had occasion to say ‘That’s a good advertisement’. They

can be skilfully designed and produced, very attractive, entertaining and funny. But we

should not lose sight of their ideological function, which is linked to their economic func-

tion, nor of the real messages that lie behind their superficial gloss.

The primary function of advertising is, we are told, to introduce a wide range of con-

sumer goods to the public and thus to support the free market economy, but this is clearly

not its only role; over the years it has become more and more involved in the manipulation

of social values and attitudes, and less concerned with the communication of essential

information about goods and services. In this respect it could be argued that advertising

nowadays fulfils a function traditionally met by art or religion. Some critics of advertis-

ing have even suggested that it operates in the same way as myths in primitive societies,

providing people with simple stories and explanations in which values and ideals are con-

veyed and through which people can organize their thoughts and experiences and come to

make sense of the world they live in. Varda Langholz Leymore, in her book The Hidden

Myth (1975) argues that like myth, advertising reinforces accepted modes of behaviour

and acts as an anxiety-reducing mechanism resolving contradictions in a complex or con-

fusing society. She remarks, ‘To the constant nagging dilemmas of the human condition,

advertising gives a simple solution… [It] simultaneously provokes anxiety and resolves

it’ (p. 156). In a similar vein Raymond Williams (1980) has called advertising ‘the magic

system,…a highly organized and professional system of magical inducements and satisfac-

tions functionally very similar to magical systems in simpler societies but rather strangely

2

co-existent with highly developed scientific technology’ (p. 185). And the critic Fred Inglis

(1972) describes the advertiser as a modern-day shaman whose ‘anonymous vantage in

society permits him to articulate a novel magic which offers to meet the familiar pains of

a particular society and history, to soften or sharpen ambition, bitterness, solitude, lust,

failure and rapacity’ (p. 78).

What is advertising?

In its simplest sense the word ‘advertising’ means ‘drawing attention to something’, or

notifying or informing somebody of something. You can advertise by word of mouth, quite

informally and locally, and without incurring great expense. But if you want to inform a

large number of people about something, you might need to advertise in the more familiar

sense of the word, by public announcement. If you put up a notice in a local newsagent’s

shop (preferably near a bus stop), design a poster or buy some space in a local newspaper,

you are likely to attract the attention of more people to the information you wish to com-

municate than if you simply pass the word around friends and neighbours. You could go

further and distribute leaflets as well, get someone to carry a placard around, even broad-

cast on local radio or organize a publicity stunt. However, you might not be content simply

to convey certain facts, such as, for example:

For sale: four 6-week-old kittens

Contact M.James Tel. 324810

and leave it at that. You might wish to add a bit of emphasis to your message by proclaim-

ing:

Adorable, fluffy kittens (house-trained) need a good

home. Black and white. An opportunity not to be

missed. Phone 342810. Hurry, only a few left!

There is a certain temptation, if we have anything to say or something to sell, to draw atten-

tion to our notice by exaggerating the facts or appealing to people’s emotions:

Troubles at home? Marriage under strain?

These kittens will change your life, and will

bring joy and peace to your family.

And this is of course where all the controversy about advertising arises.

People who criticise advertising in its current form argue that advertisements create

false wants and encourage the production and consumption of things that are incompat-

ible with the fulfilment of genuine and urgent human needs. Advertising, it is claimed, is

an irrational system which appeals to our emotions and to anti-social feelings which have

nothing to do with the goods on offer. Advertisements usually suggest that private acquisi-

tion is the only avenue to social success and happiness—they define private acquisition and

competitiveness as a primary goal in life, at the expense of less tangible rewards like better

health care and social services. The consumer economy is said to divert funds from socially

useful and human needs and make us greedy, materialistic and wasteful.

Advertising as Communication

Introduction 3

On the other hand, those who defend advertising say that it is economically necessary

and has brought many benefits to society. It contributes to society’s wellbeing and raises

people’s standard of living by encouraging the sales of mass-produced goods, thus stimu-

lating production and creating employment and prosperity. Those people who would do

away with advertising are accused of trying to deny cheaper goods and services to the

majority, and of being puritanical, élitist and economically shortsighted. Furthermore, the

champions of advertising say that people are perfectly free to ignore advertisements and

that ads do not brainwash people because a number of advertising campaigns fail to attract

customers.

Indeed it is perfectly true to say that consumer goods have brought comfort and plea-

sure to a large number of people and have alleviated want and hardship. I would not wish

to argue that this is morally bad. In a complex society such as our own, consumer goods

are necessary and important and on the whole have been a welcome development of the

modern world. But along with commodities we need information about them: about their

price, function, durability, quality, etc. This kind of information will help us make wise and

rational consumer choices.

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether consumer advertising gives us enough,

or indeed any accurate information, and whether the economic function of advertising is so

vital that we cannot afford to do without it whatever the cultural, social and personal draw-

backs. We also need to ask who is ultimately benefiting from the advertising of consumer

goods—society as a whole (as it is claimed), or a few powerful commodity manufacturers

and business corporations.

Commercial consumer advertising

There are many kinds of advertising: commercial consumer advertising is perhaps the kind

most visible in our society. It commands more expenditure, space and professional skill

than any other type and is directed towards a mass audience. It therefore provides the focus

of this book. However, the other types are worth mentioning briefly:

Trade and technical advertisements are usually confined to special interest magazines

like Hi-Fi News, Amateur Gardener or Engineering Today. They are aimed at the expert,

professional or hobbyist. Most trade advertising is informative and useful—the customers

are usually well able to evaluate the claims of cost, value, use and so on. The advertiser/sup-

plier probably regards the customer as a ‘user’ and not a ‘consumer’—a crucial distinction

first proposed by Raymond Williams (1980) in his authoritative critique of advertising.

Prestige, business and inancial advertising is a growing sector of the advertising indus-

try. Ads for large companies or the publishing of yearly financial results in newspapers

are usually designed to promote public confidence and favourable business images. Such

advertising is not usually intended to influence sales directly. You will often see ads on

television for such enterprises as the giant petrochemical firms or the large clearing banks

which present themselves as disinterested pieces of public information and which are

designed to make us think of these private corporations as benevolent, public-spirited and

socially responsible. The inherent message in this type of campaign is the promotion of the

capitalist enterprise and the values of the acquisitive society.

4

Small ads are usually straightforward and informative and have long since been rel-

egated to the small print of the classified sections of newspapers or to such journals as

Exchange and Mart.

Government and charity advertising is usually non-profit making, but often uses the

persuasive techniques of commercial advertising. However, we should remember that an

organization like the Health Education Council has a very small amount of money to pro-

mote anti-smoking in comparison with the giant tobacco firms who spend a great deal on

encouraging us to smoke and thereby, by all accounts, to damage our health.

How then is advertising related to the economic systems of modern society? The sheer

volume of goods or commodities which flow from modern factories would cause serious

problems for the manufacturers unless they were quickly consumed and unless the general

ideology of society was in tune with acquisitiveness and the ‘way of life’ associated with

the consumer society. Advertising is one of the means used by manufacturing and service

industries to ensure the distribution of commodities to people in society at large and is

designed to create demands for such goods and services. It helps the manufacturer or busi-

ness to secure a section of the market by organizing and controlling people’s tastes and

behaviour in the interests of company profit and capital growth. Advertising works not only

on behalf of specific goods and services, it also assumes certain characteristics which are

less directly connected to selling. It tries to manipulate people into buying a way of life as

well as goods. In the words of the economist J.K.Galbraith (1970), advertising keeps the

atmosphere ‘suitably consumptive’.

The more abundant goods become and the more removed they are from basic physical

and social needs, the more open we are to appeals which are psychologically grounded

argues Galbraith. Although the goods on display in shops and supermarkets do not usually

relate to our urgent needs, we nonetheless desire them. Advertising’s central function is to

create desires that previously did not exist. Thus advertising arouses our interests and emo-

tions in favour of goods and more goods, and thereby actually creates the desires it seeks to

satisfy. Our desires are aroused and shaped by the demands of the,system of production, not

by the needs of society or of the individual. It is thus the advertiser’s task to try to persuade

rather than inform.

It is not really surprising that advertisements are unreliable as sources of information

when one consideres that they come from biased or interested quarters, namely the produc-

ers of the advertised products. The producers are hardly likely to provide us with neutral

information. An analogous situation would be if the authors of books or the directors of

films wrote their own reviews in the newspaper columns, instead of ‘disinterested’ jour-

nalist-critics. And because the advertisers (‘reviewers’) subsidize the press this probably

has the effect of restraining proper professional commodity ‘reviews’. Information about

commodities is valuable if it is impartial and objective, and this can only be achieved if the

writers of advertisements which convey that information are financially independent of the

product advertiser; but this is not the case with our present press and commercial TV sys-

tems. It could be argued that if the subsidy of the media by advertising had not developed in

the way that it has, then newspapers and possibly television would have devoted more space

and time to giving consumer information in the same way that they provide reviews of cul-

tural events, and information on horse races or the Stock Exchange. In fact, advertising not

only provides deficient and suspect information; in addition its development in the media

Advertising as Communication

Introduction 5

has indirectly led to the suppression of other channels of information about commodities.

In a famous essay on the economics of advertising, Nicholas Kaldor drew an important

distinction between the informative and the persuasive element in advertising. His descrip-

tion is worth quoting here in full:

We must sharply distinguish here, of course, between the purely informative element

in advertising and the persuasive element (which belongs to another branch of the

argument). If, to take an example, XX Ltd spend large sums annually on advertise-

ments, saying ‘XX is good for you’, this may be an effective method of increasing

the sales of XX beer, but the informative content of the advertisement is merely this:

‘XX Ltd believe that the consumption of XX is beneficial to health’. Whether this is

a valuable piece of information or not, its information value is exhausted as soon as

the public are first told of it. Any further repetition of the message, and its display

in prominent form, does not serve the purpose of information but of persuasion, it

serves the purpose of inducing the public to believe it as well, and to keep it in the

foreground of consciousness. While as a means of persuasion it may be very effec-

tive, its information value is zero. (Moreover assuming the message to be true, it

might reach the public in many other ways—through the recommendation of doctors,

for instance—it does not necessarily follow that without the advertisement the public

would have remained ignorant of it.) (1950/1, p. 111)

One of the major criticisms of advertising is that it makes us too materialistic by per-

suading us, for instance, that we can achieve certain desirable goals in life through pos-

sessing things in a cycle of continuous and conspicuous consumption. But, paradaxically,

modern advertising shows that we are not materialistic enough. If we were, presentation

of the objects being sold would be enough in itself. But consumer advertising presents its

goods along with other personal and social aspirations, and as Raymond Williams argues:

We have a cultural pattern in which the objects are not enough but must be validated

in fantasy by association with social and personal meanings which in a different

cultural pattern might be more directly available. (1980, p. 185)

If we were sensibly materialistic, then, as Williams points out,

beer would be enough for us, without the additional promise that in drinking it we

show ourselves to be more manly, young in heart or neighbourly. A washing machine

would be a useful machine to wash clothes, rather than an indication that we are for-

ward looking or an object of envy to our neighbours. (1980, p. 185)

The reason that we have to be ‘magically’ induced to buy things through fantasy situations

and satisfactions is because advertisers cannot rely on rational argument to sell their goods

in sufficient quantity.

6

The roots of this situation can be traced back to the coming of large-scale industrial

production which, since the end of the last century, has been capable not only of supplying

us with essential goods but also of swamping us. These goods have to be smoothly and

effectively distributed or else the production system would clog up and collapse beneath

the weight of surplus and unwanted products. Markets have to be found and created in

order to absorb the perpetual flow of goods coming from factories. The producers have to

be able to predict demand for goods, so that expensive capital equipment and plant is not

risked, factories do not lie idle, and profits fall. Advertising is one of the mechanisms used

by modern industrial capitalism to organize and ensure markets for its goods. This has the

overall effect of taking decision-making about goods away from customers where it is not

subject to control and of shifting it to the producers where it is under their control. Despite

the fact that there is an enormous number and range of goods available, the real deci-

sions about products—what should be produced, in what quantity and quality and at what

price—lie not with us, the consumers, but with a small and powerful minority of business-

men, industrialists and entrepreneurs—a group which the sociologist C.W.Mills (1956) has

aptly called ‘the power élite’ in his book of that name.

However, advertisers will argue that the great quantity and range of goods produced in

a competitive free-market economy guarantees the consumer ‘freedom of choice’ and that

choice is a basic human freedom. But perhaps advertisers are using the words ‘choice’ and

‘freedom’ in a rather restricted sense, referring mainly to commodities and meaning no

more than a mechanistic reaction to them. Of course on the face of it there are any num-

ber of choices to be made in the marketplace. But does the choice that we have to make

between ten brands of similar toothpaste really constitute choice and guarantee freedom?

And are not the differences between the toothpastes, shampoos, televisions and so on, often

trivial and unnecessary? And when it comes down to it, are we, the consumers, ever con-

sulted whether we want toothpaste with blue stripes or green stripes of ‘added ingredient X’

in the first place? We are offered a ‘choice’ once all the real decisions about a product have

been made. In addition, most commodity manufacturers are organized into conglomerates

or monopolies who divide up the market between them and are more interested in profits

than in genuine consumer choice. So what looks like a choice between different brands of a

commodity on a supermarket shelf is not really what it seems, because the different brands

are probably produced by one or two manufacturers (who, incidentally, are also possibly

involved in a price-fixing cartel which makes prices uncompetitive).

Now of course manufacturers want to produce successful products and do indeed spend

a lot of money on market research in order to test consumer preferences and the possible

market reaction. In this sense they are influenced by what members of society claim to

want and need. But it is more likely that decisions about what goods to produce and market

will be influenced more by questions of industrial viability and profit than by questions of

longer-term economic stability and social need. If we, the public, were offered a genuine

choice of goods and services, then most of us would be perfectly capable of judging pri-

vate consumption against other pressing priorities, like better health services and schools

or more recreational facilities. But our economy is not really geared towards the social

services, and our real freedom of choice is by and large sacrificed to the flow of chocolate,

shampoos, breakfast cereals and dog foods which gushes out of the factories. Our needs

as human beings, our aspirations and weaknesses, can indeed be met by consumer goods

Advertising as Communication

Introduction 7

when they are aroused by advertisements but these are met at the expense of more pressing,

socially-based needs. Advertisers tend to think that consumer choice is equivalent to other

kinds of choice and would no doubt be surprised if someone decided that resources should

be spent on a new youth club rather than producing yet another kind of shampoo. Producers

and consumers are more often than not trapped in the illusion that more and more consumer

goods automatically guarantees choice and freedom.

Mass communications

In order to survive, powerful commercial interests must keep in almost constant touch

with the mass public and continually try to persuade them. To these ends advertisers use

the media of mass communication: commercial television and radio, the national and local

press and magazines. Originally advertising was used by newspaper owners as a necessary

and manageable support cost. Today it suffuses the whole system of mass communication

its servants. The media convert audiences into markets, and because they exist through

‘selling’ audiences to advertisers, they generally preclude the services that the media could

perform such as providing adequate consumer information to the public.

Advertisements not only influence overall media policy (although this influence is very

subtle), they also affect or modify the ‘look’ of media production. According to Fred Inglis

‘What we find [in the media]…is the harmonious interaction of advertising and editorial

styles; styles which consistently reproduce and endorse the consumer’s way of life’ (1972,

p. 16). Sunday newspaper colour supplements provide a good example of the ‘harmoni-

ous interaction’ between advertisements and feature material. Advertising has increasingly

come to dominate presentation on TV; the insertion of adverts into TV programmes has

altered the nature of TV as a sequential experience and has created entirely new visual

rhythms. As Williams argues, ‘it is possible to see TV of this kind as a sequence in which

the advertisements are integral rather than as a programme interrupted by adverts’ (1974,

p. 69).

Many TV commercials consist simply of spoken announcements with an accompanying

picture and caption. Those which are net-worked over the whole nation, rather than trans-

mitted locally or regionally, are usually more complex. They draw on existing styles in print

and poster advertising, of course, but also contain more emphasis on visual and aural styles

drawn from non-advertising material. The most successful contain:

1. Concentrated dramatic sequences or ‘playlets’ in which some problem is realized and

overcome through the recommendation and use of a branded product. These commer-

cials are often meant to portray ‘slices of life’ and are similar in style to the kinds of

drama common in programmes.

2. Popular/light entertainment sequences—comedy sketches, music and dance routines

drawn from variety programmes and TV or film spectaculars.

3. Actors, actresses, celebrities and sports personalities endorsing products in a way that

allows their allure or social standing to attach itself to the product. Whether they are

‘acting’ or being themselves, these famous people perform a dramatic function.

and some economists argue that the media are in fact not just a part of the economy but

8

4. Cartoon and animated sequences either borrowed from another source (Walt Disney

films for example) or created specially for a product image (remember Esso’s cartoon

tiger?). Animals, young children and other ‘numinous’ objects are similarly used in an

attempt to place the product in a flattering light.

5. Documentary sequences of everyday life, particularly family life, travelogues and

industrial films featuring the use of a product.

Public relations

Whereas advertising is primarily about the selling of goods, general publicity or public

relations (PR) has developed into a business for the selling of persons or companies. PR

uses many of the same techniques as advertising; the main difference being that adver-

tisements are booked and paid for, whereas PR relies on arranged incidents, spontaneous

happenings, product or company anniversaries being reported by the media as ordinary

news. The aim of PR is to promote positive and favourable images of people or firms in

public life, without actually appearing to do so. Certainly it is difficult to tell the difference

between an event or a photograph presented in the ordinary course of professional journal-

ism and one which has been arranged by a publicity agent. Many personality pieces which

appear in the popular press have landed there through the offices of a PR agent and their

publication is paid for by some means or another—not always with money. Show-business

personalities are not the only ones to benefit from this system: PR has entered the literary

and political worlds as well. No political campaign is undertaken nowadays without the

services of a publicity consultant, a fact, it is argued, that accounts for the rise and success

of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Britain during 1981.

Although advertising agencies were used to ‘sell’ Dwight Eisenhower as long ago as the

1952 American presidential election, the coming of television and increasingly sophisti-

cated PR techniques have put the political-PR relationship on a regular footing. The ‘pub-

licity boys’ rehearse politicians before they go in front of the cameras; they advise on the

timing and content of speeches; they stage-manage walkabouts, the opening of buildings,

visits to supermarkets and the kissing of babies, all for the benefit of the mass media. Poli-

ticians and campaigns are marketed like soap. In the US, politicians can buy time for TV

‘spot’ commercials during an election campaign, the tones and rhythms of which are barely

distinguishable from those of shampoo or laxative ads.

In this introduction I have tried to outline a general critique of advertising within the

dominant context of its economics. In the following chapters I shall examine the broad

historical context and growth of advertising in relation to the modern capitalist economy. I

shall also look at the relationship between modern advertising and the system of mass com-

munication within which it lodges and for which it provides the main impulse.

Chapter 4 is concerned with the persuasive power of advertising and its presumed

‘effects’. This is an intriguing aspect of advertising because although we assume it to be

powerful it is often difficult to pin down precisely what we mean by the power and influence

of advertisements. Advertisers spend a lot of money and time making ads memorable and

effective and trying to discover the best way of advertising a product to a particular group.

One assumes that on the whole their messages are successful and effective. Social scientists

are also interested in the power of advertising and have developed some elaborate methods

Advertising as Communication

Introduction 9

to test the effectiveness of advertising on individuals and society at large, some of which

will be discussed in this chapter.

Even more difficult to answer but probably more important is the question of what

advertisements are like. Is life like the pictures that the advertiser creates? Are advertise-

ments mirrors which reflect life? Are they a form of harmless escapism? Do they present

an honest and legitimate picture of human values and aspirations? In chapters 5, 6 and 7 we

will examine what advertisements say and what devices and techniques they use to appeal

to us and get their messages across.

It is not possible in a book of this length to cover every aspect of what is in fact a

complex industry and powerful form of social communication. A notable omission is any

consideration of the actual work of an advertising agency and the people who make adver-

tisements, the ad executives, the copywriters, the artists, etc. It would be interesting to go

behind the scenes, so to speak, to find out how and why ads get made in the way that they

do, how much they cost, what considerations influence the ‘creative’ people, and what

advertisers think about their work and about their public.

A great deal of thought, research, planning and money goes into an advertising cam-

paign; probably more than into any comparable form of communication. The purpose of

creating advertisements is to persuade and convert potential consumers. Thus advertise-

ments are deliberate and consciously articulated messages. However, as in all forms of

human communication, there are bound to be some ‘unconscious’ aspects of the creative

process. That is to say the person who produces or creates an ad will not think in minute

detail about every single word or image that goes into it. He or she takes for granted some

things about communication assuming that the audience will understand the ad’s message

because both communicator and receiver share a common culture or common frame of

reference. The advertiser employs language, images, ideas and values drawn from the cul-

ture, and assembles a message which is fed back into the culture. Both communicator and

receiver are products of the culture—they share its meanings. However, compared to an

average citizen, advertisers are in a position of considerable power. They spend a lot of

time and money on the production of advertisements. They also have access to powerful

channels of mass communication, unlike most of us. And although they draw on common

assumptions and meanings, and reflect trends, popular types and the social scene, they do

not draw on reality in any simple way. Producing an advertisement involves a mixture of

market research, ‘professional’ skill, personal knowledge, and intuition, particularly the

last. Advertisers might feel they are in touch with consumers, but they tend to be selective

about the ‘reality’ they portray and present the values and ideals most familiar to them. Like

anyone in a body of professionals in contemporary society, an advertiser works in a narrow

world; he or she is circumscribed by the standards of a close-knit body of workers within

the ad world or agency, which is a particular inward-looking social sub-group within met-

ropolitan cities. Ads are usually highly selective and stereotypical; certain ideas and styles

are emphasized or reinforced, others are ignored. The implicit message in most ads is ‘this

is how things/you should be’. They present what appears to be, without argument, the only

ideal and desirable way of living. They deine what is style and what is good taste, not as

possibilities or suggestions, but as unquestionably desirable goals. The world of ads is the

world of the carefree and the well-off as seen through the eyes of the advertisers. This small

group has become the arbiter and judge of taste and the messenger for the ‘good life’.

10

In the bibliography I have suggested some sources of information and reference material

campaigns. Appendix IV contains tables and codes of practice used by the professionals.

Readers will probably find that these sections give some insight into the world of advertis-

ing and provide guidelines for the analysis of advertisements themselves.

Ads are an inescapable and powerful part of our environment. Some are banal, others

attractive, entertaining and amusing. It might be worth your considering what life would

be like without them.

It is important to remember that however attractive or amusing ads are, they perform

both economic and ideological functions in our society. Even if we don’t actually believe

what they say about this or that product, their influence is nevertheless strong. Advertise-

ments provide pictures of reality and define the kinds of people we could be and the kind

of lives we could lead. It is hard to break with the values and ideals supplied by advertise-

ments although there are signs that some groups—and I am thinking particularly of the

women’s movement—are trying to campaign against the worst forms of misrepresentation

in ads. It is doubtful whether advertising can accommodate criticism of its way of com-

municating other than in small, superficial ways. It is a powerful tool of existing economic

and social relations and as such has to purvey the values which perpetuate and endorse the

current socio-economic structure—a structure which frequently pays scant regard to alter-

native values such as a fairer redistribution of resources and power in society, and the ways

of achieving this; ways which could be more humane and democratic and less wasteful of

valuable resources.

on the subject of advertising agencies, professional advertisers and planning advertising

Advertising as Communication

1

THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT

OF ADVERTISING

In order to understand advertising as a form of communication and as an influential social

institution, it is important to see it as part of an historical and social process firmly linked to

the economies of western industrialized nations. Modern advertising is effectively no more

than a hundred years old, dating from a period when the capitalist system of production

underwent major changes. Before this time advertising was a relatively simple system of

proclamation and announcement on the periphery of the national economy. Today advertis-

ing is an enormous and highly organized institution controlling vast sums of money, highly

profitable in its own terms as well as being a vital component of capitalist economies.

In order to understand the social meaning of advertising and assess its place in modern

society, we need to look at why and how it has developed from a simple to a sophisticated

system of communication from the few (the producers) to the many (the consumers).

Mercuries and newsheets

Advertising is consistent with most types of human society and in fact was not unknown

in ancient Greece and Rome. The public crier, who shouted out the wares of local traders

and shopkeepers, was a well-known figure in medieval times. But advertising as we recog-

nize it did not start until the seventeenth century. It was at about this time that newspapers

began to circulate, although broadsides and newsbooks had occasionally been produced

in the Elizabethan era. By the middle of the seventeenth century newsheets or mercuries,

as they were sometimes called, began to appear on a regular basis in the large towns of

Britain. Merchants and traders needed regular information on prices, stocks, imports and

exports and access to the new ‘middle-class’ readership whose appetite for news had been

stimulated by the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. The mercuries contained some foreign news,

shipping timetables, lists of imports and exports and small announcements from booksell-

ers, wig-makers and merchants. These announcements became increasingly important to

the newsheets and in some were displayed prominently. During the English Civil War the

demand for ‘news’ increased and more mercuries appeared under a variety of extravagant

titles. As well as news and announcements of the recent publication of books (by, among

others, John Milton), mercuries carried notices for the markets and fairs popular at the

time. If one looks at these notices, one finds a frequent preoccupation with the freaks and

human curiosities who were put on public display and whose deformities were relished by

audiences of the time. Mercuries also printed ads for lost horses and runaway slaves, and

offered rewards for their capture. Perhaps the most significant ads, however, were those

for the earliest patent medicines and ‘miraculous’ cures. These looked like what today we

would call classified or small ads.

12

The range and type of advertisement began to change from about the middle of the sev-

enteenth century. The following notice, which appeared in a Mercurius Politicus of 1658,

reflects this change, being much more direct and less restrained than ads before this time.

That excellent, and by all Physicians, approved China drink, called by the Chineans

Tcha, by other nations Tay, alias Tee, is sold at The Sultaness Head Cophee-House,

in Sweetings’ Rents by the Royal Exchange, London.

And even more enthusiastic is this advertisement of 1660 for toothpaste:

Most excellent and approved Dentifrice to scour and cleanse the Teeth, making them

white as ivory, preserves from the Tooth-ach; so that being constantly used, the Par-

ties using it are never troubled with the Tooth-ach; It fastens the Teeth, sweetens the

the right are only to be had at Thomas Rookes, Stationer

The reference to ‘Physicians’ and glowing phrases such as ‘most excellent and approved’

make this ad very similar to some of today’s. Indeed, these early examples of advertising

rhetoric should really be seen as part of a process of development from conventional rec-

ommendation to contemporary examples of persuasion and propaganda.

In England, the 1665 plague gave a considerable boost to the sales of patent medicines.

Street posters and handbills proliferated which harangued the public into buying ‘infal-

lible preventative pills’, ‘never failing Preservatives against Infection’, ‘Sovereign cordials

against the Corruption of the air’, ‘Anti-pestilencial Pills’ and ‘The Only True Plague-

water’.

In the eighteenth century the number of people who could read grew steadily, as did the

time available to do so among the middle and leisured classes. The newspaper and pub-

lishing trades flourished and in 1702 the first daily newspaper in Britain, The Daily Cou-

rant, appeared. ‘Social’ journalism came next, aimed particularly at women readers—the

Tatler was first published in 1709 and the Spectator in 1711. The volume of advertising in

newspapers increased despite the introduction in 1712 of an advertisement tax which was

imposed by the government of the day with the aim of curbing the activities of the press.

Each advertisement, whether it was a line or a column long, was charged one shilling, and

if this was not paid within thirty days the charge was trebled. Many publications closed as

a result of this tax and also because of the imposition of a newspaper stamp duty.

Advertisements of the time were still printed and laid out like classifieds and were rarely

illustrated. On the whole they were directed at the wealthy clients of the coffee houses

where the newspapers were available. A typical newspaper would carry ads for wigs, tea,

coffee, books, wine, lottery and theatre tickets—and of course the inevitable purges and

‘cosmatiks’. It was very rare to see ordinary household goods advertised, although there

were offers to engage servants and slaves. In plate 1 you can see a typical range of ads of

the time taken from eighteenth-century journals and mercuries.

Breath, and preserves the Gums and Mouth from cankers and Impothumes;…and

Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 13

Plate 1 A range of typical announcements for different products, taken from eighteenth-

century newsheets

(a) from St James Chronicle or British Evening Post, 17–19 January 1782

14

(b) from St James Chronicle, 4–7 April 1789

Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 15

1c

(c) from St James Chronicle, 23–5 September 1790

16

1d

(d) from Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 11 March 1799

Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 17

18

In order to attract a reader’s attention, the advertisers would occasionally use simple

illustrative devices. For instance, sailing announcements might display a small woodcut

of a ship at the top of a poster or small ad, and the minute figure of a man looking over his

shoulder might be placed at the head of a runaway notice. The eighteenth-century essayist

Joseph Addison, commenting on these devices, remarked

Asterisks and Hands were formerly of great use for this purpose. Of late years the N.

B. has been much in Fashion; as also were Cuts and Figures, the invention of which

we must ascribe to the author of Spring Trusses. I must not here omit the blind Italian

character, which being scarce legible always fixes and detains the eye and gives the

curious reader something like the satisfaction of prying in a secret. (quoted in Turner,

1952, p. 26).

The drawing of an anodyne necklace (plate 2) comes from an ad for the cure of children’s

‘fits’, ‘fevers’ and ‘convulsions’. Another famous eighteenth-century figure, the critic and

humorist Dr Johnson, accused a similar ad, which ‘warned every mother that she would

never forgive herself if her infant should perish without a necklace’, of trying to scare

mothers into buying the product (a tactic not unknown today).

Dr Johnson was generally critical of the growth in advertising and of the methods which

were beginning to be used to appeal to the public. ‘They are very negligently perused’,

he said of advertisements, ‘…and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by

magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.

Promise, large Promise is the soul of an advertisement…’ (quoted in Turner, 1952, p. 30).

He also wrote that ‘the trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to

propose any improvement’ (ibid.) a judgement not borne out by the extent to which adver-

tising has developed since his time. Johnson appealed for higher standards and more truth

in advertisements, and was particularly concerned about the practice among advertisers of

‘censoring [their] neighbours’, a practice which today would possibly be called ‘knocking

copy’. Addison, too, noted how rival merchants accused each other of ‘base impositions’

and ‘fallacious subterfuges’.

However, by today’s standards most ads were straightforward and informative. Their

style and language tended to be formal, respectful and ceremonious as can be seen in this

advertisement from The Times of 1788, placed there by a retailer of imported goods:

Vickery respectfully informs the ladies that he has now for sale an extensive and admi-

rable assortment of Transparent Tetes…. The taste, fancy, elegance, convenience and

accomodation of these articles have already rendered them the greatest favourites of

every court of Europe and of numbers in Asia, Africa and America…. Ladies who

order these beautiful articles are requested to describe whether for young, middle-

aged or elderly ladies.

Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 19

Plate 2 An eighteenth-century advertisement (from Fog’s Weekly Journal,

20 November 1736)

20

Plate 3 ‘Quack’ eighteenth-century advertisements (from Coventry Mercury,

14 February 1791)

Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 21

22 Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 23

24

It is worth remembering that the eighteenth century was an age of quacks, ‘empirics’ and

tricksters. These were men who enjoyed a considerable influence and social standing. They

both made and peddled an alarming variety of pills, purges, solvents and elixirs for which

extravagant claims were made. The quacks attracted attention to their wares by indulging in

the most repulsive details of the diseases and scourges they claimed to be able to cure. Their

promises were matched by spurious testimonials elicited from miraculouslycured sufferers,

who were preferably ‘dukes and other noble personages of this kingdom’. The use of snob

appeal and ‘puffs’ can be seen in the copy of the ads in plate 3.

No lesser claims were made for tobaccos and snuffs which were said to be good for

the ‘Head, Eyes, Stomach, Lungs, Rheumatism and Gout, Thickness of Hearing, Head-

ach, Tooth-ach or Vapours’. And it was even alleged that a person ‘may never come to

wear spectacles’ if he used a certain tobacco. The quacks were to have a lasting impact on

advertising, and subsequent generations of advertisers have perfected the art of puffery and

persuasion. By the end of the eighteenth century the quacks were on their way to giving

advertising what the critic Raymond Williams has wryly described as a ‘more specialized

meaning’ (1980, p. 172).

An ‘all-deafening blast of puffery’

‘Classified’ types of advertising continued well into the nineteenth century, but the use of

handbills and street posters increased. Bill-posting was in fact a large and organized trade;

both men and vehicles were hired to display boards and posters. Later in the century adver-

tisers even used hot-air balloons to advertise their products. Although the newspaper ads of

the time were discreet by today’s standards and confined to specific sections of a publica-

tion, some traders felt that it was not respectable to advertise. One local newspaper stated

the market’, and Thomas Carlyle, writing in 1843, disapproved of what he called the ‘all-

deafening blast of puffery’ (quoted in Turner, 1952, p. 55). He argued that advertising was

against nature and ungentlemanly and that a ‘hat-maker’ is degrading himself if he speaks

of ‘his excellence and prowesses and supremacy in his craft’.

During the 1800s there was, of course, an expansion in trade and a substantial increase

in manufacturing. The abolition of the advertisement tax in 1853 and the newspaper stamp

duty two years later, resulted in a growth in the volume of advertising and an increase in

newspaper circulation. By this time advertisers were beginning to pay a bit more attention

to the design and lay-out of their ads. Long sentences, superfluous linking passages and

the generally long-winded style of eighteenth-century advertising language were being

replaced by words set out in blocks, more spacing between sentences and by contrasting

type sizes. The playbills published by theatres in the early nineteenth century show how

advertisers were becoming aware of the need to communicate quickly and decisively. The

‘art’ of copywriting also sprang to life, making a noteworthy contribution to the language

in the coining and inventing of new words.

Clumsy Latin compound words and Greek neologisms were especially popular. No

doubt the public were impressed to know that teeth could be filled with ‘mineral mar-

moratum’ or ‘mineral succedaneum’, that a raincoat was a ‘siphonias’, and hair cream an

‘aromatic regenerator’. There was also Rypophagon Soap, Olden’s Eukeirogenion, Elme’s

in 1859 that ‘Advertising is resorted to for the purposes of introducing inferior articles into

Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 25

Arcanum and Winn’s Anticardium. Traders even hired poets to write stanzas in praise of

their products, and one boasted in an ad that ‘we keep a poet’. A saucemaker ‘kept’ a poet

who produced the following lines:

The goose that on our Ock’s green shore

Thrives to the size of the Albatross

Is twice the goose it was before

When washed with Neighbour Goodman’s sauce.

The following piece of lorid prose was written in 1843 for Parr’s Life Pills:

The spring and fall of the leaf has been always remarked as the periods when disease,

if it be lurking in the system, is sure to show itself. The coldness of winter renders

torpid the acrimonious fluids of the body and in this state of inactivity their evil to the

system is not perceived; but at the spring these are aroused, and if not checked mix up

and circulate in the blood, and thus the whole system is contaminated…

Another favourite device of advertisers was the fashion of printing some eye-catching

statement in bold type, followed by the remainder of the message in smaller type, thus:

A Beautiful Young Girl Strangled

a cry of admiration when she saw our new blouses

or:

The Duke of Wellington Shot

a glance of admiration at our hats

The majority of advertisements still came from local traders, and in tone and style they

were very similar to those of the eighteenth century. However, a more general kind of

household product was beginning to come onto the market. The first nationally advertised

product was probably Warren’s Shoe Blacking, followed by Rowland’s Macassar Oil, Spen-

cer’s Liquid Hair Dye and Morrison’s Universal Pill. The techniques used to promote these

products had been pioneered by the eighteenth-century quacks, but the use of ‘puffs’ was

extended. The crowned heads of Europe and all ranks of nobility were being signed up to

give testimonials—the Tsar of Russia recommended the use of Revalenta Arabica while an

ad for the Balm of Syriacum boasted that it was used in Queen Victoria’s household.

The break-up of the column lay-out in newspapers

Advertising steadily expanded from 1850 to the end of the century. After the newspaper

stamp duty was dropped in 1855, the circulation of newspapers increased and many new

ones were founded. Newspaper editors were on the whole reluctant to open their papers

to new-style advertisements, particularly to those which were designed to extend beyond

the width of a standard newspaper column as it was thought that they would disrupt the

design of the page. The more persistent ‘quacks’ pressed editors to abandon column rules

and to take ‘display’ ads, featuring large, black typefaces and even pictures of ‘voluptuous’

26

women. Some editors argued, as it turned out quite rightly, that this type of advertisement

would possibly favour bigger traders at the expense of the smaller ones.

Ingenious, if tedious, methods were employed by some manufacturers to exploit and no

doubt ridicule the editor’s fear of bold type and display lay-out. For example, some adver-

tisements consisted exclusively of repetitions of a firm’s name or its product, and the repeat

could run for as many as one thousand lines:

John Smith and Son

John Smith and Son

John Smith and Son

John Smith and Son

Phrases were printed in small type in eye-catching patterns which still preserved the col-

umn rule. In response The Times, for one, imposed a rule against the endless repetition of

words or phrases. Each line had to have some description after it. There then followed a

spate of advertisements like this one:

Rossetter’s Hair Restorer

is not a dye

Rossetter’s Hair Restorer

contains no oil

Rossetter’s Hair Restorer

prevents hair falling

Rossetter’s Hair Restorer

promotes the growth of hair

Another trick was to build up large capital letters out of groupings of smaller letters:

The names of products could be spelt out using this method. For instance CUTICURA

was spelt out one letter to a column across the top of an eight-column page of a paper, and

subsidiary headings were constructed on a smaller scale. A trader might even demand that

his product be shaped by letters in his advertisements. Thus a hatter could have a hat made

out of letters, the oculist, a pair of spectacles.

Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 27

Because they faced restrictions in the columns of the press, many manufacturers turned

to outdoor advertising where there were no such limitations on their creativity and ingenu-

ity. At one time in London billposting was so popular that it seemed you might never get to

see a building at all. The following quotation is a description of billstickers in the 1850s.

The billstickers never heeded the notices to beware, and cared nothing for the pri-

vacy of ‘dead walls’, or, for the matter of that, of dwelling houses or street doors.

Though he himself was rarely seen, his disfiguring work was a prominent feature of

the metropolis. Early morning was his busy time, and if he could cover up the work

of a rival, so much the better…(Quoted in Marland, 1974).

Slogans and catch phrases

In the US there were no newspaper or advertising taxes so the press grew swiftly during the

eighteenth century. Newspapers cost less than in Britain and sometimes over half the space

was devoted to advertising. At the beginning of the nineteenth century most advertise-

ments were largely like those in Britain; for sailing departures and arrivals, books, plays,

patent medicines, and also for the slave trade. There were also restrictions on large type

and multiple-column displays in American newspapers. One publisher grew exasperated at

this and decided to extend the technique of repetition he had seen in The Times of London.

