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Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture
Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture
Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society
FOURTH EDITION
Arthur Asa Berger With illustrations by the author
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous edition of this book as follows: Berger, Arthur Asa, 1933– Ads, fads, and consumer culture : advertising’s impact on American character and society / Arthur Asa Berger ; with illustrations by the author. — 3rd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Advertising—United States. 2. Popular culture—United States. 3. Consumer education—United States. I. Title. HF5823.B438 2007 659.1’0420973—dc22 2006100596 ISBN: 978-1-4422-0668-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
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Printed in the United States of America
Some measure of greed exists unconsciously in everyone. It represents an
aspect of the desire to live, one which is mingled and fused at the outset
of life with the impulse to turn aggression and destructiveness outside
ourselves against others, and as such it persists unconsciously throughout
life. By its very nature it is endless and never assuaged; and being a form
of the impulse to live, it ceases only with death.
The longing or greed for good things can relate to any and every imagin-
able kind of good—material possessions, bodily or mental gifts, advantages
and privileges; but, beside the actual gratifi cations they may bring, in the
depths of our minds they ultimately signify one thing. They stand as proofs
to us, if we get them, that we are ourselves good, and full of good, and so are
worthy of love, or respect and honour, in return. Thus they serve as proofs
and insurances against our fears of emptiness inside ourselves, or of our evil
impulses which make us feel bad and full of badness to ourselves and others.
—Joan Riviere, “Hate, Greed and Aggression”
CONTENTS
Foreword by Fred S. Goldberg xi
Preface to the Fourth Edition xv
Preface to the Third Edition xix
Acknowledgments xxiii
1 Advertising in American Society 1
Advertising as a Puzzlement 1
Max Weber on Religion and Consumer Cultures 4
Advertising and Politics 5
Defi ning Advertising 6
Advertising Agencies 10
A Psycho-Cultural Perspective on Advertising 12
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 13
Commercials as Mini-Dramas and Works of Art 15
Teleculture and the Internet 21
The Super Bowl 24
Conclusion 26
2 Consumer Cultures 29
A Cultural Critique of Advertising 29
Consumer Cultures Defi ned 31
Taste Cultures and Advertising 33
The Postmodern Perspective 34
The Problem of Emotions Overcoming Rationality 38
Consumer Culture and Privatism 39
Neiman Marcus and “Couthifi cation” 40
Needs Are Finite, Desires Are Infi nite 42
Mimetic Desire 44
Are There Four Consumer Cultures, Not Just One? 45
Classifi ed Advertising 51
vii
3 Advertising and the Communication Process 55
The Lasswell Formula 55
Focal Points and the Study of Media 56
The Lasswell Formula and Focal Points 58
A Problem with the Lasswell Formula 58
Metaphor and Metonymy 61
Metaphor and Identity: I Am a Seashell 63
4 Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 65
Lisa’s Morning: A Fiction 65
Lisa Greatgal’s and Johnny Q. Public’s Daily Media Diet 66
Television Viewing and Exposure to Commercials 67
Our All-Consuming Passion for Consuming 69
A Note on “Hauls” 70
The Price We Pay for “Free” Television 70
The Illusion of Control 70
Being a “Branded Individual” 75
Selling Oneself 79
Selling Oneself for Brands 80
The Problem of Self-Alienation 81
We Can Choose as We Please, but Can We Please as We Please? 82
The Agony of Choice 85
Non-Advertising Forms of Advertising 86
5 Sexuality and Advertising 89
Sex in Advertising 91
Sexploitation and Anxiety 94
The Peach That Became a Prune: A Cautionary Fable 96
The Pseudo-Poetic Appeal to the Illiterati 99
Sex Appeal and Gender Appeal 101
Sex Sells Cigarettes 102
The Case of Joe Camel 103
Sex and the Problem of Clutter 105
6 Political Advertising 109
Kinds of Political Advertisements 111
The 1998 California Primary: A “Virtual” Campaign
for Governor 113
Questions Raised by the “Virtual” Campaign 114
The 2002 California Campaign for Governor 116
The 2010 California Campaign for Governor 118
The Cost of Presidential Campaigns 118
viii Contents
The Code of the Commercial (and Other Political Advertising) 119
The Emotional Basis of Partisan Politics 120
The Death of the Tobacco Bill 122
7 The Marketing Society 125
Statistics on Advertising 125
More Comments on the Illusion of Freedom 126
The Marketing View 128
Maslow’s Theory of Needs 130
The VALS 1 Typology 130
Using the VALS 1 Typology: A Case Study 134
VALS 2: A Revision of the VALS 1 Typology 134
Zip Codes and Kinds of Consumers 136
The Claritas Typology 138
Magazine Choice as an Indicator of Consumer Taste 140
Types of Teenage Consumers 142
Blogs and Marketing 144
A Typology for Everyone in the World 145
A Comparison of the Different Typologies 147
A Conclusion in the Form of a Question 149
8 Analyzing Print Advertisements or: Six Ways of Looking 151
at a Fidji Perfume Advertisement
Lotman’s Contributions to Understanding Texts 151
What’s There to Analyze in an Advertisement? 152
Analyzing the Fidji Ad 154
A Semiotic Interpretation of the Fidji Advertisement 155
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of the Fidji Advertisement 157
A Sociological Interpretation of the Fidji Advertisement 160
A Marxist Interpretation of the Fidji Advertisement 161
The Myth Model and the Fidji Advertisement 162
A Feminist Interpretation of the Fidji Advertisement 164
Conclusion 165
9 Analyzing Television Commercials: The Macintosh 167
“1984” Commercial
A Synopsis of the Text 169
The Background 170
George Orwell’s 1984 and Ridley Scott’s “1984” 171
The Image of the Total Institution 172
The Prisoners’ Boots 173
The Blond as Symbol 174
Contents ix
The Brainwashing Scenario 174
The Big Brother Figure 175
The Brainwasher’s Message 175
The Big Explosion 176
The Inmates’ Response 177
The Macintosh Announcement 177
The Heroine as Mythic Figure 177
Psychoanalytic Aspects of the Commercial 178
The Blond as Mediator 179
Alienated Proles 181
The Big Blue 182
A Clever Marketing Strategy 182
The “1984” Commercial and a Bit of Scholarly Research 183
10 Where Next? 187
Drug Advertising 187
Children and Advertising 190
Battling for People’s Attention 192
Cell Phones, Social Media, and Advertising 193
Appendix: Useful Web Sites 195
Glossary 197
Annotated Bibliography 215
Bibliography 219
Index 225
About the Author 233
x Contents
xi
FOREWORD
Fred S. Goldberg
I spent thirty-four years in advertising: the fi rst fi fteen at what was then, ar-
guably, the fi nest of the large traditional Madison Avenue agencies (Young
& Rubicam, NY); the next nine years at arguably the fi nest creative agency
in the country at the time (Chiat/Day, LA); and the last ten founding and
managing my own agency (Goldberg Moser O’Neill, San Francisco). This
experience provided me with a unique overview and insight into the business
of advertising.
When you study advertising and advertising’s impact, it helps to under-
stand the context within which advertising messages are developed, produced,
and aired. Many of the print ads and commercials that consumers ultimately
see could have been demonstrably different, were it not for the confl icting
interests that went hand in hand with their development.
In theory, advertisers hire advertising agencies to create ads that will break
through and impact their customers and potential customers. They hope to max-
imize the effectiveness of often limited media and promotional dollars, achieve a
competitive edge, and gain extra mileage from each advertising message.
Yet, because of the nature of the industry and the agency and client rela-
tionship, a series of confl icts often prevents this from happening as frequently
as it should. And this explains, at least in part, why there is so much advertis-
ing that is spurious, curious, muddled, and jumbled. The impact that it all has
on the American character and culture, as explained in this book, is partially
the result of the confl icting way advertising gets developed. One can only
wonder what the ads, and their effect, would be if self-interest was removed
along the way.
These confl icts have a numbing consequence on the impact of clients’ ad-
vertising dollars and the subsequent success they have in the marketplace selling
their products or positioning their companies or causes. The advertising business
xii Foreword
is unique and particularly diffi cult because it is fraught with these confl icts which
very often result in a dumbed-down fi nal product.
Trying to represent what is best for the client, while still trying to make a
profi t, is sometimes a challenge for an advertising agency. It’s easy to profess,
as advertising agencies are prone to do, that their recommendations are im-
partially formulated only to drive a client’s business, but that is not always the
case. In fact they are infl uenced by the existence of various agendas operating
at different levels of management in an agency and in different departments.
Similar agendas may exist on the client side.
Advertising executives may believe that they are providing complete ob-
jectivity, but at the end of the day they can be often prejudiced, partial, and
biased. One example that Arthur Berger observes in this book is that for vari-
ous reasons it is important that the advertising agency recommend only one
campaign. It must be made to seem to be the only answer to the company’s
problems. This practice provides fertile ground for confl icts of interests and
less than complete objectivity.
Why does this happen? One reason is confl icts between departments. On
the one hand, Account Management representatives may be trying to support
the client’s view and interest within the agency, while other departments are
developing recommendations that may or may not refl ect the client’s actual
needs. Or vice versa. The Account Planners are supposedly trying to represent
the consumer; the Creative People are representing their ad; and the Client is
concerned about his brand. This leads to internal agency debate, to compro-
mises, and ultimately to a fi nished product that often depends on who made
the strongest argument or had the most authority.
This is all further complicated, as Berger accurately points out, in that
people in advertising agencies need to sell both themselves and the products
they have been engaged to advertise. This can, in and of itself, create a confl ict.
There is another confl ict where many advertisers rely on creative test-
ing to help them make a decision. They rely heavily on the often spurious
conclusions, and this confl icts directly with implementing work that can truly
break through and impact the consumer in a highly competitive manner. In
client organizations, testing is a political tool as often as it is a learning device.
It helps protect people’s decision making, particularly in the context of a large
organizational framework, as much as it determines the worth of a particular
message or idea. When a test shows an idea to be normative, then the deci-
sion to use it can be more easily justifi ed. In other words, one’s backside is
adequately covered in the event of a failure.
Finally, there is the confl ict in trying to develop truly unique and creative
solutions to business and communication problems. It is my experience that,
generally, opposition to a creative solution grows greater in direct proportion
Foreword xiii
to its uniqueness and lack of familiarity. This is true for people within an ad
agency, the client organization, and even potential customers, all of whom are
asked to judge things that are new and different.
I was personally involved in what may have been one of the great advertis-
ing lessons of all time, exhibiting all of these various confl icting forces. It was
for Apple Computer—a commercial known as “1984.” This was the introduc-
tory commercial for Apple’s Macintosh and was one of the most memorable,
most persuasive, most effective commercials ever created.
However, the commercial, after being fully produced, was rejected by
then–Apple CEO Steve Jobs, after it was inordinately criticized by Apple’s
board of directors just prior to airing. They argued that it was an extrava-
gance and did not appropriately communicate Apple’s persona as a serious
business computer company to stockholders, investors, and the consumer.
They worried that Apple would look “insane” and “out of control” if the
commercial aired.
A test of the commercial supported the board somewhat, although they
never saw the results. It indicated that the commercial was well below estab-
lished averages in its “effectiveness,” scoring only a 5 against a norm of 29 for
thirty-second business-directed commercials. The commercial was actually
sixty seconds, and should have scored all that much higher.
The commercial was to air during the Super Bowl. Because the advertis-
ing agency was not able to resell the media time they had purchased for it,
Steve Jobs ultimately gave his approval to run the commercial in lieu of for-
feiting the money for the time which had already been committed. This was
done despite internal protestations at Apple.
History was made. The personal computer industry is entirely different
today because of this single “confl icted” advertising decision. The commercial
was recalled the day after it ran by 78 percent of viewers; Apple sold $3.5 mil-
lion worth of Macintosh computers within six hours the next business day and
$155 million over the next one hundred days. Today, Apple’s revenues are
$25 billion and it has a market capitalization of $59 billion, arguably because
of the airing of one single commercial.
This is but one eye-popping example of why advertising is such a unique
business among businesses.
The manner in which advertising is developed and implemented, and the
incredible infl uence it has on our culture and consumers, is profound. Ads,
Fads, and Consumer Culture delves into this and other matters. Arthur Berger
provides fresh insights and explanations on various aspects and issues of the
industry and the ads, and the impact on all of us. On the very fi rst page he
identifi es one of the critical issues: “Advertising agencies are forced to talk out
of both sides of their mouths at the same time.”
xiv Foreword
When one considers the enormous impact advertising has on millions
of people every day, and upon our culture, it is mind-boggling that so many
arbitrary factors and self-interests can shape the communication development
process. Reading Mr. Berger’s book in this context makes many of his analyses
and conclusions that much more surprising, insightful, thought provoking,
and entertaining.
The author specifi cally discusses and analyzes the Apple “1984” commer-
cial in depth in the last chapter. It’s amazing that this advertising had such a
profound impact on products and people’s lives when one considers the agony
and irony involved in giving birth to a genuinely new idea.
On the other hand, maybe it’s not so amazing. Maybe most advertising
works, whatever the development process, just because all advertising works.
xv
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
Advertising plays a major role in American life. Paco Underhill offers an inter-
esting factoid about advertising in his book (2009:152) Why We Buy: The Sci-
ence of Shopping. “The average four year old American child can identify more
than one hundred brands,” he writes, which is probably because American
children watch so much television and because so much marketing is directed
towards children and teenagers. That’s because many older people recognize
that buying things isn’t going to change their lives in signifi cant ways. As
Underhill explains (2009:152), “The older we get, the more we recognize
that the ownership of any product, no matter what it is, isn’t transformative.
That dress, that lipstick, the iPod nano is not going to change you or anyone’s
opinion of you.”
But teenagers, Underhill suggests, still believe in the power of brands to
shape their lives and perceptions others have of them. As he writes (2009:163):
Teenagers are still young enough to be total suckers for image, for all the
blandishments of advertising, identity marketing, media messages, trends
and labels. They still believe in a brand name’s power to confer status,
cool, charisma, knowledge. They construct their identities by the shopping
choices they make—they’re a lot like adults were back in the ’50s, before
we all became so wise in the way of image hucksters.
I would argue that many adults are also “suckers,” to use Underhill’s term, for
the appeals of advertising and believe that their brand choices are transforma-
tive. That is because, in part, we are bombarded (some would say brainwashed)
by advertising of all kinds all day long. We swim, like fi sh, in a sea of billboards,
newspaper and magazine ads, television commercials and Internet ads, so it is
very diffi cult to avoid being affected by all these messages. We have the illusion
that we can shield ourselves from advertising and are not affected by it. It is
analogous to fi sh believing that though they swim in water, they don’t get wet.
xvi Preface to the Fourth Edition
We are also very interested in advertising and its impact on our culture and
society. This is refl ected in the many sites devoted to advertising and various
aspects of the industry on Google. If you go to Google search and look for sites
that deal with advertising, this is what you will fi nd (as of March 20, 2010):
Advertising 350 million Advertising New Developments 183 million Internet Advertising 170 million Advertisements 53.6 million Advertising Techniques 41.6 million Advertising Agencies 29.8 million
In this book I have added new discussions of:
• Max Weber’s study of religion and its role in consumption
• The role of the unconscious and emotion in shaping consumer
behavior
• Brands and the way handbag brands shape the behavior of “mall
girls”
• Videos of girls talking about their “hauls”
• Sexuality and advertising
• Semiotics and identity
• Abraham Maslow’s theory of needs
Preface to the Fourth Edition xvii
I have also updated relevant statistics and enhanced my discussion of a number
of other topics throughout the book.
I hope that you will fi nd this book helpful in understanding the way
advertising works and the role that advertisements and commercials and the
advertising industry in general play in your life and American culture and so-
ciety as well. In addition to dealing with advertising in general in this book,
my chapters on print advertising and television commercials teach you how
to analyze these kinds of texts. I have added a number of new advertisements
and drawn some new illustrations to make the book more visually interesting.
I would be happy if, after you’ve read this book, you think two slogans from
commercials that appeared many years ago apply to it:—“Try it! You’ll like
it!” and “I ate [read] the whole thing!”
xix
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
It is a great pleasure for me to offer this new edition of Ads, Fads, and Consumer
Culture to my readers. The advertising industry is one in which there is con-
stant change, as new technologies develop, new products are created, and new
services are offered. For example, the Internet has become a major new source
of advertising revenue, as anyone who has used search engines such as Google
or Yahoo knows. And bloggers have become increasingly important. Advertis-
ing companies are now studying what bloggers say about new movies, video
games, and other products to gain added insights into consumer behavior.
There is a good deal of debate in academic circles and in the govern-
ment about the role of advertising in American society. Does advertising for
fast foods and junk food play a role in the rapid growth of obesity in America
and in a number of other countries? If so, how big a role has it played and
what should be done to remedy this situation? Has advertising for expensive
consumer drugs had a negative impact on the medical profession and upon the
health of Americans? As I write, there are efforts being made to modify the way
drug companies can advertise their products. Are young children being taught
to be self-indulgent and materialistic as they are “branded” by advertising? If
so, how do we counter this development?
Has advertising shaped, in important ways, the way individuals perceive
themselves and the way we perceive one another? If this is the case, how can
people defend themselves against the way they are being affected or even
“manipulated” by advertisers? These are only a few of the topics I deal with
in this book.
HIDDEN PERSUADERS
Whatever else it might be, advertising is a form of mass persuasion, and
we must wonder about the social, psychological, and cultural impact of this
xx Preface to the Third Edition
industry that plays so large a role in our media and everyday lives. In 1957,
Vance Packard wrote a book, The Hidden Persuaders, that alerted his readers
to the role advertising was playing in American society. He wrote (1957:3):
This book is an attempt to explore a strange and rather exotic new area
of American life. It is about the way many of us are being infl uenced and
manipulated—far more than we realize—in the patterns of our everyday
lives. Large-scale efforts are being made, often with impressive success, to
channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought
processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sci-
ences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so
that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, hidden.
Some of this manipulating being attempted is simply amusing. Some of it
is disquieting, particularly when viewed as a portent of what may be ahead
on a more intensive and effective scale for us all. Co-operative scientists have
come along providentially to furnish some awesome tools.
The impact of this use of psychoanalytic and other methods has led adver-
tisers to more effectively sell us (1957:3) “products, ideas, attitudes, candidates,
goals or states of mind.” Packard wrote his book some fi fty years ago. Since
then, the advertising industry has developed incredible new means of under-
standing our thought processes and ways of shaping our behavior.
It has also extended its reach, and uses “product placements” to put certain
products in television shows and fi lms and now shows commercials on cell
phones. In some cases, one product placement in a television show or fi lm can
lead to huge increases in the sales of that product. In addition, since fi lms with
product placements in them are widely distributed abroad, it gives products
placed in fi lms a global reach. Sometimes, products sold in a foreign country
are substituted for the original product placements in fi lms. Thus, in Spider-
Man 2, Dr. Pepper was shown in the fi lm in the United States but Mirinda
was shown overseas.
We can say, without stretching the truth too much, that, with few excep-
tions, wherever in the world there are fl at surfaces, such as sides of buildings,
cars, buses, and screens of all kinds and sizes, advertisers will fi nd a way to use
them for their purposes.
BRAIN SCANS AND CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
There is now experimentation in using brain scans to see which parts of
the brain are activated by exposure to advertisements. Advertisers have moved
beyond surveys, focus groups, and depth interviews and now are experiment-
Preface to the Third Edition xxi
ing with bypassing people’s explanations of why they do things to see, more
directly, how specifi c images, bits of dialogue, and music passages stimulate
certain parts of our brains. If advertisers are able to fi gure out how to bypass
our consciousness by using information learned by studying brain scans, they
will be even more powerful than they already are.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalytic theory, had suggested that
material stored in the unconscious elements of our psyches, areas we cannot
access and of which we are unaware, is often responsible for our actions. Many
advertising agencies use this notion to convince us to purchase the goods and
services they are selling. The Russian psychologist Pavlov showed how dogs
could be trained to salivate on command by being given certain stimuli, and
some advertisers have attempted to use this stimulus-response theory to at-
tempt to shape our consumption behavior. Now, advertising agencies, using
information derived from neurological studies of brain activation, may move
beyond Freud’s theory and develop strategies that can only be described as
Orwellian in their implications.
So there is much to discuss in this new edition and I hope that you will
fi nd this book helps you understand the role advertising plays in American
culture and society and in giving you notions about who you are, what is im-
portant in life, and what role you should play in society. Advertising pervades
our everyday lives. How advertising affects our psyches, our society, and our
culture is a question that demands continual study and attention. This book
will help you learn how to analyze print advertisements and television com-
mercials as a means of gaining a bit of control over this subtle and all-pervasive
force in American culture and other societies as well.
A NOTE ON THE ADVERTISEMENTS
USED IN THIS BOOK
Advertising campaigns come and go so quickly that it is impossible to
keep up with the newest ads and commercials, and there is really no need to
do so. Most advertising is undistinguished, at best. And the “life expectancy”
for any advertisement or commercial or campaign is, generally speaking, not
very long. One exception to this fact is the Absolut campaign, which lasted for
twenty-fi ve years before the company decided on a new campaign.
Thus, for my chapters on analyzing print advertisements and commercials
I have chosen texts (the terms we use in academic discourse for advertisements,
fi lms, television shows, and so on) of great interest and ones that are considered
classics. They are also very useful since they are extremely rich in symbols and
cultural signifi cance and allow for a great deal of analysis.
xxii Preface to the Third Edition
The Fidji advertisement was the main subject of a major study of perfume
advertising at INSEAD, The European Institute of Business Administration,
one of the most important business schools in the world. I didn’t know about
the INSEAD study when I wrote my analysis of the advertisement. I was
captivated by the complex symbology in the advertisement. The Macintosh
“1984” commercial was voted the second best advertisement in the 1980s (the
fi rst was the famous “fast talker” commercial for Federal Express by Ally &
Gargano) by The One Club for Art and Copy, an organization that evaluates
advertising in the advertising industry.
So I have chosen texts for these two chapters, and in a number of other
places, that are extremely interesting and useful for analysis. Choosing more
up-to-date advertisements and commercials for my chapters on methods of
analyzing print advertisements and television commercials, from my perspec-
tive, would serve no useful purpose, for it is the application of the techniques
of interpreting and analyzing advertisements and commercials that is critical,
not the texts themselves. However, I have inserted new advertisements in vari-
ous places in the third edition, though what is really important is the degree to
which the reproduced advertisement refl ects some topic of interest dealt with
in the book, not when it was made.
xxiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My list of topics to consider on print advertising and television commercials
draws upon, but is a modifi cation and enhancement of, material in my book
Seeing Is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication (1998). In Ads, Fads,
and Consumer Culture I focus on a more general analysis using some of the
basic critical techniques. The interpretive techniques I use in the Fidji analysis
are dealt with in more detail in my books Media Analysis Techniques, Cultural
Criticism, Seeing Is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication, and Signs
in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics. They offer more amplifi ed
discussions of the various methodologies and concepts I will be using here, and
they also have bibliographies for those interested in pursuing these interpre-
tive methodologies in more depth. The glossary is an adaptation, revised and
tied to advertising, of my glossary in Essentials of Mass Communication Theory.
I am grateful to Transaction Publishers for giving me permission to reprint
my article on the “1984” commercial and to Sage Publications for giving me
permission to reprint my analysis of the Fidji advertisement. I have revised both
of these articles considerably for this book. I also want to thank the Advertis-
ing Education Foundation for granting me a visiting professorship in 1999 that
enabled me to spend three weeks at Goldberg Moser O’Neill advertising in
San Francisco, and Fred Goldberg and all his colleagues for making my stay
there so enjoyable and useful and for allowing me to use a number of their
advertisements in this book.
Advertisements sanctify, signify, mythologize, and fantasize. They uphold
some of the existing economic and political structures and subvert others.
Not only does advertising shape American culture; it shapes Americans’
images of themselves.
—Katherine Toland Frith, Undressing the Ad:
Reading Culture in Advertising
The loyal customer is worth more than the sum of her purchases. A faithful
General Motors customer can be worth $276,000 over her lifetime, includ-
ing the 11 or more vehicles bought plus a word-of-mouth endorsement
making friends and relatives more likely to consider GM products.
—Greg Farrell, “Marketers Put a Price on Your Life”
1
1
ADVERTISING IN AMERICAN SOCIETY
Advertising is really quite puzzling. In 2009 it was a $170 billion a year
industry (down from around $200 billion in 2006) in the United States
and it employs a goodly number of the brightest and most creative people in
American society and other societies as well (often at very high salaries, to
boot). Curiously, people who work in the industry have diffi culty proving
that it works—especially in the long term. The word advertising means “to
make known,” and generally is understood to refer to public—now we would
say mass mediated—announcements of products and services that are for sale.
The Latin root of the word is advertere, which means “to pay attention to.”
This word can be broken down further: ad means “toward” and vertere means
“to turn.” So advertising attempts to turn our attention toward something—
namely the announcement of some product or service. There is logic, then, to
the fi rst rule of advertising, which is, attract attention. If people aren’t paying
attention to a print advertisement or a radio or television commercial, you
can’t persuade them to do anything.
ADVERTISING AS A PUZZLEMENT
A department store merchant, John Wanamaker, is reputed to have said,
many years ago, “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted . . . but
I don’t know which half.” Also, advertising agencies are forced to talk out of
both sides of their mouths at the same time. They have to convince clients
that advertising is really effective—in generating sales, holding on to the cus-
tomers a company already has, or attracting new customers. But when gov-
ernmental agencies or consumer groups ask advertising agencies about what
they do when it comes to advertising products such as cigarettes and alcohol,
for instance, the advertising agencies argue that they have very little impact on
people. The situation seems to be that although nobody in the business world
is certain how advertising works, there is a consensus that it is necessary and
that campaigns are worth the enormous amount of money they often cost.
2 Chapter 1
Thus, for example, commercials broadcast during the 2005 Super Bowl
cost $2.4 million for thirty seconds and the cost of the commercials during the
2006 Super Bowl was $2.5 million for a thirty-second spot. By 2010 it was $3
million. This is a great deal of money but there are reasons why companies pay
that amount of money to show commercials during the game. I will discuss
Super Bowl advertising in more detail shortly.
We must always keep in mind the difference between the cost of making
a nationally broadcast television commercial and the cost of purchasing airtime
to show a commercial. The cost of making a standard thirty-second nation-
ally broadcast television commercial is between $300,000 and $400,000 now,
though some commercials can cost a good deal more than that. A typical “Got
Milk” commercial costs around $370,000 (fi gure 1.1). Purchasing the airtime
might run into the millions of dollars. Naturally, advertisers want to run effec-
tive commercials, so it’s worth spending a bit more money for a commercial
that will work. The campaign for “Got Milk” attracted an enormous amount
Insights from Advertising Agencies
The psychological profi le of people in advertising is that they love the drama involved in working in agencies and the excitement generated by making ads and commercials. Also, planning is about demonstrat- ing that it’s not just about logic. It’s not a linear process. In the United States, business people are rewarded for being extremely logical and having statistics to back themselves up. This produces dreadful advertising that often fails to make any impact. Advertising agencies are refuges for people who don’t think only in a linear fashion and who recognize that other people—consumers of advertising—don’t think that way, either.
Advertising in American Society 3
of attention and has spawned many “Got . . .” imitations. Of course, advertisers
and advertising agencies never know which commercials will be effective and
why they are effective. Though there is often an enormous amount of data
about target audiences “behind” a given commercial, all the data in the world
doesn’t mean anything when it comes to making a commercial that is effective.
If we believe what advertising agencies (and the companies they make
advertisements and commercials for) tell us, we have to conclude that adver-
tising works in strange and mysterious ways and that although nobody is sure
precisely how it works, it does have an impact—though its power to shape any
given individual’s behavior is (or seems to be) really quite minimal.
We each like to think we (perhaps “uniquely”) can resist advertising and it
has no impact on us. This notion, which I will discuss in more detail in chapter
3, makes light of the power of advertising and helps us preserve our sense of
autonomy and individuality. Others are brainwashed by ads and commercials,
but not us, we think—as we fi nd ourselves purchasing products we feel, some-
how, we must have. Thus, we play into the hands of advertisers who use our
illusion that we are not affected by advertising against us. As the president of a
large advertising agency once told me, “Even lousy advertising works!”
The Cost of a Typical Commercial
These fi gures represent a breakdown on the cost of a thirty-second “Got Milk” commercial. They were supplied by a former student of mine who works at the advertising agency that created the com- mercial. A typical thirty-second spot costs between $300,000 and $400,000; this spot cost $363,000.
$281,000 Television Production $45,000 Television Postproduction (editing) $6,000 Music (usually much higher) $1,000 Sound Effects Search/Narration $11,000 Talent Fees (3 principal actors, 5 extras, including
voice-over) $1,000 Tapes and Dubs $1,000 Legal Clearances (often much higher) $1,000 Shipping $16,000 Agency Travel, Casting, Callbacks, Pre-Pro Edit $363,000 Total
Figure 1.1
4 Chapter 1
We cannot show that a given commercial or campaign makes a given in-
dividual buy a product or service being advertised—or is the primary force in
shaping that person’s behavior—but we can see that advertising has a collective
impact; that is, it affects people in general. Corporations don’t spend hundreds
of billions of dollars a year because they are Good Samaritans who want to
make sure that radio stations and television networks are very profi table. And
politicians, who spend millions of dollars on their election campaigns, aren’t
Good Samaritans either.
I believe that advertising is a very powerful force, one that plays a major
role in the economy. It has replaced Puritanism in motivating people to work
hard so that they can earn money and be able to buy things.
MAX WEBER ON RELIGION
AND CONSUMER CULTURES
Max Weber (fi gure 1.2), one of the greatest sociologists of the nineteenth
century, wrote a classic study of the relationship between Puritanism and capi-
talism, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this book he pointed
out that John Calvin, an important theologian, argued that the possession of
wealth was to be taken as an indicator of God’s blessing. The Puritans believed
that the impulse towards acquisition was, Weber writes (1958:171), “directly
willed by God.” These religious beliefs did two other important things for
wealthy businessmen (1958:177):
The power of religious asceticism provided him with sober, conscientious,
and unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their work as to a life
purpose willed by God. Finally, it gave him the comforting assurance that
the unequal distribution of goods in this world was a special dispensation
of Divine Providence, which in these differences, as in particular grace,
pursued secret ends unknown to men.
Figure 1.2 Max Weber was a German sociologist
who did work on the relationship between
Protestantism and capitalism.
Advertising in American Society 5
Thus, wealth is a sign of being blessed and poverty is a sign of not be-
ing blessed, and nothing humans can do will change things. In the last part of
his book Weber talks about the ideas of a different Puritan minister, Richard
Baxter. He believed that (1958:181) “the care for external goods should only
lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside
at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”
Weber lamented that the desire for material goods had become a kind of ob-
session with people and this desire had reached its highest development in the
United States. He wrote (1958:182):
In the fi eld of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit
of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become
associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the
character of sport.
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the
end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or
there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized
petrifi cation, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of
the last stage of this cultural development, it might be truly said: “Special-
ists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has
attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
Weber’s critique is a moral one; he is highly critical of the way a passion
for consumption can take hold of individuals and, in his comments about
the United States, whole countries. It would be interesting to know what he
would have said about contemporary China, where the rage to succeed and
consume has transformed that country, in just a few generations, from a Third
World, poverty-stricken land into a world power.
ADVERTISING AND POLITICS
Increasingly in recent years, advertising has been used in the political
sphere. Advertising has the power, I believe, to infl uence and, in some cases,
shape people’s behavior, broadly speaking. For example, in the 1994 campaign
by forces against the Clinton health-care plan, the “Harry and Louise” com-
mercials, broadcast by groups opposed to the plan, are credited with eroding
support for the plan by approximately twenty percentage points. In these
commercials, Harry and Louise criticized the Clinton plan for making major
changes in the medical system and lamented the way big government would be
telling them who their doctor had to be and would be depriving them of their
6 Chapter 1
freedom to make decisions about medical matters. The passage of the health
reform bill in 2010 represented a remarkable achievement in the face of enor-
mous sums of money spent on advertising by groups that opposed the measure.
I’m not suggesting that campaigns always work or that they always work
the way advertisers and advertising agencies imagine they will. But if we take
a broad look at human behavior in the long run, it seems quite obvious that
advertising exists and has been fl ourishing because, somehow, it works—that
is, it works a good deal of the time the way those paying for the advertising
want it to work. And this is particularly the case when it comes to political
advertising. This matter will be discussed more in chapter 6.
DEFINING ADVERTISING
This is the way the advertising industry works, most of the time:
1. Advertising agencies purchase space for print advertisements in newspa-
pers, magazines, or other kinds of publications, or time to broadcast commer-
cials, made for companies selling products or services. Some organizations and
corporations do their own advertising, but this is not usually the case. There
are other ways of advertising, such as putting ads on billboards, in bus shelters,
on buses and taxicabs (fi gure 1.3), using the Internet, sponsoring events, and
placing products in fi lms and television shows.
Figure 1.3
Advertising in American Society 7
2. These commercials or print advertisements are generally designed to
attract the attention of people with suitable demographics and the proper
psychographics—values and lifestyles—for some product or service. Adver-
tising agencies tend to concentrate on people, roughly speaking, from 18 to
49—assuming they are the ones who buy most of the products and services
advertised. Certain products are aimed at children and others at older people,
but most advertising is aimed at the 18 to 49 cohort, give or take a few years
on either end.
3. Advertising tries to attract attention to, create the desire for, and stimu-
late action that leads to the purchase of products and services advertised on the
part of those reading print advertisements, listening to radio commercials, or
watching and listening to television commercials. That is, advertisers hope to
convince, to persuade, to motivate, and most importantly, to get people to act,
to do something. This something generally involves moving from the desire
for products and services to the actual purchase of the products or services.
There are, as I pointed out earlier, a number of different forms and genres
of advertising. Advertising pervades the American media and our lives—from
the billboards on our highways to the print ads in the publications we read,
the commercials on radio and television, and the designer logos on T-shirts
and other kinds of clothes we wear. Advertising is also used by charities, labor
unions, and organizations of all kinds to get their messages to the public. In
consumer cultures, it seems fair to say that just about everyone is advertising,
which creates a major problem—clutter. There are so many messages being
sent to us that sometimes, as the result of information overload, we get them
all mixed up.
If you look at the advertising for such products as athletic shoes, razors,
perfumes, beer, automobiles, you fi nd advertising agencies fi ghting, desper-
ately, to hold on to their segment of the market and, if possible, to gain market
share. They use every editing technique they can think of to make their com-
mercials visually more memorable and every trick of language and narrative
structure to gain our attention and divert our attention from the advertising
of competitors.
One of the problems advertisers face is that of clutter—the enormous
number of advertisements we are exposed to on a given day, which leads to in-
formation overload and in many cases, paralysis. So advertising agencies knock
themselves out to differentiate their campaigns from other campaigns and get
the attention of the target audience they are attacking. A remarkable Honda
commercial, made in England, cost six million dollars to make and involved
606 takes and took three weeks, shooting nonstop day and night, to fi lm and
three months to make. It is two minutes long, as well, which means it costs
an enormous amount of money to air the commercial on television. But the
8 Chapter 1
commercial has attracted an enormous amount of attention and interest and
thus, Honda no doubt believes, it was worth doing.
Many Americans report that they are annoyed by all the advertising to
which they are exposed. A 2004 survey by Yankelovich Partners, done for the
American Association of Advertising Agencies, reported the following:
69% expressed interest in products that would block advertising 66% felt they are constantly bombarded by advertising 61% described the amount of advertising to which they are ex-
posed as out of control 60% felt their opinion of advertising is more negative than before 54% said they avoid buying products that advertise too much
(www.medialiteracy.com/stats_advertising.jsp)
So there was, and there still is, I would add, a good deal of hostility in the
American public about the amount of advertising to which they are exposed,
and that is an additional problem the advertising industry faces.