He leased entire pages in a rival newspaper (he never advertised in his own), filling the

columns with repetitious phrases. Sometimes he bought a whole page only to leave it blank

in order to attract the reader’s attention. On occasions he would even fill the pages with the

opening chapter of a new serial story, cutting it off at the crucial moment and then notifying

the reader that the continuation could be found in his paper.

Typographical restrictions and the ban on illustrations were lifted by most American

newspapers by 1895, so the vogue of repetition, no longer needed, died out. Compared to

their British counterparts, American advertisers used more colloquial, personal and infor-

mal language to address the customer and also exploited the uses of humour to attract atten-

tion to a product. New-style department stores grew rapidly in America from the 1850s

onwards and quickly became large advertisers. Later, manufacturers of the new patent

foods and mechanical inventions joined them as major advertisers.

As the device of repetition became more and more unfashionable, advertisers had to

think of new ways of attracting the public’s interest; they turned to the invention and use

of slogans and catch-phrases. Two of the more unforgettable, if primitive, British examples

of such devices were Beecham’s pills’ ‘Worth a Guinea a Box’ and Pears Soap’s ‘Good

Morning! Have you used Pears soap?’ In America the habit was no less effective: Kodak’s

‘You press the button we do the rest’ proved to be memorable, while a slogan for Ivory soap

boasted: ‘It floats—It’s 99 44/100ths pure!’

Bubbles

The food processing industry was launched around the middle of the nineteenth century and

thanks to advertising, names like Bovril, Nestlé, Cadbury, Fry and Kellogg soon became

household words. Like their predecessors in the pills and potion trade, the patent food

28

advertisers also used testimonials from famous people of the day, and they went to a great

deal of trouble to stress the pure and healthy nature of their products.

On the heels of the new foods came such mechanical inventions as bicycles, sewing-

machines and typewriters and these too were advertised widely but with more restraint than

the patent foods.

Because advertising was expanding so rapidly in the new products area, the advertis-

ers of older products like soaps and pills were forced into thinking up fresh ideas for their

advertisements. A & F Pears, for instance, one of the pioneers of catch-phrases, decided to

use more extended campaigns for their soap. The company hoped that by constantly repeat-

ing the name of the product and the catchphrases in the press and on public hoardings, the

public would ‘automatically’ ask for Pears when they went into a shop to buy a tablet of

soap. Pears also used riddles and puzzles to catch the attention of readers: plate 4 comes

from a Pears annual, a publication started in 1891 to bring reproductions of paintings, seri-

alized stories and of course advertising to the public.

Two important trends in advertising emerged in the 1880s. First, a number of advertis-

ing agencies transferred their loyalty from the newspaper to the advertiser. The agencies

had originally established themselves in small shop premises with the purpose of selling

space for the newspapers. However, the increase in the number of newspapers during this

period made the manufacturer’s job very difficult because he had no way of knowing who

the readers of the paper were nor, indeed, if his ads were reaching the right potential cus-

tomer. But if the advertiser channelled his work through a specialist agency, the latter was

able to assess the usefulness of a particular publication and feed this information back to

the client.

This new breed of agent tried to convince reluctant traders and publishers of the benefits

of agencies. One of them, Samuel Deacon, urged newspaper proprietors to announce their

circulation figures (a move which does, of course, benefit advertisers), thus starting a cam-

paign that was to last fifty years.

The second trend that emerged at this time was that some editors decided to relax their

strict rule about single columns and began to allow display ads in their papers. Larger type-

faces were used and the ads sometimes spanned two or more columns. Towards the end of

the century even The Times was permitting advertisements onto their pages ‘in type which

three years ago would have been considered fit only for street hoardings’ (quoted in Turner,

1952, p. 153).

Newspaper editors must have been influenced by the many street posters to be found

lining the streets of Victorian England, and also by the introduction of illustrated advertise-

ments in the magazines from the 1880s onwards. Some of these ads would look crude to us

today but others established features which are still used. One rather stilted technique was

the inclusion of the name of a product or a slogan into the drawing of the people or the set-

ting in the ad itself. So there were many ads where the lettering ran along the edge of a table

cloth or along the bottom of curtains and the product’s name could even be found printed

on the bare chest of a woman. One famous ad of the day, the Borax nude, showed the naked

figure of a woman rising from waves, brandishing a wand at unclean shapes labelled ‘dis-

ease’ and ‘decay’. She was called the ‘Spirit of Purity’ in order to counter any criticism of

her nudity. Just as today, pictures of scantily dressed young women were used to advertise

a whole variety of products ranging from combinations to cigarettes.

Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 29

Plate 4 A Pears conundrum (from ‘Bubbles’: Early Advertising Art From A. & F.Pears

Ltd, edited by Mike Dempsey, 1978).

Established painters also contributed to the ‘art’ of publicity although, unlike in France

where poster art was highly regarded, British artists were initially unwilling to venture into

the world of commerce. In 1886 A. & F.Pears bought a picture by Sir John Everett Millais,

who was unquestionably the richest and most popular painter in late Victorian England.

The company wanted it for their exclusive use in promoting Pears soap. The painting was,

of course, ‘Bubbles’ (see plate 5). Millais was apprehensive about the commercial use of

his work but warmed to the idea because of the quality of the engraving Pears intended to

reproduce. Many members of the public were hostile to this prostitution of art, and as late

as 1899, three years after Millais’s death, The Times still carried letters on the ‘debate’.

30

Plate 5 ‘Bubbles’ by Sir John Everett Millais

Advertising as Communication

The origins and development of advertising 31

Pears spent £30,000 on the ‘Bubbles’ campaign and, even today, the picture is one of

the most instantly recognizable advertising symbols ever devised. This was perhaps the

first example of advertising which associated a product with (high) culture (represented by

Bubbles who, incidentally, was the artist’s grandson). It is a combination which character-

ized the Pears image for many years. The company brought out the Pears annual until 1920.

Much of its material would strike us as unashamedly sentimental. However, Pears were

astutely catering for contemporary taste, and indeed children, animals, flowers and young

women are still the common denominators of advertising appeal.

By the end of the nineteenth century advertising had reached new heights of boldness

and confidence—not to say impertinence. Whereas ads in journals had previously been

confined to special sections, they now proliferated throughout the pages. Many people

were shocked to find theatre safety curtains displaying ads. Buildings disappeared behind

outdoor hoardings and an American patent food company even had the audacity to erect

a signboard halfway up the white cliffs of Dover. The writer Rudyard Kipling voiced the

annoyance of many people when he accused railway stations of ‘the beplastering of railway

platforms with every piece of information in the world except the name of the station’ (in

Turner, 1965).

Partly as a response to these developments and to the many advertising eyesores and

publicity stunts, the Society for the Checking of Abuses in Public Advertising (SCAPA)

was founded in 1898. The crusade of SCAPA was instrumental in defining the now famil-

iar arguments between the defenders of ‘taste’ and the ‘needs’ of commerce. But just as

the battle ‘for’ and ‘against’ advertising was gathering momentum, the very nature of the

object of their passions was radically changing.

Suggestions for further work

1. It is interesting to compare older style advertisements with contemporary examples

although it is not always easy to get hold of old ads. If you are interested in rummag-

ing around junk shops or secondhand bookshops you might be able to find some old

magazines, newspapers or posters; even train tickets, trade cards and book markers

used to carry ads. Some museums have exhibits of advertising ephemera.

so this is also a useful place to go to look at advertisements.

2. If you can get some older ads, study their design and layout and the methods used to

persuade potential customers.

Other sources of historical material There are surprisingly few books on the history

of advertising but the History of Advertising Trust (see p. 214) is an educational

foundation and a useful source of information and material. The trust has compiled

a catalogue and index of significant advertising material. Some of the larger com-

panies keep collections of their old advertisements (A. & F. Pears, for instance,

have a collection of their early publicity), and advertising agencies sometimes keep

examples of their earlier work. The British Newspaper Archive (Colindale Newspa-

per Library, Colindale Avenue, London NW9) keeps a collection of old newspapers

32

3. Compare some early examples of patent medicine advertising with today’s. How simi-

lar are they? What are their lines of appeal? Compare how the images of women in ads

have changed over the years.

4. Consider the most significant changes that occurred in the nineteenth century which

affected the purpose and face of advertising.

Advertising as Communication

2

THE NEW ADVERTISING

Fundamental and far-reaching changes in the British economy, which were responsible for

the transformation of advertising, took place at the end of the nineteenth century.

Organizing the market

During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, advertising was a relatively straight-

forward means of announcement and communication and was used mainly to promote

novelties and fringe products. But when factory production got into full swing and new

products, e.g. processed foods, came onto the market, national advertising campaigns and

brand-naming of products became necessary. Before large-scale factory production, the

typical manufacturing unit had been small and adaptable and the task of distributing and

selling goods had largely been undertaken by wholesalers. The small non-specialized fac-

tory which did not rely on massive investment in machinery had been flexible enough to

adapt its production according to changes in public demand.

But the economic depression which lasted from 1873 to 1894 marked a turning point

between the old method of industrial organization and distribution and the new. From the

beginning of the nineteenth century until the 1870s, production had steadily expanded and

there had been a corresponding growth in retail outlets. But the depression brought on a

crisis of over-production and under-consumption—manufactured goods piled up unsold

and prices and profits fell. Towards the end of the century many of the small industrial

firms realized that they would be in a better position to weather economic depressions and

slumps if they combined with other small businesses and widened the range of goods they

produced so that all their eggs were not in one basket. They also realized that they would

have to take steps to ensure that once their goods had been produced there was a market

for them. This period ushered in the first phase of what economists now call ‘monopoly

capitalism’, which, roughly speaking, refers to the control of the market by a small number

of giant, conglomerate enterprises.1 Whereas previously competitive trading had been con-

ducted by small rival firms, after the depression the larger manufacturing units and com-

bines relied more and more on mass advertising to promote their new range of products.

A good example of the changes that occurred in manufacture and distribution at the turn

of the century can be found in the soap trade. From about the 1850s the market had been

flooded with anonymous bars of soap, produced by hundreds of small manufacturers and

distributed by wholesalers and by door-to-door sellers. Competition grew steadily through-

out the latter half of the century and eventually the leading companies embarked on more

aggressive selling methods in order to take custom away from their rivals. For instance, the

future Lord Leverhulme decided to ‘brand’ his soap by selling it in distinctive packages

in order to facilitate recognition and encourage customer loyalty. In the 1880s, Pears were

spending between £30,000 and £40,000 a year on advertising and in the 1890s they and

34

Lever Brothers spent £100,000. In 1907 this figure had risen to nearly £500,000 a year but

by 1919 the ‘soap war’ had died down with the merger of the leading companies.

Lord Leverhulme was one of the first industrialists to realize that advertisements should

contain ‘logical and considered’ arguments as well as eye-catching and witty slogans.

Many advertisers followed his lead and started to include ‘reason-why’ copy in their ads.

For instance, one contemporary Pears soap ad went into great detail about how the product

could enhance marital bliss by cutting down the time the wife had to spend with her arms

in a bowl of frothy suds. And an ad for Cadbury’s cocoa not only proclaimed its purity but

also detailed other benefits: ‘for the infant it is a delight and a support; for the young girl, a

source of healthy vigour; for the young miss in her teens a valuable aid to development…’

and so on. As the writer E.S.Turner rightly points out, the advertising of this period had

reached the ‘stage of persuasion as distinct from proclamation or iteration’ (1952, p. 133).

Indeed, advertise or bust seemed to be the rule of the day as bigger and more expensive

campaigns were mounted and smaller firms who did not, or could not, advertise, were

squeezed or bought out by the larger companies.

New inventions were entering the market at a rapid rate during the early years of the

twentieth century and were introduced and popularized by advertising. Among them were

the first motor cars, although these were not widely advertised until Henry Ford extended

his publicity methods to the British market. Perhaps the most expensive and chauvinistic

campaign of this period was one launched in 1901 by leading British cigarette companies

under threat from the American Tobacco Company. One advertisement in this tobacco war

covered four pages in the Star newspaper and boasted that it was the ‘most costly, colossal

and convincing advertisement ever used in an evening newspaper the wide world o’er’. One

of its slogans was:

Don’t be gulled by Yankee Bluff

Support John Bull with every Puff

The American irms retaliated and the campaign was a long and costly one. It was another early example of what has become one of the persistent features of advertising and mar-

keting—the ad war.

The rise of popular journalism

Around the turn of the century advertising expanded rapidly alongside other innovations in

marketing and trading. The new advertising agencies benefited from this growth, and rev-

elled in their new found status and importance. By the beginning of the twentieth century

they were offering a more comprehensive service to manufacturers than just selling space

in newspapers, although some agencies continued to do this. However, they were hindered

by the fact that the newspaper publishers were still reluctant to announce the net sales of

their papers and so agents could not advise their clients as to which newspaper or magazine

reached the greatest number of people. In 1900 the Advertisers’ Protection Society was

formed in order to bring more influence to bear on newspaper publishers, as well as to help

the construction of better campaigns and to defend advertising against the attacks of critics

like SCAPA.

Advertising as Communication

The new advertising 35

Varied consumer goods, especially foodstuffs, were flowing into the country from

abroad and, at home, manufacture was expanding further which meant that the traders’ and

producers’ need for mass markets became increasingly urgent. So they turned to the ideal

medium of communication—the mass popular press.

A number of popular papers and periodicals had been launched during the second half

of the nineteenth century, helped by the Education Act of 1870 which raised the level of

literacy in Britain considerably. In order to attract readers in a highly competitive market,

the newspaper owners devised all sorts of gimmicks and publicity stunts. Competitions

and treasure hunts became popular and the serialization of stories also proved to be a good

method of capturing and keeping an audience. By 1900 the Daily Mail had reached a

circulation of 700,000 and the News of the World 1,250,000. But the cost of producing

newspapers was rising and many proprietors turned to advertising for an ‘independent’

source of finance and support. Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, was a pioneer in

this respect, and very early in the century he decided that advertising was ‘news’ in itself.

The front page of his Daily Mail was soon devoted to display advertisements, particularly

from drapery shops and the new department stores. It was not unusual to see pictures in

the papers of women parading underwear and ‘combinations’. Advertising proved such a

useful source of revenue that Northcliffe—sometimes called ‘the innocent genius of news-

papers’—decided that through it he could reduce the price of his newspaper and thereby

increase sales (despite the fact that he had reservations about the ‘vulgar’ drapery ads). He

also decided to publish the Daily Mail’s circulation figures and challenged other newspa-

per proprietors to do the same. In doing this he effectively ushered in the industrialization

of the British press and altered its entire financial base. From this time newspapers have

become increasingly dependent on advertisements for revenue.

This period was a particularly buoyant one for the popular press. Printing techniques

were improved, readership expanded and the new railways made the national distribution of

daily newspapers possible for the first time. The less formal style of American journalism

was beginning to be adopted by British journalists, and this together with the other develop-

ments made a great impact on the advertising trade.

‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?’

As the twentieth century progressed, advertising moved nearer to the centre of the nation’s

economy, discarding its marginal and ‘amateur’ status on the way. People were even talk-

ing of advertising as a ‘profession’ and a ‘public service’. New ways of appealing to and

persuading people, many of them based on American techniques, were adopted, including

the use of the new ‘science’ of psychology. For instance, a branch of psychology based on

the principle of human instinct provided advertisers with the technique of ‘association’. An

American ‘instinct’ psychologist gave this piece of advice to advertisers:

an advertisement should be presented in such a way that a reader would associate it

with his own experience, which was best done by appealing to his ruling interests and

motives. These included the desire to be healthy, to hoard, to possess, to wear smart

clothes, to get something for nothing, to be more like the privileged and successful

classes. (in Turner, 1952)

36

He stressed that advertisements should be cheerful, and products should be linked to pros-

perity, social status and attractiveness. These ‘positive’, idealized ads drew this sarcastic

comment from the magazine The New York Evening Post in 1909: ‘In the literary pages (of

magazines) the world is the worst of all possible worlds, in the advertising supplements it is

the best of all conceivable worlds.’ Psychologists also suggested that advertisers use scare

tactics to motivate people.

Psychological methods were also used to great effect during the First World War to

recruit volunteers to the armed services. There are many famous posters deriving from

this period; perhaps the most celebrated is the one entitled ‘Daddy, what did you do in

the Great War?’ (plate 6). As a poster it is simple but effective, and is a great contrast

to the crudely drawn and jingoistic ‘Yankee Bluff ’ ad mentioned earlier and the mawk-

ish and sentimental ads used by Pears. The drawing of the family group is detailed and

closely observed—the little girl on her father’s lap and the boy playing with toy soldiers

on the carpet at his feet. The scene is domestic and not only represents an appeal to

patriotism but also plays on basic human relationships and anxieties. Having aroused

these anxieties and potential guilt feelings, the poster offers the message that they can

be relieved by joining up and helping to win the war in order to preserve the family

values portrayed.

The never-never

With the end of the war in 1918, the factories once again turned their attention to the

production of consumer goods. In America, more reliable cars became available by the

thousand, as did radio sets, refrigerators, washing machines, and water closets. One way

of getting people to buy vast quantities of goods, and thus to close the gap between the

rate of industrial growth and people’s purchasing power, was to offer credit and allow

people to purchase things by instalment. But this did not really make long-term, life-

long consumers out of people, so more manipulative methods had to be devised. People

had to be made to feel guilty if they did not buy a new car or radio set, and were taught

that it was unpatriotic not to discard things every year in order to buy the latest model

of any item.

Advertising as Communication

The new advertising 37

Plate 6 Using psychology

38

Advertisers had learnt a lot from the propaganda posters of the First World War and after

the war they joined forces with the forces of management and social psychology to create a

new generation of consumers in order that the wheels of industry could keep turning. One

way of getting people interested in consumer commodities was to make them dissatisfied

with themselves and to play on their insecurities. An American advertising trade journal of

the 1920s summed up the advertiser’s task in this statement: ‘Satisfied customers are not as

profitable as discontented ones’. The advertisements of the 1920s in America encouraged

self-criticism and distrust: ‘sneaker smell’, ‘paralysed pores’, ‘vacation knees’, ‘office

hips’, ‘underarm offence’ and ‘ashtray breath’ had Americans running to the nearest store

for the latest preventative or cure. The public were taught through the ads that they could

consume their way out of any trouble or misfortune, real or invented. And set against the

afflictions that could visit people day and night, and untrustworthy friends and neighbours,

the advertisers posed the paternalistic corporation as a substitute friend and family. A critic

of the advertising of the period, Stuart Ewen, remarks: ‘The authority of industry was being

drawn as a sustaining father figure while traditional areas of social intercourse and the pos-

sibility of collective action were pictured as decrepit, threatening and basically incapable

of providing any level of security’ (1976, p. 102). The 1920s was a period overshadowed

by ‘patriarchal corporatism’ and ‘Fordism’, terms used by the Italian social critic Antonio

Gramsci (1971) to describe how industrialists entered into and directed the nation’s fam-

ily matters. Ford had pioneered not only the mass production of the motor car but also the

extension of industrial authority over family relations. Many industrialists of this period

assumed a right to administer family life in order to bring it into line with the demands of

industrial production.

The power of business corporations and the new advertising techniques did not escape

public criticism. The advertising industry responded with attempts to regulate its activities

but by and large these efforts were mere window dressing because misleading assertions,

deceptions and psychological manipulation continued. A code of ethics drawn up by the

International Advertising Corporation (IAC) in 1924 pledged the industry to ‘seek the truth

and live it’, a maxim taken very seriously by some ads: a New York department store pro-

claimed ‘Gimbels Tells the Whole Truth’.

Fearing that advertising might be getting a bad name, the industry launched a campaign

to advertise advertising. One example of this campaign which appeared in Life magazine in

1925 featured a young man saying ‘I begin to see that it’s advertising that makes America

hum. It gives ginks like me a goal…. I guess one reason there is so much success in Amer-

ica is because there is so much advertising—for things to want—for things to work for.’

The nerve war

The economic depression of the late 1920s and 1930s meant that manufacture was cut

back again and consequently the activities of many advertisers as well. But for some, busi-

ness flourished because this was a period of ‘nerve warfare’. At a time of economic gloom

and uncertainty, the pedlars of nerve tonics, vitamin pills and mouthwashes came into

their own. And the nerve war gave advertisers plenty of scope for their talents of inven-

tion: readers were told of the dangers of contracting hitherto unknown conditions such as

‘halitosis’, ‘summer sluggishness’, ‘tell-tale tongue’, ‘listlessness’, ‘night starvation’ and

Advertising as Communication

The new advertising 39

‘body odour’. The ads were often as lurid and exaggerated as the ‘quack’ advertising of the

eighteenth century and were filled with pseudo-scientific argument. People were sent into

a frenzy over threats to health, jobs, marriages and social status and words like ‘protection’

and ‘confidence’ took on new meanings. Plate 7 is a compilation of ads from the period all

using the theme of bodily functions or ‘dysfunctions’.

In Britain the advertisers appealed to patriotism and guilt. This scolding address was

made to readers of The Times in 1920:

Do you know that

nearly £10,000,000 was spent last year

by our own people in these Islands for

FOREIGN MOTOR PRODUCTS?

A colossal loss to British trade and British Workers

No government can cure unemployment

if this sort of thing goes on

Do you realize this? You should.

The following notice appeared in Advertisers Weekly in 1931. It was from the producers of

a tonic wine and displayed a somewhat cynical attitude to the nation’s plight.

Rising unemployment figures, it seemed, were inevitably reducing our market; yet

we refused to be intimidated by this. Consideration of the matter showed that even

those who drew unemployment benefit represented a potential market and one likely

to be productive enough if approached in the right way. So instead of neglecting the

unemployed, we visualized them as a prospective market of 2,500,000 people.

There seemed to be no limit to the virtues of tonic wine. It could recreate married bliss,

patch up quarrels, end nagging, etc.

The growing effrontery and absurdity of many ads drew the scorn of critics and writers

of the 1930s. Even advertising men were disillusioned with the sensationalist and unscru-

pulous practices of some colleagues. The American magazine Ballyhoo, published in the

early 1930s, was launched as a response to inflated advertising. It debunked the world of

advertisers and among other attempts at ridicule it gave a glossary of advertising terms

which included the following:

Delicate membrane any part of the body

Lubricate the skin texture put on grease

Pore-deep cleansing washing the face

Harsh irritants all the ingredients of a competitor’s product

Great scientist anyone who will sign an endorsement

Lifetime until the new model comes in

Exclusive expensive

40

Plate 7 A selection of advertisements from the 1920s and 1930s (from The World of

Small Ads, Lippa and Newton (1979))

Advertising as Communication

The new advertising 41

A number of muckraking books were published in the 1930s which aimed to expose the

tricks of advertising and alert the public to its ‘confident absurdities’. By way of response

to the criticism and the satire, many ads of the day began to display a certain kind of self

mockery and cynicism. Raymond Williams sums up this development in his comment on

the development of knowing, sophisticated, humorous advertising, which acknowl-

edged the scepticism and made claims either casual or offhand or so ludicrously

exaggerated as to include the critical response. Thus it became possible to ‘know all

the arguments’ against advertising, and yet accept or write pieces of charming copy

(1980, p. 181).

In Britain, so desperate were advertisers to attract the public that many revitalized the

older methods of the ‘quack’ and the sandwich-board men. In America, advertising copy-

writers turned their skills to inventing their own language, or ‘word magic’. In many cases

it replaced the words of the English language that copywriters had previously devalued.

Tight skirts were described as ‘stem-slim classics of lethal grace…panther-sleek and fabu-

lously disciplined’; lace was ‘a wicked whisper’; there were ‘moonstruck rayons’ and ‘par-

ody-pearls trilling with pride’. More irritating was the advertiser’s habit of using baby talk

to describe various food products. Words like ‘yummy’, ‘tangy’, ‘zippy’, ‘chewy’, ‘crispy’,

‘crunchy’ or ‘Krispy’ and ‘Krunchy’ littered magazine copy. Hyphenated words like ‘jiffy-

quick’, ‘oven-hot’ and ‘sun-sweet’ became all the rage. Stretch became s-t-r-e-t-c-h, cool

became c-o-o-l; eating became an adjective as in ‘a wonderful eating cheese’ and then, not

surprisingly perhaps, ‘eatingest’ appeared in some copy.

As the depression eased some advertisers decided that the only way to gain or regain a

reputation and to stimulate interest in advertising was to offer an additional service. Bor-

rowing techniques from sociology and psychology, advertisers tried to persuade their cli-

ents that market research was a way of ensuring that their money was ‘scientifically’ spent.

The initial impetus for market research came from doubts over the ‘readability’ of word

magic which, some said, had been written to please the seller not the buyer. Readability

tests were devised to find out if word magic was easy or difficult to read, and consumers

were recruited to test advertising copy for memorability, emotional arousal, credibility, etc.

Market research was also beginning to be used to test and measure media/advertising influ-

ence and consumer motivations.

By the end of the 1930s advertising had become an accepted adjunct of the national

economy. But the advertising of patent medicines still gave cause for concern. The adver-

tising industry, mindful of its reputation, decided to clean up or throw out some of its

more dubious associates. In both America and Britain, legislation was passed during the

subsequent decade, designed to curtail or ban misleading and dangerous advertisements,

especially those for drugs and patent medicines.

The home front

Nevertheless, the Second World War provided the advertisers of tonic wines, aspirins and

bed-time drinks with a field day. ‘War worry’ and ‘black-out nerves’ had to be conquered

and the home front had to be kept brave and cheerful. The advertisement for ‘peace-time

42

sleep’ (plate 8) is typical in that it plays on a number of wartime themes. The reader is asked

if she is ‘war-proofed’, the graph illustrates the need for ‘scientifically sound sleep’, and

added to all this, the drink would help ‘Mr Churchill’ in the war effort. Wireless manufac-

turers, too, played on the nation’s patriotism; one ad urged people to buy radios to prove

their ‘freedom to listen’.

Many ads of the war era stressed economy and self-denial. Readers were told to ‘wage

war on waste’, to ‘go easy with…’, to ‘save…’, and ‘please use…sparingly’. Firms boasted

of their own efforts and sacrifices in order to encourage their customers. Campaigns were

launched to make the best use of resources and materials in short supply, which included

anything from paper and rags to fats and metals. Men were encouraged to use certain

long-lasting raz or blades and help save the nation’s steel. A Rinso soap ad announced ‘if

everybody can prolong the life of garments by only one third then reduced supply will meet

all our needs’. An American poster urged people to ‘Save waste fats for explosives. Take

them to your meat dealer’. Food ads invariably provided hints and recipes to make rationed

food go further. Housewives were instructed how to make cakes without eggs, to make one

rasher of bacon go round the whole family, to save gas and electricity in their cooking and

to cook emergency meals for a hundred people in an air-raid shelter!

Since women were so vital to the economy outside, as well as inside, the home dur-

ing the war, their advertising images underwent a fundamental change. Instead of being

shown as passive consumers mainly interested in their appearance and the shine on their

furniture, women in wartime ads were depicted more realistically as bus drivers, factory

workers and air-raid wardens, thus reflecting their dual roles as workers and as mothers and

wives. Products such as soap, convenience foods and household gadgets were offered as a

source of help to busy women rather than as avenues to greater social status or as a means

of relieving guilt feelings.

In 1945 women were urged to return to domestic life to make way for returning sol-

diers whose jobs they had been filling. The advertisements for commercial products in the

post-war period reflected this campaign. For instance, the ‘one-job’ woman was a popular

theme in advertisements. One for Milk of Magnesia showed a woman looking cheerfully

at the viewer and saying ‘I’m clocking in at home’. ‘Glamour is returning’, warbled an ad

for handcream. There was a return to ads depicting women in their domestic role usually

looking directly out at the consumer from the picture; the ads during wartime had invari-

ably shown women concentrating on their work and unconcerned about the spectator’s

gaze. Perhaps the transition from peace to wartime stereotype and back again can best be

seen in a series of ads for Macleans’ toothpaste. Before the war the image of the woman

in Macleans’ ads showed her as a docile secretary; during the war she was represented as

a munitions worker (replying to the question ‘Did you Maclean your teeth today?’ with

‘Yes, and I always shell!’); after the war she was shown looking contented and glamorous,

baking a cake.

Advertising as Communication

The new advertising 43

Plate 8 ‘Peace-time sleep’

44

If wartime brought a check to the rapidly expanding industry of advertising, the post-

war period changed all that, for the 1950s brought a spectacular extension of advertising,

the mass media and the commodity market generally. It is with some irony that we can look

at a statement made in a book published during the war by a critic of advertising, Denys

Thompson:

advertising as we know it may be dispensed with after the war. We are getting on very

well with a greatly diminished volume of advertising in wartime, and it is difficult

to envisage a return to the 1919–39 conditions in which publicity proliferated. (in

Williams, 1980)

Contrary to Thompson’s assertion, advertising has in fact proliferated since the war. Con-

sumer goods flooded onto the market with the arrival of the post-war ‘affluent’ society and

the mass-media channels expanded accordingly in order to cope with the demands of the

advertisers. Although we should not glorify the austerities of war nor be particularly nos-

talgic for the days when there were genuine hardships, it is hard not to be alarmed at the

expansion of advertising in recent years and the degree to which we have grown to accept

it without question. We ought, perhaps, to consider if it is possible to get on ‘with a greatly

diminished volume of advertising’.

Note

1. See Baran and Sweezey (1968) for a detailed explanation of this term.

Suggestions for further work

1. In what way could advertising be said to have changed the structure and function of the

British press since the turn of the century? (There are quite a few books on the history

of the press which are worth consulting: J.Curran (1981), Power and Responsibility, or

Golding (1974), The Mass Media, are two easily available works.)

2. Do you consider the First World War poster mentioned in chapter 2 to be unreason-

able? Are the same appeals used today to attract volunteers to the armed services?

Look at the visual and verbal imagery of today’s ads for the army, navy and airforce.

What are the underlying messages of these ads? You might also look at ads for nurs-

ing.

3. Can you spot any psychological tactics in the ads of today? Do ads play on our insecu-

rities and our desire to be accepted and popular? Do they undermine our own sense of

self and self-confidence like the American ads of the 1920s mentioned in this chapter?

In this respect you could try to get hold of some American magazines and compare

their ads with those for similar products in British magazines. Are the lines of appeal

broadly similar?

4. Can you spot any tactics used in advertisements today that relate to or are indicative of

the general economic climate? (The Sunday newspaper colour supplements might be

a good source of material.)

Advertising as Communication

The new advertising 45

5. Make a glossary of terms used in advertisements of today similar to the glossary men-

tioned in this chapter. Ads for cars or beauty products might be a good place to start.

List the words or phrases on one side of a piece of paper and what you think they really

mean on the other.

6. During the Second World War, the stereotypical image of women in ads changed from

one which depicted the woman as a ‘passive object’ to one showing her in different,

more industrial roles. What kind of stereotyped women do you find in ads today?

How do you think they differ from those in wartime ads? What accounts for differing

images of women in different historical periods?

3

THE NEW MEDIA

After the Second World War, advertising expanded rapidly alongside the media of mass

communication. New methods of persuasion emerged and the field extended to embrace

more market and motivational research, organized publicity of all kinds, various applications

of computer software and hardware and a variety of non-media techniques of promotion.

It has been estimated that by the end of the 1980s, advertising’s total world billings could

exceed 300 billion dollars. And in a special feature in the Financial Times (15 October

1980), one advertiser declared that for the most part, face-to-face selling has disappeared.

Post-war developments

From 1940 to 1956 there was statutory newsprint rationing in Britain due to a shortage

of paper. When this rationing was at its most severe, national newspapers shrank to less

than a quarter of their pre-war size, which meant a considerable cut-back in advertising

in the national newspapers; regional newspapers and magazines escaped the worst of the

controls. During the affluence of the post-Second-World-War boom, the consumer market

expanded, new agencies were founded and scores of new products, particularly domestic

durables (like washing machines) and non-durable products (like convenience foods), were

launched. One of the most popular if notorious weapons in the ad man’s arsenal during the

1950s was motivational, or depth, analysis.

Among the promotional methods established during this period and still much used by

advertisers was the product jingle—an often irritating if effective catch-phrase or piece of

verse set to a catchy tune, such as the immortal: ‘Murray Mints, Murray Mints/Too good to

hurry mints.’ The jingle was first used in commercial sound broadcasting during the 1930s

in the US and was quickly adopted by television advertisers on both sides of the Atlantic

after the war. Famous pieces of music are often used to back jingles and well established

musicians and lyric writers often write (anonymously) for advertising. Writing verse for

publicity has a noble ancestry for it is claimed that the poet Byron wrote verse for Warren’s

shoe blacking in the nineteenth century. And today many authors (including the winner of

the 1981 Booker Prize for fiction) write or have written copy for ads.

Advertising has become an international enterprise over the past thirty years. Today

the mecca of the advertising industry is Madison Avenue in New York, and its agencies, or

empire, stretch all over the world. Many ads originate in the US and are then exported to

other countries where they may be slightly modified to suit local circumstances. The twelve

biggest agencies in America are the same which make up the world’s top twelve agencies.

In Britain, France, West Germany, Canada and Australia over half of the ad agencies are

owned by or are subsidiaries of one of the large American agencies. In many European,

Asian and South-American countries, the top agency is a branch of an American one.

48

During the 1950s and 1960s there was a boom in women’s periodicals; this paralleled

the boom in domestic consumption and the vast amount of advertising which accompanied

it. The focus of attention in these magazines and their ads has been the domestic role of

women and home values. A further area of expansion and diversification of consumption

which opened up during this time was clothes and make-up and in the 1960s came the

growth of the teenage market and the emergence of many teenage and ‘young set’ glossy

magazines.

However, perhaps the most significant aspect of post-war advertising was caused by the

coming of television.

Television

Two major changes in British broadcasting occurred after the war. First, television replaced

radio as the major broadcasting medium, and second, an alternative commercial network

was born and has since expanded rapidly. Advertisers were not slow to recognize the poten-

tial of broadcasting as an advertising medium. In most developed countries of the west,

radio and television are as widespread and available as any other public utility such as

water, gas or electricity. They offer advertisers access to a vast audience of potential con-

sumers, and in the case of television, the combination of sound and vision ensures the mes-

sage great force and impact.

In Britain radio and television were set up as public-service systems, similar to national-

ized industries. The concept of public-service broadcasting was extended from radio (set

up under Royal Charter in 1927) to television, which started a regular service in 1936. The

first Director-general of the BBC—John Reith—was anxious that broadcasting in Britain

be founded on a tradition of public service rather than public exploitation, arguing that

‘the serving of public interest and the serving of financial interest are not normally fully

compatible’.

The BBC’s monopoly of broadcast frequencies lasted until 1955 in the case of televi-

sion, and until the 1970s in the case of radio, when several independent local radio sta-

tions financed by commercial interests were developed to broadcast alongside the BBC

national and regional services. The BBC’s monopoly of television was broken after a fierce

campaign by financial, commercial and political interests, in and outside parliament. The

campaign against the BBC was helped by what was generally considered to be the BBC

stuffiness, aloofness and resentment of any criticism of its established role as ‘voice of the

nation’—an image which gave rise to the nickname ‘Aunty’. After much debate and heart-

searching, the forces of commerce and ‘enterprise’ won and the Independent Television

Authority (ITA) (later to become the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA)) was set

up in 1954 by Act of Parliament, ‘to provide television broadcasting services additional to

those of the BBC and of high quality’. Its network of production companies, or programme

contractors, went into operation the following year.

Commercial television

The adjective ‘independent’ in the ITA’s title was resented by many people at the BBC

who regarded themselves as truly independent since they did not depend on commercial

interests for revenue. Commercial television’s programmes are not provided by the IBA,

Advertising as Communication

The new media 49

whose function is to manage the transmitters and exercise overall control of the statute.

Programme-making franchises are allocated to consortia who bid for the licence to broad-

cast. (In the words of the late Lord Thomson, a former owner of The Times and chairman of

Scottish Television, such a commercial television franchise is ‘a licence to print money’.)

For this right, the programme companies pay the IBA a fee for the rental of transmission

facilities.

The contractors draw their income (including profits) from commercial advertising. In

order to attract advertisers, the companies must attract audiences, the programmes (with

different degrees of success) acting as the bait. Advertisers buy slots of air time for their

‘spot’ messages which go out in the programmes’ ‘natural breaks’. The more people that are

attracted to programmes and thus delivered to advertisers, the more the contractors and the

advertisers like it. The cost of air time on television (see Appendix II) depends on the time

of programme transmission, the type of programme and the potential volume of viewers.

And this is where audience research comes in, for if it can be proven that there is a substan-

tial audience for a particular programme, then the advertiser considers it money well spent

to reach its members. To buy the attention of each thousand viewers, the advertiser has

to pay ‘the cost per thousand’. This notion is central to the running of commercial televi-

sion. The TV company tries to attract the largest possible audience for which it can charge

the advertiser a high cost per thousand. This can sometimes mean that programmes more

likely to attract a ‘mass’ audience get produced more often than programmes of a more

specialized or ‘difficult’ nature, which are consequently either less frequently produced or

banished to an unfavourable spot in the schedule, such as Sunday morning. So although

pressure from advertising is by no means overt, it is a factor in commerical programming

and scheduling policy. However, the situation is much more cut-throat in American televi-

sion than in the British or European systems of broadcasting.

Aware of the excesses of American television advertising, western European countries

have laid down controls which limit the amount and type of advertising. For instance,

advertisements are not allowed to occupy more than six minutes per programme hour on

the British commercial networks. (Advertisements are not allowed during religious or royal

ceremonies and are not meant to deal with political or religious issues.) The American

model allows much greater freedom to advertisers. Competition for advertising is particu-

larly intense between the three main TV networks in the US and there is a consequent drive

for the maximum audience at all times.

Safeguards were built into the British 1954 Television Act which forbids any form of

advertising sponsorship other than ‘spot’ announcements. One clause in the Act says:

‘nothing shall be included in any programme broadcast by the Authority…which states,

suggests or implies…that any part of any programme…has been supplied or suggested

by any advertiser’. The dangers of American-style sponsorship lie in the fact that having

paid for a TV programme or series the sponsor might also wish to influence editorial mat-

ters or aspects of programme content. Sponsors could insist that they and their products

are favourably treated or at least immune from criticism in a programme. They might also

bring pressure to bear on producers not to alienate any potential customers. In any country

as socially, culturally, racially and religiously mixed as the US, this is almost—but not

quite—impossible, which explains why the kind of television that has emerged in the US

is by and large of the blandest and most superficial nature. It aims not to upset any group

50

or sectional interest, particularly not the sponsor. No wonder then that Americans call their

television the ‘boob (meaning a simpleton or fool) tube’. Networks and stations which are

constantly chasing dollars are anxious to avoid upsetting anyone who might demand the

right to ‘reply time’, which has to be donated ‘free’ to the complainant.