This book focuses on print advertisements and television commercials and
the role they may play in stimulating the consumption of products and services
by people. Traditionally we call sales messages in print “advertisements” and
sales messages on electronic media, that use sound effects, music, and actors,
“commercials.” Originally, most of the sales messages on the Internet were
little more than print advertisements. Now, with new technological develop-
ments, we fi nd pop-up screens, cartoon animations, and other ways of attract-
ing the attention of people using the Internet. Internet advertising has grown
a great deal in recent years (fi gure 1.4). In 2008, almost $18 billion was spent
on this form of advertising. A friend of mine who works in a major advertising
agency in San Francisco told me “the focus now is on the Internet and social
media. That’s where all the energy in our agency is going. Print media are no
longer that important.” The methods of analysis I discuss can be used on all
forms of advertising.
It is worth noting some of the ideas mentioned in the most common
defi nitions of advertising. We fi nd such terms as “arouse” and “desire,” which
suggest there are very powerful “affective” and perhaps even unconscious or
“irrational” elements at work in advertisements.
In his book Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising, Paul Mes-
saris suggests that there may be certain kinds of hard-wired responses in human
beings that function as a result of visual cues to which they are exposed. He
discusses the work of a number of researchers in this area and writes:
Advertising in American Society 9
When we look at the world, we are strongly predisposed to attend to certain
kinds of objects or situations and to react in certain kinds of ways. These
predispositions refl ect the infl uence of culture, but . . . they have also been
shaped to a certain extent by biological evolution. In short, real-world vision
comes with a set of built-in response tendencies. Consequently, to the ex-
tent that a picture can reproduce the signifi cant visual features of real-world
experience, it may also be able to exploit the response tendencies that are
associated with those features. (1997:4)
Messaris offers as an example of these “response tendencies” the use in
magazine ads, and other kinds of advertising, of having someone—spokesper-
sons in television commercials and models in magazine advertisements—look
directly at the viewer or reader. In real life, we have a natural tendency to look
back at someone when they look at us, and advertising agencies can exploit this
in attracting our attention to their advertisements and generating emotional
responses to them.
Later in the book I will quote from an article that makes an even stronger
argument, namely that the famous experiment in which Ivan Pavlov was able
to train dogs to act in certain ways when special cues were given to them is the
basic metaphor for understanding how advertising works. That is, advertising
conditions us—as individuals and as members of society—in the same way that
Pavlov was able to train dogs.
Figure 1.4. Now more than 500 million people belong
to Facebook, making it an increasingly important
tool for marketers.
10 Chapter 1
In this chapter I do a number of things. Having broadly defi ned advertis-
ing, I offer a brief look at advertising agencies, followed by a model of advertis-
ing that deals with advertisements and commercials in terms of their cultural
impact rather than their effects on individuals. Then I discuss how advertisers
attempt to defl ect criticism and tie this in to “weak” and “strong” theories of
the media offered by communication scholars. Next I discuss the techniques
used in commercials, which I consider to be the most powerful form of ad-
vertising. Finally, I relate commercials to “teleculture” and argue that televi-
sion has become the dominant means of socialization in American culture and
many other societies as well. We must always keep in mind that from a business
point of view, what television does is deliver audiences to advertisers.
ADVERTISING AGENCIES
Advertising agencies, we must remember, are media businesses, and like
all businesses they have human resource departments, accounting departments,
production departments, and various levels of management (such as chief ex-
ecutive offi cers, chief fi nancial offi cers, executive vice presidents, senior vice
presidents, and ordinary vanilla vice presidents). They also have huge account
management departments, with account supervisors, account directors, and
many, many account executives. The job of account executives, generally
speaking, is to look after the agency’s clients. Some cynics have suggested that
what account executives do best is take clients out to lunch.
But the most important employees of advertising agencies, I would sug-
gest, are what are generally called the “creatives.” The creatives are the creative
directors and their teams of copywriters and art directors (and sometimes oth-
ers), who turn all of the data provided by the marketing researchers into print
ads and radio and television commercials. The creatives think up campaigns
like “Got Milk” or the Absolut vodka advertisements and are the “stars” in
any agency—the people who bring fame and fortune (in the form of new bill-
Table 1.1. Total Pay, 2005
Size of Agency
Position Small Medium Large
Account Executive $55,000 61,000 74,000
Creative Director $81,000 85,000 111,000
Art Director $78,000 97,000 115,000
Copywriter $67,000 72,000 85,000
Advertising in American Society 11
ings) to their agencies. Like all important creative artists, they are given a great
deal of freedom. There are numerous awards given by organizations in the
advertising industry and some creatives have dozens of awards to their credit.
Interestingly enough, for an industry seen as glamorous by most people,
advertising doesn’t always pay that well. The top management of big adver-
tising agencies make a great deal of money, and the creatives do well, but
most of the other people in advertising agencies aren’t as well paid, as shown
in table 1.1.
The fi gures in the table (taken from Salary Wizard) for small, medium-
sized, and large agencies are rounded off and very approximate. To understand
the signifi cance of these salaries you have to realize that a very good secretary
might make $50,000 or $75,000 a year. Entry-level positions in advertising are
very low because there is a great deal of competition for what are thought to
be “glamour” jobs. In addition, women everywhere are generally paid consid-
erably less than men for doing the same job, though that is changing slowly.
Salaries are also affected by the size of the agency one works in and the
location of the agency. Thus, in a major market such as the San Francisco Bay
Area, account executives might earn around $75,000 and art directors around
$115,000 or more, and workers in smaller agencies in smaller markets would
earn considerably less. Salaries in big New York agencies are also considerably
higher, while salaries in small, Southern agencies are a good deal lower than
those in the chart. But there are also bonuses that people who work in agencies
get and other rewards, as well.
Insights from Advertising Agencies
The Advertising Age salary numbers are terribly misleading and have never refl ected the reality of the workplace. These numbers have always been way understated. For example, an average Art Direc- tor would easily make $75K, a good one $150+. Associate Creative Directors make upwards from $150K. Creative Directors make far more money than indicated. This data does not include bonuses, which could be up to 50 percent, and other rewards like stock, etc. One of the reasons this data is distorted is because it is not a proper statistical sample and tends to refl ect the smallest agencies with the fewest people. The larger and medium-sized agencies don’t bother to respond. If you’re in advertising and if you’re good, you can make a lot of money. You do have to work your ass off and you do tend to be underpaid at the start for a fair amount of time. (Fred Goldberg, retired chairman and CEO of Goldberg Moser O’Neill)
12 Chapter 1
During my three weeks at Goldberg Moser O’Neill I interviewed people
involved in every aspect of the advertising business, and everyone intimated that
it was their job that was absolutely crucial and that without them the place would
fall apart. I found the people in these agencies to be, as a rule, very intelligent
and extremely hardworking. The work is so demanding that advertising agencies
have very high turnover rates; I was told by the GMO human resources director
that the average advertising agency loses something like a third of its employees
from burnout and other factors in a given year. In some cases people move to
better jobs in other agencies, and others leave advertising for another career.
A PSYCHO-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON ADVERTISING
The model many social scientists have used in studies of the impact of ad-
vertising is a psychological one (or perhaps a social-psychological one). People
are tested to see whether they recall advertisements or whether their attitudes
or opinions have been changed by having been exposed to advertisements.
This approach, which often is quite sophisticated in terms of research de-
sign, frequently indicates that advertising has little or no effect on respondents.
Figure 1.5. This brochure describes many books
that deal with ways marketers can appeal to
various demographic groups in the United States.
Exposure to advertisement or commercial
↓
Recall, attitude change, opinion change
Figure 1.6. Social-Psychological Model
Advertising in American Society 13
Or, to be more precise, none that can be detected or measured . . . or, in some
cases, no long-term effects that can be measured.
I would like to suggest a different model, which focuses not upon at-
titude or opinion change but instead on two different matters: One can
broadly be defi ned as cultural behavior and the other as people’s or perhaps
the collective unconscious. Focusing on individuals or groups of individuals
in test studies frequently concludes that advertising plays no signifi cant role
in decision making. An examination of advertising as a cultural phenom-
enon, on the other hand, suggests something quite different, a conclusion
that might explain why revenues for advertising keep growing and why
businesses continue to advertise.
RUNNING IT UP A FLAGPOLE
TO SEE IF ANYONE SALUTES
Corporations and organizations that advertise are not irrational; they do
not spend money “running fl ags up fl agpoles to see if anyone salutes” out of
idle curiosity. (On the other hand, while companies that advertise may not
be irrational, they assume people are irrational. More precisely, they assume
that people respond to messages that avoid ego-dominated “rational” decision
making but have an effect on unconscious elements in their psyches that often
shape their behavior.)
In his structural hypothesis, Sigmund Freud suggested that the human
psyche was composed of three elements: the id, which represents drives (and
says “I want it now”); the superego, which represents moral sensibilities and
conscience (and says “don’t do it”); and the ego, which has the task of perceiv-
ing and adapting to reality and mediating between the id and the superego.
Freud described the id in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:
We can come nearer to the id with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron
of seething excitement. We suppose that it is somewhere in direct contact
People’s psyches (the unconscious)
exposed ↓ to
Advertising
↓
Cultural behavior of people
Figure 1.7. Psycho-Cultural Model
14 Chapter 1
with somatic processes, and takes over from them instinctual needs and gives
them mental expression, but we cannot say in what substratum this contact
is made. These instincts fi ll it with energy, but it has no organization and
no unifi ed will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual
needs, in accordance with the pleasure principle. (quoted in Hinsie &
Campbell, 1970, p. 372)
Thus, advertisements appeal to id elements in our psyches and our desires
for gratifi cations of all kinds (“I want it now”), and seek to avoid the strictures
of the superego (“you can’t afford it and you don’t need it”) and the mediating
efforts of the ego (“maybe you ought to think a bit before buying it”).
The devaluation of the power of advertising by advertising agencies and
by businesses that use advertising is generally an attempt to escape from regula-
tion by governmental agencies and to escape from criticisms of being manipu-
lative and, in some cases, antisocial, by consumer groups and other interested
parties. Communication scholars, I might point out, have wavered in their
assessments of the power of media. Thirty years ago, scholars concluded that
the media were powerful; then they changed their minds and concluded that
they are weak. (A famous scholar said something to the effect of “Some media
sometimes have some effects on some people.”) Now, it seems, the notion that
the media are powerful is once again gaining acceptance.
Given this situation, when the media were seen as weak, advertisers could
argue that advertising was relatively trivial—a service to inform or entertain
the public, but little more than that. Yet at the macro level, when we look at
collective behavior, it seems that advertising does have power. It is advertis-
ing’s role as a cultural and political force that is signifi cant. We may lack the
tools in the social sciences to show how advertising affects specifi c individuals
or small groups of people in tests, but when we look at advertising as a social
and cultural phenomenon, the situation is strikingly different.
One argument that advertising people use to defuse criticism is the post
hoc, ergo propter hoc argument. Just because something happens after something
doesn’t mean it was caused by it. That is, just because Y follows X does not
mean that X caused Y. Thus, if Lisa sees a beer commercial on television and
then drinks a beer, it does not mean the commercial caused Lisa to drink the
beer. Nobody can argue with this. But when you move to the collective level,
and have lots of people drinking beer after having seen lots of beer commer-
cials, there is good reason to believe that the beer commercials might have
played some role in the behavior of the beer drinkers.
That is, commercials for alcoholic beverages may not be the sole caus-
ative factor responsible for people drinking, but they may play an important
contributing role. Since the public airways are held “in trust,” so to speak (and
Advertising in American Society 15
are supposed to broadcast “in the public interest”), by television stations, the
question we must ask is whether this trust is being abused.
One reason it is so diffi cult to establish via experimental methods a direct
causal link between television commercials and consumption is that television
is so ubiquitous that it is very diffi cult to fi nd a “control” group, a group of
people who are not exposed to television. That is why I think the anthropo-
logical model is more useful than the social-psychological model.
COMMERCIALS AS MINI-DRAMAS AND WORKS OF ART
Commercials—in my opinion the most interesting and powerful form of
advertising—should be seen as works of art that have their own conventions;
they might best be thought of as mini-dramas that employ all the techniques
of the theater and the cinema to achieve their aims. At their best, they use
language brilliantly, they are dramatic, they employ the most sophisticated
techniques of lighting and editing, they have wonderful actors who use body
language and facial expressions to get their messages across, and they often cost
enormous amounts of money, relatively speaking, to produce—many times,
the production costs (on a per-minute basis) outstrip those of the programs
during which they are shown.
The power of the human voice is well-known. When it is added to strong
narratives, music, sound effects, and superb writing, it is easy to see why the
commercial is such an incredible means of persuasion. Commercials (and ad-
vertisements in print and other media, to an extent) also make use of many of
the following:
Heroes and Heroines
Young people often identify with heroes and heroines and try to emulate
their behavior, their “style,” or their images—if not in the real world, then
in the world of consumption. Some of these heroic fi gures are show-business
personalities—singers, dancers, comedians, actors, and athletes. Identifi cation
and imitation are powerful forces that can shape our behaviors in ways of
which we are generally unaware.
Sexuality
Many commercials overtly connect sex and consumption (fi gures 1.8 and
1.9). These commercials often feature extremely beautiful women; they are
shown as an integral part of the consumption experience. One hopes, in one’s
16 Chapter 1
unconscious, that by purchasing the product, one will get the beautiful woman
(or some beautiful woman) as well—or in some cases, an attractive man. In
recent years, advertising has used homoerotic appeals for gay men and lesbians.
I talk at length about sexuality in advertising in chapter 5.
Humor
At one time, advertisers were afraid of humor. Now they realize that
humor sells, and many commercials are extremely funny (fi gure 1.10). This
humor generates what might be called a “halo effect,” a feeling of well-being
that becomes attached to the products being advertised.
Since there is so much hostility toward advertising in the general pub-
lic, many companies that use advertising are turning to humor as a means of
entertaining viewers of their commercials and thus eliciting some goodwill.
Mirthful laughter generates endorphins in our brains that make us feel good
and some of this may also rub off on the product being advertised. Humor also
Figure 1.9. This advertisement for a
Brazilian liquor, Cabana Cachaca, is
very erotic, but it doesn’t show any-
thing except a woman’s knees and el-
bows. How do we explain its power?
Figure 1.8
Advertising in American Society 17
is a way of establishing relationships with others, so there is a value in using
humor as long as it doesn’t offend people and get in the way of the persuasive
part of the advertisement.
A number of years ago I did some research on the techniques that gener-
ate humor in plays and other texts. I found that the techniques I discovered
formed four different categories of humor. The list appears in table 1.2; you
can use it to analyze humor in print advertisements and commercials, and all
kinds of other works.
Figure 1.10
18 Chapter 1
Table 1.2
Language Logic Identity Action
Allusion Absurdity Before/After Chase
Bombast Accident Burlesque Slapstick
Defi nition Analogy Caricature Speed
Exaggeration Catalogue Eccentricity
Facetiousness Coincidence Embarrassment
Infantilism Comparison Exposure
Insults Disappointment Grotesque
Irony Ignorance Imitation
Misunderstanding Mistakes Impersonation
Overliteralness Repetition Mimicry
Puns & Wordplay Reversal Parody
Repartee Rigidity Scale
Ridicule Theme & Variation Stereotype
Sarcasm Unmasking
Satire
Figure 1.11. Jean Baudrillard was an infl uential
French sociologist whose theories about
simulations have been controversial.
There is considerable disagreement among scholars about the defi nition
of some of these terms, such as satire and parody, but most of them are more
or less self-evident.
Fun
Jean Baudrillard (fi gure 1.11), a French sociologist, argues that in modern
consumer societies we now feel obliged to have fun. He writes in The Con-
sumer Society: Myths & Structure (1998:80):
The fun system of forced enjoyment
One of the strongest proofs that the principle and fi nality of consumption
is not enjoyment or pleasure is that that is now something which is forced
Advertising in American Society 19
upon us, something institutionalized, not as a right or a pleasure but as the
duty of the citizen. . . . Consumerist man . . . regards enjoyment as an ob-
ligation; he sees himself as an enjoyment and satisfaction business. He sees
it as his duty to be happy, loving, adulating/adulated, charming/charmed,
participative, euphoric and dynamic.
This represents a reversal, Baudrillard adds, of the old Puritan ethic of hard
work and abstention for the glory of God. It is now our “duty” to have fun,
and we do this, to a great degree, by being a member in good standing (and
good purchasing) of our contemporary consumer culture.
Success
In many commercials, we see (and it is suggested we emulate) people
who use a given product or service and who are successful (fi gure 1.12). One
aspect of being successful is knowing what to consume—having “product
knowledge,” which has replaced regular knowledge in all too many people in
America. They don’t know history, are not well-read, have no appreciation
of art, music, philosophy . . . you name it. But they have incredible product
knowledge; that is, all they know is what they can buy.
Figure 1.12. The Movado
advertisement plays upon the
aesthetic codes of elite classes:
Simplicity is tied to upscale taste.
For downscale taste, look at
supermarket advertisements.
20 Chapter 1
I used to play a learning game in which I asked students to determine what
products Americans would likely purchase based on their class makeup. I used
a well-known classifi cation system by sociologist W. Lloyd Warner, elaborated
fi fty years ago, that suggested we have six classes in America:
Class Percentage of Population
Upper-Upper 1.4 percent Lower-Upper 1.6 percent Upper-Middle 10 percent Lower-Middle 25 percent (common man and woman level) Upper-Lower 35 percent (common man and woman level) Lower-Lower 25 percent
These percentages still apply, generally speaking, with minor modifi ca-
tions. The percentage of wealth of the top 1 percent has increased considerably
over the years and the number of people falling into poverty has also increased.
The top 1 percent of Americans own 33 percent of the wealth in America, the
same amount as the bottom 90 percent.
What I discovered is that my students were able to make a large number
of very subtle distinctions about which products people in the various class
levels might consume. There was a considerable debate among them about
whether Lower-Upper class people would or should purchase a BMW or
a Mercedes and which particular model of each car they would buy. They
debated endlessly whether an entry-level BMW had more status than an
entry-level Mercedes. What this demonstrated to me is that my students
had an enormous amount of “product knowledge,” based on their constant
exposure to advertising in print and electronic media.
Reward
Purchasing various products—such as soft drinks and automobiles—is
often shown as a “reward” for people who have worked hard and who there-
fore “deserve” their drinks and sports utility vehicles. This appeal works at
both the blue-collar and at the white-collar levels. The rewards one gets are
fun, comradeship, pleasure, and sex. Especially sex. Our print advertisements
and television commercials are pervaded by sex, and most Americans live in a
sexually saturated media environment, where men and women are used as sex
objects to sell everything from trucks to cruises.
Advertising in American Society 21
TELECULTURE AND THE INTERNET
The term “teleculture” suggests that our culture is, to a large degree,
shaped by television. Thus, television is not a simple medium for entertain-
ment, which merely refl ects the culture in which it is found. Television does,
of course, refl ect culture, but the important thing to keep in mind is that it also
profoundly affects culture. It does this, in part, by focusing attention on certain
aspects of culture and not paying attention to others, by creating certain kinds
of heroes and heroines and neglecting other kinds. We must add the Internet
to teleculture, which occupies more and more of our time, as also having a
profound effect on individuals and society.
In my opinion, television and the Internet are the most powerful social-
izing and enculturating forces in society. They not only entertain us but also
instruct us, even when they are not trying to do so. Thus, they have usurped
the roles formerly played by other actors who used to be dominant fi gures in
the socialization process. Let me list them below.
Parents
With the changes that have taken place in the family structure and the
breakdown of both the family (due to the high numbers of divorces) and pa-
rental authority in America, the role of the parents in socializing young people
has greatly diminished. Many children are now raised in one-parent families
or in blended families.
Priests, Ministers, Rabbis, Imams
Nowadays the clergy also has a diminished role, though some of the
priesthood have discovered television and now use it for its various purposes.
The use of television by the clergy, however, tends to be associated with
fundamentalist sects (and, in some cases, charlatans) and not, in large measure,
with mainstream religious organizations.
Insights from Advertising Agencies
We try to make ads that evoke an emotion—humor is often useful in this respect. We brainstorm together about ideas that might be used for an ad. Usually, we come up with three or four ideas for a spot. We’re looking for the single most compelling idea to communicate.
22 Chapter 1
Professors
At one time, teachers and other academics played a signifi cant role in
socializing young people, and in many cases they still do. But this role has
also been diminished. This is because teachers cannot compete with popular
culture and in fact have to spend a good deal of their time doing what they
can to counter the power of the media and popular culture.
Peers
It is widely known that children and adolescents are particularly suscep-
tible to peer pressure, and at various stages in their developmental cycle, peer
pressure is much more signifi cant to young people than parental pressure.
What about these peers? Who or what, may we ask, socializes peers? Where
do these peers get their values and attitudes? They, too, like the opinion leaders
who allegedly affect the beliefs of older generations of people, are socialized
by the media.
Pop Culture
It is, of course, simplistic to claim that popular culture and the mass media
are the only determinants of behavior, but it probably is correct to argue that
the media play a major role (or, at least, an increasingly important role) in the
socialization of young people. And it is television that is of major signifi cance
here—for it is television that broadcasts (and affects, as well) much of our
popular culture.
The most important genre on television is, of course, the commercial.
Teleculture is, in large measure, commercials and thus plays an important role
in creating and maintaining consumer cultures. Baudrillard devotes the last
section of his book The System of Objects (fi gure 1.13) to advertising. He makes
an interesting point in his analysis:
Neither its rhetoric nor even the information aspect of its discourse has a
decisive effect on the buyer. What the individual does respond to, on the
other hand, is advertising’s underlying leitmotiv of protection and gratifi ca-
tion, the intimation that its solicitations and attempts to persuade are the
sign, indecipherable at the conscious level, that somewhere is an agency
. . . which has taken it upon itself to inform him of his own desires, and
to foresee and rationalize these desires to his own satisfaction. He thus no
more “believes” in advertising than the child believes in Father Christmas,
but this in no way impedes his capacity to embrace an internalized infantile
situation, and to act accordingly. Herein lies the very real effectiveness of
Advertising in American Society 23
advertising, founded on its obedience to a logic which, though not that of
the conditioned refl ex, is nonetheless very rigorous: a logic of belief and
regression. (1968:167)
This is an important insight to keep in mind. Baudrillard doesn’t think
advertising works by use of conditioned refl exes, but by regressing people to
infantile states. It may be that advertising uses both conditioning (think of
Pavlov here) and regression (think of Freud here) in accomplishing its mission.
Freud explained that individuals go through a number of different stages as
they grow up: oral, anal, phallic, and genital. Regression involves, then, people
going back, psychologically speaking, to earlier stages in their development.
In 1951, Marshall McLuhan wrote a pioneering book, The Mechanical Bride
(fi gure 1.14), which was devoted to understanding the role that popular culture,
the media, and, in particular, advertising played in shaping people’s conscious-
ness. The book analyzes the symbolic and cultural signifi cance of comic strips
and the front pages of newspapers, but most of The Mechanical Bride is devoted
to advertisements that McLuhan mines for their cultural importance.
He explains the problems caused by entertainment and pop culture and
his method of operation in the Preface to the book (1951:v):
Ours is the fi rst age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual
minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public
mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object
now. And to generate heat not light is the intention. To keep everybody
Figure 1.13. Jean Baudrillard’s The System
of Objects deals with material culture and
contemporary consumer culture.
24 Chapter 1
in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect
of many ads and much entertainment alike. . . . The present book likewise
makes few attempts to attach the very considerable currents and pressures
set up around us today by the mechanical agencies of the press, radio, mov-
ies, and advertising. It does attempt to set the reader at the center of the
revolving picture created by these affairs where he may observe the action
that is in progress and in which everybody is involved. From the analysis of
that action, it is hoped, many individual strategies may suggest themselves.
It is McLuhan’s aim to waken people from the collective dream in which
they fi nd themselves by using the methods of art criticism and literary analysis
to show how advertising agencies manipulate people and strive to obtain the
effects they seek—shaping consumer taste and behavior.
Each of the short chapters in the book contains an image—usually of some
advertisement—and some elliptical questions, and his analysis, often written
in a rather jazzy style, of the social, psychological, and cultural signifi cance of
the language and images in the advertisement.
THE SUPER BOWL
The 2006 Super Bowl, held on February 5th, attracted an audience of
something like 90 million people in the United States and hundreds of millions
of people in more than 200 other countries. The 2010 Super Bowl attracted
106.5 million viewers in the United States, an enormous audience and one,
Figure 1.14. Marshall McLuhan’s The
Mechanical Bride deals with the social,
psychological, and political content
of comics and advertisements.
Advertising in American Society 25
because of the number of people aged 18 to 45 who watched the game, that
advertisers fi nd very valuable. There are a number of reasons why companies
advertise during the Super Bowl, even if the cost of doing so is very high in
dollar terms. First, there is a good deal of prestige connected with having a
commercial shown during the game. Companies recognize that having a com-
mercial during the Super Bowl attracts a great deal of interest in the media, as
well as the general public.
In addition, because Super Bowl commercials are “showcase” advertise-
ments, which are specially designed for their entertainment value, people
watching the game—especially the hard-to-reach males between 18 and 45—
tend to also watch the commercials rather than zapping them. The audience
for the game wants to see which commercials are outstanding, and having a
commercial that is successful is an important plus for advertisers and the agen-
cies that make the commercials. A highly successful commercial helps “make”
a brand by attracting the attention and entertaining members of the Super
Bowl audience. Commercials on the Super Bowl can help companies that are
relatively unknown make a name for themselves.
One company, Budweiser, advertises a great deal on the Super Bowl. It
purchased fi ve minutes of time in 2006 and in 2010, as well, for its various
brands—more than any other advertiser for the game. Budweiser prepares for
the broadcast by having advertising agencies create something like fi fty dif-
ferent spots that might be used in the game. It then pares the list down to the
fi nal ones it will use just before the game. It is in a battle with other advertisers
such as Burger King and Pepsi to create memorable commercials. A number
of these commercials will be humorous, some will have celebrities, and oth-
ers will feature animals; and all of them will attempt to become the subject of
positive commentary by those who watched the game.
Super Bowl commercials that “bomb” and that fall fl at, for one reason or
another, are a disaster. Not only do they turn off members of the audience,
they are likely to be ridiculed in media reports on the Super Bowl commer-
cials. So the stakes are very high and there is a great deal of competition among
the advertising agencies who make the commercials shown during Super Bowl
to create “winning” commercials.
The only major competitor to the Super Bowl in building brands is the
Winter Olympics, which last for seventeen days and give advertisers more
opportunity over the course of the Games to reach viewers. For a little more
than the $2.5 million a Super Bowl commercial costs, an advertiser can have
four spots during the Winter Olympics. The Super Bowl only lasts a few hours,
though with the pre-game and post-game shows, it can drag on for much
longer than that. Thirty-second spots during the Olympics only cost some
26 Chapter 1
$700,000 and over the course of the Games, NBC expects to make around
$900 million dollars.
One of the reasons the Super Bowl is such an important site for commer-
cials is that the media world is so fragmented. Advertisers know that a large
number of Americans, especially males who are often hard to reach, will be
watching the game, so it is an extremely useful way for companies to get their
messages across to audiences they target.
CONCLUSION
Let me offer here a summary of the main points I have made and a sum-
mary of the conclusions I draw from these points.
First, advertising is a huge industry that plays an important role in the
socialization of people, young and old, in American society. It provides what
might be called “product knowledge,” and research evidence suggests that
even young children, at 5 or 6 years of age, know a great deal about many
of the products advertised on television (and are often able to sing the jingles
from commercials).
Second, corporations advertise because it is effective in a number of differ-
ent ways. Advertising campaigns often have as their primary goal, we are told,
holding market share, but it is reasonable to suggest that these campaigns also
attract new users. People who are exposed to commercial campaigns may not
be able to recall the commercials they have seen or provide evidence that their
opinions and attitudes have been affected, but advertising campaigns leave a
certain kind of feeling with people, generate a certain kind of sensibility.
In addition, I have suggested that television commercials, in particular, are
extremely complicated and powerful texts (or artworks) that work a number
of different ways. I list, later in the book, some of the factors to be considered
in analyzing commercials. This complexity, the fact that works of art affect
people in strange and complicated ways, makes it diffi cult to measure their
effects. But the fact that corporations continue to advertise, and often increase
their advertising budgets each year, leads us to conclude that advertising does
work. We have only to look around us and observe the way people behave (in
supermarkets, at work, at parties) to see the power of advertising.
Finally, I have suggested that commercials are part of what I call “telecul-
ture,” which is now probably the most important enculturating and socializing
force operating in society. It is naive to think of television (or any of the mass
media) as simply an entertainment that does not have a profound impact upon
the people who watch it. For one thing, we know that the average person
watches television more than three and one-half hours per day. If television
Advertising in American Society 27
does generate “culture,” as I’ve argued, that is a tremendous amount of time
for it to enculturate people.
Television along now with the Internet and social media has usurped
the place that used to be occupied by parents, the clergy, teachers, and other
institutions as socializers of the young. We learn from all of our experiences,
a phenomenon called incidental learning (though we may not be conscious of
the fact that we are learning), and since television is such a large part of our
experience, it must play an important role in “teaching” us about life. And
commercials are the most ubiquitous genre on television and quite probably
the most powerful one.
In this book you will not only learn how to analyze print advertisements
and television commercials but will also learn about the impact of the adver-
tising industry on you, on the political order, and on American society and
culture. I also offer some examples of analyses I’ve made of interesting print
advertisements and television commercials.
I hope that as a result of reading this book you will be better able to resist
“saluting” when some advertising agency creates an advertisement or a radio
or television commercial and “runs it up a fl agpole.”
Advertising transfers its breadth of experience and calculation to its target
groups. It treats its human targets like commodities, to whom it offers the
solution to their problem of realization. Clothes are advertised like packag-
ing as a means of sales promotion. This is one of the many ways in which
commodity aesthetics takes possession of people.
The two central areas in which advertising offers, by means of com-
modities, to solve the problems of “scoring hits” and sales are, on the one
hand, following a career of the labour market and, on the other, gaining the
respect of and attracting others. “How is it that clever and competent people
don’t make it in their careers?” was the question put by a wool advertise-
ment in 1968. “Don’t call it bad luck if it is only a matter of ‘packaging.’
You can sell yourself better in a new suit! And that is often what counts in
life.” A woman whose romance has failed and who is looking for a new
partner was recommended by Teen magazine in 1969, as “step 9” in its
advice, to “become overwhelmingly pretty. . . . Why not try what you’ve
never tried before? If you want to scour the market, you’ve got to show
yourself in your best packaging.” Where love succeeds, brought about by
this fashionable packaging, and leads to encounters which under existing
conditions appear in the form of a commodity-cash nexus, the cost of
clothes can be interpreted as “capital investment.”
—W. F. Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics:
Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society
29
2
CONSUMER CULTURES
Students who take courses in critical thinking learn about a major fallacy in
thinking called the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. This Latin phrase, dis-
cussed earlier, means, roughly speaking, “after something, therefore because
of it.” Just because someone sees a commercial for some product, such as a
Norelco electric razor, and then purchases a Norelco razor, doesn’t mean that
the commercial necessarily was the prime factor or the only factor leading to
the purchase decision. There could have been any number of other factors, or
combinations of factors, such as the person’s old razor breaking down, a terrifi c
sale on Norelco razors, word of mouth from a friend who has one, and so on.
It is important that we don’t oversimplify matters in dealing with adver-
tising. But we also must not underestimate or neglect advertising’s infl uence
upon us as individuals and its infl uence upon our society and culture. Adver-
tising now permeates American culture and has affected, in profound ways,
everything from our food preferences and our body shapes to our politics.
A CULTURAL CRITIQUE OF ADVERTISING
The discussion of the impact of advertising on American personality,
culture, and society that follows is best understood as an example of cultural
criticism. Cultural criticism makes use of psychoanalytic theory, literary
theory, Marxist theory, sociological theory, semiotic theory, and various
other theories, methodologies, and disciplines that can be used as means of
interpreting texts and understanding social and cultural behavior. What I offer
here is my interpretation of the impact of advertising on a number of impor-
tant aspects of American culture and society. My analysis will also draw upon
critiques and interpretations of advertising made by other scholars in America
and elsewhere. Although my focus is on advertising in the United States, the
concepts I use and techniques I explain can also be used to analyze advertising
in other countries.
30 Chapter 2
Advertising has been of interest to scholars in many disciplines because these
scholars see advertising as one of the central institutions in American society.
Americans, we must keep in mind, are exposed to more advertising than people
in any other society. This is because of the amount of television we watch and
the amount of time we spend listening to the radio and because our media tend
to be privately owned and fi nanced by advertising. Our media institutions are
mostly private, for-profi t ones; public television and public radio attract rela-
tively small (though generally highly infl uential) audiences in America.
David Potter, in his classic work People of Plenty, points out that advertis-
ing not only has economic consequences, but it also shapes our values. As he
writes:
Consumer Cultures 31
The most important effects of this powerful institution are not upon the
economics of our distributive system; they are upon the values of our soci-
ety. If the economic effect is to make the purchaser like what he buys, the
social effect is, in a parallel but broader sense, to make the individual like
what he gets—to enforce already existing attitudes, to diminish the range
and variety of choices, and in terms of abundance, to exalt the materialistic
virtues of consumption. (1954:188)
Potter makes an important point. Advertising, as an industry, is often quite
avant-garde and bold in the techniques it uses but, ironically, its impact tends
to be a conservative one—to maintain, as much as possible, the status quo. One
of the main things companies that advertise try to do is maintain their market
share; if they can increase it, all the better. But they don’t want to lose share at
any cost. And advertising must be examined not only in terms of its economic
impact but also in terms of its infl uence on American beliefs and values.
In this chapter and the ones that follow I discuss topics such as consumer
cultures and consumer “lust,” the use of sexuality to sell products and services,
political advertising, and related matters.
CONSUMER CULTURES DEFINED
Consumer cultures, as I understand them, are those in which there has
been a great expansion (some might say a veritable explosion) of commodity
production, leading to societies full of consumer goods and services and places
where these consumer goods and services can be purchased. In consumer cul-
tures, the “game” people play is “get as much as you can.” Success is defi ned as
being the person “who has the most toys.” This leads to a lust for consuming
products—and conspicuously displaying them—as a means of demonstrating
that one is a success and, ultimately, that one is worthy. And the very act of
consumption has now also become aestheticized and sexualized and is itself the
source of a great deal of pleasure.
In Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Mike Featherstone explains the
importance of “lifestyle” in contemporary consumer societies. He writes:
Rather than unrefl exively adopting a lifestyle, through tradition or habit,
the new heroes of consumer culture make lifestyle a life project and
display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the as-
semblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily
dispositions they design together into a lifestyle. The modern individual
32 Chapter 2
within consumer culture is made conscious that he speaks not only with
his clothes, but also with his home, furnishings, decoration, car and other
activities which are to be read and classifi ed in terms of the presence and
absence of taste. The preoccupation with customizing a lifestyle and a
stylistic self-consciousness are not just to be found among the young and
the affl uent; consumer culture publicity [advertising] suggests that we all
have room for self-improvement and self-expression whatever our age or
class origins. (1991:86)
And, of course, it is advertising that “teaches” us about the world of
consumer goods—what is fashionable and “hot” or, maybe even better for
some people, “cool” (fi gure 2.1). Semioticians tell us that everything we do
is read as a “message” and that we are always sending these messages to other
people—just as they are always sending messages to us. These messages are sent
by our lifestyle decisions—our clothes, hairstyles, cars, homes, and other mate-
rial goods—as well as our bodies, facial expressions, and body language. For
example, serving the right brand of wine shows that we are sophisticated and
have good taste. The advertisements for expensive wine must also be elegant
and refl ect a sense of refi nement (fi gure 2.2).