Direct intervention and instructions to producers and writers is not unknown in the

American broadcasting system and guidelines have been issued by sponsoring companies

to broadcasters in order that their product or service be seen in a positive light. However,

over the years sponsors have rarely found it necessary to exercise a veto, ask for changes or

withdraw sponsorship from programmes or series. The producers and writers involved have

become attuned to a sponsor’s wishes and are well aware of what is acceptable or uncontro-

versial. As Erik Barnouw (1978) has commented in his book on broadcasting sponsorship,

‘The tamed artist was perhaps as ominous a phenomenon as the vetoing sponsor’ (p. 54).l

Not only do advertisers on British and American television want large audience figures

or ratings, but the audience that TV provides must be of the right age and socio-economic

group. In a word, advertisers want audiences with purchasing power. Sometimes pro-

grammes have been taken off the screen because the audience, although large, was not the

kind which was in a financial position to buy the products advertised. Some programmes,

probably quite important ones, never even reach TV screens in America because of lack of

sponsorship.

Commercials appear much more frequently on American TV than on the commercial

channels in Britain. Often the dividing line between normal programme material and com-

mercial messages from programme sponsors is extremely thin. For instance, on some pro-

grammes the host/interviewer/master of ceremonies will ‘plug’ products as if it was part

of his act. Such direct plugs by programme personnel are not allowed on British TV, where

commercials have to be, in the words of the Television Act, ‘clearly distinguishable as such

and recognizably separate from the rest of the programme’. The one case of a programme

which blurred the distinction between programme and advertising matter by mixing plugs

with supposedly disinterested consumer advice (‘Jim’s Inn’), was removed from British

TV screens following criticism of the format in the Pilkington Report on broadcasting

published in 1962.

The current system of ‘spot’ commercial messages on British TV insulates the pro-

gramme makers from direct influence by advertisers on programme content. Advertisers

do know in advance what the programme schedules are going to be and are able to select

space for their commercials next to specific programmes. Programmes can therefore be

chosen on the basis that their content might complement a particular advertising campaign.

In practice this does not happen very often. Where commercials and programmes do har-

monize (an ad for a perfume with a romantic drama for example, or one for pet food with a

documentary on animals) this is more likely to be the exception rather than the rule.

Commercial television and the BBC

After a hesitant start in the 1950s, commercial TV in Britain went from strength to strength.

The programme companies have made huge profits from advertising and have succeeded in

attracting a sizeable, and growing, share of the TV audience. At one period in the late 1950s

the BBC was only capturing a third or less of the available viewers. Since then they have

Advertising as Communication

The new media 51

managed to win back viewers so that on occasion they have about a 50 per cent share of

the audience, although it is uncertain if this will continue. The reason why a public service

has over the years become so interested in its ratings is partly a political matter. The BBC’s

income comes from the public’s licence fee, an amount fixed by parliament or, more accu-

rately, the government of the day. If the BBC’s share of the audience falls too low, it could

be argued that it is not ‘popular’ with audiences. If the BBC is providing a service which is

not popular, it has, in the eyes of some people, less justification for claiming an increase in

the licence fee, or even for receiving a licence fee at all. In response to pressure from cer-

tain politicians and from the commercial networks, the BBC has tried to make itself more

lively and attractive to audiences. The competition for high-audience ratings pressurizes

the public-service BBC channels into acting more like commercial ones.

When competitiveness overshadows decisions about what programmes should be pro-

duced, the audiences tend to get viewed and treated as an homogenous mass. In other

words, programmes are produced which appeal to the widest possible cross-section of peo-

ple, and minority interests or ‘experimental’ material, although not ignored, are hived off

into unpopular times in the schedule. Many critics view the output of the television services

with growing alarm since it is rapidly becoming more bland, superficial and undemanding

as a result of commercial pressures and shows a tendency towards ‘catch-all’ broadcast-

ing—quality, they argue, too often gives way to quantity.

Diversiication It is worth mentioning in passing that commercial television companies make enormous

profits from advertising and have diversified their wealth into other leisure, communication

and culture industries and indeed into other types of business as well. For example:

Thames Television has interests in a computing firm and in a film company;

Granada Television has interests in television rentals, bingo halls, motorway

services, paperback books, cinemas and property;

Yorkshire Television has interests in Windsor Safari Park, commercial radio

and Scarborough Zoo.

Most of the newspaper companies are financially involved in commercial TV because much

of their advertising has been lost to the small screen and this kind of investment partially

protects them against losses. For example:

Trafalgar House owns Express Newspapers and has a large financial stake

in Associated Television (Midlands);

News International which owns the Sun, the News of the World and Times

Newspapers has a large interest in London Weekend Television, as

does the Daily Telegraph and the Observer.

The number of interconnections, such as interlocking directorships and financial invest-

ments, that commercial TV has with other industries almost defies description, and it indi-

cates the extent to which the communications industries, as a direct and indirect result of

52

advertising, have come today to direct or control powerful social institutions. Concentrated

ownership of the communication channels also means that commercial interests are in a

position to exert possibly unwarranted influence on editorial and programming decisions

in the media themselves.

The pattern for the future

Television is a very attractive medium for advertisers. Advertisers have to a great extent

shifted their business from the national press to television where they can reach millions

of viewers with any one commercial. In 1980 television attracted a 22 per cent share of a

total advertising media expenditure of £2.53 billion, whereas the national press received

only 16.3 per cent.

The pattern of television advertising has changed in its twenty-five year history. In 1955

most commercials were for branded grocery products—soaps, detergents and patent foods

like cereals, soups and margarine. From the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s, manufactur-

ers’ consumer advertising, which was mainly for packaged groceries, declined from half

the total advertising in 1968 to less than 40 per cent in 1979. (See Appendix II for a table

of types of advertising as a percentage of total UK advertising for this period.) During

the 1970s, television advertising revenue rose from £177 million to £347 million, but the

medium’s reliance on packaged goods fell. The sectors which gained most from this decline

were the retail and durable-goods outlets, the leisure and holidays industries, building soci-

eties and other financial and industrial services.

The increase in this type of advertising, as I have said, has been at the expense of the

national newspapers. When retail and financial advertising moved to television, the pres-

sure on available air time was greater, and as a result the TV companies’ advertising rates

went up. Some advertisers moved back to the press, but a pattern had been set. New types

of advertisers became interested in TV and wanted to use the medium to a greater extent if

more air time could be made available. It seems likely that the advertiser’s desire for more

broadcasting time will be met in the 1980s with increased use of satellites, cable television

and possibly pay TV.

Television is about to embark on a decade of upheaval which will change domestic TV

out of all recognition. A second commercial channel (Channel 4) will start operating in

1982, and breakfast television in 1983. Both these developments will provide advertisers

with more opportunities to reach audiences. Indeed, they could change the face of mass

communications in general. Channel 4 is planned as an ‘upmarket’ station and will possibly

take audiences from the BBC, and advertising away from the already struggling quality

press like The Times and The Guardian. It is quite likely that a quality newspaper will have

to fold as a result because there will not be enough ‘quality’ advertising to go around all the

possible ‘quality’ channels.

Narrowcasting is also going through a period of expansion and is likely to become more

available to the general public, which will probably please the advertising industry. Pay

TV, cable TV, videotape and videodisc systems, teletext and viewdata are revolutionizing

patterns of viewing and storing information generally. Nor do possibilities opened up by

intercontinental satellite broadcasting dismay the advertisers, since this will increase the

size of potential audiences.

Advertising as Communication

The new media 53

On the whole the future points to even greater penetration of the media by advertisers

and the possibility both of more advertising at home and that satellites will beam in adver-

tising from abroad as well.

The press

per industry. The two are inextricably entwined. Advertising shapes the tone and style of

newspapers (you have only to look at the Sunday colour supplements to notice this), and it

ultimately decides their viability.

Today’s newspapers are the products of two factors: industrialization and concentration.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Lord Northcliffe’s recognition of the importance of

advertising to his papers had a profound and lasting influence on the financial structure of

all newspapers. The ‘Northcliffe Revolution’ marked an important stage in the industrial-

ization of the press. When advertisers started to contribute to newspaper production costs,

they not only changed the economic base of the press, they also began a period of press

concentration. This meant a growth in newspaper circulation, the arrival of circulation

wars, a decline in the number of titles and the concentration of titles into fewer and fewer

hands. Consequently the range and diversity of viewpoints and opinions has also decreased.

Financiers entered the picture in the 1920s; by 1929 four leading businessmen owned half

the daily circulation of national newpapers. Competition for readers became fierce, with

the result that the number of titles reduced from twelve in 1921 to nine in 1937.

The post-war period has been one of recurrent crises for the press. The concentration of

titles into a few, rich and powerful hands has continued. Production costs have forced up

the cover price of newspapers, many readers have defected to television, as have advertis-

ers, and sales have dropped. Fleet Street has seen the closure of a number of major national

newspapers since the war, notably the News Chronicle, the Daily Herald and the Daily

Sketch.

The pursuit of advertising is a major preoccupation in Fleet Street and is intensified by

the fact that there is a decreasing amount of advertising to be distributed among the papers.

The quality press derive about three-quarters of their revenue from advertising, which is

therefore critical to their survival. Classified advertising contributes to this income, but

there are signs that this too is diminishing in volume as jobs disappear and unemployment

rises. Media watchers predict that the addition of Channel 4 to the commercial network will

mean that ‘quality’ advertising will be diverted from the quality press to the new channel.

The popular press derive about one-third of their revenue from advertising; for the rest they

are dependent on circulation, which, according to some accounts, is going down. In this

financial maelstrom, very few national newspapers make profits. This is hardly surprising

if, as is sometimes the case, the cost of gathering and producing advertisements costs a

newspaper more than the ads actually earn them in revenue.

Newspapers have responded to the financial crisis by combining into protective group-

ings either with other newspapers (e.g. the News Chronicle merged with the Daily Mail in

the 1960s), with provincial newspaper chains, or with other publishing, cultural and lei-

sure industries. In 1981 two groups (the International Publishing Corporation, a subsidiary

of Reed International, a multinational paper group, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Interna-

No general review of advertising in our society can ignore its relationship to the newspa-

54

tional) controlled over 75 per cent of the circulation of nine national dailies. The same two

also controlled over 85 per cent of Sunday newspaper circulation. The major national daily

newspaper companies account for over half the circulation of provincial dailies and nearly

half the circulation of provincial evenings.

Another significant trend in the newspaper world, which took place during the 1970s,

was the entry of industrial giants into Fleet Street. For instance, Trafalgar House (a prop-

erty, finance and shipping conglomerate) bought the Express Group from Beaverbrook

Newspapers, and Atlantic Richfield (an American Oil company) acquired the Observer in

1977, which was then sold to Lonrho, the international trading group, in 1981. Mergers,

conglomerations and interlocking directorships are a feature of other media industries, as

we have noted in the previous section.

Advertising sponsorship in the press

In a general sense, advertising lies at the heart of these changes in media ownership and

structure. In a more direct way advertising influences what we read in newspapers. Although

we often hear the phrase ‘freedom of the press’, there is, I think, some question about this

freedom. The ‘free-market’ approach which gives the advertiser access to newspaper read-

ers does not guarantee a neutral source of support nor an independent press. Successive

Royal Commissions on the press have looked at advertising and questioned whether the

press is influenced by it. The McGregor Commission of 1977 decided, like its forerunners,

that while it was difficult to demonstrate advertising influence on editorial matters, it was

probably negligible and harmless. Of course, on the face of it, advertisements look different

from the news in newspapers, so no direct crossing of the boundaries between advertising

and editorial material can be detected. Indeed, advertisers rarely attempt to persuade jour-

nalists to give them favourable reports in the editorial pages.

But advertising influence is subtle. If there is advertising pressure on journalists and

editors, it is indirect. One could say that editors and newspaper managements have ‘inter-

nalized’ the advertisers’ demands just as TV producers in America have become attuned

to sponsors’ wishes. Editors and management have to keep their newspapers viable and

the necessity to attract advertising is such that they will go out of their way to make their

newspaper attractive to sponsors.

If we are looking for overt pressure it is more likely to be found in specialized magazines

such as music papers, where, for example, the record companies are often the source of

news and topics, and have to be treated favourably. In the local press, influence could exist

because local advertisers and newspaper executives have more opportunities for social con-

tact than in a large metropolitan area like London. An extreme and fairly rare case of adver-

tising pressure on editorial matters occurred recently in North Wales. The local newspaper

supported villagers in their protest against the building of a gas-storage depot close to their

homes, whereupon the Gas Board withdrew its advertising from the paper.

However, in response to financial pressures, newspaper publishers have accommodated

advertisers by developing their papers along lines which appeal to advertisers; for instance,

introducing special pages and features which allow advertisers to place their messages in

specific sections of a paper. These sections organize readers into ‘market lots’ for sale to

advertisers, who are thus assured of reaching their ‘targets’. Special features include those

Advertising as Communication

The new media 55

for home-buyers, film-goers, holiday-makers, motorists, gardeners, et al. These sections

have not been introduced with the over-riding aim of attracting advertisers but their appear-

ance does indicate a degree of influence by advertising considerations.

Advertising’s increasing influence on editorial features in the national press can be seen

in the results of a study by James Curran (1978), which shows that there has been a growth

in advertising-related editorial features (defined as editorial items covering the same prod-

uct or service as advertisements on the same or facing page) during the post-war period.

This increase is most significant among the quality newspapers which derive over half their

revenue from advertising, and least among the populars which are not so dependent on

advertising. In the period of the study (1946–76) Curran also found that a growing propor-

tion of ads were placed on the same or facing pages as features covering the same topic.

He remarks: ‘This growing convergence between editorial and advertising content reflects

the increasing accommodation of national newspaper managements to the selective needs

of advertisers’ (p. 235).

Sponsored features not only organize readers into market categories, they provide the

advertiser with an ‘editorial ambiance’ which increases their ad’s effectiveness. Advertis-

ers will look for the right editorial environment as well as the right readers when they buy

space. From this we might conclude that any criticism of an advertiser’s business activities

will be avoided in the editorial sections of newspapers.

But there is also a wider question to be considered. In a subtle way advertising sponsor-

ship ‘dictates’ what material is covered by the press and also indirectly influences the way

that it is covered. In short, advertising has come to distort ‘reality’.

This process of distortion can be seen most clearly in the financial and business sec-

tions. In his study, Curran found that these sections gave priority to investment guidance,

market prices and tips for the individual investor, whereas general economic and financial

matters such as inflation and unemployment were largely ignored. Business news mainly

consisted of company gossip to the neglect of serious investigative journalism of firms and

financial issues. Women’s pages exhibit similarly narrow preoccupations. In them women

are defined as consumers of fashion, cosmetics and domestic goods, and feature articles are

biased towards this aspect of women’s lives. While there might be no direct endorsement

of these consumer commodities, the fact that feature articles are product-related tends to

reinforce a stereotypical view of women as mothers, fashion objects and home-makers.

Advertising as a publishing authority

Because advertising money is what keeps so many papers alive, it operates as a kind of

licence to print in a way analogous to the operation of the BBC’s licence fee which allows

it to broadcast. If advertisers are not disposed for one reason or another to pay the ‘licence’

to the newspaper, then the paper will either have to accommodate itself to the advertiser

or it will cease to be able to publish. So when you hear someone talk about the ‘freedom

of the press’ you ought to consider whose freedom they are talking about. ‘Freedom’ is in

fact part of the basic ideology of advertising; it is a word used to justify advertising and

claims to give the press its ‘independence’. What it really means is that the freedom to

publish rests in the hands of the advertisers; they are free to compete, and free to take their

56

advertisements elsewhere, if the editorial matter, the ambience or the audience is not to

their liking.

As in commercial television, the audience/readers have to be delivered to the advertisers

in large numbers and they have to be of the right kind. It is of no use to advertisers to reach

millions of readers who cannot, or who are unlikely to, buy their goods. For instance, the

popular press likes readers who are not too old and not too young, and who include a high

proportion of women, since it is women who usually spend the family income and have

been historically defined as consumers. The quality press only survive with their compara-

tively low circulation—less than 20 per cent of national newspaper circulation—because

their readership has higher status, greater influence and higher spending power than the

readership of popular newspapers, and consequently advertisers are prepared to pay high

rates to the newspaper for the privilege of reaching these readers.

A brief example of the power of advertising can be found in the case of demise of the

Daily Herald in the 1950s. Although this newspaper had a high circulation and was con-

sidered ‘popular’ with its readers, it appealed to the wrong kind of people. Its readership

consisted of more men than women, older rather than younger, and it was predominantly

working-class as opposed to middle-class. Daily Herald readers were not useful to adver-

tisers because they were not wealthy, did not drive cars, were not young and had not been

defined as ‘consumers’ at that time.

The significance of the forced closure of the Daily Herald lies in the fact that a large

readership lost a serious newspaper and now have to be content with tabloid entertainment

sheets like the Daily Mirror or the Sun. These papers do not devote much editorial space to

political, economic or social matters.

What happened to the Daily Herald has happened to similar, masscirculation news-

papers in the post-war period. They have been left high and dry by advertisers, who have

trickled away to television. They have had to rely increasingly on mass sales and have tried

to maximize sales by appealing to a balanced profile of readers. This profile has shown less

interest in news as such, so the mass-circulation popular papers have downgraded news in

favour of sensational crime stories, celebrity gossip, sport and the inevitable pin-ups.

The crisis

Advertising affects the viability of vulnerable newspapers, as I have tried to indicate. It has

also contributed to the precarious position of the national press as a whole. Some people

have even warned of the death of Fleet Street, others of another sharp reduction in the num-

ber of national dailies. Newspapers are in cut-throat competition for readers and advertis-

ers. Production costs have risen and advertisers have taken their patronage to the provincial

press or to television. Newspapers have responded by paring down their advertising rates

to suicidally low prices. In some cases the returns from advertisements have barely covered

their production costs. In 1960 the national popular dailies obtained roughly 40 per cent

surplus on advertising; in 1973 they obtained 15 per cent on adverts published; in 1975

they received no surplus at all. National quality dailies suffered a decline in advertising

profit from 60 per cent in 1960 to 35 per cent in 1975. In 1975 only four dailies and one

Sunday paper out of a total of seventeen national papers made a profit.

Advertising as Communication

The new media 57

The commercial media’s dependence on advertising has meant that important forms

of public communication have become increasingly subject to the competitive needs of

giant corporations such as those who produce cigarettes, detergents, soap, beer, cornflakes

and so on. Advertising no longer constitutes a marginal pressure group of ‘quacks’ nor a

manageable form of subsidy. It is a highly developed and sophisticated institution which

touches the centre of cultural as well as economic life and organizes newspapers and the

broadcast media so that they are not truly independent but fall in with the demands of the

dominant economic institutions. Advertising’s influence on the media is exerted invisibly

without acknowledgement. (Note also the amount of ‘free’ advertising companies get even

on the public-service network by sponsoring cultural and sporting events.) The press in

general professes to be the watchdog of the man or woman in the street; but such a claim

fits uncomfortably with the hidden economic power of the advertiser and the large, diversi-

fied conglomerate. Can the press really serve two masters with such different interests?

Note

1. See also Fred Friendly’s book (1968) Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control for an

account of the influence of advertisers on editorial matters in American broadcasting.

Suggestions for further work

1. Examine the regular programme material on commercial TV and compare this with

the advertising material which appears during the ‘natural breaks’. Are there links

made through the kind of language used, the situation or people described, the kinds of

ideas expressed or the type of music used? If there are any links why do you think this

might be so and what would you consider their effect to be?

2. How much will it cost an advertiser to have a commercial placed in a sports pro-

gramme and an arts/culture programme? Consult the TV Times to find out when these

programmes are on, and how often, and also look up the advertising rates in BRAD

(British Rate and Data) which can probably be found at your local public library. Is

there a difference in cost?

3. Look for any links between the editorial matter and any advertisements in the follow-

ing publications:

(a) the Guardian;

(b) the Daily Mirror;

(c) a teenage comic;

(d) a woman’s magazine.

Examine the paper page by page. Are there any ads for washing powder on the sports

pages?

4. Looking at the large display ads, what kind of people do you think read:

(a) the Daily Telegraph;

(b) the Sun;

(c) the Sunday Express;

(d) the News of the World;

(e) the Observer?

5. How much space is given over to advertising in the following newspapers:

58

(a) the Financial Times;

(b) the Daily Telegraph;

(c) the Daily Mirror;

(d) the Morning Star;

(e) the Sunday Times colour supplement;

(f) Oh Boy, Patches, Blue Jeans?

What are the reasons for any variation? How much does it cost to advertise in the dif-

ferent newspapers? Consult BRAD.

Draw a diagram of the pages of the Sun and the Daily Telegraph shading in the

area which is an ad thus:

Measure the percentage of the total paper/page area that the ads occupy. Why is

there a difference in the amount of space occupied by ads in the different newspa-

pers?

6. What does Curran (1978) mean by the term ‘advertising ambiance’? How can adver-

tising influence the media system? (See Curran, 1981.)

Advertising as Communication

4

THE EFFECTS OF ADVERTISING

In the previous chapter I discussed the influence of advertising on the decision-making

and the output of broadcasting and the press. In fact, the whole question of the influence

of advertising, particularly on us as individuals, is one of continuing debate. It is an issue

which concerns a number of people, not least the advertisers who want to know or be sure

that people buy advertised goods and therefore that their messages are effective.

In some respects the impact of advertising is all too obvious—children chant jingles

instead of nursery rhymes at a very early age, and we can probably all remember occasions

when we have bought something because we have been attracted by the advertiser’s claims.

In other respects the effects of advertising on society over a long period of time are hard

to assess. Many people would deny that they are influenced by advertisements and regard

them at worst as lies, at best as idiot triviality. It is probably true to say that most people are

consciously sceptical of advertising. However, although they might not believe the claims

made for a product by an advertiser (such as ‘Persil washes whiter’), they might find it more

difficult to resist the more general social image or message presented along with the overt

sales pitch—for example, that we can make friends by drinking the right kind of beer, get

a boyfriend by using the right kind of shampoo, become a supermum to an adoring family

by buying the right tin of baked beans, or avoid being a social outcast and guilt feelings if

we buy life assurance.

In addition to influencing some of the general values and beliefs of society, advertising

interacts with and affects other forms of communication—literature, art, and even language

itself. Some of this influence is not particularly sinister or detrimental to the original form,

or to us, but it does mean that in many areas of modern life, we can find the central values

of a consumer society—conspicuous consumption, wealth, sexual attractiveness and sexual

power, competitive one-up-manship and so on. In this chapter I want to examine both the

specific and general ‘effects’ of advertising and the problems associated with research into

‘effects’.

Effects research

The problem of the influence or effects of advertising is multi-faceted and can be

approached from a number of perspectives. We could examine the influence of ads on the

individual and look for evidence of the ability of the advertising media to shape and some-

times change a person’s behaviour, opinions and attitudes. Another angle to take would

be to consider the effects of advertising on the society as a whole and the extent to which

consumer advertising promotes general ideas and beliefs. For instance, it could be argued

that because advertising stresses the private accumulation of goods, and almost hedonistic

lifestyles, it encourages people to think in terms of escape from the real world, although

they might not actually buy the specific products advertised. It could also be said that the

60

utopian imagery of advertisements encourages passivity and makes people unaware of the

extent to which they are controlled by consumerism and unable to determine the terms of

their own existence.

These kinds of questions have generated a variety of answers and there is a vast litera-

ture on the subject of advertising’s effects, coming from both the industry itself and from

academic social and behavioural scientists. Mass-communication research in general indi-

cates that over a wide range of media, any direct effects are limited or exceptional although

the media are to some extent ‘socializers’ of young children and powerful in terms of the

definitions of reality they provide.

At this stage it might be useful to distinguish between two kinds of ‘effects’ study. Wil-

liams (1981) suggests the following kinds:

(a) Operational, which study effects as indicators of policy and marketing decisions,

e.g. ‘attitude’ surveys or testing for ‘post-exposure consumption patterns’; studies of

responses to programmes in broadcasting research; private political polling on ‘issues’

like government policy. These studies, particularly market research conducted by agen-

cies for clients, are not generally published.

(b) Critical, which look at the media’s presentation of, say, violence or at political broad-

casting or other distinguishable kinds of production (like advertisements) which are

assessed for both specific (immediate) and general (long-term) social effect, often in

response to an expressed public concern.

Neither type of research is methodologically or conceptually neutral, but the latter is

perhaps more aware of the difficulties of investigating something like televised violence or

political broadcasting.

Market research

The advertiser is involved, through an agency, in researching the effects or likely effective-

ness of a campaign. The advertising agent usually provides a market-research service for

clients as well as designing and producing ads, and buying space in the media. When an

agency has accepted an account from an advertiser, one of the first things to do is to survey

the market to find out something about the possible customers, what they need and want

from a particular product, if they will buy what will eventually go on sale, and what are the

best ways of influencing them via an advertising campaign. Questionnaires are given to a

cross-section of people, sometimes picked randomly from a telephone directory or stopped

in the streets and asked to answer some questions. Sometimes prospective consumers are

interviewed by psychologists trained to analyse deep, or psychological, motivations and

attitudes. Research might even be conducted for hypothetical products so that a producer

or manufacturer can design an actual product with the benefit of the research.

Clients and agents are also concerned to know that people have bought the goods after

a campaign. This can be done by looking at sales figures and estimating if the campaign

had the desired effect among a certain group of people or in a specific area. Or again, ques-

tionnaires can be administered after the launching of a campaign and people asked if an

advertisement influenced their purchasing decisions.

Advertising as Communication

The effects of advertising 61

Market research of this type is not designed to pick up complex, long-term issues con-

cerning consumer choice or social needs, but to provide quick ‘post-exposure’ results to

determine if a ‘stimulus’ (the ad) has achieved a ‘response’ (a purchase). The methods

used by market researchers to test and discover consumer behaviour and attitudes have

become very sophisticated over the years and they include a battery of research techniques,

computerized data analysis, demographic statistics and so on. But their notion of effects is

defined quite narrowly and the assumption that lies behind much of this type of research is

that anybody can be persuaded if the right techniques are used.

Sociological research

The ‘hypodermic’ model

The question of whether advertisements influence people is also of concern to the general

public, to teachers, politicians and policy makers. Professional sociologists and psycholo-

gists often take up the concerns initially expressed by lay groups of people and work on

questions about the ‘effects’ of the media and advertising using the concepts and methods

of research of their disciplines. A vast amount of research has been conducted into the influ-

ence of advertising. There have been studies which have tried to detect any difference in

impact on different age groups, on the different sexes or between the different media. Some

of the research into advertising’s effects has investigated the change in people’s attitudes,

values or behaviour brought about as a result of exposure to advertisements. Children are

a favourite subject of social and psychological researchers because they are considered to

be particularly vulnerable to persuasion and propaganda. And on the more positive side,

some of the effects research has looked at any possible functions that advertisements might

have for audiences: whether they are considered to be informative, fulfil any needs and give

satisfaction to audiences.

As a matter of fact, when sociologists and psychologists first turned their attention to

problems associated with the commercial media much of their research was influenced by

the concepts and methods of market research and was quite often financed by the mass

media and by advertisers who wanted precise data on their target population—such as an

audience breakdown according to age, sex, economic status, tastes, habits and so on. Early

‘effects’ research, especially of the market-research type, and some contemporary research

concentrates on finding evidence of the short-term impact of a media message (e.g. investi-

gations of a person’s change in brand choice as a direct result of an advertising campaign),

rather than evidence of longer-term shifts or changes in attitudes and values. Implicit in

many of the short-term, behavioural studies is a view or model of media influence which

is like a hypodermic needle that ‘injects’ a message into the mind of the audience. Much

of the research based on the idea of a hypodermic needle has made heavy use of concepts

like attitude change, learning, imitation and emotional arousal, has been conducted under

experimental conditions in laboratories, and it has come in for some criticism. It is argued,

for instance, that ‘experimental’ social and social-psychological research leads to a dis-

torted and artificial view of the role that the media play in society. Research that looks for

immediate responses to a single stimulus like an advertisement is probably over-simplified

(although ‘scientifically’ controllable) and inadequately conceptualized. Not all effects can

be observed in the short term or in laboratories under experimental conditions. In fact

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there is some evidence that advertising’s effects on people are complicated by a number of

factors, and that people themselves do not always reveal their responses to advertisements

under interrogation from a sociologist nor under laboratory conditions.

The ‘socially-mediated’ model

We should remember that the media and its audiences are part of a complex social structure

and are not stimulus-response mechanisms. Advertisements are part of a flow or pattern of

culture and are certainly not the only influences in people’s lives. The ‘audience’ is not a

homogenous mass; different audience members belong to different social and class groups.

Factors such as a person’s class or family relationships act like filtering mechanisms or

protective screens around an individual, and any potential influence of much of the output

of the media is therefore somewhat limited. Some of the research on the media-audience

relationship suggests that the audience is much less passive than might be thought and that

people actively or purposefully ‘use’ media products according to their circumstances. The

media’s effects can thus be thought of as being dependent on the functions that they per-

form for individual audience members, whether they are used as sources of information,

entertainment or escape. A member of the audience, some research has shown, cannot be

affected by the media if they do not fulfil or gratify a need. For instance, if a person leads an

active, varied life and is secure and stable, no amount of advertising which appeals to fears

of loneliness or of being a social outcast, or to social snobbery will succeed.1 In general the

optimistic research argues that the media reinforce rather than change a person’s prior dis-

positions and are capable of satisfying a plurality of needs. In addition, audience members

are held to be active and involved in their understanding/interpretation of the media and are

not, as has been thought, totally passive.

This view of the effects of the media is quite reassuring. It means that the audience is

not a bunch of gullible dupes waiting for messages to be imprinted on their brains, and is

capable of being critical of the products of the media. And no doubt the advertisers them-

selves are also relieved to hear from the researchers that people are capable of resisting

messages according to their individual and social circumstances, since this draws criticism

away from their activities and puts the onus on the audience. Many advertisers will even

argue in justification of some of their more exaggerated ads by suggesting that they are

providing wanted and needed fantasies to some of their audiences.

Clearly there is room in the interpretation of ads and other media messages for indi-

vidual responses according to our personal perceptions or experiences. There is no law that

says we must receive an ad’s meaning in a uniform manner or in precisely the way intended

by its producer. People can respond differently to different ads according to their language,

imagery and modes of address (or terms on which ads identify and communicate)—and

any way, as I have said before, many people take advertisements with a pinch of salt.

The ‘cultural values’ model

However, I would argue that although we should not look for effects that aren’t there (or

are not proven), nor claim -for advertising a decisive influence upon the way we see the

world, neither would we be justified in underestimating the contribution that the world of

commerce makes to the cultural climate of their societies. It is more than likely that an

Advertising as Communication

The effects of advertising 63

advertisement’s effects are diffuse and long-term, and there is some evidence that advertis-

ing plays a part in defining ‘reality’ in a general or anthropological sense. It projects the

goals and values that are consistent with and conducive to the consumer economy and

socializes us into thinking that we can buy a way of life as well as goods. For instance, the

sex-role stereotyping common to many advertisements—the ‘little woman’ as household

functionary thrilling to her newly polished table or whiter-than-white sheets, or the mas-

terful, adventurous male—act, many social scientists argue, as agents of socialization and

lead many people, young and old, to believe in traditional and discriminatory sex roles.

Any commonsense view of advertising should take into account the very central role

that advertising and its associated institutions play in the economy. Advertising must have

more power to persuade than the average individual, or for that matter organized labour,

both in terms of available resources and access to the channels of mass communication.

Our ability to withstand the constant stream of compelling and repetitive messages must

be seen in the light of the institutional power of advertising which provides, according to

Galbraith, ‘a relentless propaganda on behalf of goods in general’ (1968, p. 213). The idyl-

lic and alluring ads with their witty catchphrases, vivid imagery and stereotypes work on

an aggregate level. They are not read ‘transparently’, word-for-word as it were, by the audi-

ence, but they do offer a ‘preferred reading’, characters with whom to identify, and general

meanings about what should be admired and desired. They do not mirror or reflect social

meanings and conditions, but teach us ways of thinking and feeling, generally through fan-

tasy and dreaming. It is, of course, still possible to argue that the effects of advertisements

are not harmful to people or society. To the degree that they manipulate rather than inform,

distort rather than reflect the quality of life in our society and are the products of decisions

taken by an unrepresentative, unelected group of powerful businessmen, I would argue that

they are harmful. The sad fact is that many people, while recognizing the frustrations of

their daily lives, are caught up in the fantasies offered by ads and are unable to see through

them and their false utopias.

Advertising’s effectiveness

Although it is hard to pin down the social effects of advertising in any precise numeri-

cal sense, it might be possible to measure the effectiveness of single messages. There is

a vast amount of market research conducted every year although most of it is devoted to

‘presell’ research. ‘Post-sell’ research is limited by certain methodological weaknesses—

much of the research relying on transitory street corner or door-step interviews, which are

no guarantees of truth. Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that advertising is generally

successful in the sense that one can normally chart a growth in the sales of a product after a

corresponding increase in advertising. This, however, is not always true for all categories of

product. Some products are bought in volume independently of advertising. For example,

it is possible that the purchase of washing machines is directly attributable to mass adver-

tising; it is equally likely that people buy washing machines despite advertising because

they prefer them to the alternatives—laborious scrubbing, boiling, wringing, etc. In other

words an alternative causal explanation for a rise in washing-machine sales may be that

people have come to the rational decision that they are useful things to have in the home.

Similarly we could argue that the huge sales of some mass products like instant foods can

64

be attributed to the dominance of the market monopolists as much as to advertising in any

direct sense—the food giants like Nestlés, General Foods and Kraft can carve up the mar-

ket between them so that the effectiveness of promotion can often be attributed to lack of

alternative provision of goods as much as to the power of advertising.

So when considering ‘effectiveness’, it is difficult to prove any short-term and one-to-

one effects of advertising, and it is probably unnecessary to argue over detailed findings.

The economic and institutional power of advertising goes beyond the strictly empirical and

registers across the whole movement of a society, in social and economic institutions and

in the styles and values of popular culture and art.

Cultural effects

Many critics of modern consumer/popular culture argue that the real impact of advertising

is on the cultural climate of society. For instance, there are indications that the language

and values of advertising suffuse a variety of communication forms in modern society;

that ‘sales talk’ and genuine communication have become intertwined in such media as

the commercial cinema, in TV programmes and in popular literature. The prose in many

fictional stories in popular magazines for example, adopts the tricks and style of advertising

copy and imagery, and is very similar to that in the more developed ads which prop up the

product with a fictional situation. Whether it describes a product or a romantic adventure,

the prose is bland, superficial if persuasive, and relies upon the use of romantic clichés and

images. Certain values such as love, friendship, neighbourliness, pleasure, happiness and

sexual attraction are the staple diet of advertisements and are often confused with or trans-

ferred to the possession of things: ‘Gold is for lovers’, ‘A diamond is forever’, ‘I love my

new Hygiene kitchen’, ‘I’d love a Babycham’. The love for someone and for something is,

of course, not the same thing, although there is often not much distinction made between

the two in ads. (Look at the ads not only for jewellery but also for banks, airlines, cigarettes,

etc.) The drift if not the impact of the use of these values in selling means that genuine

feelings are devalued or corrupted, and previously acceptable words become false and used

loosely. The shift of meanings and values and the debasement of ordinary language has

brought about what Fred Inglis calls ‘a distortion in symbols and established meanings like

love or warmth or friendship or indeed success and possession’ (1972, p. 114). And Wil-

liams (1974) argues that there has been a ‘mutual transfer’ between the formulae of com-

mercials and those of separate programmes. Items in television and radio news bulletins

feature a kind of encapsulated information which has also become a mode of recommend-

ing cat food in commercials; the domestic serial interacts with the headache tablet com-

mercial which also uses the instructional device reminiscent of educational television. ‘In

these ways’ says Williams ‘and in their essential combination, there is the flow of meanings

and values of a specific culture’ (1981, p. 19).

Discussion of advertising’s cultural effects is not a new phenomenon. As early as the

1930s, the literary critic F.R.Leavis accused the popular media, particularly advertising,

of evoking cheap, almost mechanical emotional responses, and inculcating ‘the choosing

of the most immediate pleasures got with the least effort’ (1933, p. 3). He warned that

advertisements corrupted feelings, debased language, exploited people’s emotional needs

and fears and encouraged greed, snobbery and social conformity. Leavis’s writings on cul-

Advertising as Communication

The effects of advertising 65

ture and society, it must be admitted, are faintly puritanical and steeped in nostalgia for

pre-industrial folk (thus organic) culture. He also argued heavily in favour of the uplifting

values of great works of literature whose appreciation can function as an antidote to mod-

ern mass culture. Nevertheless, his criticisms of advertising have some force and relevance

even today, and he did draw attention to what he considered to be the numbing effect that

advertisements have on people’s critical responses to their environment.

A more stringent, more radical and less nostalgic response to advertising can be found

in the work of a group of writers and academics known collectively as the Frankfurt School.

Although this group no longer exists, their thesis has had a great deal of influence on critical

and non-empirical sociology and on consideration of the long-term impact of mass culture.

One of their conclusions was that the commodity culture, while offering a better material

standard of living and certain comforts and gratifications, in fact encouraged social and

political apathy. One of the writers of the Frankfurt School was Herbert Marcuse, who

claimed that the manipulation of false needs is repressive and leads to ‘one-dimensional

thought’. It blocks people’s ability to recognize that they are being controlled. He wrote

‘Free choice among a wide variety of these goods and services does not signify freedom

if these goods sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear—that is they sustain alien-

ation’ (1968, p. 23). Alienation is a concept which is used to refer to the mental and physi-

cal separation of people from each other and from real involvement with their work and

society. The modern social world dehumanizes and alienates people while modern mass

culture, including advertising, attempts to conceal or compensate for the deficiencies in a

person’s real social and personal life.

Marcuse, borrowing from the critical semiotics of Roland Barthes (see chapter 6),

argued that the conventions of mass communication are founded on faulty or abridged

grammar. The mass media use an abridged or condensed language (of which Marcuse

gives several examples in chapter 4 of One Dimensional Man (1968)) which short-circuits

thinking and suppresses cognitive evaluation. Advertising in particular uses hypnotic and

intimidatory language and imagery. Its propositions assume the form of suggestive com-

mands, and at the same time the language is tinged with false familiarity which, according

to Marcuse, is the result of skilfully managed popular directness and constant repetition.

Marcuse contends that the media define the terms in which we think and that their influ-

ence has to be assessed not in the strict sense of their impact on what we think about but in

terms of the way in which they condition our entire intellectual outlook. This means that

the media inhibit or confuse conceptual thought by encouraging us to live in a world of

hypnotic definitions which deny any effective cognitive evaluation on our part.

Images

In some respects the influence of advertising can be attributed to recent technological

improvements and innovations in the production and distribution of pictorial or visual

representations of reality. What the historian Daniel Boorstin (1963) calls the ‘graphic

revolution’ has been helped by advanced techniques of pictorial reproduction (in printing,

broadcasting, etc.) and has also changed the significance of the character of the ‘image’. We

may want to agree with Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ (that

the influence of the media is a result of their technology), but we must recognize that the

66

images conveyed by the media have, over the past thirty years, become so sophisticated and

persuasive that they now organize our experiences and understanding in a crucially signifi-

cant way. If you look at any pre-war or immediately post-war advertisement, you will see

that the visual imagery tends to be crude, simplistic and generally much less important than

the words. Today the situation is reversed. We live in a world of spectacular and exciting

images. And the word ‘image’ now also refers to a fabricated or shaped public impression

created with the help of visual techniques. An image can sell soap, toilet paper, whisky,

a corporation, a celebrity, a politician or a political party. According to Boorstin, images

have become more interesting than the original and in fact have become the original: ‘the

shadow becomes the substance’. Advertisements, he argues, encourage extravagant expec-

tations because they are more dramatic and vivid than the reality—reality cannot match up

to the image. Ads present us with images and then make them seem true. As a result they

befuddle our experience and mystify our perceptions and experiences of the real world by

offering spectacular illusions which ultimately don’t satisfy.

The consumers

Advertising is capable of real if limited success. Some people might think the better of you

for buying a certain product such as an expensive car or fashionable dress. But its success is

tempered by a general air of unreality. And advertisers are caught up in the general confu-

sion which they foster. As it is now constituted, industrial society allows no collaboration

and little mutual communication between producers and consumers. Consumers are set

apart from the arena of production and treated as private individuals, making private deci-

sions about the commodities in their private, family lives. Decision-making about produc-

tion is left to the producers. Because people are treated as markets, no arena exists where

arguments about alternative products or the provision of goods and services for social

needs can take place.

The language used by advertisers shows that they think of people as targets on which

they wish to make an impact, rather than as human beings. In advertisements, they use a

language which is subtle and cajoling, but when they speak to each other (for instance in

trade or professional journals) their words reveal a certain hostility and aggression; market-

ing is called a ‘weapon’, advertising is ‘doing battle on the sales front’, advertisers’ skills

are those of ‘unarmed combat’ and consumers are ‘forces of sales resistance’.

The use of ‘psychological warfare’, and its effects on consumers, can be seen in its

most horrifying extension in the use of motivational research (MR) by many advertising

agencies (though currently it is less in vogue). MR was developed to probe people’s uncon-

scious sales resistance, and its methods and applications are exposed by Vance Packard

in his book The Hidden Persuaders (1970). Depth interviews, projective tests and ‘living

laboratories’ were techniques developed to uncover a person’s hidden anxieties and inse-

curities, guilt feelings or secret desires. Armed with such knowledge, the advertisers have

transposed MR revelations into deceptively simple or outrageous advertisements. One clas-

sic advertising campaign based on this type of research was a series of advertisements for

a make of car which presented the sports car as the personification of a man’s mistress and

the saloon car as his wife.

Advertising as Communication

The effects of advertising 67

Women have traditionally been targets for this kind of research since they are the people

who make most of the purchases in our society. Packard cites several examples of house-

wives who have been persuaded to buy such items as cake mixes which allow them a

degree of creativity in order to give them a sense of achievement, or household gadgets

which don’t make them feel guilty for not working as hard as their grandmothers. Accord-

ing to Packard, advertisements which flatter consumers and which disguise the emptiness

and drudgery of much household work and glorify the role of housewife are guaranteed a

certain amount of success. Eventually, however, we must always come back to the question

of whether soft toilet paper will make a woman a better wife and mother, whether a new

shampoo will prevent her ageing or an aspirin give her a new identity, and consider that

such promises can keep people from knowing what the root causes of social and personal

problems are and from knowing what they really want.

Notes

1. See Fiske’s (1982) Introduction to Communication Studies, a companion volume to

this book, in which the ‘uses and gratification’ theory is discussed in more detail.

Suggestions for further work

1. What would you consider to be the general and the specific effects of advertising?

2. Have you recently spent money because of an ad? Give details of the ad. Was there

anything about it that was particularly memorable/effective? Did you want or need the

product before you saw or heard the ad? Discuss with your friends what kind of ads

they like or dislike.

3. What other factors beside possibly ads themselves influence our purchasing

decisions?

4. If you were the marketing manager of a confectionary company and you wanted to

launch a new chocolate bar onto the market, how would you go about it? What kind of

promotional campaign would you use? How would you ensure that your advertising

was successful?

5. Do you think there is a link between advertising and people’s general outlook and

behaviour? Would you consider advertising to have harmful effects on children? Is

there a relationship between anti-social behaviour and advertising? Can advertising

contribute to people’s feelings of unhappiness and frustration or does it provide valid

incentives and desires? Is it possible to answer these sorts of questions by interviewing

people and asking them directly if they think advertising affects their attitudes, behav-

iour, etc?

6. What are the differences between ‘effects’ research which is based on the ‘hypoder-

mic’ model and that based on the ‘sociallymediated’ or ‘cultural-effects’ models? What

view of the audience is implicit in each of these models? Which do you think is the

most accurate view?

5

WHAT DO ADVERTISEMENTS MEAN?

What advertisements mean is obviously dependent on what is apparently observable on the

TV or cinema screen or in the pages of magazines and newspapers. It is important to estab-

lish what is there, even though in the normal run of events we don’t pay much attention to

advertisements as we walk along the streets or flip through the pages of magazines. Having

scrutinized what ads consist of we can then make more reliable judgements about what

they mean beneath the surface gloss and witty catch-phrase. By adopting more thought-

ful and critical approaches we can check our fleeting, more personal observations against

some general survey-type information. In this chapter I want to suggest some possible

approaches to the analysis and interpretation of advertisements and present the results of

some studies which have looked at the content of ads.

Analysing the content of ads involves looking at both verbal and visual aspects of an

advertising text, and regarding the pictures to be as, if not more, important than the written

or spoken material. Pictures are ‘easier’ to understand and have more impact than words,

and they generally offer greater opportunity for the communication of excitement, mood

and imagination. A picture is used to lead the eye to the written copy in magazine ads and in

commercials;language is often used merely to reinforce a photograph or filmed sequence.

Although we usually think of images, particularly photographs, as ‘life-like’ and thus real,

we should be aware that the meaning of an image is not ‘transparent’ but like other aspects

of ads, constructed and manipulated.

Approaches to the study of meaning

Non-textual analysis

One way to identify the meaning of a text is to ask the producer/ author what he or she

meant. This, of course, is not always possible (he or she might be dead, live a long way

away, be inaccessible for other reasons or might in fact not be one person but a collective or

organization). The ‘producer’s-meaning’ approach assumes that the ‘correct’ interpretation

of a text is the one intended by the author. But the intentions of an author cannot always

be precisely stated and this is especially true if the sender or author of a message is more

than one person.

It would be dangerous to base the analysis of a text solely on the intentions expressed

by the sender. He or she may not remember, may lie or try to deceive, or may not even

have had any clear intentions. At any rate ‘intentions’ are rarely available for analysis. A

sender’s subjective comments on the text can be informative and indicative but must be

supplemented by precise, objective and systematic research.

Another ‘non-textual’ approach to the question of what a text means can be the identi-

fication of meaning with the consumer/ receiver’s experience of it. Different people ‘read’

70

and interpret texts in different ways, and it is possible to ask different groups of consumers

how they interpret or understand a specific text. Audience research—as we saw in the last

chapter—is an important branch of both marketing and the social and behavioural sciences.

It is, of course, not without its methodological problems, but some sort of empirical inves-

tigation of what and how media audiences understand, or the conditions of reception and

consumption of texts, is not only useful but necessary.1

However, the focus of this chapter is on the text itself: that is, we will try to identify the

meaning of a text with the text itself.

Textual analysis

Textual analysis of one sort or another is based on the meaning ascribed to a text by an

analyst/interpreter. This person is of course a consumer or audience member, but for the

purposes of serious investigation he or she is not a lay member but someone who has par-

ticular expertise in analytic methods.

There are a number of ways of approaching textual analysis via the text. ‘Qualified’

analysts can explain what a text means by observing it closely and describing what it says

or by making a simple paraphrase of it. They would try to clarify any ambiguities in the

text, and bring out hidden meanings. How this reading is accomplished is largely up to

the individual, relying on his or her sensitivity and acquaintance with the material, and is

largely based on the value-judgements and individual skill of the ‘reader’. The problem

with this approach is that it tends to be subjective and is unable to deal with large quanti-

ties of material. In order to be more objective, especially where the analyst is dealing with

mass-produced artefacts, the criteria on which the analysis is based need to be explicitly

formulated and a systematic approach adopted.

One of the first tasks of the analyst is to devise a system whereby a large amount of

apparently unordered material can be broken down into more manageable size and clas-

siied. A classification system provides a basic tool for the analysis and interpretation of a

varied corpus of material. It can be used to uncover any prevalent or recurring pattern in

the material, and eventually to discover its possible meanings and messages. A preliminary

classification will help to sort out just what is being investigated; what types of advertise-

ments, for what products, in what media and so on. Once the analyst-researcher has decided

on a particular focus of attention, the ads can be examined in terms of their constituent

features.

Classiications of ads One way of classifying ads, both in the press (static) and on TV (dynamic), is to look at

their functions and techniques ranging along an axis from the purely informational to those

that exhort or command.

Classified ads might be regarded as informational ads: they contain few superfluous

words (redundancy) because they are usually brief and small, and the people who consult

the classified columns in the press usually have in mind what they are looking for so there

is no need for sales ‘patter’. Some classifieds, however, contain both facts and patter.

Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 71

TV interviewer’s family house, Kensington. Superbly elegant living-room, 4

bedrooms. Modern kitchen, secluded garden. Rent…

The number of bedrooms is a fact, modern kitchen is possibly factual, but ‘superbly

elegant’ is not—the advertiser has included it as a piece of persuasion. The words ‘TV

interviewer’ are of course a blatant appeal to snobbery—the supposed desire to live in a

house once owned by a famous person.

Another category of advertisement found in posters, magazines, newspapers and even

on TV, is the simple. The ad in plate 9 for instance gives specific functional information

such as the price, the ingredients of the product and where it can be bought. The ad itself is

quite small in relation to the rest of the page and contains a small black and white line draw-

ing of the product. There is no slogan, although there is repetition in the signature line at the

bottom of the ad. Advertisements of this type are generally unobjectionable. They contain a

certain amount of ‘hard’ information like the advantages of a product, its convenience, cost,

etc. If a background setting is used it might be somewhere unremarkable like a kitchen,

although this would probably be newer, tidier and better equipped than in real life.

‘Simple’ advertisements are often found in hobby or specialinterest magazines where the

relationship between supplier and consumer is straightforward; the hobbyist is an untypi-

cal consumer in that he is able to make a reasoned judgement on an advertiser’s claims

about cost, need, value, use and so on. TV commercials on local and regional TV are often

examples of simple format and appeal. A simple picture might accompany some relevant

information about a product and there might be some modest encouragement coming from

the announcer/voice-over.

Other categories of advertisements are suggested by Hall and Whannel (1964). These

include compound, complex and sophisticated ads.

In compound advertisements what is mild encouragement in simple ads becomes subtle

association and persuasion. This type of ad still contains information, but it relies on pic-

tures to do the persuading, while the facts are left to the copy. In some fashion ads in

women’s magazines the name of the store, the address, the telephone number, the brand

name of a garment might be listed alongside a drawing or photo of it. If there is a headline

or a caption it is of a semi-technical nature: for example ‘Terylene’, ‘made from pure new

wool’, ‘Liberty -style’, ‘New spring collection from Travona’, although in the last example

‘new’ might be regarded as persuasive rather than informative. The real persuasion comes

in the picture, which is usually glossy featuring attractive-looking models or an ‘artis-

tic’ modernist line drawing of a pencil slim and elegant woman. In a compound ad for a

product such as a gas fire, a hi-fi system or a car, the setting or background in which the

object is placed is readily identifiable if unattainable. The advertiser is obviously hoping

that the reader will associate the product with the total impression—garment with model

and object with setting. In other words, the feelings aroused by the atmosphere are subtly

transferred to the product and some amount of information is linked to more general and

alluring promises.

72

Plate 9 The simple ad

Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 73

The ads in the Sunday newspaper colour supplements are usually of the compound type;

The photography is realistic but vivid; the product is projected into the foreground, usually

in crisp, clear magnification while the background is visible enough to hint at the pleasures

the commodity can bring. Cars, for instance, are usually set against some elegant mansion,

an approved public building like a bank or a cathedral, or possibly a race-course, an alpine

ski resort or an exotic tropical beach. The copy tries to limit itself to some technical data

about the performance of the car but the language of mechanics and electronics is often no

more than the familiar encouragement to power, prestige and excitement.

Complex advertisements usually concentrate on the presentation of luxury and status;

the background takes over, the product merges into it. The visual and verbal imagery evoke

the status feelings associated with money, wealth, elegance, luxury and the public display

of these things. In most advertising for expensive consumer durables—kitchen equipment,

furniture, carpets, bedroom suites, etc.—it is the ‘image’ created by the combination of

commentary and photography that is the selling point, not the specific carpet or suite. At

first glance, it is sometimes hard to see what precisely is on offer in complex advertise-

ments because the product is buried in the total image created. Similarly, ads and com-

mercials for airlines, cruises and big companies like Esso, IBM or banks work through

context or setting plus the technical sophistication of the photography or camera work.

These ‘prestige’ ads exude confidence, success, responsibility and power. Some bank ads

even communicate a benign and sentimental intimacy—from a superior position.

Sophisticated ads are extensions of the complex. They usually explore hidden or sub-

conscious feelings; subtle associations are made between product and situation, and dream-

like fantasies are acted out. The visual imagery might be blurred to suggest a dream- or

trance-like state and the colours and lighting are those usually associated with dreams and

fantasies. Sexuality may be exaggerated and sexual symbolism exploited. Self-indulgence

and violence lurk beneath the surface. Women become the imagined fetishes of men—

passive, narcissistic, exhibitionist—inviting male voyeurism. As John Berger has argued

in relation to the portrayal of women in publicity, ‘men act and women appear. Men look

at women, women watch themselves being looked at’ (1972, p. 47). Elements of Freud-

ian symbolism are often present in sophisticated ads—animal furs, feathers, mirrors. The

advertisements for Dormeuil menswear, Colmans mustard and commercials for jeans often

exploit these psychological areas of experience.

Lines of appeal

Another way of analysing ads is to classify them according to their themes or the attitudes

and feelings they are meant to appeal to or mobilize. Although advertisers will try hard to

make each ad special and different, when you look at a large number of ads you realize that

most are variations on a few basic ideas. Feelings and attitudes can be aroused by associat-

ing a product with, for example:

Happy families

Rich luxurious life styles

Dreams and fantasy

Successful romance and love

Important people, celebrities or experts

74

Glamorous places

Success in career or job

Art, culture and history

Nature and the natural world

Beautiful women

Self-importance and pride

Comedy and humour

Childhood

Not a few advertisements are based on appeals made to scientific ‘fact’ and on the tech-

nique of ‘before-and-after’ using the product. And another powerful technique of persuasion

is to play on guilt feelings and worry, the fear of being lonely or socially ostracized or of old

age. Sheer repetition is also a powerful advertising instrument of persuasion, and of course

devices such as slogans (‘Drinka Pinta Milka Day’) and jingles (‘Only Oxo can, like only

Oxo does’) are good examples of repetition. Normally any single commercial will use a

combination of association, recommendation, repetition, jingle, fear and before-and-after.

Approaches to form and content

Iconographic analysis

When trying to understand the meaning of an advertisement we must consider not only

the elements of which it is made up, but also the overall impression that it creates and the

techniques it uses to create it.

If we concentrate first on the visual, illustrative material of ads, we need to list the

items present in the picture (such as products, props, settings and actors) and then to move

beyond this simple level to try to perceive links and relationships to other elements and

other layers of the picture. Description and interpretation are inevitably linked.

The art critic Panofsky studied the iconography (imagery and symbols) of paintings, and

proposed a simple model for the analysis of the subject matter of visual communication

(see Panofsky, 1970, chapter 1). He suggested that there are three levels of meanings in an

image. By unpeeling the first and second you can get at the third.

1. The first level is that of primary or natural subject matter consisting of lights, colour,

shape and movement and the elementary understanding of representation, whether of

people, objects, gestures, poses or expressions, and the interrelations which comprise

events.

2. The second level is that of secondary or conventional subject matter which relates

to the wider culture. At this level, motifs and combinations of motifs are linked to

themes and concepts. According to Panofsky, certain motifs (which carry secondary

meanings) may be called images, and combinations of images may be called stories or

allegories.

3. At the third level we come to intrinsic meaning or content, which is discovered by

‘ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitudes of a nation, a

period, a class, a religious or philosophic persuasion—unconsciously qualified by one

personality and condensed into one work’ (Panofsky was referring here to paintings).

Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 75

Panofsky’s approach is useful because it suggests this breakdown of levels of meaning

and a fairly systematic way of identifying the constituents of a picture and relating these to

themes and concepts and wider cultural meanings.

Let us take the ad for Jøtul stoves (plate 10) and analyse it iconographically. At level one

we need to list the contents included by the advertiser—books, paintings, antique furniture,

whisky decanter, labrador (gun-) dog, horse brasses, copper log basket and two people of

a certain age, class and implied relationship. We also need to note the basic colours and

tones—warm, orangey browns. At level two we observe how these objects relate to our

culture, that is, what they ‘mean’. We recognize that they are images of an upper-middle-

class, traditional, country lifestyle. The gun dog and the horse paintings are motifs of the

hunting/shooting/fishing set, the books and antiques are motifs of education, high culture

and taste. At this level, too, the ad tells a story in which the woman ‘manages’ the house-

hold economy (hence the little picture, top right) while the man is out at work earning a

living. He has returned, it is early evening, and he is toasting his wife’s good decision in

buying the stove and thus fulfilling her role as household economist/manager and comfort

provider. Level three is where we explain how the ad means all this. It can only mean what

it does because it condenses into the one work a whole range of the underlying principles

and attitudes of one particular class in one particular period. These principles and attitudes

are the ones concerned with the appropriate roles of the two sexes, with the desirable status

within our culture of certain objects and their meanings (books, paintings, etc.), and with

the belief that muted harmonious colours are a sign of ‘good taste’ for a particular class. We

could well say that level one is the denotative, level two the connotative and level three the

ideological. These terms are explained in chapter 6 (but see also Fiske, 1982).

Visual perception

Even at Panofsky’s hypothesized first level of meaning, our understanding of the objects

before us is not completely natural, innocent or intuitive. Although we take for granted the

process of seeing and observing the people, things or events in our environment, visual per-

ception is not altogether straightforward. To start with, our vision is unlike that of a camera;

it is not a passive operation. We actively explore, select and organize sensory stimuli in the

visual field. Our eyes usually see only the essentials of an object and what we see is rarely

determined merely by the look of an object in front of us. We know this because it has been

found that even the simplest images are interpreted and reproduced differently in different

cultures. Seeing has more to do with learning and knowledge than with the unambiguous

transfer of images to the brain. When we see things we know what is there partly because of

knowledge gained from previous experience. When we observe an image we ‘read’ it rather

than just absorb it, and it is therefore accurate to talk of visual ‘literacy’. Although children

can recognize objects in a picture long before they can read, they are eight to ten years

old before they can understand still or moving pictures in the same way that adults can.

There are several perceptual exercises such as visual illusions and puzzles and unfamiliar

diagrammatic representations which demonstrate the general way in which our brains deal

with the information it receives; how we are selective about what we see and how our previ-

ous learning and experience constrains our perception.2

76

Plate 10 Analyse the iconography

Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 77

Non-verbal communication

Whilst we are on the subject of visual communication, we ought to touch on the question

of non-verbal and para-linguistic meaning. There is a body of thought and material on this

subject, mostly stemming from social psychologists and anthropologists, some of which

can help us construct a system for the analysis of advertisements.

Let us start by considering the obvious. An advertiser’s aim is to capture our attention

and favourably dispose us to a product or service. This means that by and large the product

will be shown in a desirable context so that some transference is made from the latter to

the former. If you buy the product you are likely to attain the glamour and prestige of the

situation depicted. One of the most successful ways of gaining the consumer’s attention and

getting him or her to infer the right message in a limited amount of space and time, is to

use proxy advertisers or typical consumers—actors or actresses who will act out and typify

favourable persons and dramatize the value of the product. By using characters and scenes

which can be stereotypically identified, the spectator is drawn into the ad and invited to

identify or empathize with what is said and done. This is a clever technique because when

we look at an ad our attention is usually drawn immediately to its human aspect.

In any analysis of ads we ought, therefore, to pay some attention to the way human

actors communicate feelings, social meanings and values like power, authority, subordina-

tion, sexuality and so on. Facial expressions are of course very important, as are gestures,

poses, body movement, size and the way people group themselves in particular situations.

All these ways of communicating meaning non-verbally seem to be natural and spontane-

ous. But with the possible exception of size and some basic expressive movement of the

face and body which might have a physiological or biological origin, expressive displays

are conveyed and received according to learnt cultural traditions. Some expressions can be

read and understood cross-culturally, but to understand fully the function and meaning of

affective displays we need to refer to a particular context or social situation within a cul-

ture. In ads, because they need to communicate swiftly, unambiguously and economically,

you will find that devices like facial expressions, poses and movement tend toward styl-

ization and generalization, or what the social anthropologist Erving Goffmann has called

‘hyper-ritualization’ (1979, p. 84)—tendencies which contribute towards the stereotyping

of people (particularly with regard to their gender), activities and situations.

Equally important as conveyors of meaning in ads are the clothes, hairstyles and acces-

sories used by the actors; quite precise meanings can be attached to someone’s overall

appearance. For instance, the labels ‘punk’, ‘chic’, ‘county-set’, ‘mod’, ‘rocker’, etc. con-

jure up certain specific appearances and styles.

In order to understand the meanings of ads featuring human subjects we need to delin-

eate the principle non-verbal means by which people communicate. We can divide these

means into appearance, manner and activity.

Appearance

1. Age. The age of the people in ads is a crucial focus of identification and an important

factor in how we view the product. Research indicates that the age range of people in ads is

typically narrow—the preferred age of the models/actors is between 18 and 35. Particularly

where women are the subjects of ads, the emphasis is on youth.

78

2. Gender. This again is a most important source of identification. The display of a charac-

ter’s gender refers to conventionalized portrayals of culturally established correlates of sex.

Analysis of ads suggests that gender is routinely portrayed according to traditional cultural

stereotypes: women are shown as very feminine, as ‘sex objects’, as housewives, mothers,

homemakers; and men in situations of authority and dominance over women. Femininity

and masculinity are prototypes of an essential expression which, according to Goffmann,

can be ‘conveyed fleetingly in any social situation and yet [is] something which strikes at

the most basic characterisation of the individual’ (1979, p. 7).

3. National and racial. These characteristics are usually related to stereotypical views of

‘other’ people and are frequently used as sources of humour.

4. Hair. This is one of the most potent symbols in cultural communication. Female hair in

particular is considered to be seductive and narcissistic, meaning an object of love or self-

admiration. The colour, length, texture and style of a person’s hair are important qualifiers

of their overall appearance. Sometimes young women in ads are shown with their hair

mysteriously hiding their face or their eyes.

5. Body. This can be thin, fat, short, tall, clothed or partially clothed. The naked body is,

of course, not value-free, carrying meanings according to a particular society’s norms.

Advertising has been quick to exploit the potential meaning of human, particularly female

bodies. The body may be presented in such a way as to convey exhibitionism, narcissism,

incongruity or daring. In some ads it is pictorially dissected or presented in a fragmented

way, or as Trevor Millum describes it, photographically ‘cropped’ (1975, p. 83). Lips, eyes,

legs, finger nails or hands are shown divorced from the body. Men are less often dismem-

bered in this way, although the Flora margarine ads, which show only a man’s torso, are an

exception.

6. Size. Size is an important signifier of meaning. Relative size can convey social weight

and superior status, power, authority, rank, etc. Men usually take precedence over women

in this respect, although as Goffmann notes there are a few exceptions that prove the rule—

women are sometimes pictured taller than men when the men are inferior in social class and

‘thoroughly costumed as craft-bound servitors’ (1975, p. 28).

7. Looks. Looks are related to the overall class, age, style and impression created by a char-

acter. Looks, needless to say, are conventionally ‘good looks’—handsome men, beautiful

women, cherubic children, kindly old folk. Adsgenerally confirm conventions of ‘ideal

type’. Although sophistication is a prevalent ‘look’ in ads, the plain, straightforward kind

of person also appears—there is some advantage to be gained in a studied naturalness or

simplicity. In recent years and particularly on television, some ads have tried to capture a

type of ‘ordinary’ person in everyday surroundings. The ‘normal’, ‘average’ people in Play-

ers Number 6 ads are an example of this. The captions read ‘People like you are changing to

No. 6’, directly addressing the smoker so that he or she becomes a part of the message.

Manner

Manner indicates behaviour or emotion at any one time, and is manifest in three main codes

of non-verbal communication.

Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 79

1. Expression. The face and facial expression are a particular focus of attention in ads.

Most expressions are based on socially learned, conventionalized cultural codes, which

vary from culture to culture. The expression is meant to underwrite the appeal of a product

and arouse our emotions. Normally the expression of the ‘actor’ will be positive, contented,

purposeful, delighted, happy, gleeful, etc. There is considerable empirical evidence to sug-

gest that in our society women smile more than men—both in reality and in commercial

scenes. Women are often depicted in a childlike state of expectation and pleasure. They

frequently seem to be too easily pleased in ads, as Goffmann suggests:

If television commercials are to be believed, most American women go into uncon-

trollable ecstacies at the sight and smell of tablets and cabinets that have been lov-

ingly caressed with long-lasting, satin-finish, lemon-scented, spray-on furniture

polish. Or they glow with rapture at the blinding whiteness of their wash—and the

green-eyed envy of their neighbours…(1979, p. 68).

In cosmetic ads in glossy fashion magazines the model’s look might be cool and haughty as

she looks the reader in the eye. Other typical expressions in ads may be seductive, alluring,

coy, kittenish, inward-looking, thoughtful, pensive, carefree, out-going, comic, maternal

or mature.

2. Eye contact. The attention of the actor in an ad is significant whether it be directed

towards audience/camera (person to viewer eye contact), at an object (product), towards

other people in the ad or to the middle-distance (detached, distant). Goffmann discusses the

ritual of withdrawing one’s gaze, mental drifting and social dissociation under the genera!

description licensed withdrawal. He remarks that

Women more than men…are pictured engaged in involvements which remove them

psychologically from the social situation at large leaving them unoriented in it and

to it, and presumably, therefore, dependent on the protectiveness and good will of

others who are (or might come to be) present. (1979, p. 57)

Covering the face or mouth with the hands is one way of hiding an emotion like remorse,

fear, shyness or laughter. The aversion of the eyes and lowering of the head can indicate

withdrawal from a scene and symbolize dependency and submissiveness. In many adver-

tisements women are shown mentally drifting while in close physical contact with a male

as if his mental and physical alertness were enough for both of them. Women may focus

their attention on the middle distance, on some object (like the product) or on a piece of the

man’s clothing. Women are sometimes seen with a dreamy luxuriating look in their eyes

(see plate 11). Eyes may be covered up or shaded by hair, hats, hands, dark glasses. Simi-

larly, blinking or winking have great cultural significance. However, an equally important

feature in ads is the shielding of everything but the eyes so that the person can observe

an event without actually participating in it; some ads show women coyly peeping from

behind fans, curtains, objects or products.

3. Pose. This can be static or active and sometimes corresponds to expression. Poses can be

composed, relaxed, leisurely, passive, leaning, seductive, snuggling. Bodies can be vertical

80

or horizontal. An individual can use another to act as a shield or as an object to lean against,

or rest hands or legs on. Pose is also related to social position and status, hence women are

often seen in a lower position than the man, for instance sitting at their feet.

4. Clothes. These are obviously extremely important carriers of meaning in ads, even when

they are not the object being sold. They can range from the formal (regimental or work

costume), to the informal (leisure, relaxation, sports wear), and can be smart, sophisticated,

glamorous, elegant, trendy or comfortable and casual. They can of course sum up a ‘look’,

e.g. the ‘twenties’ look.

Activity

Body gestures, movement and posture can be related to what the actor is doing.

1. Touch. The finger brought to the mouth or face can signify thoughtfulness but of a dis-

sociated kind; women and children are often shown with the tips of their fingers in the

mouth. Finger to finger touching similarly implies dissociation. Women more than men

are pictured touching, or delicately fingering objects, tracing their outline, caressing their

surfaces. This ritualistic touching is different from functional touching like grasping or

holding.3 Handholding can be a significant gesture in ads and often is used to allow the man

to protect or direct the woman. Self-touching is again something that women do more than

men; it conveys the impression of narcissism, admiring one’s own body and displaying it to

others, so that everyone can share the admiration of this delicate and precious thing. Some-

times the act of touching is displaced onto things—sun, wind or water on the naked body

when sunbathing or swimming. The feel of clothes against the skin—satins, silks, furs—is

conveyed as a pleasurable thing.

2. Body movement. This might be quite functional, i.e. simply related to what the actor

is doing—cleaning the kitchen floor, making beds, filling up the car with petrol, playing

football, gardening. These movements may be exaggerated, ridiculous or child-like, call-

ing into question the competence of the performer. Bodies, particularly women’s, are often

not treated seriously, either through what Goffmann calls ‘ritual subordination’ (that is

lowering the body in front of others more superior, lying or sitting down, ritually bending

the knee or lowering the head) or through puckishness and clowning. An example of body

movement is where two people are engaged in ‘mock assault’ and this is sometimes seen in

advertisements, men usually playing these games on women.

3. Positional communication. The relationships between actors and actors, actors and

objects are extremely significant, and are shown by their position within the frame of a

picture. Superiority, inferiority, equality, intimacy and rank can be signified by people’s

position, size, activity and their relationship to the space around them, the furniture and to

the viewer/consumer. Close-up shots, for instance, are meant to signify more intimacy and

identification than long-shots.

Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 81

Plate 11 The submissive woman

82 Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 83

Millum has suggested four categories to deal with the relationships that occur in ads (1975,

p. 96):

(a) Reciprocal—a two-way relationship in which each person is the centre of the other’s

attention.

(b) Divergent—each person’s attention is directed towards something different.

(c) Object—the attention of each person is directed towards the same object.

(d) Semi-reciprocal—one person’s attention is concentrated on the other, whose attention

is elsewhere.

Props and settings

Non-verbal communication is associated mainly with ‘actors’, but we must not forget that

there are other visual elements in ads: stage props and other objects (like grass), the set-

ting (including weather), and of course the product. You might think that the meaning of an

inanimate object or place is fairly straightforward. But physical objects can convey mean-

ings to us in both literal or objective ways and also more subtly by suggestion and associa-

tion. Objects are cultural as well as physical. Their appearance, shape, size and colour are

the intentional result of a series of conscious choices and decisions made by human beings.

The look of things is rarely accidental. The furniture we use, the rooms we live in, the

meals we eat, our activities and everyday household objects implicitly or explicitly embody

meanings. The best example of the analysis of everyday cultural objects can be found in

Roland Barthes’s book Mythologies (1973), in which the author ‘decodes’ such unlikely but

totally accepted things as a wrestling match, a plate of steak and chips, an ad for margarine,

the Citroën car, a travel guidebook and hairstyles. He shows how these objects function as

cultural communication and reveals their underlying social values.

Props

Props are often used in ads and can be as prominent as the product or relatively insignifi-

cant. Props can be selected because they help demonstrate the product’s use (e.g. a paint

brush in a paint commercial, a cup and saucer in an instant coffee commercial) or results

of usage (a damp cloth can be shown rubbing over a newly painted wali). They are more

likely to appear, however, with a signifying as well as a functional role to play. An ad for a

food product might show it on a plate or in a bowl (functional), but if this piece of crockery

is high quality Spode rather than mass-produced Woolworth’s, we can see that the prop is

intended to convey a special meaning: good taste and superior quality. In this example the

prop has both a functional and a symbolic meaning. If coffee is shown in a coffee cup, the

prop is there for functional reasons; if a bunch of freshly-cut daisies is placed next to it, it

suggests that the coffee is as fresh as a daisy: the flowers are used as a metaphor.

Some props occur so frequently in ads that they have gained a conventionalized or sym-

bolic value; they stand for what is regarded as being desirable—wealth, love, power, luxury,

security. A Rolls Royce used as a prop in an ad signifies wealth and power. Country houses

appear frequently, as do certain breeds of dog and thoroughbred horses. Dogs usually sig-

nify loyalty and devotion, cats and French poodles are used as symbols of (particularly

feminine) fastidiousness and luxury. Drinks such as brandy or champagne are symbols of

extravagance and good taste. Beer has strong connotations of masculinity, and might be

84

used in ads for mens’s clothes or accessories or to assure the reader that a brand of after-

shave is adequately ‘masculine’. Books, especially if accompanied by bowls of flowers,

symbolize sound educational taste, while spectacles are meant to suggest cleverness.

Settings

Advertisements do not always contain settings; even those with actors sometimes have

non-specific backgrounds. Like objects, settings are carriers of meaning and are rarely

value-free. They act as a context which qualifies the foreground. Sometimes, of course, the

setting is the advertised product itself, as in travel/holiday ads. In such instances, people

and objects personalize the picture. The more defined, obtrusive or cluttered the back-

ground, the more it will affect the main action or purpose of the ad. The setting of an ad

can be quite vague and hazy or it can be a collection of specific props, but as far as impact

goes the whole may be greater than the sum of the parts. Panofsky’s iconographic analysis

is particularly useful here, for it demonstrates how a ‘level-three’ meaning can carry far

more significance than an analysis on levels one and two alone might suggest. In some ads

several backgrounds/settings are shown in order to show off the product’s versatility or to

provide some kind of juxtaposition of meanings—the mundane versus the exotic.

One way of categorizing settings is to decide whether they have been staged or are

meant to give the impression of a ‘slice of life’ like a documentary. The two are not mutu-

ally exclusive. Outdoor settings generally look ‘real’ (although the desert-island setting for

a Bird’s Eye fish-fingers ad was designed to look artificial and cartoonlike). Indoor settings

can vary from looking extremely natural to highly contrived or even surreal. A series of ads

for Dulux paint show an interior setting without walls, which reveals the outdoors: here the

setting is both realistic and surrealistic. Needless to say, indoor, realistic settings are actu-

ally unrealistic: they are tidier, more expensively equipped and better planned than in real

life, and thus are idealized versions of reality, not reflections of it.

Millum suggests a useful categorization of interiors:

1. The familiar, known, real, that which we can experience or have experienced for our-

selves.

2. The wishful, slightly unusual, imaginative, at one remove from direct experience: a

wishful-thinking interpretation of reality.

3. The fantastic, exotic, very strange, improbable, dreamlike: far from daily, conscious

experience.

inhabit, and a wishful one he or she might hope to inhabit. (1975, p. 93)

Analysing photographs

The advertising image and the way we see it are of course crucially dependent on the actual

techniques of production and reproduction and on photographic or filmic techniques such

as focus, film stock, lenses, close-up, cropping, editing (special electronic effects), camera

movement, lighting, etc. Advertising and TV images are so eyecatching and persuasive

largely because the advertisers use some of the most technically sophisticated equipment

would

To look at them in a slightly different way: a fantastic setting is one which the reader

never rationally expect to inhabit, a familiar one he or she would expect to

Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 85

available and constantly experiment with new techniques, often the same which are used in

feature films like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ or ‘Star Wars’.

Focus and depth of vision can make things appear clear and crisp or fuzzy and misty,

and may be used to emphasize some parts of a picture and fade others away.

Close-ups are used frequently in advertisements to show objects in all their appealing

detail or to give them a larger-than-life appearance. Blow-ups are also used to exaggerate

the sensuousness of their physical characteristics.

Lighting and colour can be used in non-naturalistic ways, to give a dramatic or mysteri-

ous atmosphere. Colours can be soft and muted or impart a dream-like or nostalgic qual-

ity.

Cropping is the device of cutting up a picture, often to draw attention to certain parts of

the body—isolated legs, eyes, lips or hands. Women are more frequently represented in this

fragmented way than men, as if their bodies were made up of spare parts.

Camera angle does not usually draw attention to itself; we rarely notice that a scene or

person is shot from an eye-line ‘angle’, but it can be altered to produce dramatic or unusual

effects, or to control connotation.

Special effects, or montage are some of the devices which give moving film greater

opportunities for special technical effects. Scenes and shots can be spliced together, and

although we don’t usually notice ‘realistic’ editing or ‘montage’, it can be used to great

effect, e.g. to give the impression of dynamism and excitement. For instance, Welch et al.

(1979) have shown that TV ads for boys’ toys have far more ‘edits’ per 30 seconds than do

ads for girls’ toys. They conclude that this style of editing reinforces society’s belief that

boys are more active than girls. Images can be superimposed one on top of another in both

still and moving photography, and trick effects are now widely used in TV commercials.

Many insights into the technical and ‘creative’ dimension of ads can be gathered from

photography manuals and advertising primers. These kinds of books generally attempt to

define guidelines and rules for ‘good’ pictures and good advertising campaigns. They pro-

vide useful pointers for analysis but in themselves are not concerned with analysis or inter-

pretation but rather with professional practice and expertise.

In relation to visual techniques, we can also note the overall impact and impression

created by an ad. Although the standard elements in a press ad are the product, a person,

props, setting, headline, body copy, slogan, signature line, price reference, etc., the over-all

impression of an ad will depend on how many of these elements appear in an ad and on how

large they are. The more elements that appear in an ad and the more space that is used up,

the more crowded it will appear, although it will not necessarily lose impact as a result.

Content analysis

Having outlined a possible approach to the study of advertisements based on the observa-

tion and classification of their component parts, I shall now discuss an analytical approach

which is based on the quantifications of textual elements. This approach is called con-

tent analysis and is a well-established research procedure in the social sciences. The basic

assumption of content analysis is that there is a relation between the frequency with which

a certain item appears in a text/ad and the ‘interest’ or intentions of the producer on the one

hand and on the other, the responses of the audience. What the text is all about or what the

86

producer means by the text is ‘hidden’ in it and can be revealed by identifying and counting

significant textual features. Content analysis is usually confined to large-scale, objective

and systematic surveys of manifest content using the counting of content items as the basis

for later interpretation (see Fiske, 1982).