Along with the growth of the supply of material objects, there is also
a growth of leisure—which must be fi lled with the right kind of activities,
depending upon one’s social class and status. Thus, upscale (those with high
incomes and an appreciation of elite culture) people also consume high-art
cultural products—operas, plays, works of sculpture, paintings, and so on—
while those in a lower class tend to consume more ordinary products such as
inexpensive clothes, drive-to vacations, and fast food, for example.
It doesn’t always work exactly that way; some people with limited in-
comes love opera and ballet, but generally speaking, there is a connection
between socioeconomic status and taste level. More elite elements in society
(socioeconomically speaking, that is) take expensive vacations, drive expensive
cars, and go to trendy and generally expensive restaurants, for example.
Figure 2.1. This advertisement plays upon
our fascination with style.
Consumer Cultures 33
TASTE CULTURES AND ADVERTISING
Sociologist Herbert Gans suggested that there are a number of what he
called “taste cultures” in the United States. As he writes in his book Popular
Culture and High Culture: An Evaluation of Taste (1974:x):
I suggest that America is actually made up of a number of taste cultures, each
with its own art, literature, music, and so forth, which differ mainly in that
they express different aesthetic standards. . . . The underlying assumption
of this analysis is that all taste cultures are of equal worth. . . . Because taste
cultures refl ect the class and particularly education attributes of their publics,
low culture is as valid for poorly educated Americans as high culture is for
well-educated ones, even if the higher cultures are, in the abstract, better or
more comprehensive than the lower cultures.
These fi ve taste cultures are: high culture, upper-middle culture, lower-
middle culture, low culture, and quasi-folk culture. This classifi cation system
is similar, in many respects, to the six socioeconomic classes that W. Lloyd
Warner found when he analyzed American society.
Figure 2.2. Beringer wine estates.
34 Chapter 2
If Gans is correct and there are these fi ve different taste cultures, this poses
a problem: It means advertising agencies have to fi gure out how to direct mes-
sages that will resonate with the various taste cultures. One way that advertising
agencies have addressed this problem is by targeting different audiences. That
is, advertising agencies look for ways to reach specifi c audiences for particular
products and services, which means, for example, they have to determine
who will most likely be watching a certain television program. The larger the
audience, the more diffi cult it is to fi nd ways of reaching all the different taste
cultures in print ads and radio and television commercials.
Gans offers some comments about advertising in his book that are worth
thinking about. (1974:35–6):
Unknown numbers of children and adults are . . . taken in by the puffery
and exaggeration of advertising, and ought to be protected against it; but
part of the attractiveness of the ads is that people want the offered goods
and it is not at all certain that the ads themselves initiate the wants. Nor is
it wrong that people should want things that are useful or provide pleasure.
Moreover, studies of advertising impact and the complaints of advertis-
ing executives suggest that most people retain little of the ad content they
see and misinterpret much of the message. Successful ads produce sharp
increases in sales curves, but often these refl ect the behavior of only a few
hundred thousand people and no one yet knows the relative impact of ad
and product on buying decisions.
These comments refl ect notions about advertising that were rather com-
mon some thirty years ago, when it was generally held that the impact of the
media was weak. Nowadays, there is less ambivalence about the power of the
media and of advertising.
THE POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE
We often see the term “postmodern” in newspapers and magazines, gen-
erally referring to buildings that blend a number of different styles together. For
example, Philip Johnson’s AT&T building has Roman colonnades at the street
level and a Chippendale pediment at the top. But postmodernism is broader
than architecture, and has been used by some philosophers and cultural theo-
rists to characterize contemporary societies in which pastiche and a mixing of
styles are dominant. The term means, literally, coming after or moving beyond
modernism—the period covering (approximately) from 1900 to 1960, which
was characterized by a sense that we could know reality and that there were
valid rules that governed politics and society.
Consumer Cultures 35
An infl uential postmodernist theoretician, Jean-François Lyotard (fi gure
2.3), described postmodernism as “incredulity toward meta-narratives,” by
which he meant a lack of acceptance of the great philosophical systems that
had ordered our lives in the past. He writes:
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens
to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local
cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in
Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to fi nd a public
for eclectic works. By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which
reigns in the “taste” of the patrons. Artists, gallery owners, critics, and public
wallow together in the “anything goes,” and the epoch is one of slacken-
ing. But this realism of the “anything goes” is in fact that of money; in the
absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value
of works of art according to the profi ts they yield. (1984:76)
What Lyotard is describing is the world in which we live, in which—
without any rules that everyone accepts—we all create and change our
lifestyles and identities whenever we feel like doing so. Postmodernism also
doesn’t accept that there are signifi cant differences between elite forms of
art and popular or mass-mediated forms and isn’t concerned about narratives
having the traditional beginning, middle, and end, in which everything is
resolved. In the postmodern world, simulations are dominant and everyone
is playing games with everyone else. In the postmodernist world, remember,
anything goes. The pastiche, which combines elements from many different
sources into an image, is considered a quintessential postmodern art form
(fi gure 2.4).
Figure 2.3. Jean-François Lyotard is a French scholar
who did important work on postmodernism.
36 Chapter 2
One important theorist of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, has argued
that what we call postmodernism is, in reality, the form that capitalism takes
in advanced capitalist societies. The most widespread and eclectic art form in
our day, I would suggest, is the advertisement, which helps us decide upon
what to consume to create our “eclectic” lifestyles. Madison Avenue and the
advertising world have been quick to adopt the postmodern sensibility, and
Figure 2.4. The pastiche is considered to be a postmodern art form.
Consumer Cultures 37
now we see television commercials that don’t seem to make any sense. Things
happen but they don’t seem to mean anything.
What’s important in these commercials is their “look.” Jack Solomon
describes a postmodern television commercial for a perfume. He writes in The
Signs of Our Time:
Traditional commercials often set up a narrative situation of some sort,
which, though trivial, has a beginning, middle, and an end—as when Mrs.
Olson saves her young neighbors’ marriage by introducing them to Folger’s
Coffee. But in Calvin Klein’s postmodern campaign for Obsession perfume,
it’s virtually impossible to tell just what is going on. A tormented woman
seems to be torn between a young boy and an older man—or does the
young boy represent a fl ashback to the older man’s youth? Maybe it’s her
kid brother? Her son? She touches his face for an instant but he refuses to
be touched and glides away. Tears run down her glacial Art Deco face, but
it isn’t clear what she’s crying about. (1990:229)
It may very well be the confusion created by this commercial that is part
of the sell, but it also may be wrong to look for logic and rationality in a post-
modern television commercial. The assumption has to be made that people
with a postmodern sensibility will “get” whatever message the Obsession com-
mercial is delivering to them.
One essential attribute of postmodernism, as it relates to advertising, in-
volves what has been described as “de-differentiation.” In their book Consumer
Behaviour: A European Perspective, Michael Solomon, Gary Bamossy, and Soren
Askegaard describe this phenomenon (2002:560):
Postmodernists are interested in the blurring of distinctions between hi-
erarchies such as “high and low culture,” or politics and show business.
Examples would be the use of artistic works in advertising and the celebra-
tion of advertising in artistic works. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Nike
and Guinness have their own museums. Another clear example is TV pro-
grammes featuring advertising for themselves (in order to increase viewer
ratings) and TV commercials [that] look like “real” programming, as the
ongoing soap opera with a couple spun around the coffee brand Gold Blend.
The blurring of gender categories also refers to this aspect of postmodernism.
The authors add fragmentation, by which they mean the ever-growing
brand extensions and categories of products, and hyperreality, involving simu-
lations and a loss of an ability to distinguish between the authentic and simula-
tions, as other important aspects of postmodernism.
In postmodern societies, where there are no all-encompassing and
dominating philosophical and ethical belief systems, the notion of a coherent
identity is not valued and people are constantly changing their identities and
38 Chapter 2
“looks,” and these changes all are tied to purchasing the right products. Post-
modern societies are consumption societies in which people are always looking
for the next craze—whether it is iPods or a new brand of sneaker.
If the postmodern theorists are correct, postmodernism represents an
important change in our culture, a “cultural mutation” that has taken place,
which explains why American culture is the way it is and why our young
people behave the way they do. Some critics of postmodernism argue that
it was a passing fad and that we now live in what they describe as a post-
postmodern era. The debate about postmodernism and its infl uence upon
American culture and society continues in our universities. Lyotard’s book
is one of the seminal texts in discussions of postmodernism and its impact
on individual, society, and culture.
THE PROBLEM OF EMOTIONS
OVERCOMING RATIONALITY
Many people have illusions about the way people act when they purchase
things. This illusion suggests that people consider alternatives and think care-
fully about their projected purposes. The truth of the matter is that consumers
generally act in a nonrational way when making purchases. According to Gerald
Zaltman, a professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School, consumer
behavior is not well-reasoned or linear in nature. As he explains in his book How
Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (2003:8–9):
Figure 2.5. The cover of Lyotard’s widely
read book on postmodernism.
Consumer Cultures 39
The selection process is relatively automatic, stems from habits and other
unconscious forces, and is greatly infl uenced by the consumer’s social and
physical context.
In reality, people’s emotions are closely interwoven with reasoning pro-
cesses. Although our brains have separate structures for processing emotions
and logical reasoning, the two systems communicate with one another and
jointly affect our behavior. Even more important, the emotional system—the
older of the two in terms of evolution—typically exerts the fi rst force on our
thinking and behavior. . . . Ninety-fi ve percent of our thinking takes place
in our unconscious minds—that wonderful, if messy, stew of memories,
emotions, thoughts and other cognitive processes we’re not aware of or
that we can’t articulate.
What Zaltman suggests is that consumer cultures are built upon appeals
to our emotions, and the notion that consumers are always rational is falla-
cious. Zaltman sounds very Freudian here, though we don’t fi nd Freud in his
book’s index.
CONSUMER CULTURE AND PRIVATISM
One of the most important critiques scholars and social critics make of the
consumer culture is that it is privatistic; the focus is upon personal consump-
tion, not social investment for the public good. Governments spend also, but
if a governmental agency helps build up the infrastructure in some city, that
spending yields jobs and increased productivity and is really a form of invest-
ment. Personal consumption, on the other hand, is based on private desires
and the satisfaction of individual wishes. It may have a marginal benefi t to
society because the money spent on personal consumption “drips down” to
other people, but economists generally fi nd the amount of money dripping
down to be quite minimal.
A number of years ago, a company that manufactured eyedrops suggested
that using its product was the solution to smog and polluted air. Rather than
fi x the quality of air for everyone, this company suggested everyone use its eye-
drops instead. When you push the argument to its most extreme end, society
is an abstraction and there are only individuals inhabiting the same territory,
each of whom pursues (and should pursue) his or her private destiny. From
this perspective, the worse things are, the more opportunities there are to sell
products to people, so the market economy may have an implicit stake in social
disorganization and the neglect of the public sphere.
Advertising, since it is paid for by private entities, does not generally have
a social-investment message to it but instead focuses upon individuals pursuing
their private passions. “The hell with everyone else” is the subtext of many of
these messages. And as American society becomes more and more split into two
40 Chapter 2
classes, one that is increasingly wealthy and one that is increasingly poor, the
social tensions and possibilities for serious class confl ict become stronger. People
can retreat to gated communities to avoid crime, but they end up prisoners of
those communities. My point, then, is that advertising often distracts us from
paying attention to the need for social investments, from a concern for the public
sphere, and thus, by its very nature, tends to be politically conservative.
NEIMAN MARCUS AND “COUTHIFICATION”
There is a great deal of pressure upon people to show taste and discrimina-
tion, suitable to their place in the great chain of being (that is, to their socioeco-
nomic status), in the products and services they consume. Neiman Marcus, for
example, was useful to oil millionaires who had plenty of money but no sense of
style adequate to their fi nancial resources. What Neiman Marcus did was what
I would describe as “couthifi cation.” The salespeople at Neiman Marcus made
sure that nouveau riche oil millionaires purchased the right clothes for them-
selves and their families and bought the right home furnishings. (Stanley Marcus
provided this insight to me when we appeared on a radio program together.)
The famous Neiman Marcus catalogs, with their absurdly expensive “his”
and “hers” gifts, generated a great deal of publicity for the store and also gen-
erated a halo effect for items purchased at Neiman Marcus. Anything bought
there was, Neiman Marcus suggested, by defi nition stylish and in good taste
(fi gure 2.6). For people with no taste, Neiman Marcus—and the legion of
Figure 2.6. Notice the long neck,
the profi le, and the pose of this model
for the Neiman Marcus company. How
does this image suggest sophistication
and an elite status?
Consumer Cultures 41
other stores like it—provided an escape from the anxiety of showing poor
taste. Neiman Marcus was expensive, but it was worth it.
On the radio program we were on, I suggested to Stanley Marcus that
department stores, such as Neiman Marcus, reminded me of medieval cathe-
drals. One can fi nd interesting parallels between the two. These similarities
are refl ected in table 2.1.
We can see from the parallels between department stores and cathedrals
that there is something holy, something of the sacred, connected to purchasing
Table 2.1. Department Stores as Functional Alternatives to Cathedrals
Department Store Cathedral
Modern Medieval
Paradisical: Heaven on Earth Now Paradisical: Heaven in the Future
Merchandising Passion: Salvation
Sales: Save Money Prayer: Save Souls
Sacred Texts: Catalogs Sacred Texts: Bible, Prayer Books
Clerks Clergy
Sell: Products Sell: God
Possessions as Signs of Spiritual Election Holiness as a Sign of Spiritual Election
Big Sales Religious Holidays
Sale of an Expensive Product Conversion of a Sinner
Buy Incredible Gifts Experience Miracles
Pay Taxes Pay Tithe
Muzac Religious Music
Lighting to Sell Lighting to Inspire Reverence
Bad Credit Penance
Advertising Proselytizing
Cash Register Offering Plate
Brand Loyalty Devotion
42 Chapter 2
objects—the things we buy are signs, it can be surmised, that we have been
blessed. And so we consume, often with religious fervor—even though we
may not recognize the sacred dimension of our activities.
In his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, the historian Johan Huizinga
explains how the two realms—the sacred and the secular—merged into one
another. He writes:
All life was saturated with religion to such an extent that the people were
in constant danger of losing sight of the distinction between things spiritual
and things temporal. If, on the one hand, all the details of ordinary life may
be raised to a sacred level, on the other hand, all that is holy sinks to the
commonplace, by the fact of being blended with everyday life. (1924:156)
Our lives, in contemporary consumer cultures, are saturated with com-
mercials and other forms of advertising. And beneath these advertisements and
fueling our desire to consume more and more products is, I would suggest, a
sense that our actions have an unconscious and ultimately religious dimension
to them; they are a means of showing our “election” (a good Puritan term)
and that we are the worthy benefi ciaries of God’s grace.
NEEDS ARE FINITE, DESIRES ARE INFINITE
In America, as the quintessential consumer culture (not that many West-
ern European, Asian, or Latin American countries are far behind us), what you
can afford becomes the means of determining who you are . . . or who people
think you are. In earlier days, consumption was more or less limited to a small
percentage of fabulously wealthy industrialists and entrepreneurs. America’s
great genius has been to spread consumer lust to the middle classes, and for
some items, to the lower classes.
One problem with consumer cultures is that people become too caught
up in consuming things as a means of validating themselves and proving their
worth (there is a religious dimension to this, ultimately, as my discussion of
department stores and cathedrals suggests). In consumer cultures, all too often
people don’t think about what they have but only concern themselves with
what they don’t have. And that is, in part, because advertising constantly re-
minds them of what they don’t have. Needs are fi nite but desires are infi nite,
and thus, as soon as our needs have been taken care of, we become obsessed
with what we don’t have but want. Or, more precisely, one might suggest,
with what advertising tells us we should want.
Consumer Cultures 43
What advertising does, among other things, is manufacture desire and shape
it, and thus create people who are insatiable and who have been conditioned to
continually lust for more things. And the more we have the more we want. Be-
cause the things we buy—the sports utility vehicles, the expensive vacations, the
trophy wives and husbands—are evidence that we believe in our intelligence,
industry, potency, and ultimately, our worth (in man’s and God’s eyes).
Paco Underhill, a “retail anthropologist” who studies shoppers for a liv-
ing, has noticed this in his work:
At that exalted level, shopping is a transforming experience, a method of
becoming a newer, perhaps even slightly improved person. The products
you buy turn you into that other, idealized version of yourself. That dress
makes you beautiful, this lipstick makes you kissable, that lamp turns your
house into an elegant showplace. (2000:116–7)
The subtitle of Underhill’s book Why We Buy, in its updated and revised
version, published in 2009, is The Science of Shopping (fi gure 2.7). There is also
a banner saying “Updated and Revised for the Internet, the Global Consumer
and Beyond,” which indicates fi rst that shopping is now a “science” (in that
it is studied in scientifi c ways) and second that the Internet is now playing an
increasingly important role in advertising and that many of the insights that
Figure 2.7. Why We Buy was a best-selling
book that discusses what motivates shoppers.
44 Chapter 2
Underhill offers in the book now have relevance to everyone. That is because
shopping is a global passion. His book is fi lled with fascinating factoids about
the amount of time people spend shopping in supermarkets and department
stores, information he has to offer about how consumers behave in various
settings where they purchase goods and services, and ideas he offers about how
to facilitate their purchasing things.
The British novelist and critic John Berger has a different perspective on
advertising and consumer cultures. In his infl uential book Ways of Seeing (also
a British Broadcasting Company television series), he offers what is, in essence,
a Marxist critique of advertising or “publicity.” He writes:
It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying
something more.
This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer—even though
we will be poorer for having spent our money.
Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who
have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state
of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of
manufacturing glamour. . . . Publicity is never a celebration of pleasure-in-
itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of
himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell.
The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what
makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity
is about social relations, not objects. (1972:131, 132)
This is an important point. What Berger suggests is that advertising takes
advantage of the desire we have for a better life for ourselves and our loved
ones and uses our envy of others and of ourselves—as we might be if we pur-
chase the right things—against us.
MIMETIC DESIRE
The French literary theorist René Girard has a fascinating theory about
why we consume things, which he explains in his book A Theater of Envy:
William Shakespeare. According to Girard, what we desire is what others desire;
and “mimetic desire” means we imitate their desire—whether it be for mate-
rial possessions or marriage partners. Girard argues that mimetic desire explains
the behavior of Shakespeare’s characters who desire people essentially because
others desire them.
As Girard explains:
Consumer Cultures 45
When we think of those phenomena in which mimicry is likely to play
a role, we enumerate such things as dress, mannerisms, facial expressions,
speech, stage acting, artistic creation, and so forth. Consequently, we see
imitation in social life as a force for gregariousness and bland conformity
through the mass reproduction of a few social models.
If imitation also plays a role in desire, if it contaminates our urge to acquire
and possess, this conventional view, while not entirely false, misses the main
point. Imitation does not merely draw people together, it pulls them apart.
Paradoxically, it can do these two things simultaneously. Individuals who
desire the same thing are united by something so powerful that, as long as
they can share whatever they desire, they remain the best of friends; as soon
as they cannot, they become the worst of enemies. (1991:3)
Girard sees mimetic desire and rivalry as a fundamental source of human
confl ict and suggests that Shakespeare understood the role mimetic desire
plays in our behavior. He continually made use of it as a motivating force for
characters in his dramas.
Girard offers an example: Helen of Troy and the Trojan War. As he
explains, perhaps oversimplifying a bit to make his point (1991:123): “The
only reason the Greeks want her back is because the Trojans want to keep
her. The only reason the Trojans want to keep her is because the Greeks want
her back.” What Girard shows, here, is the awesome power of this generally
unrecognized force, mimetic desire.
It is also, I believe, a motivating force in our behavior as consumers. It
is mimetic desire that helps explain our consumer lust; we desire what others
have desired and have purchased, especially those we look up to—such as ce-
lebrities, movie stars, and sports heroes. Our desire imitates their desire, which
takes the form of our purchasing various products that they have desired and
purchased . . . or that they tell us they desire by appearing in advertisements
and commercials for these products.
The point here is not only that we identify with and want to imitate these
celebrities who advertise products or whose lifestyles we admire. By imitating
their lifestyles and product choices, we are caught by a much stronger force,
which we do not recognize—our imitating their desires.
ARE THERE FOUR CONSUMER CULTURES,
NOT JUST ONE?
When we talk about consumer cultures, we use the term to describe the
fact that the private consumption of objects and services is a cultural dominant
46 Chapter 2
in many different modern societies. But it may be a simplifi cation to say that
there is just one consumer culture. It can be argued that there are actually four
different consumer cultures found in democratic societies, based on certain
beliefs and values (tied to the strength or weakness of group affi liations and
adherence to few or many rules by people in these groups that members hold
in common).
This analysis draws on the cultural theories of a political scientist, Aaron
Wildavsky, and a social anthropologist, Mary Douglas. Wildavsky suggested
that cultural theory tries to help people answer two basic questions—the ques-
tion of identity: Who am I? and the question of action: What should I do? Wil-
davsky writes, in his chapter “A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation”:
The question of identity may be answered by saying the individuals belong
to a strong group, a collective that makes decisions binding on all members,
or that their ties to others are weak in that their choices bind only them-
selves. The question of action is answered by responding that the individual
is subject to many or few prescriptions, a free spirit or tightly constrained.
The strength or weakness of group boundaries and the numerous or few,
varied or similar, prescriptions binding or freeing individuals are the com-
ponents of their culture. (1989:25)
We fi nd, then, that there are four political cultures—and, by extension, so
Douglas argues, consumer cultures—that arise from this situation. Wildavsky
calls his four political cultures hierarchical or elitist, individualist, egalitarian,
and fatalist. These cultures are created by the strength and weakness of group
boundaries and the numbers and kinds of rules and prescriptions. Social sci-
entists Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky point out, in
their book Cultural Theory, how the four cultures are derived:
Strong group boundaries coupled with minimal prescriptions produce social
relations that are egalitarian. . . . When an individual’s social environment
is characterized by strong group boundaries and binding prescriptions, the
resulting social relations are hierarchical [sometimes known as elitist]. . . .
Individuals who are bounded by neither group incorporation nor prescribed
Insights from Advertising Agencies
Bianca Jagger would be a good person to associate with the wine we’re trying to advertise, since she’s one of the new aristocracy or celebritocracy. They are the opinion leaders and style setters thrown up by the world of pop culture, who set trends and infl uence a number of “hip” people.
Consumer Cultures 47
roles inhabit an individualistic social context. In such an environment all
boundaries are provisional and subject to negotiation. . . . People who fi nd
themselves subject to binding prescriptions and are excluded from group
membership exemplify the fatalistic way of life. Fatalists are controlled from
without. (1990:6–7)
The basic characteristics of these four political and consumer cultures are de-
scribed here.
Hierarchical/Elitists
Hierarchical/Elitists believe in the need for hierarchy in societies, but feel
a sense of obligation to those below them.
Individualists
Individualists feel that individuals are basic and that the role of govern-
ment should be minimal—protecting against crime and invasions and maxi-
mizing possibilities for individuals in the business world. They have little sense
of obligation to others, since they believe we’re all responsible for ourselves.
Egalitarians
Egalitarians believe that everyone has certain needs that have to be looked
after by government. They’re critics of the status quo and elitists and individu-
alists. They stress the importance of voluntary consent.
Fatalists
Fatalists are at the bottom of the totem pole and have little economic,
purchasing, or decision-making power. They depend on luck to escape from
fatalist status. Over the course of time Wildavsky changed the names of some
of his cultures, I should add, in attempt to clarify things. We can use these four
political/consumer cultures to understand why people consume the things
they do. Some examples appear in table 2.2.
This chart can be extended and can deal with many other categories of
purchases, and it’s an interesting project to consider how people in the four
political/consumer cultures make the choices they make.
Wildavsky adds an important point—there are only four political cultures
possible in any democratic society, and individuals make political decisions on
the basis of their allegiance to whichever political culture they fi nd themselves
48 Chapter 2
in and not on the basis of self-interest, since people generally don’t often know
what is in their self-interest. Below I list the four consumer cultures and their
relation to groups, boundaries, and prescriptions. Members of these four politi-
cal cultures or consumer cultures don’t recognize that they are members of one
of these groups; that is, they probably aren’t even aware of their existence. But
they have certain values and belief systems connected to group affi liation and
rule acceptance that Wildavsky and Douglas have identifi ed as placing them
in one of the political cultures.
Culture Group Boundaries Numbers of Prescriptions
Hierarchists strong numerous and varied Egalitarians strong few and weak Individualists weak few and weak Fatalists weak numerous and varied
Mary Douglas, who collaborated with Wildavsky on a number of proj-
ects, argues that these four political cultures can also be seen as consumer cul-
tures—which for her purposes she also describes as lifestyles. She substitutes the
term “isolates” for “fatalists” and “enclavists” for “egalitarians” and explains
that it’s membership in one of the four consumer cultures or lifestyles—each
of which is antagonistic toward or in confl ict with the three others—that best
explains people’s consumer choices. As she writes in her essay “In Defence of
Shopping”:
None of these four lifestyles (individualist, hierarchical, enclavist [egali-
tarian], isolated [fatalist]) is new to students of consumer behavior. What
may be new and unacceptable is the point [that] these are the only four
distinctive lifestyles to be taken into account, and the other point, that
Table 2.2. Lifestyles and Preferences
Category Elitist Individualist Egalitarian Fatalist
Songs “God Save the
Queen”
“My Way” “We Are the
World”
“Anarchy in
the UK”
Fashion Uniforms Suit Blue Jeans Thrift Shop
Books The Prince Looking Out for
Number One
I’m OK—
You’re OK
1984
Restaurants French Cafeteria McDonald’s Food Kitchen
Automobiles Rolls Royce BMW Civic Yugo
Consumer Cultures 49
each is set up in competition with the others. Mutual hostility is the force
that accounts for their stability. These four distinct lifestyles persist because
they rest on incompatible organizational principles. Each culture is a way
of organizing; each is predatory on the others for time and space and re-
sources. It is hard for them to co-exist peacefully, and yet they must, for
the survival of each is the guarantee of the survival of the others. Hostility
keeps them going. (1997:19)
Douglas offers her theory of the four consumer cultures to counter the
theories of consumption that come from a framework based on individualist
psychology. She argues that “cultural alignment is the strongest predictor of
preferences in a wide variety of fi elds” (1997:23).
Her theory argues, then, that there is an inherent logic behind the shop-
ping that people do and, furthermore it is shoppers, or consumers, who ul-
timately dictate what will be sold. We can see this is the case if we examine
the households of people from different consumer cultures. Members of the
different consumer cultures may have similar incomes (except for the fatalists/
isolates, who are at the bottom of the income ladder, generally speaking) but
their patterns of consumption and the way they organize their households are
affected by their membership in one of the four groups.
Douglas concludes that it is cultural bias and membership in one of the
four consumer cultures that is critical to understanding consumption. The no-
tion that shopping is essentially the expression of individual wants is incorrect,
then. As she writes in the concluding section of her essay:
The idea of consumer sovereignty in economic theory will be honoured
in market research because it will be abundantly clear that the shopper sets
the trends, and that new technology and new prices are adjuncts to achiev-
ing the shopper’s goal. The shopper is not expecting to develop a personal
identity by choice of commodities; that would be too diffi cult. Shopping is
agonistic, a struggle to defi ne not what one is but what one is not. When
we include not one cultural bias, but four, and when we allow that each
is bringing critiques against the others, and when we see that the shopper
is adopting postures of cultural defi ance, then it all makes sense. (1997:30)
If Douglas is correct, there are, in fact, four distinct and mutually antago-
nistic lifestyles or consumer cultures, even though people who are in each of
them may not be aware of the matter. This would mean that it wouldn’t be
socioeconomic class and discretionary income that is basic in consumption
decisions, but lifestyles or membership in one of the four mutually antagonistic
consumer cultures.
50 Chapter 2
The comment by Douglas that shopping is “a struggle to defi ne not what
one is but what one is not” is similar in nature to Ferdinand de Saussure’s writ-
ings about how language shapes the way we fi nd meaning in life (fi gure 2.8). In
his classic work, A Course in General Linguistics, Saussure wrote (1966:120) “in
language there are only differences” and when it comes to concepts (1966:117)
he added:
It is understood that concepts are purely differential and defi ned not by their
positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the
system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.
What Saussure is suggesting is that nothing has meaning in itself; it is the re-
lationships in language that are basic, and the most important relationship among
words and concepts involves opposition. This book is one of the founding docu-
ments of semiotics, the science of signs. He divided signs into two parts: a signifi er
(sound or object) and a signifi ed (concept or idea generated by the signifi er) and
pointed out that the relationship between signifi ers and signifi eds is based on
convention. A sign, we can say, is anything that can stand for something else.
Hairstyles, facial expression, body language, clothes—just about everything we
can think of is a sign and sends messages to others, who interpret the signs we
send, and not always correctly. I will use semiotics to analyze print advertise-
ments and television commercials in chapters 8 and 9 of this book.
When we purchase things, Douglas argues, we do so to show what we
are by showing what we are not. To simplify matters greatly, what we mean
by “poor” is “not rich,” and by “happy” is “not sad.” That is why she argues
that shopping is “agonistic.” We want to demonstrate, she says, that we are
not a member of the three other consumer cultures and are not guided by their
aesthetic standards. From Saussure’s perspective, everything has meaning by
being opposite of something else.
Figure 2.8. Ferdinand de Saussure is
one of the fathers of semiotics.
Consumer Cultures 51
Douglas moves consumption decisions from psychology to membership
in a consumer culture. Modern societies may be characterized as being con-
sumer societies and “consumer cultures” but, if Douglas is correct, there are
really four consumer subcultures and they are of major importance when it
comes to such things as individuals making decisions about what to buy or, to
the extent that voting is a kind of consumption, whom to elect to public offi ce.
There is the question, of course, of whether Douglas is correct and
whether her four consumer cultures typology is the best way to understand
patterns of consumption. It is certainly worth keeping in mind when we
consider the way advertising attempts to persuade people to buy various
products and services. Later in the book we will see that marketers have de-
vised many different ways of breaking down American society into different
target audiences.
What we have to wonder about is whether these many different target
audiences can each be subsumed under one of the four consumer cultures
Douglas writes about or whether her theory is, while intellectually elegant, too
narrow. For example, marketers have focused a good deal of attention on how
to reach children and make use of their notorious “pester power.” (I’ll deal
with this subject in more detail at the end of this book.) How does Douglas’s
theory take into account the infl uence of children on the consumption pat-
terns of their parents?
CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING
One of the curious ironies about advertising is that generally the most
banal and trivial aspects of life are advertised at great expense and with great
care, while important matters, such as fi nding jobs, selling houses, and look-
ing for relationships, are relegated to the bland monotony of the classifi ed
advertising pages in newspapers. A remarkable amount of talent and money
are used to sell aspirins, cold remedies, soaps, soups, detergents, and other such
products. These products are quite inconsequential in terms of our everyday
lives, though when you add everything up, the amount of money we spend
on these items is enormous.
On the other hand, the most important and personal aspects of our lives
are generally dealt with in the most mundane and impersonal of formats, the
classifi ed advertising sections of newspapers. In these classifi ed advertisement
sections we fi nd advertisements for jobs, houses, and lovers that are printed
in small typefaces and, to save money (since we pay for each word), make use
of all kinds of shorthand devices to communicate information, such as: SWM
seeks SWF (single white male seeks single white female).
52 Chapter 2
These classifi ed advertisements refl ect with compelling power, it can be
argued, the anonymity and alienation that pervade our culture. The fact that
we have elaborate advertising campaigns about sandwich wraps or snacks only
serves to heighten the sense of pettiness that many of us feel about ourselves.
For we are reduced to the cheapest and least expressive kinds of advertising for
the most important aspects of our lives. Inadvertently advertising may be re-
fl ecting a basic question that has troubled us for much of our history—which is
more important, people or property (things)? As far as advertising is concerned,
the contrast between the advertisements involving human relationships and
important matters like jobs, housing, and the elaborate advertisements for
products suggest that it is things that are of most concern to us. As Emerson
put it many years ago in his “Ode to W. H. Channing,” “Things are in the
saddle, and ride mankind.”
Most of the products we buy are designed to help people do things they
consider useful and to gain various kinds of satisfactions—such as avoid-
ing smelly armpits or having beautiful, lustrous hair—but the distinction
between the kind of advertising for products and services of commercial
organizations and classifi ed advertisements is quite compelling. It is in the
classifi ed “want-ads” that the “little people” speak—telling the world of an
old refrigerator for sale or a house or a “proven” blackjack system or trying
to fi nd a lost calico cat.
The pages of the classifi ed ads are generally gray—except for advertise-
ments for certain jobs or car ads—messages reduced to the lowest possible
number of words, using certain abbreviations and stacked one on top of an-
other for page after page. Does the monotonous and tedious nature of these
little advertisements refl ect anything on the part of the people who place these
ads or read them? Does the “art form” of the classifi ed advertisement refl ect
anything about the personality of the writers of these ads? We fi nd in the clas-
sifi ed ad sections of newspapers a world of errors made in purchases, of useless
or no longer wanted objects, and an almost staggering number of services,
notices, statements, and announcements. It is a study in chaos—a chaos above
which, by virtue of its general categories, there seems to be a semblance of
order. It is the chaos of the lives of the “little people” who read little boxes or
write little advertisements about everything from trivial matters to the most
important things in their lives—jobs, housing, and love.
In some of the “relationships” classifi ed advertisements we fi nd humor
and imagination, but most classifi ed advertisements are telegraphic in nature
Consumer Cultures 53
and communicate at the most elemental levels. These classifi ed advertise-
ments offer an alternative picture of American culture and society—and
are characterized by a gritty realism that counters the rosy and celebratory
optimism of traditional newspaper, magazine, and television advertising. In
recent years, Craigslist.org has had an enormous impact on classifi ed adver-
tising in newspapers and has just about destroyed this kind of advertising as
a major revenue source for them.
For the semiotician, the contradictory nature of the American myth of
equality is nowhere written so clearly as in the signs that American advertis-
ers use to manipulate us into buying their wares. “Manipulate” is the word
here, not “persuade”; for advertising campaigns are not sources of product
information, they are exercises in behavior modifi cation. Appealing to our
subconscious emotions rather than to our conscious intellects, advertise-
ments are designed to exploit the discontentment fostered by the American
dream, the constant desire for social success and the material rewards that
accompany it. America’s consumer economy runs on desire, and advertising
stokes the engines by transforming common objects—from peanut butter to
political candidates—into signs of all the things that Americans covet most.
—Jack Solomon, The Signs of Our Times:
The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life
Any analysis of the system of objects must ultimately imply an analysis of
discourse about objects—that is to say, an analysis of promotional “mes-
sages” (comprising image and discourse). For advertising is not simply an
adjunct to the system of objects; it cannot be detached therefrom, nor can
it be restricted to its “proper” function (there is no such thing as advertis-
ing strictly confi ned to the supplying of information). Indeed, advertising is
now an irremovable aspect of the system of objects precisely because of its
disproportionateness. This lack of proportion is the “functional” apotheosis
of the system. Advertising in its entirety constitutes a useless and unneces-
sary universe. It is pure connotation. It contributes nothing to production
or to the direct practical application of things, yet it plays an integral part in
the system of objects not merely because it relates to consumption but also
because it itself becomes an object to be consumed.
—Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects
55
3
ADVERTISING AND THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS
It is useful, at this point, to place advertising in the communication process—
so we can better understand how print advertisements and radio and televi-
sion commercials (and other forms of advertising in other media) function. To
do this I offer a brief overview of communication theory, focusing on one of
the most famous statements, the famous Lasswell formula, and an amplifi cation
of this formula that I’ve made. There are, of course, numerous models for un-
derstanding the communication process, just as there are many different ways
of analyzing and interpreting advertisements and commercials and the role they
play in our lives.