A study based on content analysis published by T.Manstead and C.McCullogh (1981)

surveyed 170 different commercials broadcast on Granada TV. The researchers found that

66 per cent of the central figures in financial ads (for banks, credit cards, insurance com-

panies, etc.) were men or ‘voiced-over’ by men. In all ads men were depicted as indepen-

dent, whereas women were shown as dependent. Men were typically portrayed as ‘having

expertise and authority’, as being objective and knowledgeable about the product; females

were typically shown as consumers of products. Of the central figures shown in the home,

73 per cent were women and of the people who voiced no argument about the product, 63

per cent were women.

Although men were less likely to appear in commercials for body, home and food prod-

ucts, male voice-overs were used in 94 per cent of the sample of ads for body products, 83

per cent of home products and 80 per cent of food products. These figures confirm similar

content analyses of ads on American TV, where for instance all-male ads appear more

frequently than all-female ones (though these appear less frequently than mixed sex ads).

In one American study 946 ads with voice-overs were analysed—6 per cent used a female

voice and 86 per cent a male voice (the remainder used both). In summary:

Women were seven times more likely to appear in ads for personal hygiene products.

75 per cent of all ads using females were for products found in the kitchen or

bathroom.

Men were significantly more likely to be shown outdoors or in business settings than

were women.

Twice as many women as men were shown with children.

56 per cent of the women in ads were judged to be only housewives.

43 different occupations were coded for men, 18 for women.

TV commercials clearly portray sex-role stereotypes, and according to some researchers

repeated exposure to such stereotypes must influence the learning of sex-role stereotypes.

The British research suggests that advertisements are not even approximately accurate in

reflecting the real nature of sex roles. In 1978, for instance, 41 per cent of all employees in

the UK were women. In the sample of British ads women comprised a mere 13 per cent of

central characters portrayed in paid employment.

This treatment of women in ads amounts to what an American researcher has called the

‘symbolic annihilation’ of women. In other words, ads reflect the dominant social values:

women are not important, except in the home, and even there men know best, as the male

voice-over for female products suggests.

Not all examples of content analysis strictly adhere to the principle that significance is

synonymous with frequency and in some cases latent content is considered to be as worthy

of analysis as is manifest content. It is doubtful after all if the counting of isolated content

items alone will indicate what a text means or how meaning is produced, nor how the audi-

ence interprets it.

Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 87

In one recent study of ads in American magazines, the authors tried to get round some of

the serious limitations of traditional content analysis by studying the rhetorical and persua-

sive devices of a sample of 300 ads. They also examined the ads for their ideological values

and evaluations, and their norms and concepts of reality. In other words they tried to assess

how an ad persuades and attempted to uncover more latent messages.

In the first part of their study, Andren and his colleagues (1978) discovered that in their

sample of 300 magazine advertisements there were 576 instances of the different rhetori-

cal means for non-rational persuasion that they had hypothesized and for which they had

developed categories. Twenty of the sample contained rational argumentation only, with no

persuasive devices.

The authors of the research used the following criteria to judge whether a part of an

advertisement is persuasive or rationally argumentative:

1. An argumentative part of an advertisement deals with the product advertised and does

not include statements that obviously lack relevance for the ad-thesis.

2. It does not contain emotionally coloured language when more neutral expressions can

be used that have the same cognitive content.

3. When possible it contains precise and easily interpreted language.

4. It does not contain obvious untruths and exaggerations.

5. It does not invoke themes which are psychologically or socially loaded in the society

in which it is published.

They concluded that ads do not act as objective guides to the audience to any significant

degree and that if an ad is filled with persuasion (as occurred in 93 per cent of the ads in

their sample) then it has a tendency to block or disturb rational examination and critical

examination.

The authors also found that although the ads that they analysed were not overtly politi-

cal, they did carry a number of latent messages that could have been regarded as ideo-

logical. For instance, the vast majority of ads stressed youth and leisure activities at the

expense of older age groups and working environments. The portrayal of working life was

found only infrequently in the ads, and where it was referred to, the jobs depicted were of

high status and reward. The ads generally supported an individualized consumer mentality

and one that was compatible with the aims of the consumer/capitalist economy. They pre-

sented images of a world and society devoid of conflict of interest such as those between

nations, classes, racial and sexual groupings. Any expressed discontent with a situation or

person was channelled into dreams about a better past or future or into self-criticism or

self-contempt. It was a general tenet of all ads that any social or personal problems could

be dealt with and overcome through the use of more and more commodities, gadgets, etc.

The people in the ads were first and foremost consumers, and rarely workers, especially

workers involved in collective work or in routine conveyor-belt work. The world depicted

was a world of hedonistic, individual pleasure. How the rest of society fared seemed to be

irrelevant.

Content analysis, a procedure which relies on the identification and counting of signifi-

cant categories of content, can tell us a great deal about ads that we would not normally

discover by impressionistic or cursory readings. But sometimes the counting or quantifica-

88

tion of isolated elements in a piece of content cannot tell us everything about how meaning

is produced in the text nor how the audience understand what is after all a complex piece of

signification—the whole is often more than the sum of the parts. Advertisements are expe-

rienced as part of a flow of many sorts of cultural communication and their significance

cannot always be reduced to their manifest, objective content. In the next chapter I want to

look at an approach to the analysis of content which treats messages as complexly struc-

tured texts composed of signs combined into codes which allow meaning to be produced.

Notes

1. For a useful discussion of the problems associated with developing an adequate meth-

odology for the investigation of audience ‘readings’ see Morley (1980), especially

chapter 4.

2. See R.L.Gregory (1966), E.H.Gombrich (1962) and R.Arnheim (1967).

3. See Winship (1981) for a discussion of women’s and men’s hands in advertisements.

Suggestions for further work

1. Why do ads in magazines and newspapers and commercials on TV use the following

techniques or formulae?

— dramatized sequences,

— song and dance routines/jingles,

— sophisticated photographic/cinematic techniques,

— experts and celebrities and scientific tests,

— slogans and repetition.

Can you think of any other standard advertising devices?

2. Why do many advertisements show products in a family setting? Are real families like

the ones in the ads? Can the purchase of a product help towards an ideal family?

3. What impression of young people do advertisements seem to give? How is this impres-

sion put over? What language is used in ads featuring teenagers and what images are

presented?

4. How is ‘love’ portrayed in ads? Collect a range of ads that feature people in love or

products that will help their love life and make them attractive to the opposite sex.

5. Try to construct/design an ad showing how extreme some ads are.

6. Collect a series of ads featuring women in a principal position. Group them according

to age, ‘looks’, clothes, hairstyles, relationship to men/children, posture, setting etc.

Do any consistencies emerge? What does Goffmann (1979) mean by ‘licensed with-

drawal’ in relation to the way women are posed in ads? Collect some ads where women

are shown in apparent ecstasy over a product. Are men shown ‘transported’ like this?

Can these images have any possible effect on society’s attitudes towards women and

on women themselves?

7. Using a set of categories such as sex, occupation, status, facial expression, clothing, do

a content analysis of ads in a teenage magazine and/or a hobby or specialist magazine.

Break down the ads into these categories and indicate how many ads feature certain

occupations or lifestyles, men, women, etc. Alternatively, construct a category system

Advertising as Communication

What do advertisements mean? 89

for analysis on the lines suggested by Andren et al. in Rhetoric and Ideology in Adver-

tising (1978); base your analysis on the following categories:

Eye catcher Picture or graphic occupies more than 50 per cent of space of ad.

Sex appeal Sexually stimulating as opposed to informational.

Slogan Phonetic or prosodic qualities designed to catch the eye.

Paradox Syntactical or semantical peculiarities.

Value transference Some quality, person or phenomenon is made to seem obtainable through

use of product.

Pop method Suggestion that product is in great demand, fashionable, etc.

Nature method Product is natural; contains no artificial ingredients.

Flattery Ad flatters viewer/recipient of ad in some way.

Temptation Ad asserts that the owner of the product can achieve some generally desir-

able state of affairs or process.

Testimonial Some identifiable person or institution recommends the product.

Entertainment Ad contains a joke, a pun, a funny figure.

Take a sample of ads and identify the categories appearing in the ads. (For a fuller expla-

nation of the content analysis method see Fiske and Hartley (1979), chapter 2, and Fiske

(1982), chapter 7.)

6

SEMIOTICS AND IDEOLOGY

When we talk about advertisements or attempt to analyse them, most of us tend to assume

that they are vehicles for the communication of usually somewhat distorted or exagger-

ated publicity; and that they are ‘transparent’ or invisible carriers at that. We tend to take

for granted that what is on the screen or page is what the ad means and we ‘measure’ ads

against some assumed reality which could replace the ‘unreal’ images which constitute

most ads. The images of men and women in ads, for example, are usually considered to be

mythic rather than real, and also stereotyped. This kind of criticism usually gets bogged

down in arguments about the extent to which such images are true or false and seeks to

replace distorted images with representations of people and situations as they really are. It

assumes that there is a simple and better reality with which to replace the stereotypes and

myths and ignores the fact that ads are in themselves a kind of reality which have an effect.

In this sense ads are not secondary to ‘real life’ nor copied or derived from it. Ads are what

some critics call ‘specific representational practices’ and produce meanings which cannot

be found in reality. There is no simple reality with which to replace the falseness of ads,

and there are no simple alternatives to stereotypes. In order to gain better understanding of

the role that advertising plays in our society, we need to ask how advertising organizes and

constructs reality, how ideology and meanings are produced within the ad discourse and

why some images are the way they are, or how they could have been constructed.

In order to approach these questions we need to consider a framework for analysis estab-

lished by semiotics, described by its founder Ferdinand de Saussure as ‘a science that

studies the life of signs within society’. It is an approach which has adopted some concepts

and tools of analysis from structural linguistics, which attempts to uncover the internal

relationships which give different languages their form and function. Although language

is a basic model, semiotics has cast its net wider, and looks at any system of signs whether

the substance is verbal, visual or a complex mixture of both. Thus speech, myth, folktales,

novels, drama, comedy, mime, paintings, cinema, comics, news items and advertisements

can be analysed semiotically as systems of signification similar to languages.

This approach involves a critical shift from the simple interpretation of objects and forms

of communication to investigations of the organization and structure of cultural artefacts

and, in particular, to enquiry into how they produce meaning. It is argued that the meaning

of an advertisement is not something there, statically inside an ad, waiting to be revealed by

a ‘correct’ interpretation. What an ad means depends on how it operates, how signs and its

‘ideological’ effect are organized internally (within the text) and externally (in relation to its

production, circulation and consumption and in relation to technological, economic, legal

and social relations). Implicit in this approach is a rejection of much impressionistic criti-

cism and ‘scientific’ content analysis which assumes that the meaning of an ad is evident in

its overt, manifest content and ignores the form that the content takes. As I said at the begin-

ning of this chapter, ads are not invisible conveyors of messages or transparent reflections

92

of reality, they are specific discourses or structures of signs. As such we do not passively

absorb them but actively participate in their production of signification, according to the way

they ‘speak’ to or ‘ensnare’ us. We come to advertisements as social readers. According to

Janice Winship ‘We all, so to speak, bring our social positions with us to the reading of any

discourse; and we are not automatically “interpellated” as the subject(s) which the discourse

constructs’ (1981, p. 28). She cites the example of a poster for a car which proclaimed: ‘lf it

were a lady it would get its bottom pinched’, and which was defaced with this rejoinder: ‘lf

this lady were a car she’d run you down’. This challenge is effective because it uses the same

means of representation as the ad. It also highlights the fact that the original ad was clearly

addressed to a male and that the social reader objecting was a female. It matters, then, who

an ad is implicitly addressed to, which may or may not include you.

Most semiotic/structural studies of advertising texts distinguish between their outward

manifestation and inner mechanisms—the codes and conventions which organize and

release the meanings of a text in the process of viewing or reading. Such codes are what

makes meaning possible. Texts result from the dynamic interplay of various semiotic, aes-

thetic, social and ideological processes within them which also operate in the culture out-

side them. The audience member is involved in the work of the text and the production of its

meaning; his or her own knowledge, social position and ideological perspective is brought

to bear on the process of the construction of meaning. As Judith Williamson argues:

Advertisements must take into account not only the inherent qualities and attributes

of the products they are trying to sell, but also the way in which they can make those

properties mean something to us…Advertisements are selling us something besides

consumer goods; in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods are

interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves. (1978, p. 13)

Advertisements do not simply manipulate us, inoculate us or reduce us to the status of

objects; they create structures of meaning which sell commodities not for themselves as

useful objects but in terms of ourselves as social beings in our different social relationships.

Products are given ‘exchange-value’: ads translate statements about objects into statements

about types of consumer and human relationships. Williamson gives the example of the ad

for diamonds (‘A diamond is forever’) in which they are likened to eternal love: the dia-

mond means something not in its own terms as a rock or mineral but in human terms as a

sign. A diamond cannot buy love, but in the ad it is the diamond which is made to generate

love and comes to mean love. And once this initial connection has been made we almost

automatically accept the object for the feeling. People and objects can become interchange-

able as in, for example, the slogans ‘The Pepsi generation’, ‘The Martini set’.

It is in this sense that advertisements should be seen as structures which function by

transforming an object into something which is given meaning in terms of people. The

meaning of one thing is transferred to or made interchangeable with another quality, whose

value attaches itself to the product. In the simplest of cases, we can see how something

(someone or some place) which we like or value transfers its qualities to the product. Two

things are made interchangeable or equal in value—‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’.

Williamson calls this transfer of meaning between signs in an ad ‘currency’. The cigar

represents or replaces the feeling of happiness: ‘Currency is something which represents a

value and in its interchangeability with other things gives them value too’ (1978, p. 20).

Advertising as Communication

Semiotics and ideology 93

Feminists have pointed out that ads addressed to women define women in terms of the

commodity. Goods like convenience foods, domestic appliances, toilet products and fash-

ions are sold not as commodities but in terms of what they can do for relationships (with

men, with the family, with neighbours). Women are made to identify themselves with what

they consume—‘You, Daz and your Hotpoint automatic’, ‘You and Heinz together make

a perfect team’. Success with the family and friends can be purchased for the price of a

packet of detergent, a bottle of cough syrup or a jar of moisturizing cream. Of course, it

is women who usually do the washing and cook the meals, but they are made to feel inad-

equate without the commodities which help them perform the tasks which constitute their

family and social relationships.

So in order to understand the image of a woman in an ad, it is important to identify how

she is signified and positioned in the ad as a female person, and to remember that any rep-

resentation is also partially defined in relation to the material position of women ‘outside’

the ad, within what feminists call ‘patriarchal relations’—their economic, political and

ideological position in society.

Semiotics—concepts and methods

In order to clarify the contribution that semiotics/structuralism can make to the analysis of

ads as signs and sign systems, I will describe some of the basic features and concepts of the

structuralist model and apply them to different advertisements.

Structuralism (and I am taking this word to be more or less synonymous with semiotics)

usually makes a distinction between the systematic and social part of signifying practices/

structural systems—the material, conditioning and determining aspects of culture—and

the resulting individual signifying practice. The former is usually referred to as langue

(language) and it consists of structural rules and conventions, which are independent of the

individual use of them. The individual use is called parole (speech), and is the manifestation

of the selected, combined and articulated elements of langue. In language itself, the distinc-

tion between langue and parole is perhaps more clear-cut than in a system like advertising.

Nevertheless it could be argued that an advertisement is the parole—the ordered combina-

tion of verbal and visual signs into messages—and that langue is the means (codes) which

allow the messages to function. Langue conditions and is conditioned by parole and con-

sists of a diverse set of social constraints, references and discourses, images, formal tech-

niques and rhetorical figures which advertisers draw upon to create the publicity message.

A second distinction, which is important for understanding how sign systems work, is

that made between the two parts which make up the sign, be it visual or verbal. A sign is

made up of the signiier, a material vehicle, and the signiied, a mental concept or refer-

ence. A signifier has potential but not actual meaning whereas the signified is the concept

or meaning which the signifier refers to. The two are materially inseparable, although it is

useful to distinguish between them for the purpose of analysis in order to see how the sign

works. A simple example will illustrate the two aspects of the sign.

The ad for gold (plate 12) consists of the photographic image of two people in profile.

They can be identified as a woman and a man, although only part of their faces are show-

ing and the ‘eye-line’ of the photo is their shoulders (naked). We assume they are about

to kiss. She has her hand on his shoulder and this reveals a gold wedding ring and a gold

94

Plate 12 Signifier and signified

Advertising as Communication

Semiotics and ideology 95

bracelet on her wrist. A linguistic caption, strategically placed between them, proclaims:

‘The strongest links are forged in gold’. At one level this message can only mean that the

links in her bracelet are made of gold and that they are strong and durable. This is more

or less a rational/objective statement about the properties of the metal. Thus one of the

signiiers of this ad is the gold bracelet; its signiied is that this piece of jewellery is long

lasting and a sound investment. But there is an assumed narrative in the ad which works

beneath the surface. We need to delve deeper into the ad’s rhetoric. He has given her a gift,

she is rewarding him with a kiss. Their relationship is founded on this transaction: gold

is the basis of their ‘link’. Their (and by implication your) relationship will therefore be

strong and durable. Much of this ad then, works at an unconscious level where a connec-

tion is being made between a gold bracelet (signifier) and an intimate (sexual) relationship

between two people (signified). The significance of the message lies in its implicit narra-

tive, the world it creates (which denies questions about the object’s production—who made

it, where does it come from, for whom is it intended) and the relationship it coins between

the significance of love and its transference to gold. We have to make the connection. It is

only implied by the visual message, although somewhat helped by the punning linguistic

message. Gold is a precious and valued (expensive) metal; its currency is recognized out-

side the ad. This meaning is incorporated into the ad and carried by it. Romantic love is

similarly an ideal in our society. The two are made interchangeable. The value of each is

attached to the product—a gift of jewellery.

A further point can be made about this ad and that is the way in which colour is used.

It is obviously no accident that the two unclothed bodies appear to have golden tans. The

background is a simple, neutral colour. Again a connection is being made between the

couple in the ad and the commodity, gold. Many ads use colour as an ‘objective correla-

tive’, where the colours of the product, a packet of cigarettes, a cosmetic range, etc. are

echoed by its surroundings: the décor in a room or a natural setting, by the clothes a model

is wearing or by an object placed next to the product. The assumption is that the qualities

and style of one will enhance the other through this visual link. The people or the world

they inhabit in the ad become accessories of the product.

The colour technique is also used in TV commercials. The Kellogg’s cornflakes adver-

tisements, for instance, rely on the connection between the golden colour of the flakes and

fine sunny skies, golden beaches, etc. In one commercial for this product, the image on

the screen of cornflakes cascading out of a packet is spliced in with an image of a person

jumping on a trampoline with the same abundant exuberance. The movement of flakes and

person is almost continuous although the subjects of the two juxtaposed images are differ-

ent. Here the formal techniques of cinematic editing act, like the colours, as signifiers of an

implicit signified: energy, youthfulness, happiness, etc.

An ad for Renault cars (plate 13) sets up a correspondence between the car and a

woman through the content and form of the signifiers. The woman is made synonymous

with the car through the shiny dress she is wearing and through its colours, and in addi-

tion through the formal techniques of cinematic dissolves and the montage of images.

The silk-clad, slinky, fashionable model lies in a sensuous horizontal position in the first

frame of the commercial. Her image dissolves slowly into the image of a car in the next

few frames, the curves of her body forming the outline of the car. Subsequent frames show

96

Plate 13 Renault cars

Advertising as Communication

Semiotics and ideology 97

98

the fragmented parts of a woman; her hands, head, torso, etc. are juxtaposed with, dissolved

into or made to stand instead of the car’s instruments, headlights and reclining seats. Elon-

gated fingers and manicured, painted nails sensuously touch and caress the control panel

and the car’s phallic-looking locking mechanism. Woman as a sign, shaped and moulded

like a car, displays herself to be looked at by men. She is made into a decorative, passive

object available and controllable like the car. She is moulded in the form that men desire;

she is controlled by the gaze of the absent man and is represented by the imagined fetishes

which men are supposed to respond to. She adorns and caresses the car and men are invited

to caress their cars/women. The images are misty and the music throbs. This kind of ad

expresses women’s sexuality in men’s terms; it invites the signified voyeurism and sexual

power and control through the forms of the signifiers.

The important thing to remember about signs is that their meaning can only be assessed

in relation to their structure and their structural relationships with other signs. A sign not

only means in and for itself but also through its place in other signifying systems, for

instance the individual ad within advertising. The signified does not exist except as a func-

tion of a particular signifying system. Meanings are organized in ‘chains’ of signification

and signifieds can become signifiers for further chains of signification (see denotation and

connotation below, p. 127).

Advertising, like language, is a system consisting of distinct signs. It is a system of

differences and oppositions which are crucial in the transfer of meaning. In the commod-

ity market there are many products such as soap, detergent, cosmetics, breakfast cereal,

margarine, beer and cigarettes which are essentially the same. Ads for these products have

therefore to create differences and distinctions through the use of signs arranged in struc-

tures. The most obvious way of creating a distinction between products and to make one

stand out from the rest is to give it a distinctive image. Perfume ads, for instance, try to

create an image of the product because of the lack of any ‘hard’ information that can be

given about its properties. And cigarette ads use brand images extensively. For instance, the

series of ads for Marlboro cigarettes trade on the well-established image of cowboys, cattle

round-ups, wild horses, wide-open prairies, etc., drawn from the mythic world of cowboy

films. These images of the old wild west transferred to the world of cigarettes act as signi-

fiers for the signifieds: adventure, masculinity, freedom, etc. The product substitutes for the

scene and is meant to signify these attributes too. Virginia Slim’s cigarettes also appropriate

a referent system, this time women’s history: their exploitation and oppression, and also

their ‘quaint old-fashioned’ ways. This image is juxtaposed with one of today’s women—

free, swinging, carefree, sophisticated—a contemporary system of reference to the liber-

ated woman. Hence the slogan ‘You’ve come a long way baby’.

Ads continually move between systems of meaning like this, transferring from one

meaning we are already aware of to create a new meaning.

Iconic, indexical and symbolic signs

It is worth digressing here to explain in a bit more detail the nature and form of signs, since

they are the bedrock of communication. It is easy to be misled by advertisements, which

consist mainly of photographic representations.

Advertising as Communication

Semiotics and ideology 99

Photographic images look like the thing, place or person being represented. This makes

them iconic signs, and the signifier-signified relationship one of resemblance or likeness. A

portrait of a person is an obvious example of an iconic sign, because the picture resembles

that person. Some signs go beyond the mere depiction of a person or thing and are used

indexically to indicate a further or additional meaning to the one immediately and obvi-

ously signified. For example, the idea of Paris or Parisian holidays can be indicated by a

picture of the Eiffel Tower, a landmark in the city which is frequently associated with it.

The costume a person is wearing may denote iconically the mode of dress worn by a person

or character in an ad, but at the same time stand indexically for a social position or pro-

fession. A character’s movements may simultaneously represent some (dramatic) piece of

action and indicate his or her frame of mind, habits or livelihood. For example a man who

walks with a rolling gait is probably a sailor and one who has a swagger might be a cowboy.

A woman in ads is often represented indexically by bits of her body—hips, eyes, head,

hands or legs—which signify not only in themselves but also her whole being. They can

also signify a commodity—lipstick, eye make-up, shampoo, nail polish, tights, etc.—thus

suggesting that women are commodities also.

If an advertiser wants to convey the idea of heat he or she could show a picture of a

thermometer rising, beads of sweat on a person’s brow, hot, shimmering colours, etc. As

with all indexical signs, there is a sequential or causal connection between signifier and

signified—the mercury in a thermometer rising, sweat, or shimmer, and the idea, concept

or feeling of heat.

The relationship between signifier and signified in some signs is arbitary based neither

on resemblance nor on any existential link. In other words, the signifier does not resemble

or cause the signified, but is related to it only by convention or ‘contract’. This kind of

sign is called a symbol. A rose is a symbol of love or passion not because a rose looks

like love or passion or even because the flower causes it. It is just that members of some

cultures have over the years used the rose in certain circumstances to mean love; just as

in the ad campaign for gold we are invited to connect gold with love; and in cigarette ads,

cool, refreshing things like mountain streams or fresh-looking and tasting foods, are made

to symbolize (very unhealthy) cigarettes. In some ads, people like judges, policemen or

nurses are used to mobilize feelings associated with the job or profession. In many cases

the symbols used to convey meanings or ideas are not entirely arbitrary: the symbol for

justice, a pair of scales, for instance, could not be replaced by any other symbol. In other

words there are the rudiments of a ‘natural’ bond between signifier and signified in many

symbols. An example of a pure symbol, with no such bond, would be that of the white horse

used by White Horse Whisky, where the horse standing in a bar or on top of a mountain or

at a building site stands for the bottle of whisky itself, although there is no ‘logical’ con-

nection between the bottle and the sign horse. The sign and its referent co-exist in the brand

name. The function of presenting a horse in these ads is to make more real the meaning the

brand name gives the drink and is backed up by the slogan ‘You can take a White Horse

anywhere’. Brand images generally act as symbols for their products, but it is perhaps

important to note that in most ad campaigns iconic, indexical and symbolic signs invariably

overlap and are co-present.

Advertisements may look ‘real’ and ‘natural’ and the connections they make between

dissimilar things may have the appearance of a system that is ‘logical’, and belongs to a

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‘real’ or ‘natural’ order, but such connections are not inevitable. Even in the incongruous

and illogical case of placing a white horse in a bar or living room or an enormous bottle of

whisky on top of a mountain, the ‘system’ of the ad makes more ‘real’ the natural significa-

tion that the brand name gives to the drink, which is never out of place in a bar, as a horse

never is on a mountain side, and vice versa. The whisky becomes a natural object through

the white horse. In the end we come to accept the ‘logic’ of the system without question.

The signs of other meaning systems, which have certain images, feelings or ideas attached

to them, are transferred to the products rather than springing from them and are given the

status of ‘facts’. We are of course meant to see the meaning of the product as already there

in its image on the screen as it unfolds. We rarely notice the inherent dissimilarity of objects

and products placed together. As Judith Williamson has pointed out, ‘a product and image/

emotion become linked in our minds, while the process of this linking is unconscious’

(1978, p. 30).

This linking of thoughts, emotions or feelings with something ‘objective’ and external

is not a new phenomenon; it forms the basis of much art and many myths and rituals.

However, advertising has a particular function in evoking emotions and feelings through

promises of pleasure connected to the purchase or possession of a product. A product can

even go from being the signified of a correlating thing, person or lifestyle which acts as

a signifier, to generating or being that feeling, e.g. ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’,

‘Bacardi and friends’. The act of consuming the product sign releases or creates the feel-

ings it represents. As Williamson reminds us, when the product precedes the feeling we

can end up not only speaking but feeling in clichés: ‘The connection of a “thing” and an

abstraction can lead them to seem the same, in real life’ (p. 37).

Syntagmatic and paradigmatic sign relations

Before discussing the coding of photographic signs in more detail, I need to introduce

another pair of semiotic concepts. De Saussure proposed a distinction between the syn-

tagmatic relation between elements in a language, and paradigmatic relations. Syntag-

matic relations are the permissible ways in which elements succeed each other or combine

together in a chain of discourse. These elements have nothing in common and are brought

together by virtue of ‘combinatory (syntactic) rules’. A syntagm is defined by its opposi-

tion to that which follows or precedes it.

In advertising the syntagm is the advertisement or series of advertisements as they appear

on the screen or page—a ‘chain’ of visual, verbal and aural signs. In order to discover the

paradigm and eventually the rules of an ad’s signification we have to break up the syntag-

matic chain and isolate (for the purposes of analysis) a distinctive unit, in order to find the

roots of its meaning. A unit or sign thus identified, for example a stallion in a Marlboro

ad, can then be (theoretically) classified according to its paradigmatic (vertical) relations,

which in this case consist of all other functionally similar objects: ponies, donkeys, mules,

dray horses, foals, mares, etc. Obviously the stallion was chosen to appear in the Marlboro

ads because of its particular associations. It recalls a system of meaning beyond the imme-

diacy of the syntagmatic (horizontal) text. Paradigmatic structures facilitate the associative

and connotative use of terms: they assume a code or coding. A stallion is understood by

virtue of its relation and opposition to mules, asses, cows, etc. but it is connotative due to a

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Semiotics and ideology 101

‘deeper’ paradigmatic relation. Connotation relies on the reader’s cultural knowledge of a

system which can relate ‘stallion’ to feelings of freedom, wide open prairies, masculinity,

virility, wildness, individuality, etc.

Paradigmatic relations are those which belong to the same associative set by virtue of

the function they share. So a sign is in a paradigmatic relation with all the signs which can

also occur in the same context but not at the same time. An example from Barthes’s Systeme

de la Mode (1967b) might help to clarify these concepts: In the garment/fashion semiotic

system, the paradigmatic order is ‘A set of pieces; parts or details which cannot be worn at

the same time on the same part of the body, and whose variation corresponds to a change

in meaning of the clothing: toque-bonnet-hood, etc.’ (p. 63). The syntagm consists of the

‘juxtaposition in the same type of dress of different elements: skirt-blouse-jacket’ (ibid.).

A linguist, Roman Jakobson, extended the idea of paradigm and syntagm to the notions

of metaphor and metonymy: metaphors belong to a paradigmatic order and metonymy to

a syntagmatic order. Metaphor is a matter of the selection of elements from an associative

plane; metonymy is concerned with combination at a horizontal level (see Jakobson, 1971,

p. 67).1

Denotation and connotation

The concepts denotation and connotation are two of the most important in semiotic analy-

sis (although they are not exclusive to semiotics). Roughly speaking, denotation and con-

notation refer to first and second levels of meaning in a sign. The term denotation refers

to the literal meaning of a sign; to what is ‘objectively’ present and easily recognized or

identified. Connotation is a term used to refer to meanings which lie beyond denotation but

are dependent on it. Connotative readings of signs are introduced by an audience/viewer/

reader beyond the literal meaning of a sign and are activated by the means of conventions or

codes. Roland Barthes elaborates these concepts in Elements of Semiology, where he says

‘the first system (denotation) becomes the plane of expression or signifier of the second

system (connotation)…the signifiers of connotation… are made up of signs (signifiers and

signifieds united) of the denoted system’ (1967a, p. 91). We the spectators can only join

up or make sense of these two systems by our knowledge of cultural codes and associa-

tive meanings without which the second system, connotation, is not possible. A rose, for

example, means on the denotative level, a flower. This signified can become the signifier

(vehicle) of another signified at another level. Depending on the context, the rose can con-

note love or passion. In the context of a historical film like Richard III, the images of a red

or white rose would connote the houses of Lancaster or York. In the context of an ad for

beauty preparations or perfume, a well-known film star signified by a photo can in turn

become the signifier of the connoted meaning glamour, beauty, sophistication, fame, etc.

Readers or spectators have actively to introduce cultural codes in order to interpret a

sign by uniting signifier and signified. In an important essay on semiotics and publicity

images, Barthes draws attention to the levels of meaning in ads. He calls the denotative,

first level of meaning of an advertising image, a non-coded iconic message and the second

level, a coded iconic, or symbolic, message. The latter is based on pre-existing bodies

of knowledge of a practical, cultural, national, historic or aesthetic nature. According to

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Barthes, interpretation at the iconic, denoted level is relatively unproblematic and even

suggests that the photographic image is a ‘message without a code’.

In the essay ‘Rhetoric of the image’ (1977) Barthes lists the component (discontinuous)

signs of an ad for Panzani pasta products. These are some packets of pasta, a tin of spaghetti

sauce, a sachet of parmesan cheese, some tomatoes, onions, peppers, and a mushroom all

in or emerging from a string shopping bag placed on a surface (table). The colours are

predominantly greens and yellows on a red background. Barthes analyses the ad at the con-

notative level in terms of a narrative or story.

the idea that we have in the scene represented is a return from market. A signi-

fied which itself implies two euphoric values: that of the freshness of the products

and that of the essentially domestic preparation for which they are destined. (1977,

p. 34)

Further signs are present; the vegetables and the colours of the picture signify Italy or

Italianness just as the connoted sign of the linguistic message, Panzani (the product’s brand

name and the ad’s caption) itself signifies Italianness. The collection of different objects

falling out of the bag also communicates the idea of a ‘total culinary service’, and the com-

position of foods (and container) in the image evokes the memory of innumerable still-life

paintings.2

Barthes’s analysis of the Panzani ad demonstrates how the ad’s meaning is constructed

not just by the discrete signs but by the ordering of events or the ‘world’ it implies. It is

a ‘frozen moment’, but with a before and after created by the advertisers. In a critique of

photographs, Manuel Alvarado argues that photos, including those for ads, have possibly

more than one level of narrativity—the order of events implied by the photograph and an

implicit or second level of narrativity:

The second would question the actual history of the production, circulation and con-

sumption of the photograph within particular institutions and under the regulation of

technological, economic, legal and discursive relations and practices. (1980, p. 8)

Alvarado suggests that the second level is invariably repressed in favour of the first, but that

this line of analysis suggests some further questions: namely that it challenges the authority

(verisimilitude) of the photograph and suggests that ‘How it could have been is politically

a more interesting question’ (ibid.).

The world of the advertising photograph or what Barthes calls ‘the common domain of

the signifieds of connotation’ is ideological, and ‘cannot but be single for a given society

and history no matter what signifiers of connotation it may use’ (1967a, p. 49). Ads as a

means of representation and meaning construct ideology within themselves through the

intervention of external codes which are located in society. The ad will use images, notions,

concepts, myths, etc. already available in the culture. An ad does not simply reflect ideol-

ogy; it reworks it, thus producing new meanings. It uses objects which are signifieds of ide-

ological systems and thought that already exist and then makes them signifiers of another

structure (the ad). Its connotational process depends on our knowledge of the forms of

ideology that advertisements employ.

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Semiotics and ideology 103

In advertising there is almost no denotative communication. Although it is useful to

distinguish between denotation and connotation for analytical purposes, denotation is not

neutral or untouched by ideology. It may seem to be more fixed and taken for granted but

it is still dependent upon a context of meaning and association. The supposed absence of a

code at the iconic, denotative level merely reinforces the myth of photographic naturalness.

According to Barthes, ‘it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation, which is extremely

dense in advertising’ (1977, p. 45). And in S/Z (1975) he expands on his earlier ‘innocent’

definition of connotation:

denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so. Under this illusion, it is

ultimately no more than the last of the connotations…the superior myth by which the

text pretends to return the nature of language to language as nature. (1975, p. 9)

This is why the ideology of advertisements is so powerful; it is naturalized by the image,

the neutral realm of the signifier.

We should not forget that ideology also works through the linguistic message—Bar-

thes’s third level of meaning in an ad. This level ‘fixes the floating chain of signifieds in

such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs’ (1964, p. 37). All images are made

up a number of ‘floating’ signs and subject to a variety of interpretations. The function of

the linguistic message—caption, headline, copy, etc.—is to ‘anchor’ the variety of pos-

sible meanings, inviting some interpretations rather than others and resolving ambiguity or

contradictions in the image. As I mentioned the linguistic message of the Panzani ad aids

identification and also connotes, backs up or secures the meaning intended—‘Italianness’.

The linguistic message can also function as ‘relay’. This is rare in fixed images, but

important in moving images such as TV commercials, where dialogue, for instance, eluci-

dates the image and advances the action or narrative, spelling out what cannot be found in

the images. Sometimes it is the linguistic message and not the image which predominates,

and the image is used to ‘anchor’ an eye-catching but unspecific or puzzling caption.

Photographic and filmic images have their own connotative abilities in addition to those

drawn from the wider ‘maps of meaning’ in a culture. For instance, a scene can be shot

from different angles, the camera can be moving or static and the film stock can be colour

or black and white. The stills in plate 14 illustrate some of these connotations.

(a) The mother and young daughter in the ‘Comfort’ commercial are shot in soft, fuzzy

focus and the lighting gives a golden, warm hue to the scene. The characters are lit

from behind to emphasize softness and the scene exudes caring, warmth, mother love,

etc.

(b) The ‘Ladyshave’ commercial is similarly shot in soft focus but the hues are bland and

white, suggesting a sophisticated coolness without detracting from the implied femi-

ninity of the scene. (Notice the model’s narcissistic interest in her own body, with the

implication of a male’s attention and gaze.)

(c) The ‘Krona’ commercial is crisply focused to give the impression of ‘objective’ reality.

The main character poses in the stance of a news reporter and the distance between

him and the camera lens/screen also indicates objectivity and factual reporting unlike

the close-ups in the previous two examples.

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We derive meanings from kinds of shots and other filmic techniques because we have

learned the codes and conventions of TV and film practice. We unconsciously compare

high-angle with low-angle shots and know how to distinguish between the two and what

they both indicate. The fact that a certain shot conveys a meaning depends not only on

our ability to relate it to other potential shots in a paradigm of shots but also to actual

shots that precede or follow it in the syntagmatic discourse. Thus an isolated shot might

mean something different from the same shot in the context of a sequence or chain of

shots/events.

Codes

The concept of code is central to semiotic analysis. The formation and understanding of

messages (encoding and decoding) is made possible by codes—a set of rules or an inter-

pretative device known to both transmitter and receiver, which assigns a certain meaning or

content to a certain sign. We recognize the signifier, long blonde hair for example, as a sign

of femininity when we interpret it through the code of femininity as the signifier of a cer-

tain signified, woman. Within that code there is a sub-code which assigns this long-blonde-

haired woman a particular meaning—a particular kind of ‘healthy sexuality’. Codes are

forms of social knowledge which are derived from social practices and beliefs although

they are not laid down in any statute. Codes organize our understanding of the world in

terms of ‘dominant meaning patterns’, patterns which vary from culture to culture and

from time to time but which we largely take for granted and which are uppermost in our

minds when we interpret things or think about them.

There are a number of codes at work in both press and TV commercials. Before the ad

reaches the page or screen it undergoes a complex coding process involving a large number

of people, including at the outset an account executive/team, a copywriter, an art director

and possibly a graphic artist or photographer. These people make decisions about the fin-

ished advertisement and have a determining influence on what it will look like. At a further

stage in the encoding process, decisions have to be made about what kind of transmit-

ter will be used (photographic stills, drawings, film, actors, voice-over, etc.). The lighting

technician, set designer, costume designer, composer, camera operator and actors in their

capacities as performers and creators are also involved in the ‘coding’ of the ad and they

draw on their own general knowledge, social, professional and technical skills and apti-

tudes. Actors in ads are themselves multiple coders: their bodies, voices and metonymic

accessories like costumes and props act as transmitters of signs.

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Semiotics and ideology 105

Plate 14 TV commercials: (a) Comfort (b) Ladyshave (c) Krona

106 Advertising as Communication

Semiotics and ideology 107

108

In effect, ads consist of many messages; several channels are used simultaneously

although in synthesis. The viewer interprets this complex of messages—images, speech,

gesture, costume, setting—as an integrated text according to the media/cultural codes at

his or her disposal. In addition to the multi-levelled nature of an advertisement, there is the

question of the mediation of the ad as a whole. We are, as Goffmann points out, willing and

ready ‘to switch at any moment from dealing with the real world to participating in make-

believe ones’ (1979, p. 23). Commercial realism like other forms of fiction requires that

we frame it off from the rest of life; indeed it has advantages over real life, probably being

richer and fuller and less ambiguous than glimpses of real life. We are normally perfectly

aware that ads are ads however much we might believe in them, and this is due to our ability

to bracket off and to accept the ‘factitious’ in advertising texts.

An advertisement could be said to be ‘semiotically thick’: it comprises a heterogeneity

of signals and is characterized by its spatial as well as temporal dimensions. Each image or

frame operates spatially, whilst linguistic messages and the unfolding of the text/message

is temporal. Movement, however, is both spatial and temporal.

We can begin to understand how an advertisement works if we look at the complex of

codes which permit a range of messages to be brought together in a text. Not every ad

will contain every possible code available to it. Most ads contain a broad type or class

of code—a linguistic code and an ‘iconic’ code. These enable us at a minimum level to

understand them as pieces of communication. Further, there is an advertisement or framing

code, which probably comes into operation and allows us to apprehend it in its own terms.

Similarly, we bring to an ad our knowledge of generic and stylistic rules relating to ads and

the more general cultural, behavioural, ideological and ethical principles which we apply

in our everyday social activities.3

Notes

1. See also chapter 8 for a discussion of advertising’s use of metaphor and metonymy.

2. See also Berger (1972), chapter 7, for a discussion of the way publicity appropriates art

to lend allure or authority to its own message.

3. See Appendix IV for a taxonomy of advertising codes.

Suggestions for further work

1. What are the main advantages of analysing advertisements as sign systems like lan-

guage? What would the equivalents of words and sentences be in advertisements? (See

Barthes, 1968, and Williamson, 1978.)

2. Analyse the ad for Philips Ladyshave (14b) in terms of its codes and conventions. What

is the relationship between the way this ad is organized (coded) and social experience?

How important is our experience of other texts and discourses to the understanding of

this ad?

3. Why is there little iconicity in ads? Collect some ads in which a photo image of an

everyday object is meant to signify more than itself. Have these images become

indexical signs or symbols of another, additional raeaning? Collect some examples

of brand images (e.g. Marlboro cigarettes). What are their meanings? How are these

conveyed?

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Semiotics and ideology 109

4. What use are the concepts syntagm (or metonymic pole) and paradigm (metaphoric

pole) to the analysis of ads? (See Barthes, 1968, Jakobson, 1971 and Fiske, 1982).

Discuss the Colman’s mustard ad (plate 15) in terms of its paradigmatic dimension.

Break down the syntagmatic chain into its relevant constituent units (i.e. woman, fur

rug, fire, etc.) and then group them into paradigmatic classes (colours/tones, lighting,

body language, decor, etc.). How do these paradigmatic structures facilitate the con-

notative meanings of an ad?

5. What codes and sub-codes are at work in the famous series of ads for Benson and

Hedges cigarettes or Guinness? Cut them out of magazines, and paste them on a sheet

of cardboard in order to help you in your analysis.

6. What binary oppositions like nature/culture can you observe at work in television

commercials? Are there other fundamental kinds of binary oppositions which underly

many commercials?

Plate 15 Paradigmatic dimension

7

THE LANGUAGE OF ADVERTISING

I have discussed the changes that have taken place in the appearance of ads over the past

thirty years and the contemporary emphasis on the visual aspects and image-making of

promotion and publicity. It would be wrong to suggest, however, that advertising language

is unimportant. In fact the language of ads is sometimes more important than the visual

aspect.

Advertising language is of course loaded language. Its primary aim is to attract our

attention and dispose us favourably towards the product or service on offer. Advertisers

use language quite distinctively: there are certainly advantages in making bizarre and con-

troversial statements in unusual ways as well as communicating with people using simple,

straightforward language. Copy-writers are well known for playing with words and manip-

ulating or distorting their everyday meanings; they break the rules of language for effect,

use words out of context and even make up new ones. Plain and direct language and modes

of address can, however, still be used to attract attention and add emphasis to a picture. The

use of the imperative mode is of course very common in advertising: ‘Buy this’, ‘Try some

today’, ‘Don’t forget…’, ‘Treat yourself’, as are plays on words or puns: ‘Short, Black and

Sides’, ‘Black hander’, ‘Black on the map’, etc., have appeared in a recent campaign for

John Player cigarettes. Of course some ads are completely devoid of language or speech,

relying on the visual image of the product to speak for itself.

Catching our attention and imagination and aiding memory are perhaps the primary func-

tions of advertising language: unusual or stylish words and short, crisp sentences are easy

to repeat and remember. And our memories are also served by brand names, slogans and

catch-phrases, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, snatches of song or verse and of course end-

less repetition. In addition to conveying meanings and feelings through the judicious and

experimental use of vocabulary and syntax, language can function not just as a sign system

but also as a sign itself. For instance, some ads rely more on the style of language than its

actual content. In ads for, say, a foreign product like French cheese, wine or cigarettes, the

speech or writing might be in the French language. We are not really expected to understand

the literal meaning of the words used nor to decipher the details of the sales message but

merely to recognize that it is French—a sign in itself that signifies ‘Frenchness’. Similarly,

colloquial language can be used to indicate everyday life, and childish language to connote

childishness. Different typographical and calligraphic techniques can also be used as signi-

fiers so that language can signify the product directly by uniting language and product. I will

examine some of these aspects of advertising language in the following pages.

Words have feelings

When we choose a word we do more than name an object, person or situation, we also

convey feelings about what we are describing. What you feel or your attitude towards what

112

you describe is an important part of meaning. Words can affect the beliefs and attitudes of

other people. If you call a person one of the following:

obese

fat

chubby

well-built

you are obviously giving your opinion, and it might be the case that the person would prefer

to be called the last of these four adjectives. The advertising copy-writer is well aware that

words can work like this, and indeed the fact that they can adds a richness to our com-

munication. The copy-writer will use words to project the product he or she is bringing to

people’s attention in the most attractive way.

Words not only describe things, then, they communicate feelings, associations and atti-

tudes—they bring ideas to our minds. For instance, the names of these lipsticks bring cer-

tain ideas to mind: sleek peach, hanky pinky, quiet flame, warm coral. When products like

carpets, paints or make-up come in a number of shades, colours or patterns, the advertisers

choose attractive names for them which are designed to do more than just separate and

distinguish one from another.

Brand names

Brand names communicate denotatively and connotatively. When it comes to naming the

product in the first place, there is considerable scope to invest it with particular meanings

and associations. The manufacturer has to give a product a distinctive name in a mass

market. The name should do more than just label or identify the product; it should also

bring flattering associations to mind, associations which will help sell it. The names given

to cosmetics and other beauty products frequently recall images of beauty, cleanliness,

sophistication and naturalness: Moondrops, Natural Wonder, Rainflower, Sunsilk, Skin

Dew. Sometimes the names of products convey scientific authority: Eterna 27, Clinique,

Endocil, Equalia. Men’s toiletries (not ‘beauty products’, you notice) also have evocative

names: Brut, Cossak, Denim, Aramis, Devin. And it doesn’t take much imagination to work

out why cigarette brands are called by such names as Piccadilly, Embassy Sovereign, Con-

sulate, State Express, Lambert and Butler, nor why there are cars called Jaguar, Mustang,

Triumph, Princess.

A popular identifying technique is the deliberate misspelling of words in brandnaming

to give a product uniqueness while at the same time allowing it to retain some recognizable

elements. In the names Rice Krispies, Ryvita and Brylcreem, the elements ‘Krisp’, ‘Ry’

and ‘creem’ are still meaningful although they are not spelled correctly.

The tone of voice

It is not only words that attract attention to an advertiser’s product. Usually we are more

inclined to listen to a speaker if the voice sounds pleasant or friendly. Television and radio

have a considerable advantage here because the advertiser can use actual voices to create

the right impression. Some advertisements try to stimulate interest in their products by

using a bright and breezy or efficient sounding voice, others use a warm and cosy voice or

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The language of advertising 113

a seductive and intimate one. Some voices are insistant, pushing and aggressive. Even press

and magazine ads attempt to suggest a tone of voice by the style of language used:

Earl Grey [Tea]

Reminiscent of the warm natural

scents of a far-away summer evening

with a tantalizing taste and delicately

scented in a secret way described

by a Chinese mandarin many years ago.

Much to the satisfaction of its many

admirers Twinings share the secret.

At its most refreshing served

straight with only a sliver of lemon.

To keep your grip, you need more than the

latest in tyre technology—we’re talking

about the Cavalier’s suspension.

It is designed to complement the most

recent thinking in the tyre world.

And it produces a ride that Starsky

and Hutch wouldn’t be proud of.

No slipping and sliding.

No rocking and rolling.

No shaking all over.

Independent, computer-tuned

suspension with coil springs at the front,

live axle with coil springs at the rear,

plus anti-roll bars at both ends—those

are the reasons.

Not that you need anything as

unexciting as a reason to drive a Cavalier.

In the first example a sensuous, quite high-class tone of voice is suggested by the use

of such words as ‘tantalizing’ and ‘delicately’, and it also sounds as though the message

is coming from a knowledgeable person. In the second example (from a car ad) the tone

is more conversational, jocular and breezy. A tone of brisk efficiency is suggested by this

copy:

Its sleek, sporty styling shows a careful attention to aerodynamics: Low-slanting

hood. Sharp high-tipped rear end. Air-clam front spoiler. And a wedge shape that

slices air cleanly—all of which adds up to better fuel economy.

Notice the short clipped sentences, sometimes with no verb, and also the ‘shape’ words like

slanting, high, wedge. In the following example of copy from an American magazine, the

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imagery and tone are intensely patriotic: it almost reads more like a national anthem than

an advertisement:

America the Beautiful.

From the prairies. To the cities. To the oceans

bright with foam, America shows its true colors.

Colors with a strong constitution. Proud colors.

Young colors.

Colors destined for greatness. Sand soft, plum deep

and mauvy.

Some of these new colors are: North-West Rose,

Prairie Mauve, City Lights, Gold Coast Red.

For your eyes, your lips, your cheeks, your nails.

Ultima II.

The ‘tone of voice’ of an advertisement as well as the words used and the rhythm of the

copy will sometimes try to recreate the experience of having and enjoying the product:

‘M’is for moments you’ll never forget

For days marvellous with flowers and laughter

For nights magical with moons and old promises

‘M’Fragrance by Henry C.Miner.

It’s Magic.

Here the mood is pitched towards fantasy and dreaming. In the following copy for a type of

fire, the language is cosy, intimate and domestic (and, incidentally, sexist):

Having a quiet night at home for once—and very nice too. You’ll browse through

magazines, he’ll try to read his paper, and you’ll both enjoy the sheer comfort of

your new fire.

The language for fashions is often tactile and caressing and uses adjectives of touch, shape

and physical comfort. The intention is to invest the product with meaning by tone, rhythm

and association.

The role of advertising language

Advertising language is generally informal and colloquial. Sentences are usually simply

constructed and short. Imperative clauses are frequent. The prospective customer is con-

tinually exhorted: ‘Buy X’, ‘Discover Y’, ‘Find out about…’, Try it today’, ‘You’ll feel

better for it’, ‘Don’t ask a man to drink and drive’, ‘Don’t be vague. Ask for Haig’. As an

example of direct and colloquial speech consider this copy:

Let’s face it, isn’t it worth considering? Of course it is and there’s no time like the

present—so get that pen right away and fill in the coupon in this week’s TV Times. Or

call in at your nearest branch and talk things over with the branch manager.

Advertising as Communication

The language of advertising 115

This mode of address would be unthinkable and even rude in private English. (Some people

would argue that it is also ‘rude’ in advertising language and that the advertiser is not only

invading a person’s privacy but also assuming that he or she is of pretty mediocre intel-

ligence.) Nevertheless it does illustrate some typical features of advertising language. The

tone is jocular, even disingenuous, the grammar is abbreviated and disjointed.

In TV commercials there is an even greater tendency towards the abbreviated or dis-

junctive mode of discourse. Time is short (some commercials are only seven or fifteen

seconds long), and the spoken word often plays a relatively minor role because of the

combined power and impact of visual and auditory material. There are even commercials

with no speech at all or just an end-line of slogan: ‘X, the name you can trust’ or ‘Big on

convenience. Smaller in size. New all around.’ The following ad for an insurance company

illustrates the disjunctive mode:

If you’re a married man.

What if you died young?

It could happen.

And then who’d pay the bills?

Would your wife have to go back to work?

Who’d collect the kids from school?

Of course not all advertising consists of direct exhortation or direct address where the

advertiser seems to be communicating directly with the audience. Often an advertisement

will have a presenter who does a monologue on behalf of the advertiser or there might be a

dialogue, where two secondary participants (actors) talk to each other. The most common

type of advertising dialogue is the domestic playlet, where the dramatis personae are ordi-

nary men, women and children—mothers, fathers, neighbours and shopkeepers—and the

‘plot’ is an unremarkable happening in everyday life, the theme being the excellent quali-

ties of the product. This situation gives the viewer the position of eavesdropper; it has often

been argued that people enjoy watching other people, preferably ordinary people, going

about their day-to-day business.

Another common form of advertising is the dialogue interview with an ‘ordinary’ cus-

tomer:

Q Mrs Facet, do you ever get a headache?

A Yes, I do.

Q And do you take a pain reliever?

A Yes, I do.

Q Is it possibly this, the number 3 best seller?

A No.

Q Or this, the number 2?

A No, not that one.

Q Or this, the number 1 best seller?

A Ah yes, Anadin, that’s the one I take.

Q Can you tell me why?

A Nothing works better than Anadin for me.

Try Anadin for headaches. For tense nervous headaches. Anadin is the number 1 best

seller.

116

Interviews which act as testimonials for products can be very effective, particularly

when the interviewer is an experienced broadcaster or celebrity and is able to elicit what

look like spontaneous remarks from the ‘man-in-the-street’. But some interviews can

involve fictional participants or even be jokes or parodies of ‘real’ interview styles. Another

familiar type of commercial is the monologue testimonial by a celebrity, showing him or

her in suitably expensive or luxurious surroundings. A caption might identify the celebrity,

for example ‘David Niven at home’.

Sometimes advertisers use the interior monologue technique which conveys the inner

thoughts of the person seen in the ad using the product. The viewer is invited to identify

herself or himself with a secondary participant and see the product through her or his

eyes. This technique is more suggestive than overtly persuasive. The speech style is usually

impressionistic and like a stream of half-formed thoughts rather than a connected line of

argument. It may be used in advertising which uses appeals associated with dreaming and

fantasy, where rational judgement is suspended in favour of indulgent instincts.

Advertising also borrows the styles and idioms of other types of discourse, such as

scientific or legal language. In other words, an ad might use particular linguistic features

which are more appropriate in a different context. In private conversation we might borrow

someone else’s language for sarcastic reasons. In literature, language is borrowed for artis-

tic purposes; in comedy, language-borrowing is a form of parody. There are many adver-

tisements which use features strictly appropriate to another role. Both TV commercials and

magazine display ads sometimes use the format of an official form, a medical record card

or a medical interview. Here is part of a fullpage ad from a teenage magazine:

Period Problem No. 5

Name: Angie

Age: 15

Problem: Angie believes her Mum knows best, but her info’s not up to date.

At the bottom of the page, after a series of photographs, the same copy is repeated but this

time printed on a piece of paper, which looks as though it has been torn from a note book.

Next to the copy is a passport-style photograph of a smiling young girl and ‘stamped’ over

the top of copy and photo is the word ‘solved’ in official-looking lettering. The rhetorical

effect of this type of advertisement lies in its seeming objectivity and terseness and also

in the way that it mingles formality with emotive images. The language of science would,

of course, not be appropriate in advertising because few people would understand it. But

copy-writers like to use scientificsounding terms because they impress the audience. The

word science itself and related terms are no less popular and are probably less baffling:

‘laboratory tests show…’, ‘scientifically clean’, ‘science tells us…’.

Role-borrowing often disguises the sales message and persuades the public into think-

ing that the message is a disinterested and not a ‘loaded’ piece of writing. Some commer-

cials, for instance, have all the trappings of a TV documentary using neutral-sounding but

earnest voice-over commentary, and ‘objective’ film techniques which one might expect to

find in ‘factual’ news or current-affairs programmes. In magazines it is not difficult to make

an ad look like a feature article, because some publications have tended to adopt the visual

and linguistic techniques of ads for all kinds of material. Another kind of disguised sales

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The language of advertising 117

message can be found in those ads which present a piece of general knowledge. ‘In 1849

Charles Dickens wrote David Copperield, and it remains a classic…’ leads to a selling

proposition which is linked only tenuously to the body copy: ‘Today the art of fine writing

lives on in…pens’. In the advertisement for Birds Eye orange juice (plate 16), the language

and style appropriate to the wine waiter in an expensive restaurant has been ‘borrowed’ or

parodied for comic effect. This also allows the highly-valued qualities of wine to be trans-

posed to orange juice.

Language and the law

Before discussing some more examples of advertising language and rhetoric I should

briefly raise the question of legality. The associations that words have can mislead people

into thinking that they are buying something other than what the product actually is or

contains. For instance, orange squash is sometimes called orange crush which might make

people think that the drink had more real oranges in it. The Trade Descriptions Act (1968)

makes it an offence to offer goods or services under descriptions that are not accurate.

Descriptions can relate to a product’s size or quality, to its method of manufacture (e.g.

‘home-made’ or ‘farm-product’), to what it is made of, to what it will do, to its country of

origin, etc. If a label on a tin says ‘stewed steak and onions’, ‘produce of countries of the

EEC’, we can reasonably check on the former—the latter we have to take on faith. The

Consumer Association has analysed the meat contents of various tinned products under

terms laid down by the Canned Meat Products Regulations, and has issued a rough guide

to tinned meats which includes the following points:

The more words in the name, the lower the meat content is likely

to be.

Chopped usually means a higher meat content than sliced or

pressed.

The sooner vegetables appear in the name, the less meat there

will be.

Gravy usually means more sauce than meat.

As a result of complaints, advertisers are now not allowed to make the kind of exces-

sive claims that were made, for example, in the Smirnoff vodka ad: ‘I was Mr Holmes of

Household Linen until I discovered Smirnoff’. It was thought that such an overt connection

between alcohol and sexual/social success should not be made in an advertisement.

Nowadays you are less likely to see or hear such questionable descriptions as ‘miracu-

lous’ or ‘magic’ for products, because of the legal sanctions.

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Plate 16 Parody

Key words

If you listen to any commercial or glance at advertisements in magazines, you will be sub-

jected to a liberal sprinkling of adverbs and adjectives. These are the key parts of speech

for advertisers. They are the trigger words because they can stimulate envy, dreams and

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The language of advertising 119

desires by evoking looks, touch, taste, smell and sounds without actually misrepresenting

a product. Words like ‘big’, ‘small’ and ‘long’ are relatively easy to imagine in connection

with a product, but ‘elegant’, ‘superb’, ‘enchanting’, ‘discreet’, ‘sheer’, ‘intriguing’, ‘cap-

tivating’, are vague, cannot easily be checked upon and are often a matter of opinion rather

than of fact. A rush of adjectives often substitutes for clear and reasonable description in

advertising:

More than a peppery-potent fragrance—Aramis is a complete action-oriented master

plan of more than forty grooming essentials—from shampoos to shaving needs, bath

soap to muscle soaks. Aramis is the only collection of men’s grooming specifics that

really works with authority, speaks with eloquence and communicates success.

The most common adjectives used in advertising are good/better/best, free, fresh, deli-

cious, full, sure, clean, wonderful, special, fine, big, great, real, easy, bright, extra, rich and

golden. But ‘new’ is probably the favourite. It is used in connection with almost every type

of product or service, from insurance to fish fingers, and applies to any number of their

features: size, shape, colour, formula and so on.

You might also have noticed unfamiliar adverbs and adjectives in advertising copy.

These have usually been coined for the occasion and do not have any value in standard

English. For instance, advertisements often contain words like: ‘tomatoful, ‘teenfresh’,

gemostest drink in the world’, ‘Ricicles are twicicles as nicicles’. Phrases are sometimes

made by joining adjective with noun or adjective with adjective as in the following example

from an American magazine:

Inside this jar you’ll find a radiantly-glowing skin, naturally-blushed cheeks,

wondrous eyes and color-kissed lips. Suddenly your skin has a radiant sun-kissed

glow.

Here are some further examples of these adjectival compounds: ‘Stay-on, stay-put colour’,

‘elegant drop-waist swirls’, ‘quick drying’, ‘new-face hygiene’, ‘figure-flattering’, ‘the so-

many-ways cheese’, ‘the go-any where blouse’, ‘youngshape’, ‘the freezer-pleazers’. These

words seem to suggest that the product has a special feature, which it alone possesses. They

are created to give uniqueness, vigour and impact to the advertising message. A special

kind of made-up word can be seen in copy where the product’s name is incorporated with

other words: ‘Goudanight’ (cheese), ‘Schweppervescence’, ‘Pontinental’ (holidays), ‘Lux-

soft’, ‘Knorr-fresh’, ‘Afiordable’ (holidays in Norway) and ‘Give your feet a Scholliday’.

Another favourite device of copy-writers is to spell words wrongly in order to attract

attention. Perhaps the most famous of these misspellings is the ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’ slogan

and variations on it like ‘Supperz’, ‘Cornish Pastiez’, ‘Vol au Beanz’, ‘Welsh Rarebeanz’.

The slogan ‘Drinka Pinta Milka Day’ also shows a kind of misspelling, where indefinite

article and conjunction fuse with the noun and verb.

Advertisers often use verbs and nouns unusually, in emotive rather than accurate ways.

To a certain extent, of couse, the emotional use of words is also favoured by poets; but if

we were to make a distinction between a poet’s use of language and an advertiser’s, we

‘temptational’, ‘flavoursome’, ‘cookability’, ‘peelability’, ‘out-door biteables’, ‘the oran-

120

could argue that the poet wants to create an impression, pin-point or sum up a feeling in

the interests of an emotional ‘truth’ rather than to paint a falsely glowing picture. Here

are some examples of oddly-used nouns and verbs found in a few American and English

magazines.

Thirty colours. Some so spectacular they send messages. (paint) The first bra

to understand the facts of life.

Creamy soft brilliance to bloom tenderly on your lips. (lipstick) After-shave

cologne with the sharp, crisp tang of action as well as the smooth

undertones of elegant charm.

…a raincoat that keeps its cool when the weather’s not.

We use essence of almond to coax extra body into the hair and control fly-away.

It speaks freedom and friendliness.

Drink a masterpiece.

Pink goes ping in our brave new spring collection. Pink-to-ice lace frolics

up from the hem…

In twenty-four sensational shades that wake up a morning and turn on a

night. (make-up)

The shampoo that holds in health, holds out dirt.

Go footing in our new soft soft tights…at a low, low price.

For skin that’s lit from within. Outer beauty begins with innerglow.

Enter Visible Difference…it performs.

Notice in the last example, and others, a typical tendency to treat intangible entities as

if they were living creatures: ‘pink goes ping’, ‘shades that wake up a morning’. Scent

‘communicates’, saucepans have a delicate ‘touch’ with food, bras ‘understand’, shampoo

doesn’t simply clean, it ‘holds dirt out’. It is as if we had to be persuaded to buy things on

the basis that products are more than things—almost like pets.

Although the above examples of oddly-used words of figurative language are out of

context, we can see that most of them are meaningless. Sometimes meaning is sacrificed

in order to introduce a rhythmic beat to advertising copy. Rhythm is very important to

advertisers; it allows people to remember things more easily, and can convey and induce all

sorts of emotions. A great number of advertisements read or sound like verse even though

they may not rhyme. Clear examples of rhythm can be found in television jingles which are

often crudely cheerful and stirring. Meaninglessness is an important technique in adver-

tising as are loose promises that don’t tie down the advertiser to anything specific. Even

advertisers recognize this tendency in their work; they call meaningless copy ‘resounding

non-statements’: ‘Triumph has a bra for the way you are’.

Figurative language

Advertising language is sometimes quite standard and unobtrusive, but more often it

attracts attention to itself by being highly colourful and imaginative, and it sometimes

involves stretching or breaking the rules or conventions of ‘normal’ language. We looked

at examples of the unorthodox use of language in advertising above when we discussed

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The language of advertising 121

role-borrowing, coined or made-up words and misspellings. In addition, advertising copy

sometimes breaks grammatical rules and uses words incorrectly (semantic mistakes) as

for example in the slogans ‘liquid engineering’ (oil), ‘liquid Tchaikovsky’ (vodka), or in

the sentence ‘our dishwasher is pronounced Mièle’. This unorthodox use of language is

sometimes called figurative language. There are other ways of exploiting language to cre-

ate particular effects and enlarge it as a means of expression. Double meanings and puns

are often used in advertisements and so are rhyme, alliteration and other types of repetition

designed to attract attention and arouse emotions.

Figurative language is rhetorical language in that it tries to create effects by breaking or

exploiting language rules. We use language figuratively every day; communication would

be very dull if we didn’t. Some figurative or rhetorical expressions have passed into daily

use and as a result are less surprising and memorable. We all accept that expressions like

‘musical taste’, ‘I’ll eat my words’, or ‘chewing over an idea’, are not to be taken too

literally; we interpret them in a figurative sense. They are examples of metaphor, where a

word acceptable in one context (e.g. ‘eat’ in the context of food) is transferred to another

context. Eating words is an absurd proposition unless we interpret the phrase in a figurative,

non-literal way. Interpreted figuratively, this metaphor suggests the right kind of associa-

tion: eating—swallowing—taking in—taking back—retracting. In other words we see a

symbolic identity or connection between the literal and figurative meaning of a word. In

the following slogan, the copy-writer has used the word ‘sizzle’ inappropriately: ‘Taste that

sizzle—Hear it say…’. Taste has been joined to sizzle, which is an abstract noun and not

an edible object. ‘Eat a bowl of sunshine’—a slogan for a breakfast cereal—is an example

of a metaphor. In fact Kelloggs, the breakfast cereal makers, have built their whole cam-

paign around the image of cornflakes=sunshine. The cornflakes brand image is a metaphor

by which the product is identified with (desirable) sunshine. Copy-writers like metaphors

because they allow the right kind of emotive associations to be linked to a product. A

picture or image of a product can be built up through the ‘irrational’ use of language. In

the slogan for Malboro Cigarettes, ‘Come to where the flavour is…Marlboro Country’,

cigarettes are associated with a place, and an ideal one at that. You can’t literally visit a

flavour in the same way that you can visit Kansas or Wyoming, and by the same token you

can’t go to Marlboro Country because it is a fiction and doesn’t exist on the map. In the

Consulate cigarette ads we can see another kind of figurative meaning at work, this time a

simile. In ‘Cool as a mountain stream…cool fresh Consulate’, the properties of the stream

are directly compared to the cigarettes and incidentally given as the reason for buying

them. Figurative language like this which, at least initially, catches the eye is very useful

for slogans and headlines.

The examples on p. 150 illustrate figurative meanings. In the first we can see a case of

personiication: colours are invested with the human faculty of communication; likewise

in the second a bra is given human abilities. An example of the rhetorical figure synechdo-

che can be found in the slogan ‘Bring a touch of Paris into your life’. Here a very specific

meaning, Paris, stands for general concepts—fashion, sophistication, good taste. ‘Clarks

bid to get Britain back on its feet’ is another example where Britain stands for the British

people. The slogans ‘Go to work on an egg’ and ‘Wash the big city out of your hair’ fit into

the category of metonymy: ‘egg’ and ‘big city’ could be said to stand for the more general ‘a

good nourishing meal of eggs’ or ‘breakfast’, and ‘the dirt of the big city’. ‘Egg’ substitutes

122

for a whole thing (breakfast) of which eggs form a part, and a part of big cities, their ‘dirt’,

is substituted for the whole ‘big city’.

Copy-writers also explore the ambiguous properties of language. Ambiguity can either

be used for humorous reasons or to provoke interest in the ad. A statement could be said to

be ambiguous if different meanings can be expressed by using the same word or if different

meanings are expressed by words that are alike in spelling and pronunication. A famous

example of the latter, which linguists call homonymy, is the ‘Players Please’ slogan. It can

be read as either ‘Please give me some Players’ or ‘Players are pleasing’. Puns or plays

on brand names are particularly popular. In the advertisement for More Cigarettes (plate

17), the name of the product is linked to a quality or idea. ‘More’ the product is made syn-

onymous with ‘more’ the measure of quantity. The ambiguity in the word does not allow

us to separate the product from the ‘fact’ that these cigarettes are longer, slimmer, milder.

(American brands of cigarettes seem to go in for punnable brand names. There are brands

called Real, Target, Vantage and City Lights.) The slogan ‘Spoil yourself and not your fig-

ure’ for weight-watchers’ ice-cream is a common type of play on ambiguity in advertising.

It involves interpreting ‘spoil’ in ‘spoil yourself as an idiom or well-known phrase and as

a word in its own right. ‘Population down 30 per cent’ is a headline of an ad for Kellogg’s

30 per cent Bran Flakes. It involves our interpreting it as a statistical statement about popu-

lation which catches our eye because it is plainly not true and any way is out of context

next to a picture of the packet. We then have to look further into the statement and see that

‘down’ here means ‘eat’ or ‘swallow’, as in the expression ‘down the hatch’.

An important class of rhetorical effects depends not so much on breaking rules or

exploiting semantic ambiguity as on repetition of linguistic patterns. Parallelism is the

repetition of formal patterns and alliteration is the repetition of initial consonants or conso-

nant features. In the ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’ slogan we have an example of both parallelism

and alliteration. A sort of parallel scheme is at work in the More advertisement:

It’s longer

It’s slimmer

It’s surprisingly mild.

And there is a cheese advertisement which says: ‘Grate it, grill it, spear it, stuff it, bake

it, break it, toast it, roast it, post it’ (a coupon). If this were a television commercial, the

clauses would probably be accompanied by a simultaneous musical rhythmic beat and a

parallel visual rhythm. In the following examples, no word is actually repeated but there is

a parallelism in structure:

Fine workmanship

Beautiful design

Real compactness

Wonderful value.

More Chic. Less Cheek.

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The language of advertising 123

Plate 17 More cigarettes—a pun

124

Alliteration is also very common: it is not hard to find examples:

The Superfree sensation

It’s got to be Gordons (gin)

Pinky and Porky (pork pie)

Guinness is good for you.

The ‘absence’ of language—calligraphy

Language is of course a primary reference system in communication. Language function-

ing as a sign can be used in the same way as pictorial signs: it can be there to be deciphered

or absent to be filled in by the spectator/reader. As I mentioned at the beginning of this

chapter, in some ads language is used to signify the product directly through calligraphy.

This is an extension of showing the product (or sign of the product) directly without any

words (as in the series of ads for Benson and Hedges cigarettes). The product of an ad can

be made to be its language, e.g. when the word KITKAT is made up of pictures of the bar

of chocolate wafer biscuit. This is not a new idea. I described in chapter 1 how advertisers

in the nineteenth century tried to beat the newspapers’ column width rule by building up

the names of their products with letters in order to comply with the size of the newspaper

column and also to attract attention. Ads which use calligraphy suggest that the language

is absent and that the product speaks for itself; that it can signify without being named. It

is a way for language to deal with absence of language; like other hermeneutic systems,

the calligram tries to unite the sign and its referent and give the impression of transparent

meaning.

Finally, Michel Foucault, the historian/philosopher, has offered this useful account of

calligraphy:

The calligram makes use of this double property of letters to function as linear ele-

ments which can be arranged in space and as signs which must be read according to

a single chain of phonic substance. As sign, the letter permits us to establish words;

as line it permits us to establish letters. Hence the calligram playfully seeks to erase

the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilisation: to show and to name; to figure

and to speak; to reproduce and articulate; to look and to read. Pursuing twice over the

thing of which it speaks, it sets an ideal trap; its double access guarantees a capture

of which mere discourse or pure drawing is not capable. It undermines the invincible

absence over which words never quite prevail by imposing on them…the visible

form of their reference…. The signs summon from elsewhere the very thing of which

they speak…. A double trap, an inevitable snare…. (in Williamson, 1978, p. 91).

Suggestions for further work

1. Choose a range of products, like Jaguar (cars), Brut (aftershave), Piccadilly (ciga-

rettes) and think of other names for them which bring opposite associations to mind

than the ones intended by the advertiser.

2. Look at some commercials on TV and radio and try to pin down the tone of voice

being used. What is the most widely used tone you have come across? What are the

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The language of advertising 125

connotations of these tones of voice? What tone of voice would be right for the way

this ad is written?

3. Why do some ads use puns, alliteration, foreign or foreign-sounding words? Pick out

some examples from magazines and TV and say what their effect is likely to be.

4. What is the effect of using the interior monologue technique in ads? List some ads

which use this technique and the range of products which are likely to be associated

with this technique.

5. What would you say were the main differences between a poet’s use of figurative lan-

guage and an advertising copy-writer’s? Find five different advertisements in which a

verb has been used for its emotional tone rather than for straightforward descriptive

accuracy. Why do you think these were chosen?

6. Find an example of a persuasive word that is currently fashionable among advertisers:

try to find ads for different products. Find some examples of portmanteau or hyphened

words. What conclusions about the nature of the product can you draw from the use

of portmanteau words? Are these kinds of words more associated with one kind of

product than another and with one medium more than another?

7. Find some examples of ‘resounding non-statements’ in ads.

8. What likely effects would a strong verse rhythm have in an ad?

9. Examine the language of ads in different media: a teenage magazine, the Economist,

and a TV commercial. List the similarities and differences in the use of language, i.e.

the words and grammar used and misused, the rhythm or beat of the language, the situ-

ations or images evoked.

8

THE RHETORIC OF ADVERTISING

The word ‘rhetoric’ comes up frequently in any analysis of advertising since it refers to

those techniques, usually verbal, that are designed and employed to persuade and impress

people. Rhetorical language also carries the implication of extravagance and artifice, not to

mention a lack of information. In his influential essay ‘The rhetoric of the image’ (1964),

Barthes not only discusses a semiotic of the publicity image but also suggests a rhetoric of

the image or classification of the connotators of the image. Such a rhetoric, he argues, is

general because rhetorical figures are never more than formal relations of elements; they

vary in substance (sound, image, gesture, etc.) but not necessarily in form. This feature

makes the rhetorical device a useful concept for the study of visual language as well as

written/spoken language. I shall examine this argument in this chapter, although I have

touched upon it in the two previous ones.

Rhetoric, the effective or artful use of speech and writing, is used to clarify or add

strength and impact to persuasive oratory. Its origins can be traced back to Ancient Greece

and Rome, and it was practised in institutions of learning in Europe up until the nineteenth

century. Nowadays you might still come across explanations of rhetorical devices and fig-

ures of speech in school textbooks on composition. In classical times there was a very

large number of these rhetorical figures, and one of the difficulties of studying them today

is that the ancient names are still used to label those that survive. Since advertisers are in

the business of persuasion and have developed a vast array of devices for their purposes,

advertising is the most obvious place we might expect to find the practice of rhetoric today.

In the first place, advertisers deliberately set out to attract and retain the attention of listen-

ers, readers and viewers. In the second place it is obvious that every element in an ad has

been carefully placed for maximum effect.

A theory of rhetoric

Roland Barthes was not the only critic to suggest the possible application of rhetorical

terms to the visual field. The art historian Ernst Gombrich (1962) deals with symbols and

metaphors in relation to fine art in his book Art and Illusion, and a psychoanalytic appli-

cation of rhetoric was suggested by Giancarlo Marmori (1968) in his book Senso e Ana-

gramma. The most extensive and systematic exploration of rhetoric in publicity images

has been carried out by the French critic, Jacques Durand (1970). From an analysis of

thousands of ads he constructed a near exhaustive inventory of figures, or modifications of

figures, used in visual advertising.

Principles for the classiication of igures Durand defines rhetoric as ‘the art of fake speech’ (l’art de la parole feinte). Rhetoric

brings into play two levels of language, ‘language proper’ and ‘figurative language’. The

128

rhetorical figure is the mechanism that allows passage from one level to the other. What

is said in ‘figurative’ terms could, in theory, have been expressed in more direct or sim-

ple fashion. The problem, as Durand sees it, is to discover what occurs in the figurative

proposition which is not expressed in the simple one. If we want to say one thing, why say

another? Durand turns to the psychoanalyst Freud for some guidance on this question, and

particularly to the notions of desire and censure. According to a Freudian interpretation,

people will speak figuratively to satisfy a forbidden desire. Thus a statement like ‘I married

a bear’ (Durand’s example taken from a letter to a newspaper’s agony advice column) vio-

lates legal, social and sexual codes of conduct. It is an improbable statement and has to be

interpreted in the more plausible way ‘My husband is beast-like’, ‘His behaviour is like a

bear’. This pretend or mock transgression of rules satisfies a forbidden desire, according to

Durand’s interpretation of Freud, and because it is only a pretence it remains unpunished.

Rhetorical figures, in Durand’s view, should be regarded as mock violations of a norm.

These violations could be against the ‘normal’ use of language or the norms of logic,

morality, social rules and physical reality. Advertising frequently breaks ‘rules’, such as

those of spelling (‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’) or grammar (‘Winston tastes good like a cigarette

should’). It also breaks the rules of physical reality by using the devices of dreaming and

fantasy to induce ‘trance-like’ states in the audience. The use of humour and irony could be

considered as a deviation from ‘straight’ discourse, while some critics suggest that photo-

graphic images ‘break the rules’ of physical reality. Even the most life-like photo is, after

all, a transposition if not a manipulation of what we generally regard as reality. The photo is

two-dimensional; real scenes or objects are three-dimensional and a photograph is usually

smaller than the actual size of that which is being photographed.

In order to understand how rhetoric works, Barthes proposed that rhetorical figures be

classified into two types: metabolas, based on the substitution of one expression for another

(e.g. metaphors, metonyms and puns); and parataxes, based on the relationship between

elements in a discourse (such as a sentence), that is, on the modification of ‘normally’ exist-

ing relationships between successive elements (e.g. elipses, parallelisms, alliterations).