THE LASSWELL FORMULA
Harold Lasswell—an infl uential political scientist—said, in a 1948 article,
that to understand the communication process we should ask the following
questions:
Who?
Says what?
In which channel?
To whom?
With what effect?
I have offered an overview of the communication process that is somewhat
similar to the Lasswell formula. I deal with four focal points in the study of com-
munication and with their relation to media. These focal points are: (1) the work
of art, (2) the artist, (3) the audience, and (4) America (or the society in which
the work of art is created or disseminated by the media).
56 Chapter 3
FOCAL POINTS AND THE STUDY OF MEDIA
We can see the relationships that exist among these focal points in fi gure
3.1. The arrows connect each focal point to every other focal point, either
directly (for example, art and audience or art and artist) or indirectly (art/me-
dium/America or artist/medium/audience).
The work of art (or “text” in the jargon of communication scholars) is, in
terms of our interests, a print advertisement or a radio or television commer-
cial. It is important that we realize that print and electronic advertisements are
works of art—even though their purpose is a commercial one—to convince
people to use some product or service. Thus, we have to consider, among
other things, aesthetic matters when dealing with advertising.
All advertising is directed toward a target audience—the people who are
the most likely purchasers of the product or service being advertised. Copy-
writers and artists work hard to create advertisements and commercials that will
interest and appeal to members of their target audience. Advertisers talk about
upscale audiences, who have a considerable amount of money to spend (on
things such as expensive cars and vacations), and downscale audiences, who
are targeted for low-cost products. Research companies have elaborated vari-
ous schemes and categories of purchasers, based on zip codes, racial and ethnic
characteristics, values and lifestyles, and so on. A number of these matters are
discussed later in the book.
Art Audience
Medium
Artist America (Society)
Figure 3.1. Focal points in the study of communication.
Advertising and the Communication Process 57
Advertising is a collaborative medium. So when we talk about artists in my
chart of focal points, we really are talking about teams of copywriters, artists,
directors, musicians, fi lmmakers, and numerous other creative artists, in addition
to researchers and others involved in the complicated process of making adver-
tisements. Television commercials are the most complex form of advertising,
since they involve script writers, actors, musicians, cinematographers, and others.
The fourth focal point is America or the society in which advertisements
are disseminated—either via print or via electronic media, such as radio, televi-
sion, or the Internet. The term “society” is probably too broad, since advertise-
ments are traditionally targeted and directed to certain segments of the general
population—based a good deal of the time on demographic factors such as age,
gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic standing.
Finally, there is the medium that is used to disseminate the advertisements.
The medium used has a major impact on the creation of texts. Each medium—
print (newspapers, magazines), radio, or television—has certain strengths and
weaknesses. So although the medium may not be the message (the late Mar-
shall McLuhan, a famous communication theorist, argued that “the medium
is the message”), it has a lot of impact upon the message.
In fi gure 3.1, there are arrows pointing in all directions, which signifi es
that all of the focal points are connected to one another. We can focus our
attention on the following:
1. one focal point: the work of art (the advertisement), the artist, the
audience, America, or the medium
2. the relationship that exists between any two:
A. the advertisement and the artists who create it
B. the advertisement and the audience to whom it is directed
C. the advertisement and the society in which it is found
D. the advertisement and the medium in which it is transmitted
3. any three
4. any four
5. all fi ve
Insights from Advertising Agencies
A great ad is one that connects people to what you’re selling and isn’t too subtle. If it’s too subtle people will see it but not remember it. But if it’s too gimmicky, people will get bored with it once they’ve seen it. We conduct wear-out analyses to see how long an ad will last. Sometimes we put them on the shelf and then bring them back after a while.
58 Chapter 3
The more focal points we consider, the more complicated the analysis be-
comes, which leads me to suggest that it is generally more productive to focus
on fewer focal points.
THE LASSWELL FORMULA AND FOCAL POINTS
I developed my model of the focal points by extending one used by liter-
ary theorist M. H. Abrams. When I elaborated this model (discussed in con-
siderable detail in my book Essentials of Mass Communication Theory), I did not
realize that my focal points were similar to the different elements found in the
Lasswell formula, described by some researchers as probably the most famous
phrase ever uttered in communication research.
The similarities between the Lasswell formula and my focal points are
shown in table 3. 1. The major difference between the two, aside from the fact
that I’ve used alliteration as a mnemonic device, is that my focal point America
(or society) doesn’t concern itself as directly with effects.
A PROBLEM WITH THE LASSWELL FORMULA
Some researchers have faulted Lasswell, suggesting that he overemphasizes
the effects of communication. As Denis McQuail and Sven Windahl write in
Communication Models: For the Study of Mass Communication:
The Lasswell Formula shows a typical trait of early communication models.
It more or less takes for granted that the communicator has some inten-
tion of infl uencing the receiver and, hence, that communication should be
treated mainly as a persuasive process. It is also assumed that messages always
have effects. Models such as this have surely contributed to the tendency to
exaggerate the effects of, especially, mass communication. (1993:14)
McQuail and Windahl make a good point. Some communication is not
necessarily meant to persuade. But some is—especially the kind of commu-
Table 3.1. Comparison of the Lasswell Formula
and Focal Points
Lasswell Berger
Who? Artists, copywriters, etc.
Says what? Artwork (advertisements)
In which channel? Medium
To whom? Audience
With what effect? America (society)
Advertising and the Communication Process 59
nication I am dealing with in this book, advertising. In some cases, of course,
advertisements have unintended consequences.
Another well-known model of the communication process is similar,
in certain ways, to the models discussed above, but adds some new factors
to understanding the communication process. The famous linguist Roman
Jakobson elaborated a communication model (fi gure 3.2) that is useful for
us because it uses many of the terms currently popular with communication
theorists. In this model someone, a sender, sends a message to someone else,
a receiver, using a code such as the English language. The context helps us
interpret the message better.
The Jakobson model was explained in part by Robert Scholes, a literature
professor, in Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. As Scholes writes:
Whether we are considering ordinary conversation, a public speech, a letter,
or a poem, we always fi nd a message which proceeds from a sender to a re-
ceiver. These are the most obvious aspects of communication. But a success-
ful communication depends on three other aspects of the event as well: the
message must be delivered through a contact, physical and/or psychological;
it must be framed in a code; and it must refer to a context. In the area of con-
text, we fi nd what a message is about. But to get there we must understand
the code in which the message is framed—as in the present case, my messages
reach you through the medium of an academic/literary subcode of the English
language. And even if we have the code, we understand nothing until we
make contact with the utterance; in the present case, until you see the printed
words on this page (or hear them read aloud) they do not exist as a message
for you. The message itself, uniting sender and receiver, in the quintessentially
human act of communication, is simply a verbal form, which depends on all
the other elements of a speech event to convey its meaning. The message is
not the meaning. Meaning lies at the end of the speech event, which gives
the verbal formula its life and color. (1974:24)
One of the problems those who make advertisements and commercials
face comes from the fact that audiences or receivers “aberrantly decode” the
Context
Message
Sender Receiver
Contact (Medium)
Code
Figure 3.2. The Jakobson model of communication.
60 Chapter 3
messages (advertisements and commercials) they are sent. In part this is because
communication is such a complicated process, but also this problem stems in a
general sense from differences in education, socioeconomic class, and cultural
level between the senders of the messages and the receivers of the messages.
The Jakobson model uses different (and now common) terms from the
Lasswell model and my focal points model, but there are also a number of
similarities, as table 3.2 shows. What the Lasswell model doesn’t deal with are
codes and the importance of context in interpreting (decoding) messages. And
the Jakobson model doesn’t concern itself with effects, as the Lasswell model
does. The Berger model indirectly involves context, in that American society
provides a background that helps people decode messages. With these models
we have a good understanding of the communication process and can under-
stand how print advertisements and commercials function from a theoretical
point of view.
In this book, I use various aspects of communication theory such as dif-
ferent focal points, codes, receivers and senders, and so on, from time to time
as it suits my purpose, in my discussion of specifi c print advertisements or
television commercials and advertising in general. Consider, for example, all
those television commercials we watch. They all want to persuade us to do
something—whatever the maker of the product or provider of the service
being advertised (the advertiser) and the advertising agency that made the
commercial want us to do.
The phrase “run it up a fl agpole to see if anyone salutes” actually is, in its
own way, similar to the Lasswell formula. We can see this by comparing the
fl agpole phrase and the Lasswell formula:
Lasswell Formula Run It Up a Flagpole Who? (Let us) run Says what? It (the advertisement or commercial) In which channel? Up a fl agpole (print or electronic medium) To whom? To see if anyone (some audience) With what effect? Salutes (is affected by it)
Table 3.2. Comparison of Models of Communication
Lasswell Jakobson Berger
Who? Sender Artist
Says what? Message Artwork (Text)
In which channel? Contact (medium) Medium
To whom? Receiver Audience
With what effect? America
Advertising and the Communication Process 61
In both the Lasswell formula and the fl agpole phrase, most of the elements
in the communication process are taken into consideration, though the adver-
tising phrase is much more colloquial and doesn’t seem to be concerned with
the communication process, except in a rather vague manner.
But how do they do this? How do they manipulate us? How do they
manufacture desire in us? How do they (when they do, that is) engineer our
consent? One way is by wearing us down under a constant barrage of adver-
tisements and commercials. One way we resist—not on purpose, of course—is
by decoding these advertisements and commercials aberrantly; that is, not the
way those who created them expect us to or want us to.
METAPHOR AND METONYMY
There are two rhetorical devices, metaphor and metonymy, that are used
by copywriters and artists to communicate with people. Jakobson argues that
metaphor and metonymy are the two essential ways that people communicate
meaning. Metaphor is a technique that uses analogy to create its effects. It ex-
plains or interprets one thing in terms of something else. “My love is a rose” is
a metaphor. There is a weaker form of metaphor known as simile, which uses
a “like” or “as.” “My love is like a rose” is a simile.
Metaphor, it turns out, is a very important matter. As George Lakoff and
Mark Johnson point out in their book Metaphors We Live By:
Most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We
have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not
just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in
terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphoric in nature.
The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect.
They also govern our everyday functioning down to the most mundane
details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in
the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus
plays a central role in defi ning our everyday realities. (1980:3)
So metaphor is a crucial element in our lives, because it shapes our thinking
and our communicating—even if we don’t recognize it as such or assume that
metaphor is just a literary device.
Metonymy uses associations to communicate information and attitudes
that we all learn as we grow up. Thus, if we see a Rolls Royce in an adver-
tisement we know that the person who owns the car is very wealthy and can
afford “the best.” The person who drives a Rolls Royce is different from the
person who drives a Ferrari, and they are both different from people who drive
62 Chapter 3
Honda Civics. Copywriters and art directors can use this information we all
have (i.e., certain associations or metonymies) to communicate, rather quickly,
notions they want us to have. There is a form of metonymy in which a part
stands for a whole, or vice versa, that is known as synecdoche.
For example, when people say “The Pentagon” we interpret this to stand
for the United States military services. When we see a Mercedes-Benz symbol,
we know it stands for a car.
Metaphor, it turns out, is one of the basic ways human beings make sense
of things, so metaphor and metonymy—which are often mixed together—
turn out to be very powerful tools that advertisers use to provide information
to us and to generate desired emotional responses in us. Table 3.3 compares
the two devices.
We can see from this table that there are both verbal and graphic forms
of metaphor and metonymy and they are used to great effect in all kinds of
advertising. For example, an image of a snake in an advertisement can be con-
strued metaphorically as a phallic symbol and metonymically as alluding to the
Insights from Advertising Agencies
“Bad taste” is anything that keeps a person comfortable in his situ- ation and reactions, anything that soothes rather than stimulates, anything dated rather than trendy, anything sentimental rather than sophisticated. This is the taste of more than 70 percent of the public, and it is this taste that dictates to advertisers. Advertising does not lead, it only follows. It’s a service of communication, of selling, of a dialogue with consumers that is supposed to argue, cajole, or coax them into learning about goods for sale. It depends not on orders from manufacturers or retailers or providers of goods and services, but on dictation from the public. By a dictation from the public’s in- stincts or habits of mind or mindlessness, too strongly entrenched for mere word-spinners and picture-makers to do anything about.
Table 3.3. Metaphor and Metonymy
Metaphor Metonymy
analogy association
meta = to transfer; phor = bear meta = to transfer; onoma = name
“My love is a rose” Rolls Royce associated with great wealth
simile analogy with “like” or “as” synecdoche part stands for whole or vice versa
“My love is like a rose” “The crown” stands for royalty
Spider-Man’s costume Royal seal on British marmalade jars
“Drive = Love” Derby suggests English society
Advertising and the Communication Process 63
snake in the Garden of Eden. Later in the book I will analyze an advertisement
that uses a snake prominently and we will see that it is a complicated symbol.
METAPHOR AND IDENTITY: I AM A SEASHELL
In a semiotics seminar I once taught I played an interesting game. I asked
my students to put simple objects that they thought refl ected various aspects
of their personalities in a brown paper bag and bring them to class. I also asked
them to list the qualities that they thought the objects refl ected and write
them on a piece of paper that they were to put in the bag. That way nobody
could tell who submitted which object. I collected the brown paper bags and
pulled out a seashell from one of them. I asked the members of the class what
the object, functioning semiotically as a sign, refl ected about the person who
had submitted the object. My students answered with terms such as “sterile,”
“empty,” “dead.” Then I pulled out the slip of paper which the student had
submitted and read: “beautiful,” “elegant,” “natural.”
The moral is: We may think we are sending certain messages about
ourselves by the way we dress and what we say when we talk, by our facial
expressions and body language, but other people may not be interpreting those
messages the way we thought they would. That’s one of the main problems
advertisers face—people don’t “get” their messages.
In the second half of the twentieth century in Europe, or at any rate in
France, there is nothing—whether object, individual, or social group—that
is valued apart from its double, the image that advertises and sanctifi es it.
This image duplicates not only an object’s material, perceptible existence
but desire and pleasure that it makes into fi ctions situating them in the
land of make-believe, promising “happiness”—the happiness of being a
consumer. Thus publicity [advertising] that was intended to promote con-
sumption is the fi rst of consumer goods; it creates myths—or since it can
create nothing—it borrows existing myths, canalizing signifi ers to a dual
purpose: to offer them as such for general consumption and to stimulate the
consumption of a specifi c object.
—Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World
The knowingness and skepticism of advertising audiences are now taken
for granted by advertising professionals and media studies analysts. . . . The
knowledge of the audience, and their indifference, pose problems both
for the advertisers and for analysts of advertising. For the advertisers, the
problem is getting around the skepticism, the knowingness, and the bore-
dom, and still having an effect, or even using these responses for their own
purposes. For the analysts, the skepticism and knowingness undermine sim-
plistic critiques of advertising effects, in which people do what ads tell them,
accept the roles offered in ads as representations of the world, and take up
the positions offered by advertising texts. But if they know how advertising
works, does this protect them against its effects? Or is their knowingness
limited and ultimately deceptive?
—Greg Myers, Ad Worlds: Brands/Media/Audiences
65
4
RUNNING IT UP A FLAGPOLE TO SEE IF ANYONE SALUTES
Let me start by offering a somewhat exaggerated account of a typical morn-
ing of a typical college student. The heroine of this story is Lisa Greatgal,
but I could also use Johnny Q. Public or any number of other male or female
fi gures of varying ages, ethnicities, racial groups, socioeconomic groups, sub-
cultures, and so on.
LISA’S MORNING: A FICTION
Lisa Greatgal got up at 8:30 A.M. and got ready to go to the college,
where she was a sophomore. She had a 9:10 class. She shared an apartment
near the campus with another girl, Melanie Valleygirl, and a junior at her
school, Johnny Q. Public. Lisa put on a Maidenform bra and panties from
Nordstrom, a yellow Nike T-shirt with a green swoosh, a pair of faded Polo
jeans by Ralph Lauren with torn knees, white Nike anklet socks, and a pair
of thick-soled black Doc Martens boots that had become popular in England
a few years earlier. She scrubbed her face using Dove soap, brushed her teeth
with Colgate Total toothpaste and a Colgate Reach toothbrush. She rinsed
her mouth with Listerine mouthwash. She dabbed a bit of Fidji perfume on
her neck. Her hair was dyed blond with L’Oreal Preference hair color. Her
eyeglass frames were by Guess?
For breakfast she had a glass of Ocean Spray Ruby Red and Mango juice
(which Martina Hingis says she loves), a bowl of Post Shredded Wheat ce-
real with Lucerne 1 percent milk, and a cup of Yuban coffee with Carnation
evaporated skim milk. She made some toast with Wonder bread and spread
Brummel & Brown margarine, made with yogurt, on it. She hastily dumped
some textbooks in an L.L. Bean knapsack and rushed off to class, arriving only
ten minutes late.
66 Chapter 4
That afternoon, after she had a Boston Carver lunch—a double-sided meat
loaf, corn bread, and salad—she got a telephone call from a marketing-survey
company. She was asked whether she felt she was infl uenced by advertising.
“I’m aware of advertising,” she replied, “but I’m not infl uenced by it.”
LISA GREATGAL’S AND JOHNNY Q.
PUBLIC’S DAILY MEDIA DIET
Lisa Greatgal and Johnny Q. Public are both students, but let’s assume
their media diet is typical of the American public. According to the 2010
Kaiser Family Foundation study “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to
18-Year-Olds” (www.kff.org), we fi nd the following measurements of media
usage, in hours per day:
Activity 1999 2009 Watching TV 3:49 4:29 Music, Audio 1:48 2:31 Computer 0:27 1:29 Video Games 0:26 1:13 Movies 0:18 0:25 Reading 0:43 0:38
In 2009 this totals more than ten hours per day, but because of multi-tasking
(29 percent of the time) Kaiser reduces the average media diet to 7:38 per day.
I might add that this fi gure doesn’t count talking for approximately 30 minutes
or text messaging for approximately two hours on cell phones.
Maybe, since they’re students, Lisa and Johnny spend a bit more time
than around forty minutes a day reading, though on the basis of teaching for
almost forty years, I wonder how much time students actually spend reading
books, especially in this era of ever-changing technology. Many students now
work, and school is something they have to fi t into their busy schedules, and
nowadays students and the general population alike read articles and get much
of their news online.
We see, then, that children and teenagers spend an enormous amount of
time involved in the media of all kinds. It’s important to keep in mind that
if children watch something like twenty hours of television per week, they
are exposed to an enormous number of television commercials. It has been
estimated that children are exposed to 20,000 thirty-second television com-
mercials a year.
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 67
TELEVISION VIEWING AND
EXPOSURE TO COMMERCIALS
The U.S. Census estimates that in 2010 Americans will spend around
3,500 hours a year with different kinds of media. This amounts to 9.6 hours
each day with media (not including some relatively minor time expenditures).
Some of the major media we consume follow (Table 1094: Media Usage and
Consumer Spending 2004 to 2012):
Medium Number of Hours Per Year TV 1,607 Basic cable 958 Premium cable 827 Recorded music 184 Consumer magazines 124 Pure play internet services 197 Newspapers 155 Video games 125 Reading books 108 Reading educational books 8
This list doesn’t include cell phones, and if you consider the hour and a half per
day talking and texting on cell phones, the amount of time spent on media and
communication would be considerably higher. We can see, then, that media
dominate our lives. If we work forty hours a week for fi fty weeks, we work for
2,000 hours. So you can see how large the 3,500 hours fi gure is. In some cases,
we have to recognize that people multi-task and consume several kinds of media
at the same time, so the fi gures may be a bit infl ated, but however you fi gure
things, we can see that, to a great extent, our lives are saturated by the media.
Let me quote from a book, published thirty-odd years ago, about what
our constant exposure to television means. In Spots: The Popular Art of American
Television Commercials (Arts Communications) Bruce Kurtz writes:
The National Association of Broadcasters’ Television Code limits the number
of commercials permitted on television to 9.5 minutes an hour during prime
time and 16 minutes an hour during other times, except during children’s
programming, which is more limited. Since the currently preferred length of
a single TV spot is 30 seconds, the number of spots per hour averages from
19 to 32. The largest percentage of television viewing occurs during prime
time, but if we average 19 and 32, we arrive at a fi gure of 25.5 spots per hour.
On the average, each American sees 156 spots a day, or 1,092 spots a week.
One hour and 18 minutes of the average American’s daily television viewing
68 Chapter 4
consists of television spots, or about nine hours and six minutes a week. There
may be no other single form of visual imagery which occupies that much of
Americans’ time, or of which Americans see such a quantity. (1977:7)
Kurtz’s fi gures are more than thirty years old; in recent years, fi fteen-second
and ten-second television commercials have become popular, which means
we’re exposed to even more commercials than before. Kurtz’s fi gures suggest
that we spend 486 hours a year watching television commercials—that’s the
equivalent of working more than twelve weeks a year, at forty hours per week,
just watching television commercials.
Thus, roughly speaking, more than a quarter of the time we spend watching
television (and the same applies to listening to the radio) is devoted to commer-
cials. In situation comedies, for example, the scripts generally take up twenty-
two minutes and leave eight minutes for commercials and station promotions.
Advertisers have also begun to emphasize product placement and are paying
to have performers in fi lms and other media use their products in shows. And
there is talk of putting advertisements, in one form or another, onto screens in
cell phones. This move to bring advertising to cell phones was described by Gary
Ruskin, executive director of a nonprofi t consumer group, Commercial Alert,
as “part of the creep of advertising into every nook and cranny of our lives. This
is advertising right in your face” (New York Times, January 16, 2006, p. C1).
The chart that follows (from www.businessinsider.com/us-advertising
-spending-by-medium-2009-10, accessed October 27, 2009) shows how
much we spend on advertising in the United States by media.
Medium (in billions) 2005 2010 (estimated)
Newspapers 47.4 23.4 Magazines 12.8 9.1 Broadcast TV 44.2 36.8 Cable Networks 23.6 27 Radio 21.4 15.9 Yellow Pages 15.9 11.9 Direct Mail 55.2 52.3 Business Papers 4.1 2.6 Outdoor 6.3 5.9 Internet 12.5 29.3 Misc. 35 30.4 Total National 156.3 168.4 Total Local 123.3 150.2 TOTAL 279.5 241.1
The fi gure for Internet advertising has increased greatly since 2005, with
the explosion of advertising on Google and Yahoo and other Internet sites.
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 69
Advertising executives expected something like 10 percent of all advertis-
ing dollars to be spent on online advertising in 2004, according to a report
on MediaLiteracy.com (9/19/2005). Because of the economic problems in
America, the total amount of money spent on advertising decreased between
2005 and 2010, but as the economy recovers, money spent on advertising
will increase.
Television commercials, we must realize, often cost fi ve to ten times as
much per minute to make (not counting the cost of purchasing time on tele-
vision shows to broadcast the commercials) than the programs during which
they are aired. This means we are exposed to the work of some of the most
sophisticated artists, writers, directors, musicians, and performers—whose sole
purpose is to manipulate our behavior and get us to do what they want us to
do, use the product or service being advertised.
It used to be a rule of thumb, a few years ago, that the average thirty-
second television spot cost around $350,000 to make. If it costs, say, $500,000
now to make a thirty-second commercial, this means that a thirty-minute
program, if it cost as much per second as a television commercial, would
cost $11 million (22 minutes at $500,000 per minute, with eight minutes for
commercials)—which is more than the price of making a low-budget movie.
OUR ALL-CONSUMING PASSION FOR CONSUMING
A pamphlet, “All-Consuming Passion: Waking Up from the American
Dream” (New Road Map Foundation, 1993), offers the following statistics
about television commercials and their impact:
1. 360,000
Number of television commercials American teenagers are typi-
cally exposed to by the time they graduate from high school. (I’ve
seen other estimates that put this fi gure closer to 500,000 com-
mercials by graduation time.)
2. One entire year of his or her life
Amount of time the average American will spend watching TV
commercials.
3. 93 percent
Percentage of teenage girls who report store-hopping as their
favorite activity. (Do you agree or disagree with this statistic?)
4. $230 a year
The average amount of pocket money for American children.
(This fi gure represents more than the total annual income of the
world’s half-billion poorest people.)
70 Chapter 4
A NOTE ON “HAULS”
A friend of mine who has his own advertising agency called me recently
and said, “Have you seen any of the hauls on YouTube? You might fi nd it
interesting.” I immediately went to YouTube and typed in “hauls” and found
a number of videos, made by young women, who introduced themselves and
then displayed clothes that they had recently purchased in stores. Some of
them showed their garments and other products with the price tags but most
just showed what they had bought. They often made comments such as “This
blouse is really cute. I like it so much I may go back and get another one in
a different color.” One woman complained she didn’t think the lipstick she
bought looked good on her.
The term “hauls” for this genre of video emphasizes the sense of com-
petition and conquest that shopping, and especially shopping for clothes, has
for women. If 93 percent of teenage girls report that shopping is their favorite
activity, then the hauls show how they spend their money.
Hauls refl ect a combination of materialism and narcissism: Shopping is a
word that means looking for things to buy, and making videos for YouTube
showing what they have purchased refl ects a kind of innocent narcissism. It
may also refl ect an attempt to escape from a sense of anonymity that many
people feel, and attempt to assuage by purchasing things. As I explained earlier,
playing upon Bishop Berkeley’s statement, “To buy is to be perceived.” Now,
with hauls, people can move from being perceived by sales clerks and perhaps
a few people in a store to thousands of people on YouTube.
THE PRICE WE PAY FOR “FREE” TELEVISION
The price we pay for “free” television is being exposed to countless com-
mercials. The impact of these commercials is not to be measured only in terms
of the pressure they put on us to purchase things; commercials (and advertis-
ing in general) have a much more profound impact than we imagine upon
our consciousness, our identities, our belief systems, our private lives, and our
societies and culture in general. It is to these subjects that I now turn in this
chapter on what might be generally described as the cultural consequences of
the commercial and of the advertising industry in general.
THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
In May 1998 I received a telephone call from a reporter from the New York
Daily News. She asked me to comment on a survey that found that many young
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 71
men and women reported that they were aware of print advertisements and
radio and television commercials, but felt they weren’t infl uenced by them.
Since the average person watches a bit more than four hours of television per
day (it’s a bit less for teenagers) and listens to music or radio for an hour or so,
it’s impossible to be unaware of advertisements and commercials.
But is it possible to be immune to their infl uence? That’s the question.
And is it not likely that the illusion many young people have—that they aren’t
affected by advertising—contributes to their seduction by the advertisements
and commercials to which they are exposed?
We must keep in mind the insight provided to us by Carl Jung, the great
Swiss psychologist. Jung wrote in Man and His Symbols (1968:22): “Many people
mistakenly overestimate the role of willpower and think that nothing can happen
to their minds that they do not decide or intend. But we must learn carefully
to discriminate between intentional and unintentional contents of the mind.”
Freudians would make the same point. Sigmund Freud (fi gure 4.1) argued that
there were three levels to the human psyche. One level is consciousness, in
which we are aware of what is in our minds. Just below consciousness is a level
Freud called preconsciousness, a level we generally don’t think about but one we
can access if we put our minds to it. And below this level, at the deepest level
and one which is not acc essible to us, is what Freud called the unconscious.
Freud explained his notions about the unconscious in his pioneering essay
“Psychoanalysis”:
It was a triumph of the interpretive art of psychoanalysis when it succeeded
in demonstrating that certain common mental acts of normal people, for
which no one had hitherto attempted to put forward a psychological expla-
nation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms of neurotics:
that is to say, they had a meaning, which was unknown to the subject but
which could easily be discovered by analytic means. . . . A class of material
was brought to light which is calculated better than any other to stimulate a
belief in the existence of unconscious mental acts even in people to whom
the hypothesis of something at once mental and unconscious seems strange
and even absurd. (1963:235–6)
According to Freud, we are not aware of everything that goes on in our minds
and, in fact, only a small percentage of our mental activity is accessible to us.
Insights from Advertising Agencies
When I’m having a hard time thinking something up, I run through the seven deadly sins—sloth, envy, and so on—to look for ideas.
72 Chapter 4
Ernest Dichter, who did important work on motivation research, points
out in his book The Strategy of Desire that (1960:12) “many of our daily deci-
sions are governed by motivations over which we have no control and of
which we are often quite unaware.” It is our unconscious desires and urges,
Dichter suggests, that shape our behavior in many different areas, including,
of course, purchasing products and services.
This hypothesis can be best visualized by imagining an iceberg fl oating in
the water. We know that the part of the iceberg fl oating above the water is only
a relatively small part of the iceberg. This part of the iceberg represents our con-
sciousness. We can also dimly make out part of the iceberg that is fi ve or ten feet
below the water. It is accessible to us with a bit of work. That area represents our
preconscious. And the rest of the iceberg, most of the iceberg, that exists in the
black depths of the ocean, which we cannot see, represents our unconscious. It
is not accessible to us, unless we have the help of a psychologist or psychiatrist.
If Freud is correct, something can be in our minds without our being aware
of it. We can make a preconscious thought conscious by paying attention to it
and, conversely, something we are conscious of is no longer so when we stop
paying any attention to it. The important thing about the unconscious is that it
Figure 4.1. Sigmund Freud is considered the father
of modern psychoanalytic theory. He is one of the
most infl uential thinkers of the twentieth century.
Conscious
Preconscious
Unconscious
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 73
determines many of our actions, even though we are unaware that it is doing so.
We have repressed much of the material in our unconscious and thus fi nd our-
selves doing things at the “command,” so to speak, of forces in our unconscious.
Wilson Bryan Key expands upon this point in his controversial book
Subliminal Seduction (fi gure 4.2). Key takes Freud’s notions about sexuality and
the unconscious and pushes them, some have argued, to ridiculous extremes.
Whatever the case, it is interesting to see how Key explains the power of ad-
vertising. He writes:
The basis of modern media effectiveness is a language within a language—one
that communicates to each of us at a level beneath our conscious awareness,
one that reaches into the uncharted mechanism of the human unconscious.
This is a language based upon the human ability to subliminally or subcon-
sciously or unconsciously perceive information. This is a language that today
has actually produced the profi t base for North American mass communica-
tion media. It is virtually impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine, turn
on a radio or television set, read a promotional pamphlet or the telephone
book, or shop through a supermarket without having your subconscious
purposely massaged by some monstrously clever artist, photographer, writer,
or technician. As a culture, North America might well be described as one
enormous, magnifi cent, self-service, subliminal massage parlor. (1973:11)
Figure 4.2. Subliminal Seduction makes
the argument that advertising uses many
subliminal means to arouse individuals
and get them to purchase things. The
ice cubes in the drink on the cover are
alleged to have sexual symbols hidden
inside them that affect us.
74 Chapter 4
Key’s thesis, that advertising agencies are using subliminal means—means
that we are not conscious of—to persuade us to buy the products and services
they are peddling, has never been proved. That is, the notion that certain
symbols or phrases are hidden in many print advertisements and commercials
(or even products like crackers) is highly questionable. But Key’s point about
our being susceptible to infl uences beyond our consciousness is an important
one, especially since advertising is so ubiquitous and plays so big a role in our
entertainment and our lives.
This notion is not only held by psychoanalytically oriented scholars.
Those with a more behavioral orientation make the same point. This is made
clear by an article in the Wall Street Journal which suggests that Ivan Pavlov,
rather than Freud, may be the real founder of modern advertising techniques.
Do television commercials make people behave like Pavlov’s dogs? Coca-
Cola Co. says the answer is yes. In recent years the Atlanta soft-drink
company has been refi ning an ad-testing procedure based on the behavioral
principles developed by the Russian physiologist. So far, Coke says, its new
testing system has worked remarkably well.
In his classic experiment, Ivan Pavlov discovered he could get dogs to
salivate at the ring of a bell by gradually substituting the sound for a spray of
meat powder. Coca-Cola says that, just as Pavlov’s dogs began to associate
Insights from Advertising Agencies
You can think of me as an architect. I help translate the desires of the person who wants to have a house built into a plan for the house. Sometimes, of course, our clients don’t know what they want. We have a number of groups of people involved in dealing with clients. The brand planner thinks “my consumer.” The creative people think “my ad or commercial.” The client of the agency thinks “my brand.”
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 75
a new meaning with the bell, advertising is supposed to provide some new
image or meaning for a product.
Although the specifi cs of Coke’s test are a secret, the company says it at-
tempts to evaluate how well a commercial “conditions” a viewer to accept a
positive image that can be transferred to the product. During the past three
years, Coca-Cola says, ads that scored well in its tests almost always resulted
in higher sales of soft drinks.
“We nominate Pavlov as the father of modern advertising,” says Joel S.
Dubrow, communications research manager at Coke. “Pavlov took a neutral
object and, by associating it with a meaningful object, made it a symbol of
something else; he imbued it with imagery, he gave it added value.” That, says
Mr. Dubrow, “is what we try to do with modern advertising.” (“Coca-Cola
Turns to Pavlov,” Wall Street Journal, January 19, 1984, p. 34)
So whether we buy something because of deep, hidden unconscious
forces of the kind Freud and his followers discussed or because we’ve been
“conditioned” like one of Pavlov’s dogs to buy it, one fact remains all-impor-
tant—we’ve bought something, as a result of some process affecting our minds,
that an advertiser wanted us to buy.
BEING A “BRANDED” INDIVIDUAL
Lisa Greatgal might be a caricature of a “branded” individual—someone
who has been led to purchase only brand-name products, and certain brand-
name products, at that—but she’s probably much more representative of what
goes on in American households than her opposite, someone who buys only
store brands and consults Consumer Reports before purchasing most products
and services. And, to make matters worse, many people delude themselves
into thinking that they don’t buy brand-name products, but they actually do.
These brand-name products are used to help create an image of oneself for
others and to reinforce this assumed identity. We can use clothes, eyeglasses,
and other props to create identities for ourselves and to change these identities
when we tire of them.
The following comes from an article, “The Case of the Closet Target,”
by Martin Solow, who is a copywriter. (It was published in Madison Avenue
magazine originally.) He describes being invited to a party in Long Island’s
Nassau County. When his hostess hears that he’s in the advertising business,
the following takes place:
“I’m sorry,” [the hostess] says, “I never watch TV commercials, I can’t
stand advertising . . . any advertising.” Chimes of approval and assent from
76 Chapter 4
the small group around us. I throw up a few defenses, because I know the
syndrome: “How do you buy the products you buy?” I want to know. I get
a patronizing smile. She buys what she considers best; what Consumer Reports
tells her; what she knows (and how does she know, I murmur to myself)
to be the best. I excuse myself and ask, since it is a large house, for a road-
map to the bathroom. Once in the large bathroom, the door safely locked,
I open the medicine cabinet and survey the contents: Colgate toothpaste,
L’Oreal hairspray; Trac II shaving cream and the new Gillette Trac II razor;
Ban Roll-On Deodorant (for him, I guess) and Arid Extra Dry (for her—or
maybe vice-versa); Bayer aspirins. . . . (1988)
Solow goes on, at considerable length, listing the numerous name-brand
products he found in the medicine cabinet. Bayer aspirin is signifi cant be-
cause, according to Consumer Reports, all aspirin is the same, so people who
use Bayer aspirin are paying two or three times as much for their aspirin as
they would if they bought Rite Aid aspirin; that is, they really are paying for
Bayer’s advertising.
It’s the same story all the time, he says, which leads him to offer “Solow’s
First Law: Those who claim they don’t watch TV are much more vulnerable
to commercials than those who unashamedly do.” And when he asks people
who use brand-name products why they do, they invariably, as he puts it, “play
back the message”—that is, repeat the claim, sometimes verbatim, made by the
advertiser in the commercial. Many young children, who watch a great deal
of television each day, can sing the lyrics of jingles found in countless com-
mercials. Isn’t that cute? we think. Is it possible that we have a subtle form of
brainwashing going on here? Or is it that I’m taking something that’s actually
rather trivial too seriously?
In an unpublished paper, “Suspension of Disbelief as a Bridge between
Media and Consumption,” social scientist Norbert Wiley of the University of
Illinois offers an interesting insight into the relationship between advertising
and consumption. The term “the willing suspension of disbelief” was fi rst used
by the writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge to describe the way people attending
theater productions (and by extension fi lms, videos, and other similar kinds of
productions) identify with the characters in these works. What happens is that
we forget that we are watching a show and become involved in the drama as
if we were actually part of it.
Wiley’s thesis is that “the suspension of disbelief places customers in a
relaxed and unguarded state, such that it is easier to sell them products” (un-
dated:1). He suggests that the owners of stores and the manufacturers of the
products in these stores have to infuse products with the suspension of disbe-
lief. He writes:
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 77
They have to get the aesthetic suspension of disbelief somehow into the
products, so that people fi nd themselves caught up in fantasy and identi-
fi ed with the things on the shelf. Once that is done, access to the wallet or
pocketbook is almost automatic.
A clue to how this might be done is what the shopper might do, or
think they might do, with the product. Needs are pretty physical and
body-based. We die, or at least languish, without needs. Wants are another
matter. They get to be wants, not through elementary body drives, but
through the action of the mind. That darling toy, or powerful fi shing rod
or adorable outfi t became a want by thought and fantasy. The advertisers
may have dinned us with temptation and suggestion, but at some point
we give in to their blandishment. We begin to let the image enter the
play of our minds.
Thus, the item we purchase becomes part of our fantasy life and we suspend
disbelief and, in most cases, the strictures of the ego and superego, when we
buy things.
As we’ve seen, Freud posited that our psyches have three components that
are in constant confl ict at the unconscious level:
our ids, which represent desire and lust;
our egos, which represent knowledge of reality;
our superegos, which represent conscience and guilt.
It is the task of the ego to mediate between our ids and superegos, between
our desires, on the one hand, and our sense of guilt, on the other hand. Our
ids provide energy and our superegos provide restraint. When people have a
balance between the id and superego, all is well. When either the id or su-
perego is too dominant, then we have problems. Much advertising seeks to
evade the strictures of our superegos and the reasonableness of our egos and
appeal directly to our ids. These contending forces represent those found in
the dramas that Wiley talks about.
As Wiley concludes, “fantasying ourselves with the object was the perfor-
mance and buying is the catharsis,” the resolution of the drama with attendant
emotional rewards. Aristotle argued that theatrical performances led to a ca-
tharsis, an outpouring of emotion, in the audiences of these works. We need
these commodities, Wiley argues, to complete the dramatic performances in
which we are caught up.
Many sociologists have used theatre as a metaphor to explain various
aspects of social life, and Wiley’s notion that advertising helps us “suspend dis-
belief” and enter into fantasies in which we use the commodities we purchase
for various satisfactions is an excellent example of how the theatrical metaphor
78 Chapter 4
can help explain consumer behavior and how people become “branded” and
attached to certain products and services.
Advertising agencies stress the importance of “branding,” which means
developing an emotional tie between some product or service and individuals.
More precisely, it involves an emotional tie between individuals and images
they have of the product (fi gure 4.3).
In his book, Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising,
Anthony J. Cortese offers a good description of branding. He writes (2004:4):
Branding—the process of differentiation—is at the core of advertising. What
distinguishes similar products is not ingredients but packaging and brand
names. Most major shampoos, for example, are made by two or three manu-
facturers. . . . The major thrust of advertising is to remind shoppers to seek
out and purchase a particular brand. Branding seeks to nullify or compensate
for the fact that products are otherwise fundamentally interchangeable. Tests
have shown that consumers cannot distinguish between their own brand of
soap, beer, cigarette, water, cola, shampoo, gasoline from others. In a sense,
advertising is like holding up two identical photographs and persuading you
that they are different—in fact, that one is better than the other.
One of the reasons that we become attached to certain brands is that they
help us form an identity. We use brands to differentiate ourselves from other
people and to generate images of ourselves to others that we think are positive.
We become, so to speak, the sum of our brands. It is the symbolic value of
brands, not the functions of the products, that become most important.
Figure 4.3. This advertisement for Moet
uses a beautiful black woman to sell an
upscale product.
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 79
And once established, it is relatively easy for brands to extend themselves.
For example, the Mont Blanc pen company, which has a reputation for mak-
ing outstanding fountain pens, now sells expensive watches (fi gure 4.4).
There is what might be called a “halo effect” that transfers from the Mont
Blanc fountain pens to their watches. Once a brand becomes very popular, it is
often the case that we fi nd brand extension, and the brand is used to sell other
products. At the core of branding is a sense of confi dence people develop that
the brands they use are good and refl ect positively upon them. Branding, we
may say, sells the sizzle not the steak.
SELLING ONESELF
In a marketing society like the United States, we learn to market our-
selves, and using brand names gives anxiety-ridden people a sense of security
that they believe will enhance the job of selling themselves that they feel they
must do. Personality is the product, so to speak. The term personality has its
root in the Latin word persona, which means “mask.”
So our personalities are masks we wear to sell ourselves to others—to
become popular, to market ourselves, to fi nd a job, a mate, whatever. The
matter is complicated because almost everyone we meet is in the same bind—
we are always (with few exceptions) marketing ourselves to others, and they
are marketing themselves to us. And much of this marketing—another term
might be “manipulation”—is done by using products that announce to others
Figure 4.4
80 Chapter 4
our sense of who we are, and by implication, what our socioeconomic level is
and what kind of taste we have.
I knew someone who wanted to work in advertising. He wore Robert
Hall cheapie suits in a world where, at the time, rather expensive Brooks
Brothers and J. Press suits were what advertising people wore. The people
in the advertising agencies took one took at him in his Robert Hall suit and
thought, “Not one of us!”
But the products we use keep changing, which means our personas, to
the extent that they are intimately connected to the products we use, keep
changing also. And our sense of ourselves—whether we are “successes or
failures”—is tied, we are taught by advertising, to what we can afford. Of
course, there are people who are frauds—who drive cars and wear clothes that
really are too expensive for them; they are putting on a front. And there is the
reverse—wealthy people who drive and dress poor; at least in public, that is.
Our personalities, then, are to a considerable degree, products based on
the material culture that we make part of our lives. And so we are doomed to
constant change. This is part of our postmodern world, in which we sample
different styles and identities to suit our whims. The problem is that identity
suggests some kind of coherence, and a constantly changing identity is a con-
tradiction in terms.
SELLING ONESELF FOR BRANDS
A review by Dan Bilefsky of the fi ctional Polish fi lm Galerianki, or Mall
Girls, in the New York Times (March 16, 2010, p. 8) deals with a group of
young women who sleep with men so they can afford to dine in expensive
restaurants and purchase cell phones, designer handbags, and other brand-
name clothing to “support their clothing addiction.” The director of the
fi lm, Katarzyna Roslaniec, based the fi lm on young women she noticed
loitering in malls in Poland. Many of these “mall girls,” who tend to be
from 14 to 16 years old, are from middle-class families. The fi lm caused a
sensation when it was shown in Poland and prompted debates on materialism
and “moral decadence” in contemporary Poland. These girls do not identify
themselves as prostitutes and maintain some kind of an illusion that they are
turning tricks in shopping mall restrooms and in the backs of automobiles
with their “boyfriends.” A Polish social worker in Krakow, Marcin Drew-
niak, who counsels young girls, suggests that the behavior of these “mall
girls” represents an attempt to obtain self-esteem.
This matter of young girls prostituting themselves to purchase name-
brand purses and other things also exists in Japan and other countries as well.
In Japan, many young school girls sleep with middle-aged businessmen in
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 81
order to have money to buy things they want. They describe their behavior
as “compensated dating” and this behavior is spreading to other countries as
well. What this “mall girl” and “compensated dating” phenomenon represents
is the power of brands to shape the behavior of impressionable young women
who feel that prostituting themselves is a small price to pay for being able to
purchase the purses and cell phones they desire.
THE PROBLEM OF SELF-ALIENATION
What happens, ultimately, is that we become alienated from ourselves;
we learn to see ourselves as infi nitely malleable “material” that we can mold
whenever we have the whim to do so to suit our purposes. But the cost of all
of this is a kind of estrangement from any true self that we might have been
able to fashion. We become so absorbed in manipulating others that we don’t
recognize that we have also manipulated our own sense of self and our own
identity—or is it identities?
In modern capitalist societies, there is—to give the Devil his due—a
kind of dynamism and excitement that is not found in some traditional soci-
eties, where people have worn the same costume, handed down by tradition,
for hundreds of years if not longer. These traditional societies are, let me sug-
gest, a polar opposite of the postmodern societies of modern industrialized
nations. There is a kind of stagnation on one extreme and a kind of restless,
mind-numbing change at the other extreme. What we must do is fi nd some
kind of middle ground that allows for change but does not lead to alienation
and estrangement.
Figure 4.5. The semi-exposed breasts of
the model, clutching her handbag, suggest,
from a psychoanalytic perspective, that
there is an unconscious connection between
women’s handbags and their sexuality.
82 Chapter 4
I see advertising as one of the central institutions in modern societies, and
thus it is important we learn to understand better how advertisements and radio
and television commercials work and how they help shape our consciousness.
We have to realize that fashion, style, lifestyle—all of these concerns—are
forms of collective behavior. An individual—Lisa Greatgal—reaches out her
hand at a supermarket and chooses this or that item. But behind this seemingly
free choice, there are all kinds of forces at work that have led to that choice.
Lisa, I argue, and all those like Lisa, has been manipulated by the advertising
industry, but is unaware that this has happened. All she knows is that this skirt
or pair of shoes or jeans or hairstyle or handbag that was “hot” last year sud-
denly looks dull and isn’t fashionable anymore.
And Lisa’s sense of style and fashion, her desire to be “with it,” to have
the “hot” things, profoundly affects her choices of friends, mates, restaurants,
pets, cars, homes, jobs, clothes, foods, colleges, vacation and tourism destina-
tions, and almost everything else one can think of. The term “affects” is crucial
here, for there are often other factors involved in the choices we make in life.
The question of how much autonomy we have and how free we are to
make choices leads to a step back in history and the ideas of one of America’s
most powerful thinkers, Jonathan Edwards.
WE CAN CHOOSE AS WE PLEASE,
BUT CAN WE PLEASE AS WE PLEASE?
In the 1740s, the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards, one of the great-
est minds America has produced, tried to reconcile his belief in man’s free
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 83
will with God’s omnipotence. He asked, How can man be free if God is
all-powerful? His answer was ingenious and quite relevant to our interest in
advertising. Edwards argued that there were two realms to be considered: the
realm of action and the realm of choice.
Men and women are free to act as they wish, suggesting that we have
free will. That is, we can act as we please. But in the realm of choice, God is
all-powerful and all determining. Though we can act as we please, we can’t
please as we please; God determines what will please us. This means, in effect,
that we only have the illusion of freedom. For though we can do anything we
want to do, God has already determined what it is that we will want to do.
In an introduction to Edwards’s Freedom of Will (1754), Norman Foerster
explains Edwards’s ideas as follows:
Edwards argues that all acts of will, like events in physical nature, are subject
to the law of causation. Since an act of will has its cause in a previous act of
will, and this in turn in an earlier one, we must eventually arrive at a fi rst act,
which was necessarily caused by the agent’s inborn disposition. Having traced
the whole series backward to the start, we come to realize that the will has
no independent activity but is merely passive and mechanical. Man does have
freedom, to be sure, in the sense that he feels no compulsion or restraint but
can “do as he pleases.” Yet his will cannot determine what he pleases to do.
He is free to act as he chooses, but has no freedom of choice. (1957:86–7)
Thus, because our choices are determined for us, though we can act as we
wish, we only have the illusion of freedom. For Edwards, it was an all-
powerful God who determined what our choices would be; in contemporary
mass-mediated societies, God has been replaced, let me suggest, by advertising
agencies and marketing consultants.
We can make an argument similar to Edwards’s about the role of advertis-
ing and our free choice, except that advertising is not all-powerful—just very
powerful, and part of its power stems from the fact that we don’t recognize
how advertising shapes our consciousness and helps determine how we act.
Table 4.1 shows these relationships more graphically.
Table 4.1. Freedom and Determinism Compared
Freedom Determinism
Individuals God (now advertising agencies)
Realm of action Realm of choice
We act as we please God (now advertising agencies) determines what pleases us
John buys Colgate Advertising agencies have helped make John want to buy
Total toothpaste Colgate Total toothpaste
84 Chapter 4
There is a fascinating image that brings this matter of freedom and deter-
minism into sharp relief. We fi nd it on the cover of Wolfgang Haug’s book
Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (fi gure 4.6). It is a photograph of pigeons in St.
Mark’s Square in Venice who have been lured there to eat corn and who form
the word Coca-Cola. Workers scattered birdseed that spelled out Coca-Cola
and the pigeons gathered to eat the birdseed.
The pigeons were free to do whatever they wanted to do, in theory, but
we know that when pigeons fi nd birdseed available, they will fl y to wherever
it is and eat it. As Haug explains (1986:118):
The pigeons did not gather with the intention of forming the trademark
but to satisfy their hunger. But equally the seed was not scattered to feed
the pigeons but to employ them on its tracks as extras. The arrangement is
totally alien and external to pigeons. While they are consuming their feed,
capital is subsuming, and consuming, them. This picture, a triumph of capi-
talist advertising technique, symbolizes a fundamental aspect of capitalism.
The moral we can take away from this photo is that while we are pursuing
our private interests, without our being aware of it, we are often being mo-
tivated and manipulated by forces of which we are unaware, in their interest.
Of course people are not pigeons and are much more complicated, but we
can, in certain situations, be motivated to do things that are not always based
on rational thought about what’s in our best interest.
I am exaggerating and simplifying things, of course. But this little sce-
nario—and ones like it—is acted out countless times in a given day by mil-
lions of people who “choose” this brand or that brand of some product and
Figure 4.6. The photograph on the cover
of this book shows birds forming the
word Coca-Cola. The author of the book,
Wolfgang Fritz Haug, tied this image to the
way people are infl uenced by advertising
and other aspects of consumer cultures.
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 85
who don’t recognize the extent to which their actions have been shaped or,
to use a stronger term, manipulated by the numerous print advertisements and
commercials they’ve seen. Many of these advertisements and commercials are
brilliant works that involve glamour, sex, drama, humor, and various aesthetic
and rhetorical devices to attract our attention and stimulate our desire.
Advertisements and commercials obviously aren’t 100 percent effective.
If they were, we’d probably buy whichever product we saw advertised last.
But companies don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising their
products and services for the fun of it. They expect that when they run their
product or service “up the fl agpole,” that is, when they advertise it, people
will salute—by purchasing the product. And if people (not just anyone, of
course, the right people) don’t salute, or don’t salute enough, the companies
get a different advertising agency—one that promises that it can achieve the
desired results, that is, that it can make people salute.
THE AGONY OF CHOICE
A psychologist, Barry Schwartz, discussed what might be described as “the
agony of choice” in his book The Paradox of Choice. He had an experience
going into a store and asking for a pair of jeans that led him to think about the
problems consumers face when they decide to purchase certain products. In
his article “When It’s All Too Much,” he writes about what happened when
he went into a Gap store to buy a pair of jeans. He writes (Schwartz, 2004:4):
One day I went into the Gap to buy a pair of jeans. A salesperson asked if
she could help. “I want a pair of jeans—32-28,” I said. “Do you want them
slim fi t, relaxed fi t, baggy or extra baggy?” she replied. “Do you want them
stone-washed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button fl y or
zipper-fl y? Do you want them faded or regular?
This experience alerted him to how many different decisions must be
made to purchase certain products, since there are so many different versions
that are available. These increased choices have not made us happier but, it
turns out, decreased our sense of well-being.
He concluded that there are two kinds of consumers, what he called
“maximizers” and “satisfi zers.” The basic characteristics of these two groups
are shown below:
Maximizers Satisfi zers Must have the best Good enough is acceptable Very high expectations Modest or low expectations Anxiety Ease
86 Chapter 4
The problem the maximizers have is that no matter how good a deal they
got on some purchase, they always are troubled by the notion that they could
have done better if they looked around more. Searching for the “best deal” led
to the maximizers becoming very stressed and anxiety-ridden. He suggests that
people would do well to avoid trying to maximize and settle for good enough.
What his theory suggests is that advertising may lead a person to desire a
certain product or service, but that due to personality characteristics of certain
people, the implementation of that desire by purchasing that product or ser-
vice can be very stressful. Implicit in Schwartz’s theory is the notion that most
people are maximizers.
His ideas may explain why our fantasies about our purchases tend to fade
very quickly when we face the reality of buying them, and even faster once we
have bought them—especially in those cases in which people suffer “buyer’s
remorse.” In such cases, we decide that we made a mistake in purchasing
whatever it is we bought, but we blame ourselves and not the advertisements
and commercials that persuaded us to buy the product.
NON-ADVERTISING FORMS OF ADVERTISING
As a result of the development of new technologies such as TiVo (which
enables people to record television programs on a hard disk and eliminate all
commercials), advertisers have had to fi nd new ways to get television viewers
to purchase products and services. One of the most insidious developments
has been the spread of “product placements.” Advertising agencies pay fi lm
companies to have scriptwriters include products they want to push in fi lms
and in other media. Thus, the product is integrated into the action of a fi lm and
advertisers get the “halo” effect of having a famous actor or actress actually use
a product. For example, advertisers put Pepto-Bismol into Law and Order and
Bud Light into Survivor. There are many other examples that could be given.
One added benefi t of product placements is that they serve as the equivalent
of a testimonial for the product or service by the performer.
One of the most notorious cases of product placement involves what was
called a “literatisement.” Bulgari, a maker of very expensive jewelry, hired
well-known novelist Fay Weldon to write a story featuring Bulgari jewels in
it. She came up with a thriller called The Bulgari Connection. Ellen Goodman
wrote a column on this book, lamenting the development of what she called
“literatisement,” or “litads.” Weldon, Goodman notes, was attacked for being
the fi rst well-known author to “erase the line between literature and adver-
tising.” By this she meant serious literature; advertising can be seen, I would
suggest, as a form of literature and can be analyzed by the same methods used
to interpret higher forms of literature.
Running It Up a Flagpole to See If Anyone Salutes 87
There is yet another form of advertising that is not recognized as such—
reviews of fi lms, television shows, plays, restaurants, vacation resorts, and any-
thing else that involves people paying for goods and services. These reviews,
whether they are positive or not, call readers’ attention to whatever is being
reviewed. Over the course of time, many people come to regard certain re-
viewers as being accurate and having “good taste,” so their reviews function,
for these readers, as the equivalent of a word-of-mouth endorsement.
Google and other search engines have made billions of dollars when they
recognized that people who were searching for information could be looked
upon as target audiences. These search engines scan messages and provide sites
where people using the search engine can fi nd products related to their inter-
ests, as refl ected in the topic they are investigating. This kind of advertising
is very effective since it zeros in, very directly, on the interests of the person
doing the searching.
Another important change from traditional mass-mediated advertising
involves the development of what is described as “in-store” advertising. An
article by Emily Nelson and Sarah Ellison on the fi rst page of the September
21, 2005, Wall Street Journal describes the phenomenon under the title “In a
Shift, Marketers Beef Up Ad Spending Inside Store.” As the reporters note:
Procter & Gamble Co. believes shoppers make up their mind about a prod-
uct in about the time it takes to read this paragraph.
The “fi rst moment of truth,” as P&G calls it, is the three to seven seconds
when someone notices an item on a store shelf. Despite spending billions on
traditional advertising, the consumer products giant thinks this instant is one
of its most important marketing opportunities. It created a position 18 months
ago, Director of First Moment of Truth, or Director of FMOT, (pronounced
“EFF-mott”) to produce sharper, fl ashier in-store displays. . . . P&G’s insight is
helping to power a shift in the advertising business: the growth and increasing
sophistication of in-store marketing. . . . Now, in response to the fragmenta-
tion of television and print ads, it wants to tout its brands directly to consumers
where they’re most likely to be infl uenced: the store.
This phenomenon was described by the German media scholar Wolfgang
Fritz Haug a number of years ago, in his book Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology
and Culture, when he discussed what might be described as the “aesthetiza-
tion,” beautifi cation, and sexualization of stores and the buying experience.
We can see, then, that as print media, radio, and television—traditional
venues for advertising—decline, advertising agencies and the corporations they
work for have been fi nding new ways of getting their messages across, using
devices such as product placement, Internet advertising (including studying
blogs to see how people feel about certain products and services), and devel-
oping in-store advertising.
ITEM: Daring Campaign: Models wearing only body paint with strategi-
cally placed oranges are part of a new campaign from Campari, an Italian
aperitif. The brand import by Diageo’s UDV of Fort Lee, N.J., has an ini-
tial bitter taste. The pitch suggests drinking Campari with orange juice, in
hopes of accelerating sales growth in the U.S., as happened in international
markets. The ads were created by Mullen Advertising.
—Wall Street Journal
Advertisers have an enormous fi nancial stake in a narrow ideal of feminin-
ity that they promote, especially in beauty product ads. . . . The image of
the beautiful woman . . . may perhaps be captured with the concept of the
perfect provocateur (an ideal image that arouses a feeling or reaction). The
exemplary female prototype in advertising, regardless of product or service,
displays youth (no lines or wrinkles), good looks, sexual seductiveness . . .
and perfection (no scars, blemishes, or even pores). . . . The perfect pro-
vocateur is not human; rather, she is a form or hollow shell representing a
female fi gure. Accepted attractiveness is her only attribute. She is slender,
typically tall and long-legged. Women are constantly held to this unrealistic
standard of beauty. If they fail to attain it, they are led to feel guilty and
ashamed. Cultural ideology tells women that they will not be desirable to,
or loved by, men unless they are physically perfect.
—Anthony J. Cortese, Provocateur: Images of Women
and Minorities in Advertising
89
5
SEXUALITY AND ADVERTISING
The exploitation of the female body (fi gure 5.1)—and more recently the
male body (fi gure 5.2)—for advertising is a common critique of the ad-
vertising industry. Women, and now men, are made into sex objects, used to
sell everything from automobiles to toothpaste, though women are exploited
much more than men in advertising. One problem with advertising is that
it has the uncanny ability to resist being affected by critiques of it. Attacking
advertising is like throwing thumbtacks in the path of a herd of stampeding
elephants. As Judith Williamson points out in Decoding Advertisements: Ideology
and Meaning in Advertising (1978:167), “Advertisements [ideologies] can incor-
porate anything, even re-absorb criticisms of themselves, because they refer to
it, devoid of content. The whole system of advertising is a great recuperator:
it will work on any material at all, it will bounce back uninjured from both
advertising restriction laws and criticisms of its basic functions.” It is helpful,
nevertheless, to examine one of the most important and most often criticized
aspects of advertising—its sexism.
In the article “Primping or Pimping” (San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday,
September 26, 2000) Valli Herman-Cohen discusses some “raunchy” sexually
explicit fashion ads:
Fashion’s plunge into soft porn didn’t happen overnight. In the 1960s, the
late French photographer Guy Bourdin brought sex and violence to French
fashion magazines, while his American counterpart, photographer Helmut
Newton, added a fetishistic element beginning in the 1970s. Now lesbian
sex and sadomasochism have been added to the lineup.
Tongues wagged over this year’s taboo-touting campaigns for French
designers Emmanuel Ungaro and Christian Dior. For Ungaro’s spring
ads, a model offered suggestive interpretations of “petting” as she caressed
her male pooch. This fall, Ungaro used the same model, who intimately
embraced a nude classical statue. For Dior’s spring 2000 and new fall
ads, two women tumbled in designer togs like lovers experimenting in a
clothes dryer.
90 Chapter 5
Figure 5.2. This advertisement uses the
body of the model to stimulate male
and female lust. Note the bent knee in
this pose. What is the signifi cance of
bent knees in advertisements?
These ads seem to have struck a responsive chord, for when asked about
his advertisements, Ungaro said that his “sales have gone through the roof.”
A look at a magazine such as the October 2002 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, and it
is only typical of many such magazines, shows any number of fashion ads that
are best described as soft porn. Many of the models have their blouses wide
open, revealing most of their breasts, and there is an atmosphere of sexual ob-
session and decadence that pervades the advertising. Notice in fi gure 5.3 how
the pointed white area leads the eye directly to the model’s breasts, which are
lighted to give them maximum impact.
Figure 5.1. This Ungaro advertisement is highly
suggestive and far-fetched at the same time.
Sexuality and Advertising 91
SEX IN ADVERTISING
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing explores human sexuality as one of the most
potent tools of advertising. Berger points out that advertising makes greater
and greater use of sexuality to sell products and services. As he explains:
. . . this sexuality is never free in itself, it is a symbol for something presumed
to be larger than it: the good life in which you can buy whatever you want.
To be able to buy is the same thing as being sexually desirable. (1972:144)
The implicit message in advertising is, Berger adds, that if you can buy a
given product, you’ll be lovable and if you can’t, you’ll be less lovable. This
means that purchasing products and services is always charged with fantasies
and dreams of sexual desirability and power, even though we may not be
conscious that such is the case.
Berger’s theory explains, for example, why we often see beautiful young
women in ads for automobiles, beer, fashions, and so on, ad infi nitum. Though
this process works in our unconscious, we make a connection between buying
a product and becoming desirable to (or emulating) these women. For other
products, handsome men are used in the same way. The subtext of many
advertisements, then, involves the matter of sexuality and desirability, which
explains why the act of buying things is so important to people and yields such
great anticipated pleasures. The foundation of modern consumer societies,
then, is human sexuality.
Figure 5.3
92 Chapter 5
It is generally assumed in the advertising industry that there is some kind of
a transfer of desire from male lust for sexually attractive women to the products
that are being sold (fi gure 5.4). Since it is women who are generally exploited
for their sexuality, I will focus on them, but let me point out that there is also
a growing use of male sexuality and homoerotic images and scenarios in sell-
ing products.
In theory, seeing a beautiful woman in a print advertisement or commer-
cial with a certain amount of cleavage showing and revealing other parts of her
body “excites” men and women who are exposed to the image. In television
commercials, the woman can gaze at and directly address viewers, adding the
power of the voice to the seduction of the viewer. In many commercials, the
sexuality of the women is enhanced by lighting, by camera angles, by cut-
ting and all the other techniques available to editors. Some advertising agen-
cies have been attacking the stereotypes of women in commercials by using
women who are not tall and slender but more normal—in some cases, even
“pleasingly plump” or heavy.
In his book, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising, Paul Mes-
saris offers an interesting insight into the use of very slender models in fashion
advertising. He discusses studies of male preferences of physical attractiveness
in women that give higher ratings to heavy women with narrow waists than
slender women with narrow hips. He writes (1997:49):
Superfi cially, this preference for thin models among fashion executives
may seem to be a perverse, and persistent, miscalculation. But of course,
Figure 5.4. This advertisement, part of
a two-page spread, is unusual in that it
shows a nude woman. Her bent knee
hides her pubic hair.
Sexuality and Advertising 93
that is not the case. The fashion industry’s predilection for thinness does
not stem from a misreading of real-world sex cues; rather, it represents a
deliberate suppression of those sex cues to heighten the sense of the hu-
man body as pure status display. In other words, this situation could be
described as a confl ict between sexual and social status cues, with the latter
coming out on top.
What Messaris reveals is that there is often a sociological and class aspect
to the images of women found in advertisements and that the sexual charac-
teristics of the women found in advertisements is not the whole story.
These aspects in fashion advertising, and other kinds of advertising as
well, are shown by other things than body shape and involve such matters
as the context where the woman is shown, her props, the kind of clothes
she is wearing (or almost wearing in some cases), her hairstyle, and her facial
characteristics. It could be argued, in fact, that many of the models in fashion
advertisements are refl ecting their unavailability and sense of separateness and
alienation from ordinary concerns and everyday life. Fashion advertising, more
than any other kind, I would suggest, generates stereotypes of what women
are supposed to look like—and act like. The effects of these stereotypes, which
involve being beautiful and yet, as you can see from many of the poses, sub-
missive, are very pernicious. The mixture of sex and sociological and cultural
matters means that there is often a great deal more to sexually exciting and
erotically stimulating advertising than we might imagine.
Figure 5.5. This advertisement
for Dolce Gabbana exploits male
sexuality to sell its products.
94 Chapter 5
SEXPLOITATION AND ANXIETY
Sexuality, sexual desire, sexual lust, and even intimations of sexual inter-
course are ubiquitous in contemporary advertising (fi gure 5.6). As Germaine
Greer points out in The Female Eunuch:
Because she is the emblem of spending ability and the chief spender, she is
also the most effective seller of this world’s goods. Every survey has shown
that the image of an attractive woman is the most effective advertising gim-
mick. She may sit astride the mudguard of a new car, or step into it ablaze
with jewels; she may lie at a man’s feet stroking his new socks; she may
hold the petrol pump in a challenging pose, or dance through the woodland
glades in slow motion in all the glory of a new shampoo; whatever she does
her image sells. (1971:51–2)
We use beautiful women, in various stages of dress and undress, to sell ev-
erything from automobiles to new technological gizmos, as the Palm Pilot
advertisement (fi gure 5.7) demonstrates.
One of the problems this sexploitation of the female body causes is a
sense of inadequacy on the part of many women, who don’t have the lean and
Figure 5.6. This advertisement is one of a series
for Cabana Cachaca that exudes sexuality. The
campaign, which features beautiful photographs of
women in suggestive poses, has been criticized by
some groups for exploiting the female body.
Figure 5.7
Sexuality and Advertising 95
boyish or, in some cases, anorexic bodies that so many supermodels do—who
aren’t twenty years old, who aren’t six feet tall, who don’t weigh ninety-fi ve
pounds, who don’t wear size three dresses, who aren’t made up to kill, and
who aren’t dressed in expensive fashions.
These supermodels, “it” girls, and movie stars also cause problems for
many men, who see these women and become dissatisfi ed with their sexual
partners. As Raphael Patai explains in Myth and Modern Man:
The movies, television, magazine and newspaper ads, posters, store-window
mannequins, life-size, smaller than life, bigger than life, in colors or in black-
and-white, in partial or total undress, in all kinds of alluring and enticing
positions with the most express indications of availability, willingness, readi-
ness to welcome you into their arms . . . have the combined and cumula-
tive effect of making many men dissatisfi ed with whatever sexual activity is
available to them. (1972:286)
What Patai suggests, then, is that not only women but also men are af-
fected—and to a considerable degree disturbed—by the endless number of
sexually provocative advertisements and commercials to which they are ex-
posed (fi gure 5.8). Men can satisfy their sexual hunger with their wives and
girlfriends, but not their erotic fantasies. (The same applies to women as well,
no doubt—since they are continually exposed to virile, rugged, handsome
men in advertisements and commercials.)
I am, of course, stating things in a rather extreme way. But the models
used in a signifi cant number of commercials and fashion advertisements—for
expensive, upscale products, that is—are frequently unusual physical speci-
mens. Advertisements for cosmetics often play upon the anxiety women feel
Figure 5.8. The pose of this woman,
with her legs spread apart and a sensual
look on her face, uses sexuality in a
rather overt manner to sell the product.
96 Chapter 5
as they start getting older about no longer being young and no longer being
beautiful. It may even be more extreme than that: no longer young, therefore
no longer beautiful.
THE PEACH THAT BECAME A PRUNE:
A CAUTIONARY FABLE
In this respect, consider the copy for a moisturizer that follows. There is
a large headline followed by copy that reads:
There is
a fountain of youth.
It’s called water.
Nature has been telling us this forever. Water keeps a rose fresh and beauti-
ful. A peach juicy. All living things, living. Including your skin. The mil-
lions of cells in your skin contain water. This water pillows and cushions
your skin, making it soft and young-looking. But, for a lot of reasons, cells
become unable to hold water. And the water escapes your skin. (If you’ll
forgive us, think of a prune drying up and you’ll know the whole story.)
This copy was in an advertisement for Living Proof Cream Hydracel by Gemi-
nesse, a moisturizer that promises to do two things. First, it promises to help
women develop younger-looking skin, and second, it promises to help women
avoid drying up and looking, if you’ll forgive the harsh analogy, like prunes.
There is a question that now must be considered. What is this overwhelm-
ing need women have to be “moist”? At fi rst glance, and I use the phrase pur-
posefully, it seems to involve looking younger by having soft, peachlike skin.
And it also has something to do with being roselike (see Lancôme’s recent ad
in fi gure 5.10), whatever that might mean. But underneath it all, I think the
fear of losing moisture really has to do with anxieties women have—generated
by the advertisement or, at least, exploited by the advertisement—about their
loss of fertility, about changing from being a “garden” (where things can grow)
to being a “desert” (barren, lifeless, and sterile).
This is symbolized in the ad by the two fruits mentioned—the juicy
(young) peach and the dried-up (old) prune. And if you aren’t one, the bipolar
logic of the advertisement suggests, you must be the other. It is this drying up
that women must avoid at all costs, this loss of youth and fertility symbolized
by having soft, moist skin. And that is where moisturizers come in—especially
moisturizers like Hydracel (and Lancôme’s “Primordiale Intense” in fi gure
5.10). They preserve the illusion women have that they are still young, the
Let me cite a number of passages relating to gender in advertising found in Erving Goffman’s “Gender Advertisements.” The general thrust of his argument is that by various means, such as bent knees, smiles, and being shown smaller than men, women are placed in positions of subordination and weakness. See fi gure 5.9 below, in which the woman in the Nautica advertisement is in a subservient position to the man.
1. One way in which social weight—power, authority, rank, of- fi ce, renown—is echoed expressively in social situations is through relative size, especially height.
2. Women, more than men, are pictured using their fi ngers and hands to trace the outlines of an object or to cradle it or caress its surface.
3. In our society when a man and a woman collaborate face-to- face in an undertaking, the man—it would seem—is likely to perform the executive role.
4. Smiles . . . often function as ritualistic modifi ers, signaling that nothing antagonistic is intended or invited, meaning that the other’s act has been understood and found acceptable. (1976)
Figure 5.9
98 Chapter 5
illusion of generativity by merging pseudoscience and magic. These products
succeed by terrorizing women—who live in constant fear of water gushing
out of their cells, fl ooding out of their bodies, until the magic no longer works
or is no longer needed.
As the Living Proof Cream Hydracel by Geminesse advertisement adds,
discussing “the truth about moisturizers”:
Most people think a moisturizer literally puts moisture into your skin. Not
true. (Your skin has all the water it needs. Holding it there is the problem.)
An average moisturizer holds the water in by blocking its escape. But, unfor-
tunately, this does not affect your cell’s ability to retain water. This is where
we come in. . . . The name Hydracel tells you what we’re all about: water
and cell. Cream Hydracel actually helps the cellular tissues retain water. We
let nature do the work, not heavy creams. And this can make all the differ-
ence. Your skin will breathe and start to recover its water-holding power.
And your face will feel softer and look younger, naturally. . . . Nature gave
you a fountain of youth. Cream Hydracel keeps it fl owing.
This is only one example of the campaign of terror waged by cosmetic
companies and all the industries involved with feminine sexuality through such
matters as hair, clothes, eyeglasses, jewelry, watches, shoes, stockings—you
name it.
Women are put in a no-win situation. Beauty is associated with youth,
and women are made to feel that when they lose their youth, they will lose
their beauty. The passage from ripe, juicy “peach” to dried-up old “prune”
whose fountain of youth no longer fl ows is inevitable—though one can,
through the magic of cosmetics, so the advertisements and commercials imply,
hold off the ravages of getting older. Advertising creates the problem and then
Figure 5.10
Sexuality and Advertising 99
provides the solution—some product or service that will help women become
beautiful and stay beautiful, which means keeping them looking young and
juicy, like a peach.