Durand’s definition of rhetorical figures goes further:

The figure of rhetoric being defined as an operation which, starting from a simple

proposition, modifies certain elements of that proposition:

(a) on the one hand, the nature of the operation

(b) on the other, the nature of the relation which unites the variable elements. (1970,

p. 72)

The former is situated mainly at the level of syntagm, the latter at the level of paradigm.

(a) The nature of the operation

According to Durand, there are two fundamental operations in rhetorical figures:

Addition: where one or more elements are added to a word, a sentence or an image.

(Repetition is a special case of addition as it consists of the adding of identical ele-

ments.)

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The rhetoric of advertising 129

Suppressiom one or more elements in, for example, a sentence are suppressed,

excluded, or concealed.

There are two operations which derive from these:

Substitution: a ‘suppression’ followed by an addition; an element is suppressed or

concealed and replaced by another.

Exchange consists of two reciprocal substitutions. Two elements of a sentence can

be permutated, as for example in the saying ‘I eat to live not live to eat’ or ‘I cannot

beg, to beg I am ashamed’; the second phrase inverts the order of elements in the first

phrase.

(b) The nature of the relation

The relation or connection between the figurative use of language and the ‘proper’ use of

language can be based on:

identity (uniquely ‘same’ relations)

similarity (at least one ‘same’)

difference (uniquely ‘other’ relations)

opposition (at least one ‘opposed’ relation)

false similarity (as in paradox and ambiguity).

This breakdown of the structure of the different rhetorical figures may seem abstract, but

the theory will become clearer when we look at actual examples of advertising rhetoric.

Meanwhile, here are two very well-known lines from poems; both use the figure simile.

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, and ‘O, my love’s like a red red rose’. In the first example,

cloud is added to lonely, so the rhetorical operation is addition. In the second, rose is

added to love. The relation between cloud and lonely, love and rose is one of similarity.

One thing is compared to another, although the form of the things compared is actually

different.

All figures of rhetoric can be classified according to the two dimensions defined above

and can be tabulated as shown in table 1.

We will now look at some examples of visual rhetoric in advertising according to

table 1.

Visual rhetoric

Figures of addition

1. Repetition. In classical rhetoric this is the repetition of the same sound, the same word or

the same group of words. In advertising, verbal and visual repetition is a well-used device.

The After Eight mint ad shown in plate 18 is an example of visual repetition.

130

Table 1 Classiication of rhetorical igures (from Durand, 1970)

Relation between elements Rhetorical operation

Addition Suppression Substitution Exchange

Identity Repetition Ellipsis Hyperbole Inversion

Similarity

—of form Rhyme Allusion Hendiadys

—of content Simile Circumlocution Metaphor Homology

Difference Accumulation Suspension Metonymy Asyndeton

Opposition

—of form Zeugma Dubitation Periphrasis Anacoluthon

—of content Antithesis Reticence Euphemism Chiasmus

False homologies

—Ambiguity Antanaclasis Tautology Pun Antimetabole

—Paradox Paradox Preterition Antiphrasis Antilogy

The white spaces that separate the identical images are in themselves not insignificant and

in some cases indicate temporal change. Durand has suggested that if the spaces are nar-

row, the everyday use of a product is signified, while if the spaces are larger, a more widely

spaced activity (e.g. the seasonal or occasional use of a product) is indicated; if the images

are fused together, the continuous use of a product is indicated. He also implies that a large

border of white around an image of a product connotes high class. In the advertisement for

Evette cosmetics (plate 19) there is a multiple image of the same lips and finger nail. The

form of the image is the same throughout its twelve separate versions. It is the content of the

image that changes. Each one shows a different colour in the range of lipstick and nail pol-

ish colours. There is no space between the images; they almost fuse together as in a dream

movement. (Notice also the alliteration in the headline, an example of sound repetition).

Some ads consist of a repeated visual image in order to show how the same product works

over a time period. An ad for a hair-setting lotion consisted of seven different pictures of

the same woman in the same position with seven different hair styles to demonstrate how

the product can be used to style hair for every day of the week.

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The rhetoric of advertising 131

Plate 18 The device of repetition

132

Plate 19 Multiple repetition

Advertising as Communication

The rhetoric of advertising 133

2. Similarity. In classical rhetoric, a figure can be based on similarity of form as in rhyme,

or on similarity of content as in comparisons (simile) and pleonasm, and of course it can

also be found in visual rhetoric. There are many advertisements which are based on the idea

of similarity of ‘formal’ features. An ad for a biscuit had a picture of a raised finger next

to a picture of the biscuit. It was trying to compare the two by indicating how similar they

were in form. The caption said ‘It’s like a finger’ (should there be any doubt). An ad for a

baby-chair showed the product next to a picture of a woman’s encircling arms, and the cap-

tion read The security of a mother’s arms’. These two examples show how an idea can be

expressed ‘formally’ both in the image and in the content of the written text.

Durand (1970) defines a figure of similarity as ‘an ensemble of elements of which some

are carriers of similitude and others of difference’ (p. 70). There is a great variety of adver-

tising images based on constructions of similarity. For example, if an advertiser wished to

show a range of nightdresses, the advertisement might consist of a number of pictures of

the same model against the same background in a similar pose. However, the nightdress

would be different in each photo. In this structure the user/person is the consistent feature.

Conversely, an ad for a carpet or range of kitchen furniture might show several identi-

cal pictures of the product, each one containing different people showing off its various

features—durability, good looks, etc.

3. Accumulation. When a message contains a number of different elements it is a figure of

‘accumulation’ and can convey the idea of abundance and quantity or disorder and chaos.

Objects or people can be seen in a state of confusion, heaped up or crowded together as

opposed to neatly and judiciously arranged or posed. Durand observes that ‘relations of

identity and opposition are not only absent, they are denied. Expressing profusion, accu-

mulation is a romantic figure.’ In the advertisement for TU cosmetics (plate 20), we can

see objects scattered in disorder around the room. The slightly neater arrangement of the

products below (which acts as the ad’s signature) shows the figure of epitrochasm (a figure

of accumulation), which in classical rhetoric is a hurried summary of points. There is also

ellipsis in this ad because people are unseen or absent (suppressed) although their presence

is implied. We can see their and by implication our tastes and habits ‘written in’ to their

possessions—the champagne, the evening gown, the carpet, etc.

4. Opposition. Opposition can exist at the level of form or content. For example, the same

scene in an ad can be presented in the same style but set in two different countries or cen-

turies (formal opposition). On the other hand a single image can bring together elements

which are in opposition to each other. An ad for a detergent showed a man dressed in white

sitting on top of a heap of coal, and one for a deodorant consisted of a person who looked as

though he smelled placed next to an image of a delicate nostril. The clash or juxtaposition

of opposites is a certain way of gaining a spectator’s attention.

5. Double meaning (ambiguity) and paradox. These figures play on the opposition between

appearance and reality. In double meaning an apparent similarity conceals a real difference

(a similarity of form hides a difference of content). In paradox an apparent difference con-

ceals a real identity or sameness (a difference in form hides a similar content).

134

Plate 20 A figure of accumulation (and ellipsis)

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The rhetoric of advertising 135

(a) In classical rhetoric double meaning is essentially the repetition of the same sounds

with different meanings (antanaclasis): ‘Learn a craft in your youth so that in your old age

you can earn your living without craft’. In an advertisement this figure is present if the dif-

ference between identical-looking objects or people is pointed out in the text or caption.

In the advertisement for Kraft margarine (plate 21) the caption offers an explanation of an

image which contains what appear to be identical roses.

Kit-e-Kat cat food ran a press and TV advertising campaign f or some years which

consisted of a picture or film of two identical cats with the caption (or voice-over commen-

tary): ‘Of these two cats which one is the Grandmother? Difficult to tell’. Of course it was

supposed to be the product which kept the older cat young. An ad for a home perm showed

a pair of identical twins and the question to the audience was ‘Which one is the Toni twin?’

Over the caption ‘One of these pullovers is new. Which?—impossible to see’, an ad for a

soap powder showed a picture of two identical garments. Purely visual antanaclasis can be

seen in ads which show a picture of a person and his/her reflection in a mirror or in ads

for film which show two pictures of the same scene, one a slide, the other a photographic

print.

(b) In ads which contain paradox the text might indicate the real similarity which exists

between two images of objects or persons which look dissimilar. In an ad for a make of

beauty preparations, a picture of a glass with a toothbrush in it was placed next to a bottle

of soap and face lotion. The same caption appeared above each of these separate images:

‘Twice a day’. The implication of this message is that the facial cleansing products are as

essential as brushing one’s teeth twice a day. The ad for Colman’s mint sauce (plate 22) is

paradoxical because despite the obvious difference between fresh mint and bottled mint,

the ad’s question implies that there is no difference. In other words, the latter is the same

as/as good as, the former.

Another version of paradox can be seen in ads which pose a problem or suggest a

dilemma. An advertisement for a brand of lipstick asked the question: ‘Which will win, the

deep red or the light pink?’ and then answered it by saying that it didn’t matter very much as

long as the product was Peggy Sage. The alternatives were false ones. The same mechanism

is at work in this message from a paint manufacturer: ‘Which do you want, subtle shades or

bold colours? Polycolour or Polyardent?’ An interesting example of paradox can be found

in those ads in which it is claimed that the product will be able to resolve a contradiction or

provide an answer to a supposedly insurmountable difficulty. In an ad for Outspan oranges

the caption reads: ‘How to gain a slender waist with the appetite of a horse—eat Outspan’.

And one for ‘SlimGard Protinets’ declared ‘How to lose weight by eating between meals’.

In the caption for Evian water, ‘Drink Evian and breathe fresh air’, we can see the same

figure—the implied message being that if you lead an unhealthy life a remedy can be found

in Evian water.

136

Plate 21 Double meaning

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The rhetoric of advertising 137

Plate 22 A figure of paradox

138

Figures of suppression

These are much less common in advertising than figures of addition; probably because

advertisements are more likely to exaggerate (add to, or expand) their case than to under-

state (lessen) it. It is difficult to argue a case by leaving something out and expecting spec-

tators to notice this and supply the missing element themselves, although sometimes a

play on absences is used in ads—the spectator has to fill in the missing object or person.

As Judith Williamson suggests, ‘in advertising, the exclusion of products, people or lan-

guage, as opposed to their customary plenitude, works to give the subject the impression

that he is “free” to produce a meaning for himself’ (1978, p. 71). Of course, any absence

in advertisements requires us to fill something in, usually along the lines suggested by

the ad. Similarly understatement, humour, jokes and puzzles involve signification through

absence. Certain gaps or oblique references can be deciphered and reached through the ad.

This has the effect of making us think that meaningful reality lies directly behind the signs

once we have succeeded in deciphering them.

1. Ellipsis. This figure may be seen as the opposite of repetition. In the latter the same

element is present many times in succession, in the former an element is missing or left

out. Usually ellipsis consists of the omission of an object or person such as we saw in the

TU perfume ad. By leaving out an image of the product it is possible to give it extra value

or an enigmatic quality. In its absence a product can be demonstrated to be indispensable

or of even greater value.

2. Circumlocution. In this figure a part of an object is missed out, but it is linked to

another element through a relationship of similarity. Visually we can see this in the ad for

J’ai Osé (plate 23). A person is reflected in a mirror, but we can only see the reflection, not

the person. Similarly in the Johnnie Walker ad (plate 23) the reflection is shown in full, the

actual bottle is only half seen.

3. Suspension. This figure consists of holding back part of a message. Ads that cover two

sides of the same page in a magazine, and which present an enigmatic image or a question

on the first and the answer on the second, are examples of this figure. A television ad can

also be based on suspension or digression. A recent commercial was divided into two parts,

the first appearing at the beginning of the ‘natural break’, the second after a series of other

commercials but before the programme started again. It consisted of a presenter putting a

product to a test and inviting the audience to stay tuned and wait for the results which were

presented in the second half of the ad a minute or two later.

4. Tautology. In tautology a word is repeated, and although it is used in a different

sense the second time it looks redundant because the different sense is not obvious: ‘A

Volkswagen is a Volkswagen’. An advertisement can employ visual tautology where the

product itself is visually represented as if its mere presence dispenses with any further

commentary. A product which is presented visually without benefit of commentary or cap-

tion is an example of a ‘pure’ advertisement. It is as if the ad doesn’t need to say anything.

Although they appear to be transparent, ads based on the image of a product exclusively

are, nevertheless, signs.

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The rhetoric of advertising 139

5. Preterition. This can be seen in advertisements which feign a secret ‘Don’t tell your

friends about X’, in ads which say that the product has no need of publicity or which

omit the name of the product on the assumption that it is so well known. A Schweppes

campaign which mentioned only the first three letters of the product’s name, ‘Sch…’, was

a good example of this. Visually, preterition can be seen in gestures of false modesty:

a woman’s arms crossed in front of her breasts or a nude model covering her eyes with

her hands; and in ads where the product is only half seen or presented in silhouette or

outline only.

Figures of substitution

1. Identical substitution. The simplest example of substitution is where one thing replaces

an identical one in a discourse. The difficulty with this figure is obviously that the substitu-

tion must be perceived despite the fact that the substituted element is identical. Sometimes

the substitution can be a matter of degree. The use of exaggeration (hyperbole), accent,

emphasis and understatement (litotes) are all devices whereby the element stays the same

but is made a degree or two bigger, more emphatic or smaller. Accent has a number of

visual equivalents in advertising: a black and white image can have a certain part of it

picked out in colour in order to highlight it, or a product can be arrowed or circled to draw

the audience’s attention to it.

Examples of hyperbole in advertising are almost too numerous to mention. As I men-

tioned in chapter 7, words such as ‘big’, ‘bigger’, ‘most’, ‘gigantic’, etc., are frequently

used in advertisement copy. And hyperbole can also be encountered in the visuals and

illustrations of ads. For example, the ad for Sansui hi-fi equipment (plate 24) shows an

oversize image of the product dwarfing the small (and ordinary or understated) suburban

houses next to it. The caption, ‘Way above the common or garden system’, underlines

the visual theme of superiority. Photographic techniques can be used to create hyperbole,

such as when an object is shot in extreme close-up or blown up to fill the entire page or

screen.

Meiosis is the opposite of hyperbole and similar to litotes. There are not many exam-

ples of this figure in advertising, since under-statement or underselling a product are not

usually used by advertisers. Nevertheless, one could argue that those ads which consist

of precise, terse or objective statements are examples of meiosis. Understatement in ads

can be so surprising or humorous that it is in fact very effective. In an ad for Burrough’s

business machines, an entire page was left blank. The accompanying text read: ‘lf you

haven’t got a Burrough’s calculator yet, we are offering you this blank page to do your

calculations’.

140

Plate 23 Circumlocation

Advertising as Communication

The rhetoric of advertising 141

142

Plate 24 Hyperbole

Advertising as Communication

The rhetoric of advertising 143

2. Substitution of similar elements. This is an important class of rhetorical figure, and the

most common example is metaphor—the transference of ideas or meanings from one con-

text to another. In the comparison of objects it allows abstract concepts to be expressed

visually: freshness can be presented by a block of ice. When a comparison becomes con-

ventional because it has been repeated so often, the thing which the object was originally

compared to becomes a symbol: a feather symbolizes lightness, an egg can mean simplicity

or novelty and a diamond can signify purity.

3. Substitution of a different element. Visual metonymy is frequently used in advertising.

It occurs where an associated detail is used to invoke an idea or represent an object: in an

ad for refrigerators, the product was replaced by a block of ice (the cause of the ice being

the refrigerator). In a shoe ad, a shoe was replaced by its print. Substitution can also work

the other way around: wool was replaced by a sheep in an ad for knitting yarns. An object

can be replaced by its destination; thus in an ad for a radio, the product was replaced by a

picture of an ear.

A synechdoche is another figure of speech based on replacement; in this case the part

stands for the whole or the whole for the part (a car can be referred to as a motor, a police-

man as the Law). In ads, a product can be represented by just one of its features or a person

by a part of the body, as in the series of Flora margarine ads featuring a man’s feet or his

torso.

4. Substitution of an opposing element. This category includes periphrasis—a roundabout

way of saying something—and euphemism—a mild or vague way of expressing something

harsh or blunt. Antonomasia is a figure which substitutes an epithet for a proper name (the

Iron Lady for Margaret Thatcher) or uses a proper name to express a general idea (a Solo-

mon or a Jeremiah). Euphemism may occur in advertising if the product relates to sensitive,

personal or private matters.

5. False homology. Puns are plays on words involving the humorous use of words to sug-

gest different meanings. Visual puns can be seen at work in the ads for White Horse whisky,

where there is a continual interplay between the idea of taking the animal, a white horse,

and the bottle of whisky to some rather unlikely places (plate 25). Two meanings of white

horse are condensed to fit together perfectly in the same space.

Figures of exchange

These figures are more complicated to analyse because they concern a great number of

elements.

1. Inversion. This figure is similar to repetition; the elements in a discourse may be identi-

cal but their order may be modified. It can be found in visual form in the advertisement for

ball-point pens which shows a person using the pen suspended upside down from a ceiling.

Another example of inversion is seen in those ads which show a little person standing next

to a giant version of the product; the normal size of the objects (elements) are inverted.

2. Hendiadys. This is the expression of a complex idea by two words connected by ‘and’, as

in ‘in goblets and gold’ for ‘in golden goblets’. One can see a visual version of this figure

in ads where a formal similarity is established between a concrete object and an abstract

144

idea, for example a type of light bulb and energy conservation. The abstract concept can be

illustrated by an image in the shape of the bulb.

Homology is the opposite of this. It is a figure based on similarity of content. The same

meaning is presented in successive images but in different form. An ad for instant mashed

potato showed a picture of raw steak and a packet of potato mix followed by a picture of the

cooked steak and the prepared purée of mashed potato.

3. Asyndeton. In this figure one or more elements or things are unconnected. In verbal dis-

course a conjunction joining two sentences is missed out; the visual equivalent is an image

which has been fragmented into parts. Ads for cosmetic products sometimes consist of a

Plate 25 False homology

highlight the application whole page showing the fragmented parts of a woman’s body to

of the products: lips showing lipstick, nails showing nail polish, eyes showing eye shadow.

Advertising as Communication

The rhetoric of advertising 145

4. Anacoluthon. Here a sentence lacks a grammatical sequence. Visually this figure exists

where an image appears to be an impossibility—it has probably been created by photo-

montage. The ad for pasta

Plate 26 Anacoluthon

(plate 26) shows a plate on which the spectator can see, not

146

spaghetti, but a picture of a wheat field. One can often see improbable things in ads, such

as baths in the middle of fields, people walking in and out of television screens, and

clever TV editing techniques allow ‘magically’ impossible feats to be executed.

5. Chiasmus. Another figure which involves the exchange of elements, although this time

the ‘grammar’ may be correct. Visually this figure is present when, for example, two people

are shown exchanging clothes: a father and son wearing each other’s hats and carrying each

other’s newspapers, or a little girl in woman’s clothing. In the ad for Smirnoff Silver vodka

(plate 27) several huntsmen are shown in their ‘pink’ coats, but on the back of one we can

see a Hell’s Angel badge. In some respects this symbol is not out of place; it is displayed

where one would expect to find it—on the back of a jacket worn by a man who is a member

of a group who some would say are like Hell’s Angels, violent and aggressive, they stalk

their prey on horses instead of motorbikes. But of course, as the caption confirms, the audi-

ence is meant to read this as inappropriate behaviour.

6. Antimetabole. This is another figure of double meaning. An image can show a person the

right way up and next to it the same person upside down looking uncomfortable.

7. Oxymoron. The reverse of paradox. Two elements remain contradictory, as in an ad which

shows a basket of strawberries in the snow, and in another which shows a woman in a bath-

ing suit against a wintry background.

You will often find several rhetorical figures in a single advertisement. This is especially

true of television commercials. The following stills (plate 28) come from a TV commercial

for bread, in which the loaf acts as a metaphor for a family photograph album. The slices of

bread are turned over like the pages of an album revealing pictures of the family in various

stages of growing up and involved in different ‘family’ activities. One shot shows a picture

of a bottle of milk, cheese, fish and eggs, framed within a slice of bread. This is a visual

synechdoche: the bread contains the attributes and qualities of the milk, cheese, fish, etc.

In the final shot of this commercial we see a small image of the family group standing on

top of an outsize loaf of bread (hyperbole) and in the caption there is an example of a pun

in the double meaning of the word ‘support’.

The examination of rhetoric in advertising is useful in that it draws attention to the

constructed nature of advertisements and avoids some of the weaknesses associated with

intuitive analysis. Durand’s work also calls into question the myth of creativity and inspi-

ration which exists among advertisers. Far from being truly creative, Durand argues, all

advertisements can be seen to be based on a limited number of rhetorical figures. However,

in emphasizing the rhetorical devices of advertising there is a danger that analysis will be

excessively formalistic and inward-looking, mystifying more than it clarifies. The formal

rhetorical devices in advertisements should help us understand how ads work internally

according to their own specific representational practice, but we also need to make connec-

tions outwards to a wider ideological field. To use terms first proposed by Winship (1981),

ads should be analysed from the point of view of their means of representation, their mode

of address and their ‘ideological problematics’.

Advertising as Communication

The rhetoric of advertising 147

Plate 27 Chiasmus

148

Plate 28 Rhetoric

Advertising as Communication

The rhetoric of advertising 149

Suggestions for further work

1. Find five ads which use asyndeton visually. Why do you think this figure was used in

your chosen ads? What does it lead us to think?

2. Choose an ad which contains more than one example of a visual figure of rhetoric.

Name the different figures.

3. Why are paradoxes and double meanings popular with advertisers? Find some exam-

ples. Why is litotes less popular with advertisers? Try to find some examples.

4. Find some examples of ads which use

(a) colour

(b) numbers

(c) jokes and puzzles

in a rhetorical way. Name the precise figure used.

5. What is the link between rhetoric and connotation? (See Barthes, 1977.) Why do

advertisers use rhetorical figures in ads? What do they expect to achieve by the use of

rhetoric?

6. Why is metaphor particularly useful to advertisers? Find some examples of visual and

verbal metaphor in TV commercials.

CONCLUSION

Advertisers play a major part in shaping society’s values, habits and direction. They are

also partly responsible for influencing the character and development of the media system.

The traditional media are in decline as a result of advertising allocation, and advertising has

encouraged the conservative domination of the press, orienting it more and more towards

the young middle class and in the process depriving a substantial section of the population

of a serious newspaper. Advertising threatens the UK public-service broadcasting institu-

tion and has caused both kinds of television service to limit their programming, ‘play safe’

and go for large, predictable audiences. Newspapers and magazines are increasingly forced

into creating the right ‘editorial environment’ for advertisers, and in addition we can see a

growing polarization between popular and quality newspapers.

The future of the media as organs of public communication looks extremely gloomy

because of the narrow and competitive needs of large corporations. We might applaud

the aesthetic and technical standards of many of the ads themselves or at worst regard

them as superficial, unreliable and intrusive, but it is hard to get away from them and to

resist the general temptations and advantages of the consumer society. It is often hard to

pin down what is actually objectionable about ads. Who seriously believes, for instance,

that ‘Heineken reaches the parts that other beers can’t reach’ or that ‘Four out of five

people can’t tell Stork from butter’ or does ‘The Daz blue whitener window test’ with

their washing?

To be fair, advertisements rarely perpetrate downright lies. The ads in magazines and

newspapers, on posters and at the cinema are bound by a code of practice administered

by the Advertising Standards Authority (see Appendix II for ASA guidelines). The IBA

is responsible for television commercials and makes sure that they are not misleading

or offensive and that they are confined to ‘natural breaks’. The ASA judges the valid-

ity of complaints that come from the general public and publishes its verdicts in its own

literature and in the press. (It also advertises itself in the press.) If a complaint is upheld

the ASA can tell the advertiser to amend or remove offending material. It is particularly

keen to uphold standards in sensitive areas such as those for slimming products, alcohol,

tobacco and ads aimed at children. Ads for these products come in for special scrutiny,

but as this book has argued, it is often not the overt message of an ad that is misleading or

dangerous but its subtle, hidden message, which presumably the ASA is unable or unwill-

ing to do much about.

As you might imagine, a lot of advertisements fall through the ASA’s net. Many ads that

might be seen as an attack on or demeaning to women are not considered so by the ASA. For

instance, while many ads that appear in magazines, on posters and on television might not

be too objectionable as far as women’s roles in society are concerned, some ads that appear

in trade or industrial journals, car, motorbike or girlie magazines often feature pictures of

scantilydressed or naked women, and captions such as ‘Like a bit of spare’ (from an ad for

152 Conclusion

motorbike accessories), ‘We’ll never let you down’ (an ad in a car magazine accompanying

a picture of a woman with her knickers down) and ‘Abbey carpets lay best’ (alongside a

woman lying down with few clothes on). Frequently the ASA dismisses complaints about

these sorts of ads because ‘they do not cause grave or widespread offence’; they have been

known to dismiss complaints about the sexist portrayal of women in ads because they argue

that the woman is there as decoration and is irrelevent to the product (and therefore presum-

ably without significance), or because the ad is not addressed to women but to motorcycle

enthusiasts, or long-distance lorry-drivers.

In general, the success of advertising depends not on its logical propositions but on

the kinds of fantasies it offers. The world of ads is a dream world where people and

objects are taken out of their material context and given new, symbolic meanings, placed

on hoardings or on the screen where they become signs. Advertising appropriates things

from the real world, from society and history and sets them to its own work. In doing so it

mystifies the real world and deprives us of any understanding of it. We are invited to live

an unreal life through the ads. The more we are isolated from the real world by the media,

the more we seek images from them to give us a sense of social reality. Advertising helps

us to make sense of things. It validates consumer commodities and a consumer life-style

by associating goods with personal and social meanings and those aspirations and needs

which are not fulfilled in real life. We come to think that consuming commodities will

give us our identities. In this sense advertising is capable of some success. People may

admire us if we have made the right purchases within a system to which we are trained to

respond. Ads may provide a magic which displaces our feelings and resolves our dilem-

mas but only at a personal and social cost. We become part of the symbolism of the ad

world; not real people but identified in terms of what we consume: Raymond Williams

sums this up when he says:

Fantasy seems to be validated at a personal level but only at the cost of preserving

the general unreality which it obscures: the real failures of society…if the meanings

and values generally operative in society give no answers to, no means of negotiat-

ing, problems of death, loneliness, frustration, the need for identity and respect, then

the magic system must come and mixing its charms and expedients with reality in

easily available forms and binding the weakness to the condition which has created

it. (1980, p. 191)

The condition which has need of this fantasy is one which isolates us, the consumers,

from real information and decision-making about the production and distribution of goods.

Advertising, according to Williams, has become ‘a mimed celebration of other people’s

decisions’, not the consumers’.

One of the ways in which advertising rebuffs criticism and validates its own existence

is by appropriating hostile criticism and counterideologies, Some advertisers, aware of the

objections of the feminist movement to traditional images of women in ads, have incorpo-

rated the criticism into their ads, many of which now present an alternative stereotype of

the cool, professional, liberated woman. On the whole, however, advertising hasn’t been

able to keep pace with women’s changing roles and aspirations and, unsure about what to

Conclusion 153

do about criticism, has fallen back on tried and tested clichés. Some agencies, trying to

accommodate new attitudes in their campaigns, often miss the point and equate ‘liberation’

with a type of aggressive sexuality and very unliberated coy sexiness. So we have seen in

the past few years campaigns like ‘Underneath they’re all Lovable’ (for frilly underwear),

or ads showing cool, professional women who really have weak spots, be they for a man’s

aftershave lotion, a gift of chocolates or ‘sexy’ underwear.

Another example of the way that ads escape real criticism is by self-reference; that is,

by incorporating criticism or by showing up the ad system as rather dishonest and silly. The

actor John Cleese’s presentation of Sony products incorporates a kind of cynicism about the

process of celebrities endorsing products—no doubt with great commercial success, since

his image on his comedy programmes is that of a cynic. A shampoo commercial on TV

shows a young couple running towards each other on a deserted beach in slow motion to the

sound of an orchestra in full romantic flood; but instead of falling into each other’s arms as

we might have expected from watching countless similar ads and romantic films, they run

past each other. The voice-over remarks that this shampoo will not get you a lover (as we

have been led to believe from other shampoo ads) but will make your hair clean and beauti-

ful. This is a parody of other, much criticized ads for beauty products. It is self-validating

because we are disarmed by its honesty and its apparent self-criticism. Another example of

an ad which refers to the genre of ads is a poster for sausages which says: ‘I’m meaty. Fry

me’, a take-off of the offensive series of airline ads which said ‘I’m Suzie/Cheryl/Lorraine.

Fly me’. These kinds of ad often set themselves up as more aware, down-to-earth, honest

and credible.

This leads us to a further point about advertising’s resistance to criticism. The reason

why ads are rarely dishonest in any ‘legal’ sense is that they don’t function at the manifest

level but at the level of the signifier. Few people believe or take seriously the (dishon-

est) slogans of ads: ‘I was Mr Holmes of Household linens until I discovered Smirnoff’,

‘Fairy tales come true’ (Martini), ‘Daz with the blue whitener washes cleanest’. But the

signiiers of the image of these ads are usually the kind of people who are seen using the

product—smart, young people, caring mothers or happy families. And it is at this level

that ads are hard to resist because they offer the chance to obtain perfect relationships,

handsome lovers, luxurious surroundings, appreciative husbands and happy children. We

remember these images rather than the claims made on behalf of the product. We don’t

use a product for what it is; we identify with the result. The product can make us like the

signifier in the ads.

It is possible to attempt to ban deceitful, sexist or racist slogans from ads. For instance,

the ASA made the original ‘I was only… until I discovered…’ Smirnoff ads unlawful,

because of the overt implication that drinking Smirnoff would bring sexual and material

success. Some Smirnoff ads now show the successfully transformed Smirnoff person say-

ing ‘They say Smirnoff won’t…I’ll drink to that’, referring to the old series of ads and to

the restriction imposed on them. This again shows how ‘daring’ ads are and how they can

rebut criticism by criticising themselves. It is impossible to ban the use of images and sym-

bols in ads and the interconnections they make between things of value. It is ultimately the

images that ads leave us with, and the images of the slogans, not the slogans themselves,

that make ads so successful.

154 Conclusion

This is why it is important to be aware not just of the content, but also of the structure

of signs in ads, the way meanings are exchanged, the way signifier and signified work, the

way ads incorporate other referent systems and ideologies (even advertising itself), and

the way they structure us into the ad and call upon us to create meaning. Only in this way

can we understand the way ideology works and ties advertising to the existing conditions

of society.

APPENDIX I

A central argument of the first part of this book was the importance of advertising to the

general economic environment and how shifts and changes in the economy affect the role

that advertising plays. Some people argue that the expenditure on advertising is a shock-

ing waste of human and monetary resources and that the advantages of this expenditure,

in terms of the expansion of the economy and technical progress, are outweighed by the

disadvantages. Some understanding of the scale and type of expenditure in advertising can

be gained from the following selection of statistics and information. It has been collected

from trade journals and the financial pages of the quality press and can be updated with

reference to these sources.

Tables 2–9 are taken from Advertising Association statistics

Table 2 Total advertising expenditure and its relation to consumers’ expenditure

Year Total expenditure

£m (in current prices) as a percentage of consumers’ expenditure

1952 123 1.23

1962 348 1.83

1972 708 1.78

1973 874 1.94

1974 900 1.74

1975 967 1.53

1976 1188 1.62

1977 1499 1.79

1978 1834 1.92

1979 2129 1.90

Table 3 Total advertising expenditure by media

£m Percentage of total

Media 1960 1968 1973 1975 1977 1979 1960 1968 1973 1975 1977 1979

National

newspapers

64 99 160 162 251 347 19.8 19.7 18.3 16.8 16.7 16.3

Regional

newspapers

77 121 256 283 396 593 23.8 24.1 29.3 29.3 26.4 27.9

Magazines and

periodicals

40 50 72 79 116 180 12.4 9.9 8.2 8.2 7.7 8.5

156 Appendix I

Trade and

technical

31 46 73 86 133 203 9.6 9.1 8.4 8.9 8.9 9.5

Directories (inc.

Yellow Pages)

2 8 17 20 43 54 0.6 1.6 1.9 2.1 2.9 2.5

Press production

costs

15 23 46 49 73 119 4.6 4.6 5.3 5.1 4.9 5.6

Total press 229 347 624 679 1012 1496 70.9 69.0 71.4 70.2 67.5 70.3

Television 72 129 210 236 398 471 22.3 25.6 24.0 24.4 26.6 22.1

Poster and

transport

16 20 31 35 54 93 5.0 4.0 3.5 3.6 3.6 4.4

Cinema 5 6 7 7 9 17 1.5 1.2 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.8

Radio 1 1 2 10 26 52 0.3 0.2 0.2 1.0 1.7 2.4

Total 323 503 874 967 1499 2129 100 100 100 100 100 100

Table 4 Total advertising expenditure by type

£m. Percentage of total

Type 1960 1968 1973 1975 1977 1979 1960 1968 1973 1975 1977 1979

Display advertising:

Press1 151 193 322 361 533 795 46.7 39.3 36.8 37.2 35.6 37.3

Television. 72 129 210 236 398 471 22.3 25.6 24.0 24.4 26.5 22.1

Other media2 22 27 40 52 89 162 6.8 5.4 4.6 5.4 5.9 7.6

Total 245 349 572 649 1020 1428 75.8 69.4 65.4 67.1 68.0 67.1

Financial notices

etc.3

4 10 16 14 19 22 1.2 2.0 1.8 1.4 1.3 1.0

Classified

advertising

43 98 213 218 327 476 13.3 19.5 24.4 22.5 21.8 22.4

Trade and

technical

journals

31 46 73 86 133 203 9.7 9.1 8.4 8.9 8.9 9.5

Total 323 503 874 967 1499 2129 100 100 100 100 100 100

1 Excluding financial, classified and advertising in trade and technical journals. 2 i.e. poster and transport, cinema, radio. 3 Company reports, prospectuses and other notices, but excluding display advertising by financial

institutions.

Appendix I 157

Table 5 Classiied advertising expenditure by media

£m Percentage of total

Media 1960 1968 1973 1975 1977 1979 1960 1968 1973 1975 1977 1979

National

newspapers

8 22 41 38 57 75 19 22 19 17 17 16

Regional

newspapers

34 68 154 160 230 350 79 69 73 73 70 73

Magazines and

periodicals

1 4 7 7 8 12 2 4 3 3 2 3

Directories (inc.

Yellow Pages)

– 4 11 13 32 39 0 4 5 6 10 8

Total 43 98 213 218 327 476 100 100 100 100 100 100

Table 6 Newspaper advertising by category of newspaper

£m

Year National newspapers Regional newspapers Free sheets

Dailies Sundays Dailies Weeklies Newspaper format Magazine format

1969 73 38 85 48 2

1971 70 38 94 55 3

1973 108 53 161 83 13 2

1975 108 54 176 89 18 1

1977 168 83 244 123 29 3

1979 242 105 359 181 53 6

Table 7 Newspaper classiied advertising by type

£m

Type 1971 1973 1975 1977 1979

Recruitment 37 105 75 100 173

Property 17 27 34 45 58

Automotive 17 25 31 60 80

Other 34 27 44 65 92

105 184 184 270 403

158 Appendix I

Table 8 Index of Media Rates (1970=100)

1961 1966 1971 1973 1975 1977 1979

National dailies 76.9 84.4 107.7 116.1 172.4 257.6 333.7

National Sundays 80.0 87.7 107.1 120.3 161.2 242.9 294.7

Regional dailies 77.8 83.8 109.6 120.0 192.4 277.1 361.5

Weekly papers 74.1 80.7 104.3 117.0 176.5 243.3 315.4

Magazines/periodicals 72.0 83.4 108.9 113.3 160.2 214.6 277.8

Trade and technical 67.7 82.1 113.1 126.2 176.9 245.1 301.1

Total press 74.4 83.7 108.6 118.5 177.5 252.0 322.5

Year on year % change +1.7 +8.6 +3.5 +28.9 +19.1 +13.8

TV 85.8 94.8 109.0 133.4 152.6 238.5 342.4

Year on year % change +3.9 +9.0 +9.7 +21.3 +16.9 +19.5

Combined index 77.6 86.7 108.7 122.2 171.3 248.0 327.4

Year on year % change +2.4 +8.7 +5.1 +26.9 +18.4 +15.2

Table 9 Estimated media expenditure by product group

Product group £m Manufacturers’ consumer advertising

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979

Food 62 70 82 88 81 89 112 144 165 166

Clothing 13 12 13 12 10 12 15 18 21 23

Auto 19 18 23 29 23 33 43 56 75 93

Drink and tobacco 46 50 55 64 65 73 97 111 121 148

Toiletries and medical 32 35 39 48 50 53 66 77 86 98

Household and leisure 54 59 68 84 79 87 113 150 204 230

Publishing, books 9 11 13 16 17 16 20 26 32 34

Tourism, entertainment,

foreign

22 24 26 30 32 34 39 47 63 75

Nationalized industries 12 14 16 19 18 18 23 28 34 41

Government 14 16 17 21 21 21 22 26 37 42

Retail 56 63 84 114 134 163 206 260 307 355

Savings, financial 23 28 39 39 36 36 44 57 70 84

Industrial 71 70 81 95 103 111 130 168 212 258

Charity, education 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 5 6

Classified 119 119 150 213 228 218 255 327 402 476

Appendix I 159

Table 10 How the power is shared

(extracted from Campaign, 2 January 1981)

Number of agencies in each billing category

£80 million and over ........................................2

£70 million to £80 million ...............................2

£60 million to £70 million ...............................2

£50 million to £60 million .............................nil

£40 million to £50 million ...............................2

£30 million to £40 million ...............................7

£20 million to £30 million ...............................8

£10 million to £20 million .............................35

£5 million to £10 million ...............................52

Up to £5 million ...........................................141

Table 11 The top ten agencies in 1980

(extracted from Campaign, 2 January 1981)

Billings in £m Staff

1980 1979 1980 1979

1= Saatchi and Saatchi 83.00 67.50 530 500

1= J.Walter Thompson (London) 83.00 64.40 563 555

3= D’Arcy MacManus and Masius 75.00 64.00 456 456

3= McCann-Erickson Advertising 75.00 68.32 400 477

5 Ogilvy Benson and Mather 61.20 49.30 378 390

6 Collett Dickenson Pearce 60.89 54.96 272 265

7 Young and Rubicam 46.41 38.62 315 311

8 Foote Cone and Belding 45.22 32.80 282 259

9 Ted Bates 39.64 34.35 237 241

10 Allen Brady and Marsh 39.12 30.90 253 216

160 Appendix I

Table 12 The top 99 advertisers for 1979

(extracted from Campaign, 2 May 1980)

Appendix I 161

162 Appendix I

Advertiser Holding

company

Expenditure

£000s 1979

TV

%

Press

%

21 John Player

(Players cigarettes, cigars and tobacco)

Imperial Tobacco 4826 15 85

22 Elida Gibbs

(Denim, Signal, Sure, Pears, Sunsilk,

SR, All Clear, Harmony, etc.)