THE PSEUDO-POETIC APPEAL TO THE ILLITERATI
A good deal of the writing found in advertisements for perfumes and other
cosmetics has what might be described as a pseudo-poetic character to it. One
of the best descriptions of this phenomenon was written by the anthropologist
Jules Henry in his book Culture Against Man. He writes:
Consider the advertisement for Pango Peach, a new color introduced by
Revlon in 1960. A young woman leans against the upper rungs of a ladder
leading to a palm-thatched bamboo tree-house. Pango Peach are her sari,
her blouse, her toe and fi nger nails, and the cape she holds. A sky of South
Pacifi c blue is behind her, and the cape, as it fl utters in the winds, stains
the heavens Pango Peach. “From east of the sun—west of the moon where
each tomorrow dawns . . .” beckons the ad, in corny pecuniary lingo. But
when you are trying to sell nail polish to a fi ling clerk with two years of
high school you don’t quote Dylan Thomas! The idea of this ad is to make
a woman think she is reading real poetry when she is not, and at the same
time to evoke in her the specifi c fantasy that will sell the product. Millions
will respond to poetry as a value and feel good when they think they are
responding to it, and this process of getting people to respond to pseudo-
values as if they were responding to real ones is called here pecuniary distortion
of values. (1963:59)
Henry quotes some other phrases from the advertisement—Pango Peach
is described as “a many splendoured coral . . . pink with pleasure . . . a volcano
of color,” and it adds, “It’s full ripe peach with a world of difference . . . born to
be worn in big juicy slices. Succulent on your lips. Sizzling on your fi ngertips.
. . . Go Pango Peach . . . your adventure in paradise.”
Figure 5.11. This advertisement is a graphic
representation of sexual passion.
100 Chapter 5
He then discusses the signifi cance of the language used in the Pango Peach
advertisement. He writes:
Each word in the advertisement is carefully chosen to tap a particular
yearning and hunger in the American woman. “Many splendoured,” for
example, is a reference to the novel and movie Love Is a Many Splendoured
Thing, a tale of passion in an Oriental setting. “Volcano” is meant to arouse
the latent wish to be a volcanic lover and be loved by one. The mouthful of
oral stimuli—“ripe,” “succulent,” “juicy”—puts sales resistance in double
jeopardy because mouths are even more for kissing than eating. “Sizzling”
can refer only to l’amour à la folie. (1963:59)
We can see then that what seems to be a simple advertisement for a new
color contains any number of oral stimuli and references to a culture that will,
it is hoped, persuade the readers of the advertisement to purchase Pango Peach
lipstick and other products and put themselves, like the model, in the South
Pacifi c where “volcanic” love awaits. Notice, also, that this advertisement—
like the Hydracel moisturizer advertisement—makes use of peaches as symbols
of youth, beauty, and sexual allure. I return to this subject in chapter 8 in my
analysis of an advertisement for Fidji perfume. The ad in fi gure 5.12 suggests
that teenagers are an important marketing category and that certain kinds of
appeals can be made to them and can be effective.
Wise Up to Teens: Insights into Marketing and Advertising to Teenagers
By Peter Zollo
Here at last is the expert analysis that will help you capture your share of the nearly $100 billion that teenagers spend. This book explains where teens get their money, how and why they spend it, and what they think about themselves and the world around them. It presents fi ve rules that will make your advertising appealing to teens. Learn about brands teens think are cool, words to use in advertising to teens, which media and promotions teens prefer, and how much infl uence teens have over what their parents buy. This is a fascinating look into the world of teens—a market whose income is almost all discretionary.
—Advertisement for a book on marketing to teens in the November 1995 Marketing Power: The Marketer’s Reference Library
Figure 5.12
Sexuality and Advertising 101
SEX APPEAL AND GENDER APPEAL
We have to make a distinction between advertising that is directed to-
wards a particular gender (male or female) and advertising that exploits sexual-
ity to arouse people of either gender (fi gures 5.13 and 5.14). In her book Why
She Buys: The New Strategy for Reaching the World’s Most Powerful Consumers,
Bridget Brennan writes (2009:184–5):
Gender appeal is the type of marketing that resonates strongly with the culture
of a particular sex. Its messages and images tap into a gender’s collective
consciousness—its rites of passage, milestones, communication styles, body
issues, desires and motivations. . . . Sex appeal is different—it defi nes words,
images, or people that others fi nd arousing. And when it comes to being
Figure 5.13. The Tom Ford ad refl ects
a conscious attempt to confuse viewers.
Is the person with the glasses a woman?
It would seem so, which means this
advertisement should appeal to lesbians.
Figure 5.14. What was the thinking behind this unusual
advertisement? Is the foot that of a male or a female?
102 Chapter 5
aroused, most of us have lived long enough to know that women and men
have different ideas about what’s sexy and what’s not.
Brennan’s book argues that marketers and advertisers don’t pay enough at-
tention to the difference between genders and don’t understand what motivates
women. This often leads to advertising campaigns that are ineffective and don’t
work. In the last few decades, the male body has also been exploited as an object
of lust—for women, metrosexuals, and groups with other sexual orientations
(fi gure 5.15). This marks a major transformation in the sexual consciousness of
people in contemporary societies. We will see, now, how cigarette manufac-
turers used a symbolic cartoon character, Joe Camel, with symbolically sexual
attributes, to induce teenagers and preteens to start smoking.
SEX SELLS CIGARETTES
I have suggested earlier in this book that we cannot always make a con-
nection between a person’s exposure to a commercial or print advertisement
for a product and his or her subsequent use of that product. But we can see that
collectively, large numbers of people may be infl uenced by their exposure to
advertising. While we cannot make a connection between one person seeing
an advertisement for a product (or many advertisements for the product) and
buying it, statistically we can note that advertising campaigns do have effects
on large numbers of people.
Figure 5.15. The male body is
now seen as an object of lust
for females and males.
Sexuality and Advertising 103
THE CASE OF JOE CAMEL
According to an American Medical Association study, Joe Camel, the
cartoon fi gure of a camel shown smoking a cigarette, is “twice as familiar” to
3- to 6-year-olds “as a box of Cheerios” and is “as well-known to 6-year-olds
as Mickey Mouse.” Joe Camel ads have played an important role in making
Camels “the brand of choice among male children, 12 to 17 years old.”
Marjorie Garber explains the power of the Joe Camel drawing in her ar-
ticle “Joe Camel, an X-Rated Smoke” (New York Times, March 20, 1992). As
she writes: “His long straight snout bulges from above two pouchy folds as he
stares insouciantly out at the viewer, a lighted cigarette hanging from his lips.
Look again. Any schoolchild can recognize this ribald caricature; only adults
need to have it pointed out.” What we have, Garber points out, is a phallic
symbol—an example of what Freud described as “displacement upward,” a
translation in dreams and fantasies of a taboo part of our bodies from below
the waist—where its signifi cance would be easily seen—to above the waist,
frequently to the head or to the face, where its signifi cance is not so apparent.
In this respect Garber discusses noses and cigars as some of the most
commonly used phallic symbols. Freud said that “sometimes a cigar is only a
cigar.” True. But the obverse of his statement, which we must keep in mind,
is that sometimes a cigar isn’t only a cigar. It is the unconscious appeal to sexual
potency that is behind the acceptance by puerile young males of Joe Camel’s
inducements to choose Camel cigarettes.
Cigarette smoking, to a rather alarming extent, is also found in many
recent fi lms. Directors use cigarettes because they help defi ne characters,
they give characters something to do with their hands, and because there are
aesthetic dimensions to capturing cigarette smoke as it drifts upwards and dis-
perses. And recently cigars, an even more potent phallic symbol than cigarettes,
Insights from Advertising Agencies
The sentimentality and warmth appeal is being dropped for a campy sex-and-youth appeal, and they aren’t trying to sell people on the idea of cognac but on their particular brand. There was much talk about the Smirnoff Vodka campaign, which was a great success and which was based on sexploitation and the double entendre. The problem they faced involved thinking up an advertisement that would command attention, that was original, and that worked. There was some talk about thinking up some kind of a catchy phrase that would become part of public currency, that comedians might repeat, and that might strike the public’s fancy.
104 Chapter 5
have become popular—with men and to a limited extent with women. Young
men and women learn from watching fi lms that smoking is glamorous and
“cool.” (In some cases, certain brands of cigarettes are “placed” in fi lms—the
tobacco companies pay to have their cigarettes used in them; the same applies
to other products as well.) And since teens have a good deal of discretionary
income, many of them use it to buy cigarettes. Placing products in fi lms is a
kind of advertising that is not recognized as such and thus is even more insidi-
ous than regular advertising, especially since young people often identify with
and strive to imitate famous actors.
Many young girls smoke because, among other things, they believe smok-
ing will enable them to stay slim and look like the supermodels they see in
fashion magazines (fi gures 5.16 and 5.17). Ironically, obesity has now reached
epidemic proportions among the American public. Young people don’t get
enough exercise nowadays, and older populations also eat too much and exer-
cise too little. One of the things we often do when we watch television is eat
snacks, and one of the things we are bombarded with when we watch televi-
sion is commercials for foods. And, of course, many of these commercials are
for diet products—so the foods we eat won’t make us fat. So advertising, let
me suggest, plays a role in shaping our bodies as well as affecting our choices
of all kinds of products—from foods to cigarettes.
Because of the numerous protests by parents’ groups and other organiza-
tions against the Joe Camel advertisements, they have been discontinued. The
recognition that sexuality has been used to induce teenagers (and preteens) to
smoke has now led to a counterattack using sexuality—and the fear of sexual
Figure 5.16. Virginia Slims was based on
the notion, now shown to be fallacious, that
cigarette smoking helped women stay slim.
Sexuality and Advertising 105
Figure 5.17
impotence and lack of function—to convince young boys and girls not to
smoke. In one antismoking commercial, a young teenager sees an attractive girl
and as he looks at her, the cigarette dangling from his mouth goes limp. It is
an excellent example of fi ghting fi re with fi re. The limp cigarette is a powerful
visual metaphor that teenage boys can understand since it deals with something
very important to them—an unconscious sense of phallic power.
SEX AND THE PROBLEM OF CLUTTER
One reason for using sexuality to sell products is explained by Jack Solo-
mon in his book The Signs of Our Times. His thesis is that sexuality enables
advertising agencies to avoid the clutter of competing ads and commercials.
As he writes:
The sexual explicitness of contemporary advertising is a sign not so much
of American sexual fantasies as of the lengths to which advertisers will go
to get attention. Sex never fails as an attention-getter, and in a particularly
competitive and expansive era for American marketing, advertisers like to
bet on a sure thing. Ad people refer to the proliferation of TV, radio, news-
paper, magazine, and billboard ads as “clutter,” and nothing cuts through
clutter like sex.
By showing the fl esh, advertisers work on the deepest, most coercive
human emotions of all. Much sexual coercion in advertising, however, is a
sign of a desperate need to make certain that clients are getting their money’s
worth. (1990:69)
106 Chapter 5
On the other hand, if advertising agencies compete with one another
by using sexuality to sell, they just raise clutter to a different or higher level,
creating what might be described as an all-pervasive kind of “sexual clutter.”
And I think this is, to a considerable degree, what has happened. Sexu-
ality is all-pervasive in American media, and as it becomes more and more
commonplace, advertisers have to develop new and more daring, and in
some cases more explicit, ways of having their sexual commercials and print
advertisements stand out or attain some degree of differentiation. As the
Pierre Cardin advertisement (fi gure 5.18) shows, companies do whatever
they can to differentiate themselves from their competitors and catch a
reader’s attention.
There is also the law of diminishing returns to consider. For as the Ameri-
can media becomes oversaturated with sexual images, in programming as well
as in advertising, the law of diminishing returns starts operating and the power
of any particular sexual image to attract attention and stimulate demands weak-
ens. This leads to the crisis that advertising now faces as companies and their
agencies engage in what has been called “sign wars” to attract the attention of
the American public. Sexual imagery is so all-pervasive that the commercials of
one company may be neutralizing the commercials of its competitors and lead-
ing, ultimately, to a kind of “turning off” by the general public as it becomes
overwhelmed by sexuality in advertisements and commercials.
In her “Primping or Pimping” article, Valli Herman-Cohen quotes an
editor who makes this kind of an argument:
“Everybody is reaching, and I no longer know what they are reaching for,”
said Edie Locke, former editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle. “If every image
Figure 5.18
Sexuality and Advertising 107
now is centered around sex, or almost-rape, or lesbian chic, the difference
between the ads is no longer perceptible.” (2000)
As I’ve argued, sex is used to sell everything from video games to milk
(fi gure 5.19). So there is a problem fashion and other advertisers face—their
advertisements get lost in the sexual advertising clutter, and no matter how
far they are willing to go, it seems that some other advertiser is willing to
go further.
We must never underestimate the power of sexual images to affect us in
mysterious and profound ways. But the incessant clutter of sexual images may
weaken the power of any one advertisement or commercial to sell us some
product or service and may even be having an impact upon our sexual lives.
There is so much vicarious sex in our lives, found in fi lms, television shows,
and now in “sexting” text and image messaging on cell phones, that the “real
thing” may be losing its appeal for a goodly number of people.
Figure 5.19
The effect of advertiser-driven campaigning has been felt in more than just
the professionalization of electoral propaganda, though the slickly produced
political advertisement is certainly its most visible product. Promotion has
been drawn into the heart of the process. Through the 1970s and 1980s it
has become normal practice for the managers of campaign advertising to be
recruited directly from the highest ranks of the advertising industry. Their
role, moreover, sometimes in collusion with the offi cial party machine, has
been not just to supervise the specifi cs of advertising, but to map out entire
campaigns. The scope for involvement is endless. Every public statement or
gesture by campaigners, whether intentional or not, can be considered part
of the campaign, and is therefore susceptible to promotional orchestration.
—Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture:
Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression
Under the heading of deceptive editing of “documentary” material, we
might also want to consider a notorious political ad used in Richard Nixon’s
1968 presidential campaign. Aired only once, the ad juxtaposed images of
Nixon’s Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, with scenes of warfare
in Vietnam, protests in the streets of Chicago, and poverty in Appalachia.
Because Humphrey was smiling in some of the shots, these juxtapositions
created the impression that he was indifferent to the suffering and distur-
bances in the other images.
—Paul Messaris, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising
109
6
POLITICAL ADVERTISING
In recent decades, political advertising has assumed greater and greater impor-
tance in campaigns for offi ces at all levels. There is a reason for this. As po-
litical scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar write in their book
Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate:
Unlike most channels of communication, advertising allows candidates to
reach uninterested and unmotivated citizens—those who ordinarily pay
little attention to news reports, debates, and other campaign events. After
all, the “audience” for political advertising is primarily inadvertent—people
who happen to be watching their preferred television programs. Of course,
viewers can choose to tune out or channel-surf during advertising breaks,
but the fact remains that the reach of advertising extends beyond relatively
attentive and engaged voters. (1995:52)
Thus, advertising is a tool that enables politicians to send their messages to
a large number of people who tend to be apolitical, who are not particularly
interested in political campaigns. What is important to recognize is that these
people are often profoundly affected by the political advertisements to which
they are exposed.
What follows is an introduction to an important and very controversial sub-
ject—how advertising has become a major instrument of campaigning for and
winning political offi ce. I have chosen to discuss political advertising because,
although many people do not think about it, our decisions about who we vote
for play a crucial role in determining what laws will be passed and how we will
lead our lives. From my perspective, political advertising can be seen as the most
important genre of advertising. I would hope the information presented in this
book will help readers learn to “read” or “decode” political advertisements better
by offering insights into the methods used by political advertisers and thus make
more informed and more intelligent decisions when they vote.
There are some theorists, I should point out, who consider all advertis-
ing to be political in that advertising suggests a political order that produces
110 Chapter 6
all the products and services being advertised. Hans Magnus Enzensberger ties
advertising to the need political orders have for acceptance by the public. He
writes in his essay “The Industrialization of the Mind”:
Consciousness, both individual and social, has become a political issue only
from the moment when the conviction arose in people’s minds that ev-
eryone should have a say in his own destiny as well as in that of society at
large. From the same moment any authority had to justify itself in the eyes
of those it would govern; coercion alone would no longer do the trick; he
who ruled must persuade, must lay claim to the people’s minds and change
them, in an industrial age, by every industrial means at hand. (The Conscious-
ness Industry, 1974:8)
This leads to the development of what Enzensberger calls the “mind
industry,” whose basic concern is to convince people that the existing order
should be perpetuated. The mind industry’s main task—and advertising is a
major element of the mind industry—is “to perpetuate the prevailing pattern
of man’s domination by man, no matter who runs the society and by what
means. Its main task is to expand and train our consciousness—in order to
exploit it” (1974:10).
We must recognize that all political advertisements are not the same. In
her book 30-Second Politics: Political Advertising in the Eighties, Montague Kern,
a social scientist, suggests there are four kinds of political advertisements. We
Political Advertising 111
tend to lump all political advertising together, but if you examine political ads
over the course of a typical campaign, you discover there really are a number
of different kinds of political advertisements, which are used at different times
in a typical campaign. With this insight in mind, it is worth examining in
some detail Kern’s insights into the kinds of political advertisements and how
political advertising works.
KINDS OF POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENTS
Kern discusses political advertisements and points out some changes that
have taken place in them in recent years:
If recent research indicates that contemporary political advertising has an
impact that includes but is much broader than that of informing the public
about candidate positions on the issues, content research based on ads sup-
plied by campaigns also suggests that the purpose of advertising has changed
since 1972. It is concerned as much with conveying impressions about can-
didate character as with providing information about issues. Richard Joselyn
has argued that there are four types of ads, with issue statements that are
largely sloganistic relating to only two of them: prospective and retrospec-
tive policy satisfaction appeals, as opposed to election as ritual and his largest
category, benevolent leader appeals. (1989:6)
The most signifi cant development in political advertising in recent de-
cades, of course, is just the opposite of the benevolent leader appeal. Much
political advertising is now negative (fi gure 6.1), and it attacks political fi gures
for their policies and often for their character and behavior as well. This leads
to counterattacks, so that negative advertising becomes a dominant method in
many campaigns. These attack ads are used, as Kern explains, generally only at
certain times in campaigns.
She discusses different kinds of commercials one fi nds at different stages in
a typical campaign for political offi ce. It isn’t just a matter of developing name
awareness in voters anymore. As she explains:
Further, now-classic theory of media use argues that there are four types of
ads associated with four stages in a campaign: fi rst, name identifi cation spots,
which are shown early in the campaign; second, argument spots, which
present candidate positions on issues; third, attack spots, which focus on the
opponent; and fourth, positive visionary appeals, which are used at the end
of a campaign to give voters a reason to vote for the candidate. (1989:6)
112 Chapter 6
We see then that political advertising has developed over the years and televi-
sion spots have different purposes at different times in a typical campaign.
Political advertising in electoral campaigns is, ultimately, aimed at per-
suading voters to do what the person paying for the advertisements wants them
to do—that is, to vote for a particular candidate, which means not voting for
any other candidates. Or, in the case of political propositions, to vote the way
the advertiser wants them to vote.
We must remember that when advertisers pay to have something “run up
a fl agpole,” they always expect large numbers of people to “salute.” Or to use
a different metaphor, it may always be the case that “he who pays the piper
calls the tune,” but it doesn’t always work out that the tune is one people like
or one that convinces them to sing along. In the case of political advertising,
“saluting” or “singing along” means voting for a particular candidate or in a
certain way on propositions.
Table 6.1 lists the four stages in a typical political campaign and describes
the kinds of political advertisements found at each stage in the campaign. I’ve
also suggested what the specifi c function of each kind of advertisement is, using
words beginning with I as a mnemonic device to facilitate remembering them.
Early in the campaign the politician wants to gain name recognition or
persuade voters to associate him or her with the position he or she is running
for. Then the campaign moves into issues the politicians believe in or don’t
believe in. Later the politicians use attack ads or what we commonly call “neg-
ative ads” to put opponents on the defensive. Finally, politicians offer “vision-
ary” ads to give voters reasons to vote for them on the basis of their character.
Figure 6.1. This frame was found in a Republican
political commercial, using the last four letters of
the word Democrats to—so some critics suggest—
infl uence people. The image lasted only a fraction
of a second.
Political Advertising 113
THE 1998 CALIFORNIA PRIMARY:
A “VIRTUAL” CAMPAIGN FOR GOVERNOR
The 1998 California campaign for governor has achieved a rather leg-
endary status. In the campaign there were three Democratic candidates. The
least-known one, at the beginning of the campaign, was Al Checchi, a multi-
millionaire former airline executive who spent $40 million (his own money)
seeking the nomination. When Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic U.S. senator
from San Francisco, decided not to enter the race, Jane Harman, a two-term
U.S. congresswoman, entered. She spent $15 million (her own money) seek-
ing the nomination. Checchi’s $40 million is the most any nonpresidential
candidate has ever spent on a primary campaign.
The underdog was Gray Davis, the lieutenant governor of the state, and
a person with more than twenty years of experience in state government. He
spent $9 million (not his own money) on the race and won the primary. The
slogan for his campaign was brilliant:
experience money can’t buy
This slogan did two things. First, it pointed out that Davis was a per-
son who had a lot of experience in government. Al Checchi, it turned out,
hadn’t even voted in a number of elections and was a political novice. And
though his $40 million bought him name recognition, when he started run-
ning negative advertisements about Jane Harman, he neutralized her as a
political force and he alienated many voters. Thus, one unintended conse-
quence of Checchi’s campaign was to weaken Harman so Davis had an easier
time getting the nomination.
Davis’s slogan also played on a feeling people in California have that
wealthy people shouldn’t be able to buy an election. And they shouldn’t be
able to start at the top. These notions seem to be, in part, an outgrowth of
a particularly vicious and expensive self-fi nanced campaign run by Michael
Huffi ngton, a wealthy Republican in California’s 1996 U.S. Senate race,
which Feinstein barely won.
Table 6.1. Stages and Kinds of Advertisements in Political Campaigns
Time in Campaign Kind of Advertisement Function
Early Name Identifi cation Ads Identity
Later Argument Ads Ideology
Later Still Attack Ads (Negative Ads) Insult
End of Campaign Positive Visionary Ads Image
114 Chapter 6
California is an enormous state with a population of more than 30 mil-
lion people. The only way to get one’s message out to the people in the state,
aside from whatever news coverage a candidate may get, is through advertis-
ing—and chiefl y through commercials on radio and, more importantly, on
television. There were several debates in the campaign, with the Republican
nominee Dan Lungren participating, but for all practical purposes, all that most
voters in California saw in the primary were commercials—which is why the
campaign was dubbed a “virtual” campaign.
QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE “VIRTUAL” CAMPAIGN
The 1998 primary raises some interesting questions about the relationship
between political advertising and voting.
1. Are people no longer affected by negative campaigns?
People always say, in polls, they don’t like negative campaigns but voting
records seem to indicate that they are affected or infl uenced by them. Nu-
merous case studies of elections show that negative campaigns, full of attack
commercials, are effective. One theory is that negative campaigns turn many
viewers off (dissuade them from voting at all) and thus play into the hands of
politicians, generally conservative Republican ones, who rely on the minor-
ity of conservative Republicans who do vote (in contrast to the majority of
generally liberal Democrats, who don’t vote).
It may also be that California voters are somewhat different from voters in
other states, or that California voters have established a new trend.
2. Is it the number or the quality of the advertisements that counts?
The primary showed, at different times, each of the candidates in the lead.
First Checchi, with his advertising blitz, took the lead. Then when Harman
entered, she took the lead—until Checchi’s negative ads hurt her. Then
when he started advertising late in the race, Gray Davis’s advertising cam-
paign put him in the lead, and he stayed there and captured the nomination
by a large margin.
Davis’s $9 million was a considerable amount of money, but it paled in
comparison with Checchi’s $40 million and Harman’s $15 million. Statewide
campaigns in California, especially for important and high-profi le positions
such as governor, are very expensive—due in large measure to the enormous
size of the state and its huge population.
3. Is it the advertising or the record of the candidate that is crucial?
This matter is particularly signifi cant. Do people vote for someone because
of advertising per se or because the advertising points to a person’s record
Political Advertising 115
or stand on important issues (and attacks opponents’ positions)? In the 1998
California primary, the experience of the winning candidate seemed to be
crucial. If so, that would suggest Californians have rejected the notion that
experience in government is bad and that the less experience a politician
has, the better—a position made popular by Ronald Reagan and by many
conservative Republicans.
It is estimated that by a ratio of something like four to one, Americans get
their information about the positions of candidates from advertising rather than
the news. Much of the news in political campaigns tends to focus on the horse
race aspect of the campaign—who’s ahead rather than differences on issues.
And curiously, what the news programs on television decide to cover is often
shaped by the candidates’ political advertisements. The advertisements set the
agenda for the newspapers and radio and television news programs.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson explores the relationship between news and adver-
tising in her book Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction and Democracy. She writes:
News reporting can provide a frame through which viewers understand ads.
Conventional campaign wisdom holds that news sets the context for ads.
If the news accounts are inconsistent with the ad, the power of the ad is
diminished. When the two are consistent, the power of both is magnifi ed.
But news can only reframe ads if reporters question the legitimacy of their
claims, point out the false inferences that they invite, and so on. Without
such reframing by reporters, campaign ads have the potential to shape the
visual and verbal language of news, and in recent campaigns they have be-
come increasingly successful. (1992:124)
This failure of news reporters to deal with misleading statements and matters
of that nature is due, in part, to the obsession news people have with who is
winning a campaign rather than the truth or falsity of advertisements. In addi-
tion, written critiques of political commercials in newspapers generally cannot
undo the damage done by them, since the impact of television commercials
is so great.
Political advertisements about issues can be divided into two categories.
There are so-called platform ads, which are full of broad generalities, and slo-
gan ads, which contain some slogan related to an action the candidate promises
to take or gives an important insight into the candidate’s character. When
Dwight David Eisenhower said “I will go to Korea” in 1952, he was offering
a slogan ad. And Gray Davis’s “Experience money can’t buy” was another
slogan ad that took his primary campaign and reduced it to one slogan that
people could remember.
116 Chapter 6
THE 2002 CALIFORNIA CAMPAIGN FOR GOVERNOR
Governor Gray Davis had very high popularity ratings for the fi rst two
years in which he was in offi ce. He spent a great deal of money on education
and was riding high when, in 2000, California was hit by an energy crisis—
manufactured by Enron and other companies, which used illegal tactics to
gouge California for electricity. Davis didn’t handle this crisis to the satisfaction
of most Californians and his popularity plummeted.
Compounding his problems was his rather aloof and somewhat authori-
tarian manner, leading to diffi culties with members of his own party. With
the demise of the dot-com boom and the fl at economy, California suddenly
found itself with a gigantic budget defi cit, just when the 2002 elections came
around. From the moment he became governor, Davis started gathering a
huge amount of money for his campaign chest—estimated at around $60
million—because he was afraid that some rich California Republican might
decide to run for governor, which is exactly what happened.
Political Advertising 117
In the Republican primary, a wealthy Republican, Bill Simon, ran against
the former mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan. Riordan is a moderate
Republican and polls suggested he had a very good chance of defeating Gray
Davis. So, in a brilliant move, Davis spent $10 million attacking Riordan and
ensured that Simon, a bumbling, doltish, and very conservative candidate, won
the Republican nomination for governor. Even though Simon ran what some
Republicans described as the worst campaign in the country, he only lost to
Davis by six percentage points. Lyn Nofziger, a Republican campaign expert,
called Simon “too dumb to win.”
Simon made one disastrous mistake after another, but still came close. In
part, this was because many Californians, though they didn’t like Davis very
much, didn’t like Simon at all. In truth, most Californians said they didn’t like
either candidate and picked the lesser of two evils. Many people felt that Da-
vis had spent too much time getting money for his campaign and that he had
looked after companies that had given large donations to his campaign. Simon
called him a “pay to play” governor. Davis ran essentially a negative campaign,
fi lling the airwaves with attacks on Simon. Toward the end of the campaign,
Davis ran some positive commercials about his achievements.
Dan Walters, a reporter from California, wrote an article, “A State of
Gray,” that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 24, 2002. In it he
quotes from the endorsement that the Los Angeles Times gave Davis:
Davis’s obsessive pursuit of every last campaign dollar from special interests
is unseemly, and the governor has been slow to grasp the lead on critical
issues. . . . Davis is aloof. He agonizes over minor decisions most governors
would leave to aides. He is robotic and largely humorless. He is often at war
with the Legislature.
This, remember, is from a newspaper that endorsed Davis.
Davis had predicted he would win by double digits and mentioned, a
number of times, when he was giving his victory speech on November 5, how
he found politics to be “humbling” (by that he meant his humiliating victory
over Simon). He did pass some very forward-looking social legislation in the
weeks before the election, which shows—as one commentator put it—that
if pressed, Davis does “the right thing.” Being the governor of a large state
like California is often a stepping-stone to the presidency, and Davis was,
for a while, thought to have a very good chance of securing the Democratic
nomination for the presidency. In a remarkable turn of events, California held
a special election in the fall of 2003 and Davis was voted out of offi ce. His
replacement, Republican and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, served out his
term and was reelected in 2006 by a landslide.
118 Chapter 6
THE 2010 CALIFORNIA CAMPAIGN FOR GOVERNOR
To show that nothing much changes in life, the 2010 campaign for
governor was similar to the campaign in 2002. In the 2010 campaign, Re-
publican Meg Whitman, a billionaire who used to run e-Bay, waged another
virtual campaign against Steve Poizner, a multimillionaire. Whitman, as of
March 2010, had spent more than $45 million on “Can’t Trust Steve” at-
tack commercials about Steve Poizner and other commercials to introduce
herself to Californians.
In an article by Michael Rothfeld and Patrick McGreevy in the March
22, 2010, Los Angeles Times we read:
Republican Meg Whitman spent $27 million on her campaign for gover-
nor in the fi rst 11 weeks of the year, setting a record-shattering pace with
a prime-time television ad blitz to introduce herself to voters and attack
her GOP opponent, according to a disclosure statement she fi led Monday.
Whitman, the billionaire ex-chief of EBay, has spent $46 million since join-
ing the race early last year, seven times more than either of her main rivals.
In addition, she has avoided press conferences in which she would be
required to answer questions from reporters. She has, now, a huge lead over
Poizner, who argues that once his ads start running, her lead will shrink. The
Democratic nominee, Jerry Brown, has yet to start advertising.
The question many political commentators debated was whether Whit-
man, who was a Democrat for many years and who didn’t vote in a number
of elections in California, could “buy” the nomination, win the election,
and become governor, essentially by spending millions of dollars for politi-
cal commercials. The former governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, commonly
called “The Governator,” could not run again. He had a popularity rating
of 25, which equaled Gray Davis’s popularity when the special election was
held that led to Davis being thrown out of offi ce. In June 2010 California
had its primary, and in November there was an election. Meg Whitman
ended up spending more than $160 million and lost to Jerry Brown, the
Democratic candidate.
THE COST OF PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS
The 2008 election, in which Barack Obama defeated John McCain, was
the costliest race in history. Politico.com offers cost estimates for the last three
presidential races:
Political Advertising 119
Year Cost of Advertising
2000 $528.9 million by all candidates 2004 $880 million by all candidates 2008 $1 billion by all candidates
It is estimated that Obama raised around $650 million, a great deal more
than McCain’s $200 million. This was one of the few times in recent years
in which the Democratic candidate for president raised more money than the
Republican one.
The amount of money spent by all candidates, political parties, and in-
terest groups in congressional and presidential races in 2008 was $5.3 billion,
approximately a billion dollars more than was spent in 2004. We can see, then,
that presidential campaigns are growing increasingly expensive. Obama raised
much of his money through contributions made on the Internet and didn’t
take any government money. His celebrity status, to a considerable degree,
helped him raise the money.
THE CODE OF THE COMMERCIAL
(AND OTHER POLITICAL ADVERTISING)
The television commercial, because it is the most powerful form of adver-
tising, is the most interesting and most complex kind of political advertisement.
In these commercials, a set of emotional values is established around common
themes, values, or beliefs. Table 6.2 shows these values by offering a set of
opposites and listing the negative notions that most Americans fi nd repellent.
Political advertisements use symbols, as best they can, that generate the
positive appeals listed in table 6.2. These appeals lead to positive feelings about
a candidate, which then translate into votes for the candidate.
Table 6.2. Positive Appeals and Their Negations
Positive Negative
hope (for the future) despair
compassion (for those in need) coldness, aloofness
ambition (to do what’s needed) lethargy
trust deviousness
nostalgia (for the mythic past) unconcern for the past
intimacy distance
reassurance gloominess
local pride local shame
national pride national shame
120 Chapter 6
We want candidates who reassure us, who give us hope, who are com-
passionate toward the poor and disadvantaged, who make us feel proud about
where we live and about America. We like to feel that our candidates are like
us and aware of people like us, even though they may be quite far removed—
in distance and socioeconomic status—from us.
One of the most important things candidates do is to use visual symbols to
get their messages across directly and viscerally. Thus we see them appropriat-
ing important American symbols: the fl ag, the hard hat (identifi cation with
the blue-collar worker), a “visionary” look over the horizon, the all-American
family, and so on, to generate the emotional responses that lead to instant and
powerful identifi cation with the candidate and hopefully, as a consequence,
votes for the candidate. Not that language is unimportant, but in commercials
a great deal of the communication burden is carried by physical symbols.
And that is why politics has become, to such an important degree,
dominated by advertising—just like so many other areas of American life.
Presidents (and other politicians) are just one more product to be sold to the
American public, and while advertising isn’t the only determining factor,
it does play a major role in political campaigns and, by implication, in the
governmental process.
The Internet advertisement for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign (fi gure
6.2) offered a slogan that helped defi ne him and associated him with prosperity.
Bush redefi ned himself a number of times with different slogans, and voters
may have gotten confused trying to decide whether Bush was a “compassion-
ate conservative” or a “reformer with results.”
THE EMOTIONAL BASIS OF PARTISAN POLITICS
A psychologist at Emory University, Dr. Drew Westen, did some research
using M.R.I. scanners that revealed something very interesting about political
choices. What he discovered, by scanning the brains of partisan Democrats
and Republicans, when they were given information that either attacked their
beliefs or reinforced them, was that most of the decisions people make are
unconscious. Political scientists have suggested that unconscious emotional
forces shape our political decision making, and Westen’s research proves it, by
Figure 6.2
Political Advertising 121
showing that certain regions of the brain have increased activity when people
are shown material that leads to dissonance—that is, material that confl icts with
strongly held beliefs.
When material that was unwelcome to the participants in his experiment
was shown to them, certain areas of their brains fl ared with activity due to
their unconscious rejection of this material. The experiment also found that
people who unconsciously rejected certain information that was contrary to
their beliefs had spikes in areas of their brain that are associated with feeling
relieved or being rewarded.
What this suggests is that our political decision making is primarily guided
by unconscious forces and that the arguments we make to support our posi-
tions can be seen as, to a large degree, rationalizations to justify our views. At
least this is the case with people with strong commitments to one or another
political party. What these fi ndings imply is that political commercials are most
effective when they strike hidden chords in our psyches that resonate with our
beliefs, when they “touch” us in ways whose importance we cannot, generally
speaking, fathom. In essence, we believe what we want to believe, for reasons
we cannot fathom. The notion that our political decision making is shaped by
unconscious forces should not surprise us. If we consider a vote for a candidate
similar, in nature, to buying something, as I explained earlier, most of our deci-
sions to purchase something take place in our unconscious.
Westen said that it is possible, in theory, to overcome our unconscious be-
liefs and biases but it is very diffi cult to do so. As Freud pointed out, the uncon-
scious is not accessible to people under ordinary circumstances, so to the degree
that our political behavior is shaped by unconscious forces, generally speaking we
are unable to recognize the extent to which this has occurred and do anything
about it. Freud said that where there is id (that is, unconscious emotional desires
that shape our behavior), there should be ego (by which he meant logical and
rational behavior), but in life and in politics, it isn’t very easy to do this.
We should also keep in mind how Grid-Group theory relates to political
decision making. Political scientist Aaron Wildavsky argued that the four life-
styles or consumer cultures, discussed earlier, also have relevance to politics and
that these cultures affect our politics and voting. He argued that people cannot
know what their interests are so they must have other ways of deciding how
to vote, and what guides them is their membership in one of the four politi-
cal cultures—even though they may not recognize that they belong to one of
these political cultures. What voters do recognize is that they don’t accept the
ideas and beliefs of members of the other political cultures and so they vote
accordingly. What Westen’s research shows is that this process of determining
how to vote, based on one’s membership in a political culture, is largely an
emotional one, shaped by unconscious imperatives.
122 Chapter 6
THE DEATH OF THE TOBACCO BILL
I’ve been discussing political advertising and campaigns for elected offi ce
to this point. But there is another kind of political advertising that is worth
considering—advertising done by interest groups to support their goals and
affect decision making in the Congress. One of the most signifi cant recent
examples of a successful campaign is the one run by the cigarette companies
to defeat the tobacco bill by Senator John McCain (Republican from Arizona)
in the U.S. Senate.
Tobacco companies spent $40 million on advertising in a national cam-
paign waged mostly on television and radio to defeat the McCain bill. The
money was spent to turn around public opinion in America and thus give
cover to those senators who wished to defeat the bill, which was intended to
curb teenage smoking. What the campaign did was redefi ne the nature of the
McCain bill and change the terms of the matter being debated. The cigarette
makers argued that the McCain bill was not really an attempt to curb teenage
smoking but a new tax on working-class Americans advocated by a number
of tax-and-spend members of Congress.
Since McCain is a Republican, the advertisers couldn’t claim it was a
liberal Democratic tax bill, but the advertisements and commercials suggested
that was the case. The commercials didn’t say that those paying the tax would
be the people who smoked (and then ran up enormous medical bills to treat
the diseases caused by smoking), not the general public. The McCain bill was
described as an attack on “the American way of life” (fi gure 6.3).
Figure 6.3. This is part of a classic
Marlboro campaign that connected
cigarettes with the West. The man who
posed for these ads died of lung cancer.
Political Advertising 123
To quote from one tobacco advertisement: “Washington has gone hay-
wire, proposing the same old tax and spend. Half a trillion dollars in new taxes
. . . 17 new government bureaucracies. Cigarettes up to $5 a pack. . . . Huge
job losses among farmers, retailers and small businesses.” Attacking Washing-
ton—that is, the government—is a standard technique used by interest groups.
These are the same groups, let me point out, that spend enormous amounts of
money on lobbyists to infl uence the government.
Ironically, the person who designed the campaign, Carter Eskew, is an
advertising executive who has been associated with the Democratic party over
the years. Eskew also added a “scare” issue to the campaign against the tobacco
bill—some advertising by the tobacco industry intimated that the McCain bill
would inevitably lead to a huge black market in cigarettes and thus would not
be effective.
Eskew explained his tactics as follows (quoted in an article by Howard
Kurtz, Washington Post, “How an Adman Helped Kill Tobacco Bill”): “The
message is bounced off the satellite—the satellite being the American people—
and comes back to the members [of the Senate].” Eskew did this by advertising
heavily in the markets where there were wavering senators—and it was the
senators who were his ultimate audience.
We see then that advertising is used not only to sell politicians to the
voting public during elections, it also can be used to help shape public policy.
Forty million dollars for an advertising campaign is a small amount to pay if
you think that by spending that money you’ll save billions.
In Japan, fi rms suffering severe competition have devised a course of in-
struction which aims to instill the fanaticism of selling for its own sake.
The pressure of competition faced by these companies is heightened by
the structure of each sector: they specialize too little, and thus too many
fi rms crowd into the market. In particular, the virtual absence of specializa-
tion makes additional demands on the sellers. The programme developed
under these conditions is called Moretsu (or “feverishly active”). It involves
“breeding,” the goal of which is the fanatical seller whose drives and energy
are subordinated to their selling activity. “The aim is to breed a sales genius,
with an elbow of cast-iron, brain like a computer and the constitution of
a horse.” In short, “they want to breed the sales robot.” The breeding
programme starts its day with an hour of strenuous exercise. After breakfast
it is time to practice “self-forgetting.” “They achieve this by hitting the
furniture with clubs and yelling war-cries.” This is succeeded by detailed
discussion of the company’s sales fi gures. Whoever is criticized by the
instructor must literally wallow in the dust while accusing themselves of
worthlessness. “After a time the conviction grows inside the participants on
the course that the sales plan must be fulfi lled at any cost.”
—W. F. Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics:
Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society
If we were to sum up the total number of product advertisements we are
exposed to on TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, the number could be
as high as 400 per day. . . . If we were to add up all promotional messages—
including logos on products, program promos and ads on billboards (two
media that carry nothing but advertisements)—this number could reach
16,000. . . . Jacobson and Mazur . . . argue that typical Americans will spend
almost 3 whole years of their lives just watching commercials on television.
The United States, in fact, is ad burdened. This country accounts for 57%
of the world’s advertising spending, yet the U.S. population makes up less
than 10% of the world’s population.
—Matthew P. McAllister, The Commercialization of
American Culture: New Advertising, Control, and Democracy
125
7
THE MARKETING SOCIETY
Let me start with some statistics that refl ect the extent to which American
society is saturated with advertisements and commercials.
STATISTICS ON ADVERTISING
An article on advertising written a couple decades ago calculated that “the
average U.S. adult is bombarded by 255 advertisements every day—100 on
TV, 70 in magazines, 60 on the radio and 45 in newspapers” (Jamie Beckett,
“Ad Pitches Popping Up in Unusual Places,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 17,
1989). By 2008 the fi gures were much higher. In his book Shoptimism, Lee
Eisenberg writes (2009:108):
There’s just too damn much advertising? Ad agencies and their clients are
quick to concede that their greatest challenge is bulldozing through the clut-
ter of their own making. Studies show that on average each of us is exposed
to between three thousand and fi ve thousand advertising impressions a day.
Most ads whip by so fast we don’t register them as impressions.
If you add up all the television commercials you see in a typical day
(around sixty minutes worth if you watch four hours of television a day, the
national average), ads on the Internet, ads in magazines and in newspapers and
on billboards, you can understand why Eisenberg argues that we are “bom-
barded” by advertising—the title of his chapter on advertising. Some media
critics suggest we are exposed not to 5,000 but to 15,000 advertisements in a
typical day. Whether it is 5,000 or 15,000 it is obvious that we are exposed to
an enormous number of advertisements.
In the years since Beckett’s article was written, the problem has only
grown worse, since television commercials are now frequently much
shorter—often only ten seconds long. The thrust of Beckett’s article is that
advertising is now found in other places, such as videos, shopping carts in
126 Chapter 7
supermarkets, luggage carts in airports, walls of sports arenas, sides of buses,
and numerous other places.
In previous chapters, I also quoted statistics for the total amount spent on
advertisements in 2005, almost $280 billion. Another estimate puts spending
on all forms of advertising in 2005 in the United States at around $280 billion.
This fi gure comes from Robert J. Coen of Universal McCann, who is the most
often cited expert on advertising spending. His estimate for global advertising
in 2005 is $521 billion. If you consider the number of people who are the
target of this advertising you get the following:
United States The Rest of the World
$280 billion $241 billion 300 million people 6 billion people
Because of the recession in 2008 and 2009, the amount of money spent
on advertising in the United States and globally decreased considerably. But
as the economy revives, the money spent on advertising will rise. In 2008 the
fi gure for all advertising in the United States had dropped to $170 billion. The
only bright spot for advertisers was the rise in spending on Internet advertising,
which was almost $18 billion a year. (The statistics were supplied by Zenith-
Optimedia, a company that tracks advertising revenues.)
You can see from these statistics that people in the United States in 2005
were subjected to something like twenty times as much advertising as people
in other countries, in very rough terms. This means advertisers spend more
than $800 per person in the United States and approximately $40 per person
in all other foreign countries. (Note: These statistics were cited in an article in
Stuart Elliott’s “The Media Business: Advertising” in the December 7, 2004,
issue of the New York Times.) This world average is a bit misleading because
people living in many First World countries also are subjected to a great deal
of advertising while people in some Third World countries, where television
isn’t as ubiquitous as it is in the First World, see relatively fewer commercials.
MORE COMMENTS ON THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a Marxist poet and cultural critic, argues in
his book The Consciousness Industry that we have illusions about our freedom
and the power of our wills. He writes (1974:3):
All of us, no matter how irresolute we are, like to think that we reign su-
preme in our own consciousness, that we are masters of what our minds
The Marketing Society 127
accept or reject. Since the Soul is not much mentioned any more, except
by priests, poets, and pop musicians, the last refuge a man can take from
the catastrophic world at large seems to be his own mind. Where else can
he expect to withstand the daily siege, if not within himself? Even under
the conditions of totalitarian rule, where no one can fancy anymore that
his home is his castle, the mind of the individual is considered a kind of last
citadel and hotly defended, though this imaginary fortress may have been
long since taken over by an ingenious enemy.
No illusion is more stubbornly upheld than the sovereignty of the mind.
It is a good example of the impact of philosophy on people who ignore
it; for the idea that men can “make up their minds” individually and by
themselves is essentially derived from the tenets of bourgeois philosophy.
Enzensberger then quotes Karl Marx, who wrote, “What is going on in
our minds has always been, and will always be, a product of society” (1974:3).
The Global Nature of Advertising Agencies
Over the last twenty years or so there has been a great deal of con- solidation in the advertising industry and now there are just a small number of dominant advertising holding-company super-agencies or mega-agencies such as Omnicom, Interpublic (USA), WPP (UK), and Publicis (France). Each of these mega-agencies owns many smaller agencies that are located all over the world. For example, it is estimated that Omnicom owns around 1,500 agencies.
The relationship that exists between individual or “subsidiary” agencies and their holding companies is often a source of consider- able friction, and the movement towards gigantic multi-agency mega- advertising agencies has been countered by the development of small so-called boutique agencies that are independent and in many cases are freer to create more imaginative advertising.
It is important for companies with global campaigns to take into consideration the different belief systems and cultural values of the countries where advertisements and commercials will be shown. That is why holding-company advertising agencies, with branches in various countries, are useful to advertisers planning global cam- paigns. The advertising has to fi t with the cultural values and beliefs of people in the countries who will be exposed to the advertisements, and branches in each country can help advertisers avoid making mistakes. The infamous Chevrolet campaign for its Nova automobile in Latin America was a disaster, since the word “Nova” sounds like “no va” in Spanish, which means, roughly speaking, “doesn’t go.”
Figure 7.1
128 Chapter 7
You don’t have to be a Marxist philosopher railing against bourgeois
society to recognize that Enzensberger and Marx make a valid point. We are,
after all, social animals. The idea of “individualism” is something we learn
from growing up in an advanced society, where philosophers and others talk
about the idea.
Ernest Dichter, one of the founding fathers of motivation research, makes
a similar point in his book The Strategy of Desire:
Whatever your attitude toward modern psychology or psychoanalysis, it
has been proved beyond any doubt that many of our daily decisions are
governed by motivations over which we have no control and of which we
are often quite unaware. (1960:12)
We are all, then, under the illusion that our decisions are all based on
logic, rationality, need, and our own notions of what is best for us. Gerald Zalt-
man offers an important insight into this matter. He writes, in How Customers
Think (2003:50): “At least 95 percent of all cognition occurs below awareness
in the shadows of the mind while, at most, only 5 percent occurs in higher or-
der consciousness.” He then quotes Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard
University, who writes (2003:52): “The illusion of will is so compelling that it
can prompt the belief that acts were intended when they could not have been.
It is as though people aspire to be ideal agents who know all their actions in
advance.” Zaltman points out that (2003:52) “our experience of consciously
willing an action does not mean that we consciously produced it. Far from it.”
I quoted Zaltman earlier, who argued that it is our unconscious that shapes
most of our behavior, not our consciousness.
It is the power of unconscious desires working upon us that explains why,
as Paco Underhill writes in Why We Buy (2009:47), when we go into a store
“more than 60 percent of what we buy wasn’t on our list” of things to buy. In
his discussion of supermarket shopping, he adds (2009:105): “Supermarkets are
places of high-impulse buying for both sexes—fully 60 to 70 percent of pur-
chases there were unplanned, grocery industry studies have show us.”
THE MARKETING VIEW
It may be true, as I’ve pointed out a number of times, that exposure to
an advertisement or commercial for a particular brand of blue jeans or beer
may not lead to a purchasing decision by a given individual, but when we
take a broader look at American society, we discover that large numbers of
people do purchase that brand of blue jeans or beer. You might object that
The Marketing Society 129
many people buy things on the basis of price. The question then is, When two
products cost the same price, why does someone purchase one product and
not another? Conventionally, a distinction is made between marketing, which
deals with selling goods and services in general, and advertising, which involves
selling products and services by creating texts (such as print advertisements and
commercials) that are paid for by a sponsor of some kind. Most advertising
agencies have marketing experts who supply the copywriters and artists with
information about what the audience for an advertising campaign is like and
how to appeal to this audience.
Marketers have broken American society down into various segments—
what we might think of as target audiences—on the basis of demographic factors
(such as age, race, religion, income, marital status, gender, sexual preferences,
geographical region, and zip code) and psychographic factors (values and beliefs).
And they’ve developed typologies—essentially classifi cation systems—to deal
with the various types of consumers in America.
A valid or useful typology or classifi cation system should have several fea-
tures. First, it must cover the entire population—in this case, Americans who
have money to purchase products and services. Second, its categories must be
(to the extent possible) mutually exclusive. That is, the type of person who fi ts
in one category shouldn’t fi t in any others. There are many different ways we
can classify any group of people—according to race, religion, ethnicity, age,
income, educational level, socioeconomic class, gender, or occupation. The
important thing, as far as marketers are concerned, is to fi nd some typology
that will help get people to buy a given product or service.
We all see ourselves as special and unique individuals—and we are—but
marketers see us in broadly demographic terms, for example, as senior citizens
or members of Generation X or Generation Y, members of the Asian-Amer-
ican market, or members of the 35-to-59 age group. Marketers have created
numerous marketing typologies—categories of consumers—which they use to
reach their target audiences.
Insights from Advertising Agencies
People in advertising agencies are practical individuals who have a mission—selling both themselves and the products they are en- gaged to advertise—and who must have a grasp of their publics and audiences. It is fascinating on the theoretical level and often tedious on the practical level, and since it attracts people who are frequently highly intelligent, articulate, and sophisticated, it is a trying job.
130 Chapter 7
MASLOW’S THEORY OF NEEDS
The typologies or classifi cation systems that follow are all attempts to put
people in categories that will be useful to advertising agencies. The psycho-
graphic classifi cations stem, Eisenberg suggests (in Shoptimism), draws upon the
work of psychologist Abraham Maslow. Eisenberg describes Maslow’s work
as follows (2009:82):
In 1943, when he was in his midthirties, Abraham Maslow outlined how our
behavior is driven by the quest to satisfy a series of needs. Once we address
what Maslow called . . . “lower-order needs” we move on to ascending
“higher-order needs.” Some of these needs can be more material than oth-
ers, meaning that the Buy comes into play as a means to satisfy them. Our
need for safety and security is fi rst, followed by our need to belong—our
need for love and friendship and all that. Then there’s our need for self-
respect and dignity. And fi nally there’s our need to “self-actualize,” to real-
ize our full, individual potential.
I have put these needs in a chart so you can see how we evolve as we move
up the needs ladder from lower-order to higher-order ones:
Self-Actualization Needs: realize one’s potential Psychological Needs: self-esteem, recognition Social Needs: community, belonging Physical Needs: food, health, material goods, safety
Maslow saw the American Dream as basically involving lower-order
needs—the desire for material things. His theory of different levels of needs,
Eisenberg believes, is central to all the classifi cation schemes developed by
psychographic marketers, whose work I will now explore. I begin with the
VALS typology.
THE VALS 1 TYPOLOGY
VALS is an acronym that stands for Values and Lifestyles, a typology
developed by SRI International, a think tank in Menlo Park, California. This
typology focuses on people’s lifestyles rather than on demographic statistics.
The VALS 1 typology is based on theories of psychological development and
argues that there are nine different and distinctive kinds of consumers. This
is important, SRI suggests, because advertisers can target their appeals to the
The Marketing Society 131
specifi c values of each kind of consumer. My description of the VALS 1 typol-
ogy uses material from articles by Niles Howard (Dun’s Review, August 1981)
and Laurie Itow (San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, June 27, 1982).
Arnold Mitchell’s book, The Nine American Lifestyles, describes the research
behind the VALS typology and discusses each of the lifestyles in detail.
In her article, Itow explains the VALS system as follows:
The system, called Values and Lifestyles Program (VALS) draws on behav-
ioral science to categorize consumers, not only by demographics such as age,
sex, and the products they use, but according to their state of mind. Marie
Spengler, VALS director at SRI, says the program is based on an analysis
of cultural trends that can be used to develop products and target markets
as well as match employees with jobs and make long-range business deci-
sions such as where to build plants. . . . VALS, Spengler says, captures “a
deep, underlying sense of what motivates the consumer,” using data from a
30-question survey. Consumers are questioned about demographics, such as
age and sex. But more importantly, they’re also asked about their attitudes
and values.
This provides SRI with the data needed to create the various categories of
consumers found in VALS.
Figure 7.2. This book explains
how the VALS typology was
developed.
132 Chapter 7
The nine categories of consumers in the VALS typology are as follows:
Need-Driven
These consumers are “money restricted” and have a hard time just afford-
ing their basic needs. They are divided into two subcategories:
1. Survivors: These people are old, poor, and out of the cultural
mainstream.
2. Sustainers: They are young, crafty, and on the edge of poverty but
want to get ahead in the world.
Need-driven consumers make up approximately 11 percent of the adult popu-
lation in the United States.
Outer-Directed
These consumers, who often live in Middle America, want others to feel
positive about them. There are three subcategories of outer-directed consumers:
3. Belongers: They are conservative and conventional in their tastes,
nostalgic, sentimental, and not experimental.
4. Emulators: These people are upwardly mobile, status conscious,
competitive, and distrustful of the establishment. They want to
make it big.
5. Achievers: They are the leaders of society, who have been success-
ful in the professions, in business, and in the government. They
have status, comfort, fame, and materialistic values.
Outer-directed consumers make up about two-thirds of the adult popula-
tion in America.
The Marketing Society 133
Inner-Directed
These consumers tend to purchase products to meet their inner needs
rather than thinking about the opinions of other people. There are three sub-
categories of inner-directed consumers:
6. I-Am-Me’s: They are young, narcissistic, exhibitionist, inventive,
impulsive, and strongly individualistic.
7. Experientials: This group is in essence an older version of the I-
Am-Me’s and is concerned with inner growth and naturalism.
8. Societally Conscious Individuals: They believe in simple living and
smallness of scale, and support causes such as environmentalism,
consumerism (not the same thing as consumption), and con-
servation. This group made up around 28 percent of the adult
population in the United States in 1990 and has, perhaps, grown
considerably since then.
Integrateds
9. Integrateds: This is the last subcategory, one that is characterized
by psychological maturity, tolerance, assuredness, and a self-
actualizing philosophy. These people tend to ignore advertising,
and relatively few advertisements are made to appeal to them.
Integrateds make up only around 2 percent of the adult American
population, but they are very infl uential and are disproportion-
ately found among corporate and national leaders. While integrat-
eds may not be as susceptible to advertising as other groups, their
134 Chapter 7
taste in lifestyle products may be highly infl uential and they may
function as what might be described as “taste opinion leaders.”
USING THE VALS 1 TYPOLOGY: A CASE STUDY
As an example of the usefulness of the VALS typology, Itow explains
why Merrill Lynch switched its ad campaign from “Bullish on America” (il-
lustrated with a herd of bulls) to “A Breed Apart” (illustrated with a lone bull).
The “Bullish on America” appealed to belongers—the essentially middle-class
conservative members of the mass market who want to fi t in. Belongers were
not as good a market for Merrill Lynch as achievers—who liked the “Breed
Apart” advertisements much better than the “Bullish on America” ads and
who had more money to invest.
Itow discusses the developmental structure of the VALS typology:
It’s based on the theory that as people grow they fi ll certain needs for sur-
vival and security and then seek a sense of belonging. Next, they strive for
self-esteem and then move upward to “self-actualization,” developing their
inner self and realizing their full potential. (1982)
Thus, using the VALS 1 typology, advertisers are able to make appeals that will
resonate most directly with the deep-seated beliefs, values, and lifestyles of dif-
ferent segments of the American population. The VALS 1 typology is a logical
one—but it has certain problems. So, in 1989, SRI revised the VALS typology.
VALS 2: A REVISION OF THE VALS 1 TYPOLOGY
The VALS typology was revised because it was thought that it did not
adequately connect consumer motivations with economic status and the abil-
ity to purchase goods and services being advertised. VALS 2 was an attempt
to remedy this defi ciency by doing a better job of matching consumers with
products they could afford.
Wanting to buy something is only one step; consumers have to be able to
afford what they want. So VALS 2 came up with a set of categories that took
into account such matters as income, education (the two are often correlated),
health, and the strength of a consumer’s desire to purchase something. This
led to a modifi cation of the original VALS typology—one that focused upon
matters involved in consumer decision making. The VALS 2 categories are
described here.
The Marketing Society 135
1. Actualizers: They are successful individuals with a great deal of
money. They are concerned with their image as a refl ection of
their taste and their character, not as a refl ection of their power
or socioeconomic status. They are interested in social issues and
amenable to change.
2. Fulfi lleds: They are practical and value functionality and durability
in products they purchase. They tend to be mature, fi nancially
comfortable, and satisfi ed with their lives and situations, but also
open to social change.
3. Achievers: Achievers are career-oriented and value stability and
structure, self-discovery, and intimacy. They purchase products
to gain an image refl ecting their success.
4. Experiencers: They love to spend money and tend to be young,
impulsive, and enthusiastic. They are willing to try the offbeat and
the new and are risk takers.
5. Believers: They are highly principled conservative consumers who
purchase well-known brands. They are similar to fulfi lleds but
have less money.
6. Strivers: They are like achievers, except they aren’t as well off.
They are concerned about the opinions of others and greatly
desire their approval.
7. Makers: People in this category are like experiencers and are ac-
tive, with much of their energy going into various forms of self-
suffi ciency such as fi xing a car or canning vegetables.
8. Strugglers: These people are at the bottom of the economic totem
pole and have to struggle to make ends meet.
It’s interesting to compare the two VALS typologies—VALS 1 and VALS
2. In table 7.1 I, to the extent that it is possible, line up the various categories
Table 7.1. Comparison of VALS 1
and VALS 2
VALS 1 VALS 2
Integrateds Actualizers
Societally Conscious
Experientials
I-Am-Me’s Experiencers
Achievers Achievers
Emulators Strivers
Belongers Believers
Sustainers
Survivors Strugglers
136 Chapter 7
according to similarities, starting with the wealthiest groups and working my
way down to the poorest ones. The two systems are different in that VALS 2
is concerned with income level and the ability of consumers to purchase goods
and services they desire. But there are some similarities.
One problem with this system is that it assumes rationality. That is, it as-
sumes, on the one hand, that people won’t purchase things they can’t afford
and, on the other hand, that people won’t purchase things that are “beneath”
them. Thus, it assumes that rich people won’t “dress poor” and poor people
won’t “dress rich” or “drive rich” or be willing to become “house poor” (that
is, spend most of their income on a mortgage and the upkeep for a house). But
many a person driving an expensive car has leased it and doesn’t have much
money in the bank.
There are numerous other ways of understanding consumers and what
makes them tick (and buy or not buy), a number of which I will discuss in the
material that follows.
ZIP CODES AND KINDS OF CONSUMERS
Market researchers can tell (so they claim) what you eat for breakfast, what
newspapers and magazines you read, what you watch on television, what kind of
car you drive, and so on—all on the basis of your zip code. According to Michael
Weiss, author of The Clustering of America (Harper & Row, 1988), people who
have the same zip codes tend to be remarkably similar. Weiss has developed a
typology of forty different lifestyles—each of which is quite different from all the
others, with relatively little overlap. His ideas are described in an article by Sam
Whiting in the San Francisco Chronicle (November 23, 1988, B3).
Weiss gives each zip code a nickname. Some typical nicknames are as
follows:
Nickname Zip Code Location
“Blue-Blood Estates” 94025 Atherton, California “Money and Brains” 94301 Palo Alto (Stanford University) “Single City Blues” 94704 Berkeley (University of California) “Hard Scrabble” 94103 Inner Mission (San Francisco)
As Weiss explains things, “We’re no longer a country of 50 states but
of 40 lifestyle clusters. . . . You can go to sleep in Palo Alto and wake up in
Princeton, NJ, and nothing has changed except the trees. The lifestyles are the
same. Perrier is in the fridge, and people are playing tennis at three times the
national average.”
The Marketing Society 137
Weiss offers an interesting comparison between two neighborhoods—
what he calls the Urban Gold Coast and the Bohemian Mix (table 7.2). We
must keep in mind that Weiss’s statistics are from 1988 and there have been
considerable changes in America since then. Still, his information is quite
interesting.
You can see from this comparison that there are considerable differences
between Urban Gold Coasters and Bohemians. Both, of course, are relatively
small percentages of the U.S. population.
Table 7.2. Urban Gold Coast and Bohemian Mix Compared
Urban Gold Coast Bohemian Mix
94111 Embarcadero (SF) 94117 Haight-Ashbury (SF)
10021 Upper East Side (NY) 20036 Dupont Circle (Washington, DC)
10024 Upper West Side (NY) 02139 Cambridge, MA
20037 West End (Washington, DC) 60614 Lincoln Park (Chicago)
60611 Fort Dearborn (Chicago) 15232 Shadyside (Pittsburgh, PA)
0.5 percent of U.S. households 1.1 percent of U.S. households
Age group: 18–24 and 65+ Age group: 18–34
Median household income: $36,838 Median household income: $21,916
Liberal/moderate politics Liberal politics
High Usage High Usage
Aperitifs, specialty wines Environmental organizations
Champagne Irish whiskey
Tennis Downhill skiing
Pregnancy tests Country clubs
Passports Classical records
Magazines and Newspapers Magazines and Newspapers
New York Atlantic Monthly
New York Times Harper’s
Metropolitan Home Gentlemen’s Quarterly
Atlantic Monthly The New Yorker
Food Food
Rye/pumpernickel bread Whole wheat bread
Tomato/vegetable juice Frozen waffl es
Butter Fruit juices and drinks
Fresh chicken TV dinners
138 Chapter 7
Some of Weiss’s other clusters are as follows:
Young Infl uentials Black Enterprise Two More Rungs Dixie-Style Pools and Patios Heavy Industry New Beginnings Levittown, USA Gray Power Hispanic Mix Furs and Station Wagons Public Assistance New Melting Pot Small-Town Downtown
We can guess, just from the descriptive names, what people living in such zip
codes might be like.
Weiss explains that eventually marketers may move beyond zip codes to
specifi c mailing addresses. As he points out:
Right now, Americans are bombarded with 15,000 messages a day. Market-
ers keep trying to match that little clustering niche that’s your lifestyle with
whatever they’re trying to sell you. People leave a paper trail of warranties
and subscriptions. Pretty soon Big Brother will know what’s going on in
your household. It’s only a matter of time until businesses get into the black
box of what’s in a consumer’s head.
Weiss’s fears have long been realized. Now shoppers who use Safeway or
other supermarket cards or purchase products with credit cards feed computer
databases that keep track of their purchases and know what they eat and drink,
where they travel, and all kinds of other things about them.
Weiss’s book is, it would seem, a popularization of the typology devel-
oped by the Claritas Corporation, which uses zip codes to classify 250,000
neighborhoods in the United States into the consumer clusters that Weiss
writes about.
THE CLARITAS TYPOLOGY
The Claritas Corporation argues that “birds of a feather fl ock together,”
which suggests that people who live in a given zip code tend to have similar
socioeconomic levels. Claritas argues that there are, in fact, some sixty-six dif-
ferent categories of consumers in the United States and it has come up with
jazzy names for each of them. The complete list of these groups (some of
whom were described by Weiss earlier) follows.
The Marketing Society 139
01. Upper Crust 34. White Picket Fences 02. Blue Blood Estates 35. Boomtown Singles 03. Movers & Shakers 36. Blue-Chip Blues 04. Young Digerati 37. Mayberry-ville 05. Country Squires 38. Simple Pleasures 06. Winner’s Circle 39. Domestic Duos 07. Money & Brains 40. Close-in Couples 08. Executive Suites 41. Sunset City Blues 09. Big Fish, Small Pond 42. Red, White, & Blues 10. Second City Elite 43. Heartlanders 11. God’s Country 44. New Beginnings 12. Brite Lites, Li’l City 45. Blue Highways 13. Upward Bound 46. Old Glories 14. New Empty Nests 47. City Startups 15. Pools & Patios 48. Young & Rustic 16. Bohemian Mix 49. American Classics 17. Beltway Boomers 50. Kid Country, US 18. Kids & Cul-de-Sacs 51. Shotguns & Pickups 19. Home Sweet Home 52. Suburban Pioneers 20. Fast-Track Families 53. Mobility Blues 21. Gray Power 54. Multi-Culti Mosaic 22. Young Infl uentials 55. Golden Ponds 23. Greenbelt Sports 56. Crossroads Villagers 24. Up-and-Comers 57. Old Milltowns 25. Country Casuals 58. Back Country 26. The Cosmopolitans 59. Urban Elders 27. Middleburg Managers 60. Park Bench Seniors 28. Traditional Times 61. City Roots 29. American Dreams 62. Hometown Retired 30. Suburban Sprawl 63. Family Thrifts 31. Urban Achievers 64. Bedrock America 32. New Homesteaders 65. Big City Blues 33. Big Sky Families 66. Low-Rise Living
If you go to the Claritas web site, and go to their My Best Segments in its Prism
NE Segmentation System, you can check for the clusters in your zip code.
In my zip code, 94941, which is in Marin County, you fi nd a number of
clusters at the top of the list. Cluster 03 offers the following information (ac-
cessed November 2008):
03: Movers & Shakers
Group: Elite Suburbs
CY2002 Statistics:
140 Chapter 7
US Households: 1,718,417 (1.59%)
US Population: 4,589, 292 (1.6%)
Median Household Income: $92,163
Lifestyle Traits:
Go scuba diving/snorkeling
Plan travel on the Internet
Read PC Magazine
Listen to adult contemporary radio
Drive a Porsche
Demographic Traits: Ethnic Diversity White, High Asian Family Types Couples Age Ranges 35–64 Education Levels College Grads Employment Levels Professional Housing Types Homeowners Urbanicity Suburban Income Wealthy
Claritas provides similar descriptions of each of its sixty-six clusters. It
argues that by knowing who you are targeting for your advertising, and what
they are like, you can do a better job of reaching them. There are, I should
point out, other marketing research organizations that don’t believe that “de-
mographics is destiny,” but rely on psychological characteristics of targeted
consumers and other kinds of information as well.
Another typology that claims to be more accurate than demographic factors
or zip codes, based essentially on magazine choice, is also available to marketers.
MAGAZINE CHOICE AS AN
INDICATOR OF CONSUMER TASTE
Yankelovich Partners, a well-known marketing and research company
located in Westport, Connecticut, conducted a survey in 1992 that led to a
very interesting discovery. According to Yankelovich, the publications that
consumers read, especially the magazines they like, are a better indicator of
consumer behavior than demographic factors such as age, marital status, gen-
der, and residence.
This is because people, so the argument goes, choose magazines based
on their editorial content, and this content is generally congruent with (or a
refl ection of) their interests, beliefs, and values.
The Marketing Society 141
The Yankelovich survey divided the American public into fi ve groups, or
media communities, based on their media tastes. These groups and the basic
magazines read by members of each group are described here. Like many mar-
keting typologies, the names of the groups are jazzy and meant to characterize
each group in a clever and memorable manner.
1. Home Engineers: Women who read magazines such as Family
Circle, Woman’s Day, and Good Housekeeping that contain instruc-
tions and are didactic in nature.
2. Real Guys: Men who choose magazines based on their hobbies.
They read magazines such as Hot Rod, Popular Mechanics, Mechanix
Illustrated, and Guns and Ammo.
3. Ethnic Pewneps (People Who Need People): Readers of magazines
such as Entertainment Weekly, Sporting News, and Ebony, who are
interested in celebrities and identify with them, treating these
celebrities as if they were involved in their lives. Both men and
women can be members of this category.
4. Information Grazers: People who think of themselves as intellectu-
als and read magazines such as Time, Bon Appetit, and People to
obtain opinions and gain information they can discuss with others.
Information grazers are generally male.
5. Armchair Adventurers: Older, conservative, more traditional people
who experience the world vicariously through magazines such as
Reader’s Digest and Modern Maturity. Both men and women are
members of this group, and they tend to vote Republican.
The theory behind this typology is that the media choices consumers
make are key indicators of their behavior as consumers. This notion suggests
there is a logic to people’s behavior as consumers, and certain basic interests
and beliefs, refl ected in magazine choice, shape consumer behavior in general.
This discussion draws upon an article by Stuart Elliott in the January 7,
1993, issue of the New York Times. Elliott points out that the Yankelovich survey
didn’t cover people in their twenties and people with annual household incomes
of more than $150,000. The question we must ask about this typology—and all
typologies, for that matter—is whether it is the best way of doing justice to the
information discovered in the survey or whether, somehow, it is reductionistic.
Marketers are basically interested in consumer behavior, so they always
reduce groups of people to various consumer categories. Does the Yankelovich
classifi cation system do justice to the survey results? Are there more than fi ve cat-
egories that could be elicited from the data? And, most important, is it describing
a correlation (for our purposes, something that’s associated with something else)
142 Chapter 7
or discovering causation (the “real” reason why people buy this or that product)?
It may be, of course, that all we can get from marketing research are correlations
between some factor or factors and consumer behavior.
TYPES OF TEENAGE CONSUMERS
There are (2010 fi gures) almost 30 million teenagers living in America
now, and in 1997 these teenagers spent around $4 billion on clothing, cos-
metics, and various other kinds of fashion items. Most teenage spending is
discretionary and not based on purchasing essentials such as food or housing.
Teen-Age Research Unlimited, a Northbrook, Illinois, market research
company that specializes in teenagers—known as “Generation Y” or more
recently the “Internet Generation”—has come up with a typology that argues
that all teens can be placed in one of four categories: Infl uencers, Edge Group
members, Conformers, and Passives. The characteristics of each group are as
follows:
1. Infl uencers: They are quick to embrace fashion trends, spend a
good deal of money on fashion trends, and infl uence spending
habits of other teenagers.
2. The Edge Group: Members of this group continually change their
looks in an attempt to be antifashion and drop their fashion looks
when infl uencers adopt them.
3. Conformers: Most teenagers fall into this category. Conformers use
popular brands to strengthen their self-esteem.
4. Passives: Teenagers in this category aren’t particularly interested
in using fashion as a statement or a means of fi tting in. They buy
clothes based on what is available rather than being concerned
about being fashionable.
The thing we must remember about these consumers is that not only do they
spend $4 billion on fashions, they also have a signifi cant infl uence on purchases
made by their parents.
Teenagers spend a lot of time shopping, in part because it is the only
“adult” role they are offered in American society. What does it mean to be
an adult in American society—one characterized by some critics as based on
“consumer lust”? An adult, so it seems to many teenagers, is someone who
buys things and thus in their effort to be adults they become consumers.