Unilever 4782 83 17

23 MFI — 4762 5 95

24 Renault Regie Nationale

Des Usines

4602 20 80

25 Birds Eye Unilever 4564 83 17

26 Allied Retailers

(Allied Carpet Stores, Williams

Furniture)

— 4455 55 45

27 National Dairy Council

(Milk, cream and cheese)

— 4422 68 34

28 Brooke Bond Oxo

(Oxo, Haywards, Brooke Bond tea and

coffee, Soya Mince)

Brook Bond

Liebig

4321 79 21

29 Beecham Products

(Medicines)

(Beecham Powders, Venos, Fynnon,

Eno, Night Nurse, Phensic, Mac

Lozenges, Settlers, etc.)

Beecham Group 4199 66 32

30 Carreras Rothman

(Piccadilly, Rothman, Dunhill,

Erinmore)

Rothman

International

4184 — 100

31 Kelloggs

(All Bran, Corn Flakes, Extra, Frosties,

Rise and Shine, Noodles, etc.)

Kellogg USA 4179 65 35

32 Cadbury Typhoo

(Smash, Marvel, Typhoo, Pint Size,

Snack, Kenco, Drinking Chocolate, etc.)

Cadbury

Schweppes

4017 74 26

33 Fiat Motor Co. (UK) Fiat SPA, Italy 3934 54 46

34 Co-Operative Wholesale Society — 3765 34 66

35 Gillette

(Papermate, RightGuard, Kalkitos,

G11, Contour, Lightwave, Earthborn,

etc.)

Gillette 3443 69 31

36 Allied Breweries (UK)

(Arctic Lite Beer, DR, Double D,

Burton Bot, Skol Lager, Tetley Bitter,

etc.)

— 3348 71 29

37 McVitie and Cadbury Cakes United Biscuits 3335 87 13

38 Arthur Guinness — 3314 72 28

Appendix I 163

39 Book Club Associates

(Arts Guild, Mystery Guild, World

Books, Kaleidoscope, Book of the

Month Club, etc.)

W.H.Smith and

Sons

(Holdings)/

Doubeday

3286 — 100

40 Bass Marketing

(Carling, Bass, Tennents, Tuborg,

Worthington, Hemeling, Stones Best

Bitter, etc.)

Bass Charrington 3273 95 5

41 The Nestle Company

(Nescafe, Chef, Milky Bar, Dairy

Crunch, etc.)

Nestle S.A. 3253 60 40

42 British Airways

(Poundstret cher, Sovereign Airways,

etc.)

— 3233 54 46

43 Volkswagen-Audi (GB)

(Passat, Polo, Derby, Sirocco, Audi,

Golf, etc.)

— 3216 21 79

44 Comet Discount — 3191 — 100

45 Department of Transport

(Drink and Drive, Seat Belts, Road

Safety, Pedestrian Safety, etc.)

— 3110 95 5

46 Whitbread and Co.

(Heineken, Stella Artois, Trophy,

Heldenbrau, etc.)

— 3068 81 19

47 Debenhams — 3045 18 83

48 Currys — 2020 13 87

49 C and A Modes C and A Nederland 2928 6 94

50 Colgate Palmolive

(Ajax, Palmolive, Fresh, Ultra-Brite,

Woodleigh Green, etc.)

Colgate Palmolive

(USA)

2924 93 7

51 Barclays Bank UK

(Barclay card, Barclay Trust, Barclay

Unicorn 500, etc.)

Barclays Bank 2846 20 80

52 ICI (Paints)

(Dulux Paints, Novamura, Vymura)

Imperial Chemical

Industries

2791 68 32

53 W.H.Smith and Son W.H.Smith

(Holdings)

2787 2 98

54 Richardson-Merrell

(Vick, Clearasil, Infacare, Oil of Ulay,

Milgard, etc.)

Richardson-Merrell 2766 86 14

55 Jaguar-Rover Triumph

(Daimler, Jaguar, Rover, Triumph,

MG)

BL 2686 — 100

56 British-American Tobacco

(State Express)

BAT Industries 2666 — 100

57 RHM Foods

(Bisto, Paxo, McD, Atora, Saxa,

Energen, Chesswood, etc.)

Rank Hovis

McDougall

2602 90 10

164 Appendix I

58 Kodak

(Cameras and films)

Eastman Kodak

(USA)

2588 72 28

59 Milk Marketing Board

(Milk, cream cakes, butter, etc.)

— 2568 78 22

60 Asda Stores Associated Dairies

Group

2552 37 63

61 Beecham Products

(Proprietaries)

(Aquafresh, Macleans, Silvikrin,

Vosene, Body-mist, Badedas, etc.)

Beecham Group 2546 69 31

62 Talbot Cars

(Alpine, Avenger, Horizon, Sunbeam)

P.S.A.Peugeot

Citroen

2506 26 74

63 Lyons Groceries

(Lyons Maid, Tetley and Lyons teas,

Ready Brek, etc.)

J.Lyons 2441 77 23

64 Midland Bank — 2418 32 68

65 Ministry of Defence

(Army, Navy, RAF, TAVR, etc.)

— 2411 32 68

Figures for COI Recruitment exclude advertisements on classified pages

66 Fine Fare Associated British

Foods

2371 36 64

67 Halifax Building Society — 2338 36 64

68 Bowater Scott

(Andrex, Softex Toilet Tissue,

Scotties, Libresse, Fiesta, etc.)

— 2322 67 33

69 Hedges and Butler

(Bacardi, Hirondelle, Emva Cream,

Bolla, Sandeman, etc.)

Bass 2314 24 76

70= Abbey National Building Society — 2309 46 54

70= IPC Magazines

(Woman, Woman’s Realm, Titbits,

Woman’s Own, etc.)

Reed International 2309 46 54

72 Shell UK Oil Shell UK 2282 28 72

73 British Gas Corporation

(Appliances, corporate, Save-It etc.)

— 2275 63 37

74 Scottish and Newcastle Breweries

(McEwan, Youngers, Newcastle

Brown)

— 2236 87 13

75 Courage

(Courage Colt 45 Malt, Courage JC,

Hofmeister Lager, etc.)

Imperial Group 2229 91 9

76 Dixons Photographic Centres Dixons

Photographic

2228 19 81

77 J and J Colman

(Colmans, Tom Caxton, Jif,

Robinsons, etc.)

Reckitt and

Colman

2213 46 54

Appendix I 165

78 Gilbey Vintners

(Hennessy, Smirnoff Vodka, Croft Port, J

and B Whisky, Baileys, Gilbey, etc.)

International

Distillers Vintners

2199 38 62

79 Department of Health and Social

Security

(Child Benefits, Nursing, Pensions,

Better Health, Health Education Council,

Family Income Supplements, etc.)

— 2198 25 75

80 Status Stores Status Discount 2185 51 49

81 Spillers

(Homepride, Choosy, Winalot, Tyne

Brand)

— 2153 73 27

82 Unigate

(St Ivel, Cow and Gate, Farmers Wife,

Gold Spinner, etc.)

Unigate 2119 79 21

83 Johnson and Johnson

(Band Aid Plasters, Johnson Baby

Products, Carefree, Vespré, etc.)

2108 53 47

84= Ford Motor Co.

(Capri, Cortina, Escort range, Fiesta

range, Granada)

— 2104 61 39

84= Martini and Rossi — 2104 59 41

86 National Westminster Bank

(National Westminster Bank, National

Westminster UT range, etc.)

National

Westminster Bank

2089 7 93

87 Citroen Cars P.S.A.Peugeot

Citroen

2075 47 53

88 EMI Records EMI 2048 93 7

89 Rumbelows Thorn Electrical

Industries

2029 35 65

90 Bovril

(Ambrosia, Bovril, Marmite, etc.)

Cavenham 2015 86 14

91 K-Tel International (UK) K-Tel International

NNC USA

1986 100 —

92= Esso Petroleum Exxon USA 1965 82 18

92= Vauxhall Motors (Cavalier, Carlton,

Chevette, Royale)

General Motors 1965 25 75

94 Findus — 1961 85 15

95 Lentheric Morny (Cyclax, Lentheric) BAT Industries 1958 100 —

96 British Mail Order Corp (Ace of Clubs,

Marshall Ward, John England, John Noble,

Trafford, Great Universal, etc.)

Great Universal

Stores

1957 — 100

97 Black and Decker — 1956 82 18

98 J.Sainsbury — 1941 39 61

99= American Express Int. Banking Corp. — 1935 38 62

99 Peugeot Automobiles (UK) P.S.A.Peugeot

Citroen

1935 9 91

APPENDIX II

Rate cards for the different TV and radio stations can be obtained from BRAD (British Rate

and Data). Here is one example of the sums of money that advertisers would be expected

to pay for access to the air waves (Table 13).

Table 13 London Region, Thames Television advertising rates

Monday to Friday £ per £ per £ per £ per

Time (p.m.) 10 secs 15 secs 20 secs 30 secs

up to 3.40 200 280 320 400

3.40–4.40 490 686 784 980

4.40–5.30 875 1225 1400 1750

5.30–6.30 1650 2310 2640 3330

6.30–10.35 3650 5110 5840 7300

10.35–11.35 1875 2625 3000 3750

11.35–12.05 600 840 960 1200

12.05–close 255 357 408 510

£ per £ per £ per £ per

40 secs 45 secs 50 secs 60 secs

520 600 660 800

1274 1470 1617 1960

2275 2625 2880 3500

4290 4950 5445 6600

9490 10950 12045 14600

4875 5625 6188 7500

1560 1800 1980 2400

663 765 842 1020

APPENDIX III

Laws affecting advertising

Accommodation Agencies Act, 1953

Adoption Act, 1958 (section I)

Advertisements (Hire-Purchase) Act, 1938 (1957)

Agriculture (Safety, Health and Welfare Provisions) Act, 1956

Betting and Lotteries Act, 1934 (section 26)

Betting and Gaming Act, 1960

Building Societies Act, 1960 (sections, 5, 7 and 10)

Business Names Registration Act, 1916

Cancer Act, 1939 (section 4)

Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, 1955

Children Act, 1958 (section 37)

Cinematograph Films Act, 1938

Civil Aviation (Licensing) Act, 1960

Companies Act, 1948 (section 38 and the fourth schedule)

Copyright Act, 1956

Criminal Justice Act, 1925 (section 38)

Defamation Act, 1952

Food and Drugs Act, 1955, and Labelling of Food Order (SI 1953, No. 536)

Forgery Act, 1913

Geneva Convention Act, 1957 (section 6)

Hire Purchase and Credit Sales Agreements (Control) Order, 1960

Indecent Advertisements A ct, 1889

Industrial Training Act, 1964

Labelling of Food Order, 1953 (1959)

Larceny Act, 1861 (section 102)

Merchandise Marks Acts, 1887–1953

Moneylenders Act, 1927 (sections 4 and 5)

Noise Abatement Act, 1960

Obscene Publications Act, 1959

Opticians Act, 1958

Patents Act, 1949 (section 92)

Pharmacy and Medicines Act, 1941 (sections 8–13 and 15–17)

Pharmacy and Poisons Act, 1933

Post Ofice Acts, 1908–1953 (sections 61 and 62)

Pre-Packed Food (Weights and Measures: Marking) Regulations, 1959

Prevention of Frauds (Investments) Act, 1958 (sections 13, 14 and 17)

Protection of Depositors (Contents of Advertisements) Regulations, 1963

Protection of Depositors (Exempted Advertisements) Regulations, 1963

170 Appendix III

R egistered Designs Act, 1949

Representation of the People Act, 1949 (sections 63, 94 and 95)

Road Trafic Act, 1960 (twelfth schedule)

Sale of Goods Act, 1893

Sunday Observance Act, 1780 (section 3), Common Informer Act, 1951 and Sunday

Entertainments Act, 1932

Television Act, 1964

Town and Country Planning Act, 1947 (sections 31 and 32) and Town and Country

Planning (Control of Advertisements) Regulations, 1960 (SI 1960, No. 695)

Town Police Clauses Act, 1847 (section 28)

Trade Descriptions Act, 1968

Trade Marks Acts, 1887–1938

Unsolicited Goods and Services Act, 1971

Vagrancy Act, 1924 (section 4)

Venereal Diseases Act, 1917 (sections 2 and 3)

Weights and Measures Act, 1963 (schedules 4–8)

APPENDIX IV

The Advertising Standards Authority

How the British Code of Advertising Practice (sixth edition) affects alcohol advertising

Introduction

1.1 Moderate drinking is widely enjoyed and helps to make social occasions cheerful and

pleasant.

1.2 The Alcoholic Drinks Industry, with others, is aware that a small, but significant minor-

ity cause harm to themselves and others through misuse of alcohol. They share the

concern about this social problem, the causes of which are complex and varied. There

is no evidence connecting such misuse with the advertising of alcoholic drinks.

1.3 The industry is concerned that its advertisements should not exploit the immature,

the young, the socially insecure, or those with physical, mental or social incapacity.

The industry accepts that its advertising should be socially responsible and should not

encourage excessive consumption.

1.4 The industry believes that it is proper for advertisements for alcoholic drinks:

1. to indicate that they give pleasure to many, are of high quality and are widely

enjoyed in all classes of society;

2. to seek to persuade people to change brands and/or types of drinks;

3. to provide information on products;

4. to employ such accepted techniques of advertising practice as are employed by

other product groups and are not inconsistent with the detailed rules.

Implementation and interpretation

2.1 The industry has therefore proposed the following rules for inclusion in the British

Code of Advertising Practice. The CAP Committee has accepted this proposal and the

Advertising Standards Authority has agreed to supervise the implementation of the

rules.

2.2 The rules are to be interpreted in the light of the considerations set out in paragraphs

1.1 to 1.4 above. So far as the scope and general interpretation of the rules is con-

cerned, the provisions of the British Code of Advertising Practice apply, as they do to

those aspects of advertisements for drink not covered by the rules.

2.3 ‘Drink’, for the purposes of this Appendix, is to be understood as referring to alcoholic

beverages and their consumption.

172 Appendix IV

Rules

Young people

3.1 Advertisements should not be directed at young people nor in any way encourage

them to start drinking. Anyone shown drinking must appear to be over 21. Children

should not be depicted in advertisements except where it would be usual for them

to appear (e.g. in family scenes or in background crowds) but they should never be

shown drinking alcoholic beverages, nor should it be implied that they are.

Challenge

3.2 Advertisements should not be based on a dare, nor impute any failing to those who do

not accept the challenge of a particular drink.

Health

3.3 Advertisements should not emphasise the stimulant, sedative or tranquillising effects

of any drink, nor imply that it can improve physical performance. However, references

to the refreshing attributes of a drink are permissible.

Strength

3.4 Advertisements should not give the general impression of being inducements to prefer

a drink because of its higher alcohol content or intoxicating effect. Factual information

for the guidance of drinkers about such alcoholic strength may, however, be included.

Social success

3.5 Advertisements may emphasize the pleasures of companionship and social commu-

nication associated with the consumption of alcoholic drinks, but it should never be

implied that drinking is necessary to social or business success or distinction, nor that

those who do not drink are less likely to be acceptable or successful than those who do.

Advertisements should neither claim nor suggest that any drink can contribute towards

sexual success, or make the drinker more attractive to the opposite sex.

Drinking and machinery

3.6 Advertisements should not associate drink with driving or dangerous machinery. Spe-

cific warnings of the dangers of drinking in these circumstances may, however, be

used.

Excessive drinking

3.7 Advertisements should not encourage or appear to condone overindulgence. Repeated

buying of large rounds should not be implied.

How the British Code of Advertising Practice (sixth edition) affects advertising aimed at

children

Appendix IV 173

General

1.1 Direct appeals or exhortations to buy should not be made to children unless the prod-

uct advertised is one likely to be of interest to them which they could reasonably be

expected to afford for themselves.

1.2 Advertisements should not encourage children to make themselves a nuisance to their

parents, or anyone else, with the aim of persuading them to buy an advertised prod-

uct.

1.3 No advertisement should cause children to believe that they will be inferior to other

children, or unpopular with them, if they do not buy a particular product, or have it

bought for them.

1.4 No advertisement for a commercial product should suggest to children that, if they do

not buy it or encourage others to do so, they will be failing in their duty or lacking in

loyalty.

1.5 Advertisements addressed to children should make it easy for a child to judge the true

size of a product (preferably by showing it in relation to some common object) and

should take care to avoid any confusion between the characteristics of real-life articles

and toy copies of them.

1.6 Where the results obtainable by the use of a product are shown, these should not exag-

gerate what is attainable by an ordinary child.

1.7 Advertisements addressed to children should where ever possible give the price of the

advertised product.

Safety

2.1 No advertisement, particularly for a collecting scheme, should encourage children to

enter strange places or to converse with strangers in an effort to collect coupons, wrap-

pers, labels or the like.

2.2 Children should not appear to be unattended in street scenes unless they are obviously

old enough to be responsible for their own safety; should not be shown playing in the

road, unless it is clearly shown to be a play-street or other safe area; should not be

shown stepping carelessly off the pavement or crossing the road without due care; in

busy street scenes should be seen to use the zebra crossings when crossing the road;

and should be otherwise seen in general, as pedestrians or cyclists, to behave in accor-

dance with the Highway Code.

2.3 Children should not be seen leaning dangerously out of windows or over bridges, or

climbing dangerous cliffs.

2.4 Small children should not be shown climbing up to high shelves or reaching up to take

things from a table above their heads.

2.5 Medicines, disinfectants, antiseptics and caustic substances should not be shown

within reach of children without close parental supervision, nor should unsupervised

children be shown using these products in any way.

2.6 Children should not be shown using matches or any gas, paraffin, petrol, mechanical

or mains-powered appliance which could lead to their suffering burns, electrical shock

or other injury.

174 Appendix IV

2.7 Children should not be shown driving or riding on agricultural machines (including

tractor-drawn carts or implements), so as to encourage contravention of the Agricul-

ture (Safety, Health and Welfare Provisions) Act 1956.

2.8 An open fire in a domestic scene in an advertisement should always have a fireguard

clearly visible if a child is included in the scene.

APPENDIX V

Useful addresses

Advertising Agency Register, 62 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1; (01) 437 3357.

The Advertising Association (and the CAM Foundation), Abford House, 15 Wilton

Road, London SW1; (01) 828 2771.

Advertising Creative Circle, 82 Baker Street, London W1.

Advertising Standards Authority (also Code of Advertising Practice Committee), Brook

House, Torrington Place, London WC1; (01) 580 5555.

Audit Bureau of Circulations, 13 Wimpole Street, London W1; (01) 631 1343.

British Rate and Data, 76 Oxford Street, London W1; (01) 637 7511/8.

The Central Office of Information, Hercules House, Hercules Road, London SEl; (01)

928 2345.

The History of Advertising Trust, 53 Goodge Street, London W1P 1FB.

Independent Broadcasting Authority, 70 Brompton Road, London SW3; (01) 584

7011.

Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, 44 Belgrave Square, London SW1; (01) 235

7020.

Institute of Public Relations, 1 Great James Street, London WC1; (01) 405 5505.

Trade Publications

Admap (monthly)

Advertisers Annual (yearly)

A dvertising Magazine (quarterly)

Advertising and Marketing (quarterly)

BRAD (British Rate and Data) (monthly)

Broadcast (weekly)

Campaign (weekly)

Creative Handbook (yearly)

Designers and Art Directors Association Annual

IBA Yearbook

Marketing Weekly

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Alvarado, M. (1980) ‘Photographs and narrativity’, Screen Education, 32/33.

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Bremond, J. (1977) La Publicité, Paris: Hatier.

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Cowie, E. (1977) ‘Women: representation and the image’, Screen Education, 23.

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Crompton, A. (1979) The Craft of Copywriting, London: Business Books.

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Downing, J. (1980) The Media Machine, London: Pluto Press.

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178 References

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Ewen, S. (1976) Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer

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Hoggart, R. (1957) The Uses of Literacy, London: Chatto & Windus.

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Jakobson, R. (1971) Studies on Child Language and Aphasia, The Hague: Mouton.

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Lippa, M. and Newton, D. (1979) The World of Small Ads, London: Hamlyn.

Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin.

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References 179

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180 References

Whitehead, F. (1965) ‘Advertising’, in Thompson, D. (ed.) (1965).

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Williamson, J. (1978) Decoding Advertisements, London: Marion Boyars.

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Warburg.

Winship, J. (1981) ‘Handling sex’, in Curran (ed.) (1981).

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Women in Media (1976) The Packaging of Women, London: Women in Media.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

History

(Advertising has attracted surprisingly few historians.) Begley, G. (1975) Keep Mum! Advertising Goes to War, London: Lemon Tree Press. An account of

wartime advertising with some reproductions of wartime ‘austerity’ ads and propaganda posters

against ‘squanderbugs’ etc.

Elliott, B.B. (1962) A History of English Advertising, London: London Business Publications Ltd.

Field, E. (1959) Advertising: The Forgotten Years, London: Ernest Benn. An anecdotal look at

advertising campaigns during the first twenty-five years of this century. Quite interesting ‘inside’

detail and some nice illustrations but no depth.

Sampson, H. (1875) A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times, London: Chatto & Windus.

Schuwer, P. (1966) History of Advertising, Geneva: Edito-Service SA. Well illustrated.

Turner, E.S. (1965) The Shocking History of Advertising, Harmondsworth: Penguin. A lively

account of advertising from the seventeenth century to the 1950s. Not much critical analysis but

one of the very few books on the history of advertising.

de Vries, L. (1968) Victorian Advertising, London: John Murray.

Economics

(Consult also the business news sections of the quality press for a handy source of news of

the economics and profession of advertising.) Galbraith, K. (1962) The Afluent Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin. An entertaining yet profound

account of the economics of Western society with many important insights into advertising and

demand management. You don’t need to be an economist to understand it.

Galbraith, K. (1969) The New Industrial State, Harmondsworth: Penguin. A study of advanced

industrial economics, their ‘technostructures’, and the way they reach out to control the

consumer.

Kaldor, N. (1950/1) ‘The economic aspects of advertising’, in The Three Faces of Advertising

(1975), London: The Advertising Association. Although written many years ago this is still a

major contribution to the debate on economics and advertising. Recommended only for those

who have some grasp of economic theory.

Effects

(See also advertising and marketing journals and also Public Opinion Quarterly, Journalism

Quarterly, Journal of Communication.) Krugman, H. (1975) ‘The impact of TV advertising’, Public Opinion Quarterly, XXIX, 3, 1965.

Morley, D. (1980) The Nationwide Audience, London: British Film Institute. A useful resumé of the

various ‘effects’ research approaches, plus an attempt at a new kind of audience research based

on group interviews.

182 Bibliography

Inside views, apologies and professional primers

(See also the business news sections of the ‘quality’ newspapers and the professional

journals.) Arlen, M.J. (1981) Thirty Seconds, New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux. A dryly humorous and

cynical account of the machinations behind the making of a thirty second TV commercial for

American Telephone and Telegraph by a New York advertising agency. The book charts every

minute detail and the massive expense that went into the filming of a fleeting spot on American

TV screens.

Baker, S.S. (1969) The Permissible Lie, London: Peter Owen. Subtitled The Inside Truth About

Advertising, it was banned in the USA when it was first published.

Fletcher, W. (1973) The Ad Makers, London: Michael Joseph. Written by one of the top agency

men, this ‘defence’ of advertising is entertaining and witty, and gives a good insight into the

‘cynical’ mind of advertising.

Mayer, M. (1961) Madison Avenue, USA, Harmondsworth: Penguin. A very straightforward account

of the American advertising business.

Ogilvy, D. (1964) Confessions of an Advertising Man, London: Longman. A sensational kind of

apology or defence of the system.

Pearson, J. and Turner, G. (1966) The Persuasion Industry, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. An

account of the way the advertising industry works. Well written and detailed but rather blind to

its social and economic position and by no means critical.

Tunstall, J. (1964) The Advertising Man in London Advertising Agencies, London: Chapman &

Hall. One of the very few sociological accounts of the work of advertising agencies and the

people who work in them.

General cultural criticism

Barnouw, E. (1978) The Sponsor, New York: Oxford University Press. An investigation of the role

played by advertising in American television, and its influence on news, documentaries and

entertainment. Fascinating and frightening.

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: BBC/Pelican. A collection of essays on the language and

status of images, including a very illuminating one on publicity.

Boorstin, D. (1963) The Image, Harmondsworth: Penguin. General critique of the American

‘moonshine’ industries. A chapter on ‘The search for self-fulfilling prophecies’ shows how

advertisers inflate nothing into something.

Ewen, S. (1976) Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer

Culture, New York: McGraw-Hill. A history of the consumer culture, particularly of the

early conditioning of consumers in the 1920s. A very good blend of theory and ‘analysis’ of

advertisements against a background of social and economic change.

Hall, S. and Whannel, P. (1964) The Popular Arts, London: Hutchinson Educational. This book,

written in the 1960s, examines film, television, magazines and advertising. The examples seem a

bit dated now, but the general theoretical framework and the approach are rigorous and pertinent.

The section on advertising, ‘The big bazaar’, is a short but useful discussion of the cultural and

‘moral’ aspects of advertising and includes a closer look at its language, imagery and style.

Inglis, F. (1972) The Imagery of Power, London: Heinemann. A polemical critique of advertising

bringing in historical politicoeconomic and cultural arguments. A chapter on the rhetoric of

advertising examines a series of ads.

Leavis, F.R. and Thomson, D. (1933) Culture and Environment, London: Chatto & Windus. A

‘classic’ attack on advertising, originally intended as a manual for the training of ‘critical

Bibliography 183

awareness’. Very out of date and nostalgic but an interesting example of the Leavisite position

on contemporary culture.

Packard, V. (1957) The Hidden Persuaders, Harmondsworth: Penguin. A very readable debunking

of motivational research in American advertising. Probably a little out of date now. Despite its

sinister and sensational revelations, in the end the book fails to consider why and how and for

whose benefit advertising operates.

Williams, R. (1980) ‘Advertising: magic system’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture, London:

Verso. This essay originally written for The Long Revolution (1961) turned up in New Left

Review, 4, 1960, and has been rewritten for this collection. It is an acute and typically Williams

attack on modern advertising, from historical, economic, social and cultural perspectives.

Methods and analysis

Andren, G. et al. (1978) Rhetoric and Ideology in Advertising, Stockholm: Liber Förlag. A content

analysis of American advertising, written in English by a group of Swedish philosophers.

Contains detailed discussion of content analysis as a method, and very thorough analysis of

magazine ads.

Barthes, R. (1964) ‘The rhetoric of the image’, in Image—Music—Text (1977), London: Fontana. A

major essay on semiotics and its application to the analysis of an advertising message.

Barthes, R. (1973) Mythologies, St Albans: Paladin. A key work of semiotics and cultural analysis,

with several short essays on particular ads and publicity campaigns.

Durand, J. (1970) ‘Rhetorique et image publicitaire’, Communications 15, Paris: Editions du Seuil.

A close study of rhetoric in advertising, which raises some interesting questions in relation to

rhetorical analysis. No translation I know of, but easy French.

Fiske, J. (1982) Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Methuen. A companion to this

volume with good general introduction to concepts and methods relating to communications in

general.

Gauthier, G. (1976) The Semiology of the Image, British Film Institute Advisory Document. A good

introduction to the application of semiotic theory to advertisements and other media images.

Langholz Leymore, V. (1975) The Hidden Myth, London: Heinemann. An original study applying

the basic principles of structural analysis to modern television advertising. (Follows Levi-

Strauss’s Structural Anthropology.) Rather difficult to follow for the uninitiated and non-

mathematical with rather disappointing conclusions.

Leech, G. (1966) English in Advertising, London: Longmans. A very comprehensive study of

advertising style from a strictly linguistic point of view. Not too difficult for the non-linguist but

no discussion of its cultural, economic or ‘political’ consequences.

McLuhan, M. (1951) The Mechanical Bride, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. An early detailed

discussion of contemporary advertising and visual communication. One of the first critics to

consider the ‘formal’ properties of ads.

Webster, F. (1980) The New Photography, London: John Calder. A study of the social and political

role of photography and of cultural/visual communication in general. References to advertising,

photo-journalism, films and television.

Williamson, J. (1978) Decoding Advertisements, London: Marian Boyers. Interesting but sometimes

complex analysis of advertisements using semiotics as a basis for ideological and psychoanalytic

critique.

Women and advertising

Adams, C. and Laurikietis, R. (1976) Messages and Images, Book 3 of The Gender Trap. A

Close Look at Sex Roles, London: Virago. Investigates the stereotypes of women and men in

184 Bibliography

advertising, newspapers, jokes, cartoons, etc. Written for young people in school and college

and their teachers and parents.

Goffman, E. (1979) Gender Advertisements, London: Macmillan. An elegant analysis and

discussion of visual communication and gender display in advertising by a leading American

social anthropologist.

King, J. and Stott, M. (eds) (1977) Is This Your Life? Images of Women in the Media, London:

Virago. A look at the attitudes and images of women presented by advertising, with some Useful

advice on how to combat sexist and stereotypical portrayals of women.

Millum, T. (1975) Images of Women: Advertising in Women’s Magazines, London: Chatto &

Windus. A discussion of concepts of femininity and physical appearance which reveals the way

women are presented in advertising from point of view of visual communication and cultural

symbols.

Women in Media (1976) The Packaging of Women: How Women are Portrayed in Advertisements.

Report of the proceedings of a Woman in Media Seminar on whether and how it might be

possible to influence current business thinking and practice.

INDEX

accumulation, figures of, 162, 165

activity as a communication tool, 101–4

Addison, Joseph, 22

addition, figures of, 161–70

advertisement tax, 17, 29

Advertisers’ Protection Agency, 41

Advertisers Weekly, 47

Advertising Agency Register, 213

Advertising Standards Authority, 184, 208, 213

age, influence of, 97

agencies, growth of, 34–5, 41, 56, 74

alliteration, 155

allusion, 162

Alvarado, M., 129

ambiguity, 162, 167

anacoluthon, 162, 177–8

Andren, G., 109, 112

antanaclasis, 162

antilogy, 162

antimetabole, 162, 179

antiphrasis, 162

antithesis, 162

antonomasia, 175

appearance as a communication tool, 97–9

art in advertising, 35–7

asyndeton, 162, 175

Ballyhoo, 47

Barnouw, E., 59–60, 70

Barthes, R., 81, 104, 127, 128, 129, 130, 158, 159, 160

Berger, J., 92

billposting, growth of, 32

body, use of

characteristics, 98

movements, 101

Boorstin, D., 82

brand names, development of, 141

British Code of Advertising Practice, 208–12

business advertising, characteristics of, 5

Byron, George G. (6th Baron), 56

calligraphy, 155–6

Carlyle, Thomas, 29

186 Index

celebrities, use of, 10, 96, 113, 145, 186

charity advertising, characteristics of, 5

chiasmus, 162, 178–80

choice, consumer, 8–9

circulation figures, 42

circumlocution, 162, 170–1

class consciousness, 94

classification of advertising, 4–5, 88–92

classified advertisements, characteristics of, 5, 88–9

codes, semiotic, 131–6

(see also signs)

coined words, 29, 150

colour, use of, 94, 107, 120, 129

commerical television

establishment, 58–62

future, 62–3

relations with the press, 63–4

connotive signs, 127–31

consumer affairs

choice, 8–9

information, 6, 10

content analysis, 108–11

culture

impact of advertising on, 79–81, 218–19

traditions of, 97, 99, 115, 125, 135

Curran, J., 53, 66–7, 71

Daily Herald, 64, 68

Daily Mail, 42, 65

Daily Mirror, 68

Daily Sketch, 64

Daily Telegraph, 62

Deacon, Samuel, 35

definition of advertising, 2–3

denotive signs, 127–31

dialogue, use of, 130

display advertising, development of, 35

dubitation, 162

Durand, J., 159, 160, 162, 165

economic aspects, 3–4

editors, influence on, 66–8, 183

ellipsis, 162, 165, 170

emotions, exploitation of, 3, 6, 92, 150

epitrochasm, 165

Ericsson, L.C., see Andren, G.

euphemism, 162, 175–6

Ewen, S., 45

exchange, figures of, 176–82

Index 187

expenditure on advertising, 188–91

expressions, use of facial, 99

eye contact, use of, 99–100

false homology, 176

female image, see women

figurative language, 151–5

financial advertising, characteristics of, 5

financial aspects of advertising, 42, 188–94, 216

Fiske, J., 108, 113

Ford, Henry, 41, 46

Foucault, M., 156

Frankfurt School, 81

Freud, S., 159

Friendly, F., 70

Galbraith, J.K., 6, 78

gender, influence of, 97

(see also sex)

gestures, use of, 101

Goffman, E., 97, 98, 99, 101, 112, 135

Golding, P., 53

Gombrich, E., 159

government advertising, characteristics of, 5

Gramsci, A., 46

Guardian, The, 63

Hall, S., 89

Harmsworth, Alfred (Lord Northcliffe), 42, 64

Hartley, J., 113

hendiadys, 162, 176

historical aspects of advertising, 15–37, 39–53, 55–60, 215–16

History of Advertising Trust, 213

homology, 162, 176

false, 176, 177

homonymy, 153

hyperbole, 162, 173–5, 179

iconography

analysis of, 93–4, 95, 105–6

signs used in, 124–6, 128

illustrations, see imagery and images

imagery, use of visual, 82, 89, 93

images, creation of, 123–6

indexical signs, 124–6

information dissemination, 6–7, 89

Inglis, F., 2, 10, 80

Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, 213

International Advertising Corporation (IAC), 46

inversion, 162, 176

188 Index

Jakobson, R., 127

jingles, 56

Johnson, Dr Samuel, 22

Kaldor, N.H., 6–7

key words, 149–51

Kipling, Rudyard, 37

Langholz Leymore, V., 2

language

analysis of, 79–80, 81, 117–18, 151–5, 218–19

role of, 139–40, 144–7

style of, 142–3

Leavis, F.R., 80

Legal aspects, 147–9, 206–7

Lever Brothers advertising campaign, 40

Life, 46

Lippa, M., 48

McGregor Commission (1977), 65

McGuiness, J., 37

McLuhan, M., 82

male image, 78, 83, 92, 94, 97–8, 100, 105, 108–9

manufacturing patterns, 8–9, 39–40, 42

Marcuse, H., 81

market control, 8–9, 39–40, 42

market research, 50, 74–5

Marmori, G., 159

meanings, interchangeability of word, 116–17

media, role of mass communication, 9–11

(see also television)

meiosis, 174–5

metaphors, 127, 152, 162, 175

metonymy, 127, 153, 162, 175

Millais, Sir John Everett, 35

Mills, C.W., 8

Millum, T., 98, 104, 106

monopoly capitalism, 40

motivational research (MR), 83

Murdoch, Rupert, 65

music, 56

national advertisements, development of, 30

New York Evening Post, 43

News Chronicle, 64, 65

News of the World, 42, 62

newspaper advertising, development of, 42, 63–5

Newton, D., 48

Northcliffe, Alfred (1st Viscount) (Alfred Harmsworth), 42, 64

Index 189

Observer, The, 62, 65

Ohlsson, L.O., see Andren, G.

opposition of rhetorical figures, 162, 165

oxymoron, 179

Packard, V., 83

Panofsky, E., 93, 94, 105

paradigmatic sign relations, 126–7

paradox, 162, 167–70

parallelism, 155

patent medicines, advertisements for, 24–7, 30, 46–7, 50

paternalism in advertising, growth of, 45–6

Pears advertising campaign, 33–4, 35–7, 40

periphrasis, 162, 175–6

persuasive techniques in advertising

first instances of, 17

growth of, 41, 89, 92–3, 109–10, 158–9

photographic techniques, 106–8, 124, 131

physical characteristics, influence of, 198

pictures, use of, 82, 89, 93, 106–8

poetry, 29, 56

political advertising, characteristics of, 11–12

positional communication, 100, 101–4

prestige advertising, characteristics of, 5

preterition, 162, 173

psychology in advertising

first instances of, 43–5

growth of, 74, 75, 83

public relations (PR), 11–12

puns, 153, 154, 162

racial characteristics, influence of, 98

Renault cars advertising campaign, 120–3

repetition, figures of, 161–2

reticence, 162

rhetoric

and language analysis, 152–5

and visual analysis

addition, 161–70

exchange, 176–82

substitution, 173–6

suppression, 170–3

rhyme, 162, 163

(see also verse)

role borrowing in language, 146–7

Saussure, F. de, 115, 126

semiotics

classification, 124–36

190 Index

definition, 115

methods, 117–24

setting and staging, role of, 104–6

sex, in advertising, see male image, and women, image of

(see also gender)

signs

meanings, 127–31

(see also codes)

relations, 126–7

systems, 118–26

similes, 153, 162, 163

slogans, growth of, 32–3

small ads, 5, 88

Society for the Checking of Abuses in Public Advertising (SCAPA), 37, 41

sociological effects of advertising, 75–7

spellings and misspellings, 150

structuralism, 117–18

substitution, figures of, 173–6

Sun, The, 62, 68

suppression, figures of, 170–3

suspension, 162, 170–2

symbolism, 91, 94, 105, 125

synechdoche, 175, 179

syntagmatic sign relations, 126–7

Tännsjö, T., see Andren, G.

tautology, 162, 173

tax on advertising, 17, 29

technical advertisements, characteristics of, 4–5

television advertising

analysis of, 10–11

growth of, 57–63

(see also media)

Thompson, D., 53

Thomson, K.R., 58

Times, The, 30, 35, 47, 63

trade advertising, characteristics of, 4–5

Trade Descriptions Act (1968), 147

‘truth in advertising’ campaign, 46

Turner, E.S., 41

verse, use of, 29, 56

(see also rhyme)

visual imagery, 82, 89, 93, 123–6

visual perception, 94–6

visual rhetoric

addition, 161–70

exchange, 176–82

substitution, 173–6

Index 191

suppression, 170–3

visual techniques, 106–8, 124, 131

voice, use of, 141–3

Welch, R., 107

Whannel, P., 89

Williams, R., 2, 5, 7, 10, 28, 37, 49, 73, 80, 185

Williamson, J., 1, 116, 117, 126, 156, 170

Winship, J., 115, 182

women

as sex objects, 92, 107, 124, 184, 185–6

image of, 219–20

domestic, 56, 78, 83, 92, 97–8, 108–9, 117

submissive, 99, 100, 101, 102, 120–3

working, 52, 185–6

‘word magic’, 49, 50

words

choice of, 140–3, 149–51

meanings, 116–17

zeugma, 162