A Rand Youth Poll conducted in 1990 found that girls spend $73.95 a
week, and a third of this amount, approximately $25.00 a week, is spent on
The Marketing Society 143
clothes. (That adds up to more than $1,000 a year on clothes.) This $73.95
breaks down as follows, in rounded-off fi gures, based on a 1989 study by the
Rand Youth Poll:
food and snacks 33% clothing 20% (males and females combined) savings 17% entertainment and movies 14% records 5% misc. 5% grooming 4% hobbies 3%
An article, “The Young Are Getting and Spending, Too,” by Trish Hall
(New York Times, August 23, 1990, B7), quotes Selina Guber, a psycholo-
gist (and president of Children’s Market Research Inc. in New York), about
the similarity between children and adults as far as consuming is concerned:
“Throughout the country there is a tremendous emphasis on possessions.
[Children] refl ect that. Like adults, they face pressure to possess the right
brands and the right objects. Their wishes are of increasing interest to market-
ers because American children 6 to 14 years old are believed to have about
$6 billion in discretionary income.” Thus, children—as well as adults—are
of “consuming” interest to marketers, especially since children have so much
discretionary income. This fi gure, $6 billion, is for 1990; in 2007 it is, no
doubt, considerably higher.
As a blurb for Kids as Customers (in the November 1995 catalog Marketing
Power: The Marketer’s Reference Library) explains:
This indispensable handbook describes 4-to-12 year olds as having the great-
est sales potential of any age or demographic group. Each year, children
144 Chapter 7
spend over $9 billion of their own money; they infl uence $130 billion of
adults’ spending; and as future adult customers, they will control even more
purchasing dollars tomorrow.
The various citations of billions of dollars differ in various studies because of
differences in age groups being dealt with and when the studies were made.
Whatever the case, the amount of money young children and teenagers have
to spend, and do spend, is simply astonishing.
BLOGS AND MARKETING
The web logs that people write are now being mined as a source of
valuable information about consumer preferences. An article in the June 23,
2005, Wall Street Journal, “Marketers Scan Blogs for Brand Insights,” points
out that marketing organizations are gaining valuable insights into people’s
attitudes towards various products by searching through chat rooms, message
boards, electric forums, and the millions of web logs that are on the Internet.
The opinions of the bloggers, which are unsolicited and honest, can be seen
as a kind of gigantic focus group. Rick Murray, executive vice president of
Edelman, a Chicago public relations fi rm, says, “We look at the blogosphere
as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into
without going behind a one-way mirror.” Some of the insights that scanning
blogs revealed are:
Teens Fear of exceeding their cell phone minutes Children Love minivans Teens Like SUVs Dieters Losing interest in Atkins Drug Makers Poor trials not necessarily seen as negative (Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2005, p. B1)
Advertising agencies are also using blogs to get their message across.
They do this by purchasing space on popular blogs, some of which are read
by thousands—even hundreds of thousands—of people. But blog ads have to
be done carefully, lest the blog reader be turned off, so most blog ads are not
conventional. An article “Bloggers’ new brand starts to click with advertisers”
in the March 28, 2005, Financial Times mentions an advertising campaign by
the United Church of Christ, which spent $15,000 on a blog campaign. Some
74,000 people clicked on the advertisement, which means the cost per viewing
of their ad was around twenty cents (March 28, 2005, p. 14).
The Marketing Society 145
A company in Boulder, Colorado—Umbria Communications—has soft-
ware called “Buzz Report” that data mines millions of blogs to fi nd out what
the bloggers are saying about various products and trends. As the article by
Bridget Finn in the September 2005 (p. 36) issue of Business 2.0 reports,
“Umbria uses language-processing algorithms that track positive and negative
mentions of a brand and predict the age range and gender of every opiner.”
Now market research fi rms are deeply involved in studying blogs where
people offer private thoughts and opinions in a very public forum that is ac-
cessible to everyone.
A TYPOLOGY FOR EVERYONE IN THE WORLD
The typologies I’ve been discussing to this point have all been for people in
the United States—the country where marketing has reached its highest level of
development. People who live in America and are considered “normal” in terms
of the amount of television they watch are exposed to many more advertisements
and commercials than people in other countries, all things considered.
On the basis of 35,000 interviews with consumers in thirty-fi ve differ-
ent countries, Roper Starch Worldwide claims it has identifi ed basic values
that are universal in nature, values shared by people in all countries (or at least
values that cross national borders). People were studied in North America,
South America, Europe, and Asia in terms of their bedrock values and the
basic motivations that shape their behavior. Roper Starch released a study,
“Global Consumer Hot Buttons,” that claims there are six basic categories of
consumers in all countries. They are listed here, with the traditional catchy
names market researchers use.
1. Strivers: This is the largest group, with 23 percent of the world’s
adult population. They tend to be middle-aged and materialistic,
and value status, wealth, and power. They tend to be found in
developing and developed countries.
2. Devouts: They are almost as large as strivers, with 22 percent of
the world’s adult population. As the term “devout” suggests, they
believe in more traditional values such as faith, obedience, duty,
and respect for elders. Devouts tend to be found in the Middle
East, Africa, and Asia.
3. Altruists: Some 18 percent of the world’s adult population are al-
truists. They are, as a rule, well educated, older (median age: 44)
and interested in social causes and political issues. They tend to be
found in Latin America and Russia.
146 Chapter 7
4. Intimates: Only 15 percent of the world’s adult population are
intimates. They are very similar to a different typology called
pewneps—people who need people. That is, intimates are pri-
marily concerned with relationships with spouses, family, friends,
colleagues, and signifi cant others. Intimates are primarily found
in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, and
Hungary. They have in common a heavy use of media.
5. Fun Seekers: About 12 percent of the adult population falls in this
category. They are the youngest group in the typology and are
primarily interested in excitement, pleasure, and adventure. They
value looking good and spend a good deal of time in restaurants,
bars, and clubs. Fun seekers are an MTV generation.
6. Creatives: At 10 percent, creatives are the smallest category in the
worldwide typology. Their focus is on technology and knowl-
edge, and they are trendsetters who own and use computers, surf
the web, and consume the greatest amount of media—especially
print media such as newspapers, magazines, and books, of any
category.
Table 7.3 shows the basic characteristics of the six groups so that you can see
how they compare with one another.
The question we must ask about these categories is whether they miss any
important groups of people—that is, does this typology cover all the adults and
are the categories mutually exclusive? Can every adult in the world be put into
one, and only one, of these six categories? In some cases, as table 7.3 shows,
there was no information (or, more precisely, no information in the article that
discussed the report) for some categories. That explains the gaps.
What I wonder is, Are some of the fun seekers also altruists? Or some of
the devouts also creatives? We must remember, of course, that this typology,
like all of the typologies I’ve described, focuses on consumer behavior and thus
Table 7.3. International Consumer Values and Beliefs
Strivers Devouts Altruists Intimates
Fun
Seekers Creatives
23% 22% 18% 15% 12% 10%
Wealth Obedience Social issues Relationships Adventure Knowledge
Newspapers Least media
use
Like media Music MTV Highest
media use
Developed
nations
Middle East,
Asia,
Africa
Latin America,
Russia
U.K., U.S.,
Netherlands
The Marketing Society 147
is, by defi nition, reductionistic. The Roper Starch typology is about consum-
ers and their values and is primarily concerned with the belief systems or “hot
buttons” that can be used to understand the minds of consumers.
In 1951, Marshall McLuhan explained in The Mechanical Bride what ad-
vertising agencies were doing. He compared advertising agencies with Hol-
lywood and wrote, in his chapter “Love-Goddess Assembly Line”:
The ad agencies and Hollywood, in their different ways, are always trying
to get inside the public mind in order to impose their collective dreams
on that inner stage. And in the pursuit of this goal both Hollywood and
the advertising agencies themselves give major exhibitions of unconscious
behavior. One dream opens into another until reality and fantasy are made
interchangeable. The ad agencies fl ood the daytime world of conscious
purpose and control with erotic imagery from the night world in order to
drown, by suggestion, all sales resistance. Hollywood fl oods the night world
with daytime imagery in which synthetic gods and goddesses [stars] appear
to assume the roles of our wakeaday existence in order to console us for
the failures of our daily lives. The ad agencies hold out for each of us the
dream of a spot on Olympus where we can quaff and loll forever amid the
well-known brands. The movies reverse this procedure by showing us the
stars—who, we are assured, dwell on “beds of amaranth and holly”—de-
scending to our level. (1951:97)
The advertising agencies and marketing experts, with their various ty-
pologies, do offer some very interesting information about the human psyche
and about what it is that makes us tick. They are continually probing us, trying
to get at the G spot of consumer behavior and decision making, doing every-
thing they can to understand us so they can—in starkest terms—manipulate us.
A COMPARISON OF THE DIFFERENT TYPOLOGIES
Now that I’ve offered a number of different marketing typologies, it’s
worth looking at them all together to see what they refl ect about the way
marketing research sees human beings. In table 7.4 I list the various typolo-
gies—though, in some cases, not all the subcategories.
Table 7.4 does not compare types and categories horizontally. That is,
there is no similarity between survivors, actualizers, and so on. What is inter-
esting is how more than 100 million adult Americans can be classifi ed in the
fi rst four typologies, how 30 million teenagers are characterized in the teenager
typology, and how around 3 billion adult human beings are characterized in
the last typology, the Roper Starch system.
148 Chapter 7
One generalization that emerges from the chart is that certain people are
trendsetters or opinion leaders, and others, who form the majorities, imitate
and follow the trendsetters. And there are various other subcategories, depend-
ing on the typology, of those who fi t on various rungs of the ladder below that
of the trendsetters, opinion leaders, creatives—what you will. There are some
who have opted out of the system and are very hard for marketers to reach,
such as the integrateds and others who follow the trendsetters and purchase
things to generate an image of success.
Some of the typologies, such as the Yankelovich one, don’t seem to be
directly involved with fashion and such, but the magazines people in the vari-
ous categories read suggest that these people are motivated by the same things
as are those people in categories more directly related to marketing.
We can also see various oppositions in these typologies:
Actives Passives Leaders Followers Creatives Imitators Achievers Strugglers Infl uencers Conformists Experience Seekers Safety Seekers
These polarities refl ect the way the human mind functions. According to the
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, concepts are by nature differential—and
our minds fi nd meaning by setting up paired oppositions.
Table 7.4. Marketing Typologies Compared
VALS 1 VALS 2 Zip Codes Yankelovich Teenagers Roper Starch
Survivors Actualizers Blue Bloods Home Engineers Infl uencers Strivers
Sustainers Fulfi lleds Money and Brains Real Guys Edge Group Devouts
Belongers Achievers Single City Blues Ethnic Pewneps Conformers Altruists
Emulators Experiencers Urban Gold Coast Information Passives Intimates
Grazers
Achievers Believers Bohemian Armchair
Adventurers
Fun Seekers
I-Am-Me’s Strivers Young Infl uentials Creatives
Experientials Makers Two More Rungs
Societally Strugglers Gray Power
Conscious Pools and Patios
Integrateds Hispanic Mix
The Marketing Society 149
A CONCLUSION IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION
The primary goal of advertising and marketing, of course, is to shape our
behavior; advertising agencies can be looked at as hired guns, whose main
job is to destroy consumer resistance and shape consumer desire and action—
whether it be to sell cigarettes, beer, politicians, or, lately, prescription medi-
cines. And in some cases, it is to sell socially positive messages. There is little
question that the information marketers have about consumer motivation and
the minds of consumers is a source of power. Is this power used ethically and
for socially constructive purposes? That is the question.
To manufacture a product without at the same time manufacturing a
demand has become unthinkable. Today the manufacture of demand
means, for most large companies, television—its commercials as well as
other program elements. The growing scale of mass production has inevi-
tably made advertising more crucial, but this understates the situation. As
society becomes more product-glutted, the pressure on the consumer to
consume—to live up to higher and higher norms of consumption—has
become unrelenting.
The pressure, as various observers have noted, centers on selling the
unnecessary. The merchandising of necessities—which, to some extent,
will be bought anyway—can seldom sustain the budgets applied to the
unnecessary, unless the necessary is cloaked with mythical supplemental
values. The focus is on the creation of emotion-charged values to make the
unneeded necessary.
All this is now so taken for granted that it is seldom discussed. The young
writer entering advertising assumes that hope and fear are the springs he
must touch—hope of success and fear of failure in sex, business, community
status. As a dramatic medium that can draw on the resources of every art,
and has as its stage the privacy of the home, television has unparalleled op-
portunity for this psychic pressure.
—Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate
Beyond attracting the viewer’s attention, the image(s) in an ad are typi-
cally meant to give rise to some emotional disposition toward the product,
politician, social cause, or whatever else the ad is about. The iconicity of
visual images serves this process by making it possible for images to draw
upon the rich variety of visual stimuli and associated emotions to which
we are already attuned through our interactions with our social and natural
environments: facial expressions, gestures, postures, personal appearance,
physical surroundings, and so on. Moreover . . . visual images are capable
of simulating certain aspects of these interactions by means of the variables
that control the viewer’s perspective: degree of proximity, angle of view,
presence or absence of subjective shots, and so on.
—Paul Messaris, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising
151
8
ANALYZING PRINT ADVERTISEMENTS
or: Six Ways of Looking at a
Fidji Perfume Advertisement
The thing we have to realize about radio and television commercials and
print advertisements (and all other forms of advertising as well) is that they
are, aside from their commercial functions, works of popular art. Or maybe
“commercial” art is a more fi tting term. In this chapter and the next I will
focus upon print advertisements and television commercials, the two most
interesting—from my point of view—kinds of texts. I will use the term text
here for both; it is a term conventionally used in criticism nowadays to cover
all forms of artworks.
LOTMAN’S CONTRIBUTIONS
TO UNDERSTANDING TEXTS
One important thing to remember about these texts is that every aspect of
them is signifi cant. This point is made by the Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman
in The Structure of the Artistic Text. Lotman writes: “The tendency to interpret
everything in an artistic text as meaningful is so great that we rightfully consider
nothing accidental in a work of art” (1977:17). Lotman also explains why texts
yield to so many different interpretations:
Since it can concentrate a tremendous amount of information into the
“area” of a very small text . . . an artistic text manifests yet another feature:
it transmits different information to different readers in proportion to each
one’s comprehension; it provides the reader with a language in which each
successive portion of information may be assimilated with repeated reading.
It behaves as a kind of living organism which has a feedback channel to the
reader and thereby instructs him. (1977:23)
152 Chapter 8
Lotman’s two points are very important for us to keep in mind.
1. Everything in a text such as a commercial is important; and
2. The more you know, the more you can see in a text.
This is because texts store a tremendous amount of information in themselves
and are a great deal more complicated than we might imagine. This notion that
texts are storehouses of information explains, for example, why we can read nov-
els several times and see fi lms a number of times and still enjoy the experience.
That’s because we see new things in the novel each time we read it and we see
new things in the fi lm each time we see it. And the same, of course, applies to
many other kinds of artworks—paintings, music, sculpture, poems, and so on.
WHAT’S THERE TO ANALYZE IN AN ADVERTISEMENT?
Let me start with an imaginary print advertisement in which we fi nd a
photograph of a man and a woman and some textual material. Here’s a list of
possible topics to consider in analyzing the advertisement.
1. How would you describe the design of the advertisement? Do
we fi nd axial balance or an asymmetrical relationship among the
elements in the advertisement?
2. How much copy is there relative to the amount of pictorial mat-
ter? Is this relationship signifi cant in any respect?
3. Is there a great deal of blank (white) space in the advertisement
or is it full of graphic and textual material?
4. What angle is the photograph shot at? Do we look up at the
people in the advertisement? Do we look down at them from a
Analyzing Print Advertisements 153
height? Or do we look at them from a shoulder-level position?
What signifi cance does the angle of the shot have?
5. How is the photograph lit? Is there a great deal of light or is there
a little light and very dark shadows (chiaroscuro lighting)? What
is the mood found in the advertisement?
6. If the photograph is in color, what colors dominate? What sig-
nifi cance do these colors have?
7. How would you describe the two fi gures in the advertisement?
Consider such matters as facial expression, hair color, hair length,
hair styling, fashions (clothes, shoes, eyeglasses design, and jew-
elry), various props (a cane, an umbrella), body shape, body lan-
guage, age, gender, race, ethnicity, signs of occupation, signs of
educational level, relationships suggested between the male and
female, objects in the background, and so on.
8. What is happening in the advertisement? What does the “action”
in the photo suggest? Assume that we are seeing one moment
in an ongoing narrative. What is this narrative and what does it
reveal about the two fi gures?
9. Are there any signs or symbols in the photograph? If so, what
role do they play?
10. In the textual material, how is language used? What arguments
are made or implied about the people in the photograph and
about the product being advertised? That is, what rhetorical de-
vices are used to attract readers and stimulate desire in them for
the product or service? Does the advertisement use associations
or analogies or something else to make its point?
11. What typefaces are used in the textual parts of the advertisement?
What importance do the various typefaces have? (Why these
typefaces and not other ones?)
12. What are the basic “themes” in the advertisement? How do these
themes relate to the story implied by the advertisement?
13. What product or service is being advertised? Who is the target
audience for this product or service? What role does this product
or service play in American culture and society?
14. What values and beliefs are refl ected in the advertisement? Sex-
ual jealousy? Patriotism? Motherly love? Brotherhood of man?
Success? Power? Good taste?
15. Is there any background information you need to make sense of
the advertisement? How does context shape our understanding
of the advertisement?
154 Chapter 8
This list of questions will direct your attention to various matters that might be
considered when interpreting a typical print advertisement found in a news-
paper or magazine.
ANALYZING THE FIDJI AD
The more critics know, the more they can fi nd in commercials or any
kind of artistic or literary text. There are a number of standard approaches
to interpreting commercial texts—such as semiotic analysis, psychoanalytic
criticism, Marxist analysis, and sociological analysis—which I will briefl y
exemplify in my interpretation of one of the most interesting print adver-
tisements in recent decades—the Fidji “Woman with the Snake” perfume
ad (fi gure 8.1).
The methods of analysis I will use on the Fidji ad are:
1. Semiotic Analysis: What signs, symbols, and codes are found in the
text? How does the advertisement or commercial generate mean-
ing in people?
2. Psychoanalytic Theory: How does the text make use of the basic
elements of the human psyche to sell goods and services? What
appeals to unconscious elements, id/ego/superego aspects of the
psyche, sexuality, anxiety, and so on are found in the text?
3. Sociological Analysis: What does the text contain that is relevant to
such matters as socioeconomic class, gender, race, status, and role?
Figure 8.1
Analyzing Print Advertisements 155
What is the product and what does it refl ect about social concerns
and the problems of people in their everyday lives?
4. Historical Analysis: How have advertising and its methods evolved
over the years? If the advertisement or commercial is part of a
campaign, what is the campaign like? Where does this text fi t into
the campaign? How do advertising texts relate to historical events?
5. Political Analysis: What role does the advertisement or commercial
have in the political process? What techniques were used? What
appeals are made? What effects does it have on an election or some
aspect of political decision making?
6. Myth/Ritual Analysis: What mythical or ritualistic aspects of the
text are of interest? How does the advertisement or commercial
relate to ancient myths?
I will use many of these techniques in the interpretations of the Fidji adver-
tisement that follows. Since I quoted from Yuri Lotman, a semiotician, at the
beginning of this chapter, let me start by discussing the Fidji ad from a semiotic
viewpoint.
A SEMIOTIC INTERPRETATION
OF THE FIDJI ADVERTISEMENT
Semiotics, as I explained earlier, is defi ned as the science of signs—a sign
being anything that can be used to stand for something else, to deliver some
kind of a message, to generate some kind of meaning. There are two dominant
systems for analyzing signs—one created by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure and the other by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce.
Saussure said signs are made up of signifi ers (sounds or images) and signifi eds
(concepts or ideas). Our facial expressions, our hair color, our body language,
our clothes, our voices . . . just about everything we do functions as a signifi er
of something (our moods, feelings, beliefs, religion, and so on). The important
thing about the relationship that exists between signifi ers and signifi eds is that
it is arbitrary. That is, it is based on convention and has to be learned; it is not
natural and universal.
The other system, Peirce’s, includes three kinds of signs: signs that signify
by resemblance—what he calls icons; signs that signify by some kind of cause-
and-effect relationship—what he calls indexes; and signs that signify by con-
vention—what he calls symbols. A photograph is an icon; smoke coming out
of a house is an indexical sign; and a fl ag, the Star of David, a cross, and so on
are symbolic signs. Each of these systems is rather complex, but just using the
156 Chapter 8
fundamental notions of Saussure and Peirce, we can make a decent semiotic
analysis of the Fidji advertisement.
Note that the design of the advertisement is formal and has a good deal
of empty or white space. This kind of design is typical of expensive, upscale
products. We only see the bottom of the woman’s face. This enables women
looking at the advertisement to put themselves into the advertisement. The
woman’s lips are full and partially open, suggesting, perhaps, sexual passion or
excitement.
We can’t be certain, but she seems to be a Polynesian woman—the kind
of woman found on Fiji, the kind of woman painted by Paul Gauguin who
“escaped” from France to Polynesia. The lighting is rather extreme, with
strong darks and lights; the lighting emphasizes the woman’s long neck. She
has long, dark hair and is wearing a yellow orchid in it. Dark hair is connected
in the American mind (so D. H. Lawrence suggested) with notions of sexual
passion—in contrast to blond hair that is connected with innocence and sexual
coldness and unresponsiveness. And long hair has, for the popular mind, a
sexual dimension to it; in many cosmetic advertisements (for hair color, and
so on) we often see women striding across fi elds with their long hair blowing
wildly and voluptuously in the wind.
The name of the perfume, Fidji, and the photograph of the Polynesian
woman generate a sense that we are in the tropics, where there is heat and
sexual passion is natural and pervasive. We associate the tropics with earthy,
almost primitive passions and with sexual freedom, for in Fiji and other tropi-
cal islands we have, we believe, escaped from the prohibitions of civilization.
There is also the use of French—a form of snob appeal that relies on the
stereotype of the French as sexy and not as burdened by Puritanical repres-
sion as Americans. French is also a language for sophisticated people, people
who—in America—are cultivated or educated enough to be able to read the
copy, which is all in French.
Saussure explained that we understand what concepts mean only dif-
ferentially. As he put it, “Concepts are purely differential and defi ned not by
their positive content but negatively with the other terms of the system. . . .
The most precise characteristic of concepts is in being what the others are not”
(1966:117). Thus it is relations that determine meaning, not content per se.
Nothing, strictly speaking, has meaning in itself; it is the relationships of con-
cepts to one another that generate meaning, especially negation. That explains
why we fi nd it so easy to make paired oppositions: rich and poor, happy and
sad, dark and light, and so on.
We can use Saussure’s insight about the role of oppositions to help make
sense of the Fidji advertisement. It posits two worlds, which are described in
table 8.1.
Analyzing Print Advertisements 157
These are some of the more important signs and meanings generated by
these signs found in the Fidji advertisement. There are many others, of course,
but my aim here is to give you an idea of what semiotic analysis can do when
it is applied to an advertisement, not to do a complete semiotic analysis.
A PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERPRETATION
OF THE FIDJI ADVERTISEMENT
Serge Lutens, who makes perfumes, explains the effects of perfumes as
follows (www.mimifroufrou.com): “Perfume, in and of itself, is not just an
aroma. It is potentially a carrier for the imagination. Perfume is thick; it is
poison and pure desire. It is Eros in prison.”
One of the most striking elements of the Fidji advertisement is the pres-
ence of the snake wound around the woman’s neck. In Freudian psychoana-
lytic theory, snakes are phallic symbols—that is, they represent the penis by
nature of their shape—an iconic resemblance, semioticians would say. (In
some countries, I should point out, this advertisement appeared without the
snake [fi gure 8.2].)
Snakes and women are part of the Adam and Eve story and are thus known
to millions of people. There is, then, a mythological signifi cance to images of
snakes and women—one that I will explore in more detail later. For those who
have not read the passages in the Bible that deal with this all-important story,
I offer the following (King James version of the Bible, the book of Genesis):
And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, “Where art thou?”
And he said, “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I
was naked; and I hid myself.”
And he said, “Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of
the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?”
Table 8.1. Polar Oppositions (Implied)
in Fidji Advertisement
Fidji Civilized World
Polynesian Woman White Woman
Paradise Hell
Escape Imprisonment
Dark Hair Light Hair
Free Sexuality Repressed Sexuality
Magic Rationality
Fidji Perfume Other Perfumes
158 Chapter 8
And the man said, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she
gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”
And the Lord God said unto the woman, “What is this that thou hast
done?”
And the woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.”
And the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because thou hast done this, thou
art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the fi eld; upon thy belly
shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: and I will put
enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed.”
Unto the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy
conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall
be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
So—the snake tempted Eve and she convinced Adam that he should eat from
the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The results of this act were
calamitous for men and women, and snakes as well.
There is also anxiety related to snakes and to fears deep in the psyches
of some women of being penetrated by men’s genitals. Ironically, it could
be argued that perfume is in certain ways seen by women as analogous to
venom—a magical substance that has incredible effects. The most important
of these effects is to make women irresistible to men. This would be an
example of magical thinking—a feeling of being powerful and able to get
what you want.
If you think of the snake forming an S, the top of the cover of the Fidji
bottle, its two sides and the thin black cording that is used on the bottle form-
Figure 8.2
Analyzing Print Advertisements 159
ing an E, and the woman’s intertwined fi ngers as forming an X, you have the
word sex hidden in the advertisement. Even though we may not consciously
be aware that we are reading this word, in psychoanalytic theory, seeing it
would have some kind of subliminal impact upon our psyches and make us
feel more inclined toward sexual activity.
The orchid is also a sexual symbol—fl owers being the sexual apparatus of
plants. We humans use these fl owers to make products that use their smells to
excite one another sexually—or so the argument goes. Animals, we know, use
smell to determine when females are sexually receptive and fertile. We use the
same notions when we use perfumes and aftershave lotions. We try to bring
out the animal in those we hope will become our sexual partners, except that
the smells we use are not natural, based on our reproductive cycles—but arti-
fi cial. (Recent scientifi c studies suggest subtle and hard-to-detect body smells
may in fact have a sexual arousal function.)
We can also look at this advertisement, and most advertising, using
Freud’s structural hypothesis—his suggestion that the psyche has three com-
ponents: the id, the ego and the superego. These phenomena are shown in
table 8.2.
According to Freud, the id can be described as a “cauldron of seething
excitement.” It is disorganized and seeks, essentially, to satisfy instinctual needs.
The superego is the element of the psyche that is always approving or disap-
proving of acts the id is planning, and it also provides critical self-observation
and the need for reparation in cases of wrongdoing. In between these two forces
is the ego, trying to keep the psyche in balance. Too much id and a person’s life
is chaotic; too much superego and a person lacks energy and becomes obsessed
with guilt.
In terms of advertising, the factors shown in table 8.2 are the most im-
portant. Advertising appeals to the id and tries to evade the strictures of the
superego. And the ego tries to control the id’s desire to buy everything by
suggesting that it might be a good idea to reconsider the desired purchase, by
appealing to the superego of limited funds (one’s budget) or reminding people
that they are maxed out on their credit cards.
Insights from Advertising Agencies
Advertising agencies search for universal metaphors that people everywhere will be able to understand easily. Account executives are involved, among other things, with developing a creative brief—it tells what the advertisement should accomplish. We ask ourselves, If we could say one thing about the client, what would it be?
160 Chapter 8
In the Fidji advertisement, we are in the tropics, away from civiliza-
tion, which seeks to curtail our id impulses. That is the point Freud made in
Civilization and Its Discontents: The price we pay for civilization and culture
is repression.
A SOCIOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION
OF THE FIDJI ADVERTISEMENT
One thing we might consider when we apply sociological concepts to the
Fidji advertisement is its target audience. Who is the advertisement designed to
reach and why do the appeals in the Fidji ad sell it to its target audience? On
the basis of the woman in the advertisement, one would say it is young women
who feel frustrated by the constraints of their everyday lives in contemporary
urban societies and who seek, in fantasy, an escape.
This escape involves nature, which is where the Polynesian fantasy takes
place, and romantic love—which is why the product is utilized. The target
audience is also, we can infer, somewhat sophisticated—in that they know
French—or pseudosophisticated, in that they think buying a French perfume
shows one has class. That is, users of Fidji think of themselves as elites—if not
economically, then in terms of their lifestyles or what might be called their
taste culture. Maybe wearing Fidji, a refi ned perfume (it’s French, isn’t it?) also
indicates one’s socioeconomic class. You have to be able to afford it, after all.
Fidji is functional in two ways: First, it is designed either to attract a new
sexual partner or stimulate a sexual partner one already has—the main reason
for wearing perfume, after all. And second, Fidji consolidates the wearer’s sense
of herself as sophisticated and desirable. That is, it confers status—or so those
who purchase Fidji think. Thus, perfumes in general and Fidji in particular
reaffi rm the value and importance of romantic love, and wearers of Fidji signify
that they are interested in making love.
Table 8.2. Id/Ego/Superego Applied to Advertising
Id Ego Superego
Drives Reason Conscience
“Do it now” Wait “Don’t do it”
Lust Balance Moral precepts
Energy Survival Guilt
Desire Wallet Fear of debt
Buy it Limited funds Do without
Advertising Budget Bank account
Analyzing Print Advertisements 161
The fact that the model in the advertisement is a woman of color may
signify our sense, a commonplace in American culture, that women of color
are more passionate and less inhibited than white women. In America we tend
to see blonds as innocent, cold, and frigid and women of color as just the oppo-
site. We assume, of course, that the woman in the advertisement is Polynesian
because of the name of the perfume and from what we can see of her face.
A MARXIST INTERPRETATION
OF THE FIDJI ADVERTISEMENT
One point a typical Marxist would make about this advertisement is that
it refl ects, in graphic manner, the exploitation of people of the Third World,
the world of people of color, by people in the fi rst world and, in particular, by
bourgeois capitalist societies—the kind that encourage capitalist corporations
like Fidji’s maker, Guy Laroche. According to Marxist theory, capitalism has
survived by exporting its problems, and thus the woman in the Fidji adver-
tisement is really an advertisement for capitalist imperialism, not for perfume.
The Fidji advertisement is also a classic example of the excesses of bour-
geois consumer culture, which has come to dominate every aspect of our lives,
especially our sexuality. Our sexuality can be used against us, so to speak, to
encourage us to make ever greater wasteful expenditures in the name of a
spurious value—glamour. Advertising is, then, one of the central institutions
of contemporary bourgeois cultures and is not to be thought of as merely a
form of product entertainment. It has a political mission—to distract us from
the breakdown of our civic cultures and focus our attention on private ex-
penditures. We revel in our personal luxuries as our society disintegrates into
chaos and take refuge in gated communities to escape from the dangers of the
social disorganization we have generated.
What advertisements like the one for Fidji perfume demonstrate is that
alienation is very functional for those who own the means of production.
We attempt to assuage our alienation by creating consumer cultures and
by continually purchasing things, which creates greater and greater profi ts
for those who own the instruments of production and distribution. That
is, alienation leads to consumption and higher profi ts. And since in recent
years bourgeois capitalist societies have sexualized the act of consumption,
as W. H. Haug points out, there are even stronger inducements for people
to participate in consumer cultures.
One problem with the Marxist analysis of this advertisement and of
advertising and consumer cultures is that it is doctrinaire. The party line, so
162 Chapter 8
to speak, covers all advertising and just about every other aspect of capitalist
societies. In addition Marxism, politically speaking, has imploded and former
Soviet societies are now feverishly consuming, trying, it would seem, to make
up for lost time. And while the Marxist critique of bourgeois societies may be
logical and even correct, it lacks resonance. Studies have shown that Com-
munist Party members and members of political elites in previously communist
societies exploited people terribly and consumed enormous amounts of food
and goods in proportion to their numbers.
The bottle of Fidji perfume that the maiden holds so lovingly in her hands
might be construed to represent, fi nally, the domination of bourgeois capitalist
cultures over Second and Third World cultures. That is, this advertisement
might be seen as a refl ection of the cultural imperialism that we fi nd in con-
temporary society. Because the cost of making media texts is so high, Third
World countries import most of the programs they show on their television
stations and most of the fi lms they see. The cultural imperialism argument
made by Marxists and others is that this First World media is destroying the
native cultures found in the Third World, leading to an eventual homogeniza-
tion of culture, dominated by capitalist bourgeois values.
THE MYTH MODEL AND THE FIDJI ADVERTISEMENT
A number of years ago I developed a myth model that suggested, in es-
sence, that many of the things we do in the contemporary world—or maybe
the contemporary secular world would be more accurate—are really tied in
curious and interesting ways to ancient myths. Or to be a bit more precise,
many of our activities are desacralized manifestations of ancient myths. We
have emptied the religious content out of the myths and don’t even recognize
that what we are doing is, vaguely speaking, a ritual tied to a myth. The myth
model attempts to show how ancient myths inform many contemporary ac-
tivities, whose relation to these myths is beyond our awareness.
The “myth model” has the following categories:
1. The myth,
2. A historical event related to the myth,
3. A text or work from elite culture based on the myth,
4. A text or work for popular culture based on the myth, and
5. Some aspects of everyday life based on the myth.
We can interpret the Fidji advertisement in terms of this myth model. I
would argue that one myth that informs this advertisement is that of Medusa,
Analyzing Print Advertisements 163
the mythical creature—a Gorgon—whose hair was made of snakes. If you
looked at Medusa, you would turn to stone. Medusa was killed by Perseus,
a hero who escaped death by looking at her refl ection in his bronze shield
and beheading her. What is important is that we have here a woman and a
snake intimately connected.
With her hair of snakes she was in psychoanalytic terms a hyperphallic
female, since snakes, for Freudians, are phallic symbols. There may also be an
element of ambivalence about Medusa in many men: a beautiful female who
killed all who looked upon her. (This ambivalence is best refl ected in an early
churchman’s defi nition of women: templus supra cloaca which means “a temple
over a sewer.”) A contemporary aspect of the Medusa story is found in the
belief some women have that their hair has life, and is powerful. Hair color and
hairstyle now play an important role in many women’s lives. Finally, it might
be possible that the fear many men have of snakes is connected, somehow (as
this mythic story suggests) to an unconscious unifi cation of snakes and women
that leads to seeing women as snake-like. This, in turn, enables us to identify
perfume as being like venom.
I interpret myths in conventional terms: They are sacred stories, often
dealing with the creation of the world and the activities of various gods,
demigods, heroes, and heroines, that provide people with core values and
a comprehensive belief system. These beliefs are passed down, according to
some anthropological thinkers, in a coded manner and are hidden in various
stories and other narratives we learn.
With Medusa as our myth, we can see in table 8.3 the way the rest
of the myth model might be fi lled in. The point then is that many of our
everyday activities and rituals are intimately connected to ancient myths,
though we may not recognize that what we are doing has any connection
to myths or to the past. We may think we have escaped from the past and
that it is irrelevant, but in more ways than we might imagine, ancient myths
inform (though in disguised form) our arts, our media, and our everyday
lives. Women and snakes go back, of course, to the story of Adam and Eve
in the Garden of Eden. The connection between women and snakes—the
beguilers—is ancient and is part of the consciousness of all who have read
the Old Testament or heard about it.
Table 8.3. Myth Model and Fidji Advertisement
Myth Medusa
Historical Act Cleopatra kills herself with an asp
Elite Culture Text Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra
Popular Culture Text Fidji “Woman with Snake” advertisement
Everyday Life Woman dabs on Fidji perfume
164 Chapter 8
A FEMINIST INTERPRETATION
OF THE FIDJI ADVERTISEMENT
One of the basic contentions of most contemporary feminist thinkers is
that we live in a phallocentric society—one dominated by males and what
might be called the invisible power of the phallus. We may not be aware of
the power of the phallus, but the institutions of society and social relations
are shaped, so the argument goes, by the power of males, by male sexuality,
and ultimately by the phallus. Males, of course, are blind to their power and
to the role of the phallus in the scheme of things; they assume that the power
relationships found in any society are logical and natural.
What could be a better expression, then, of the power of the phallus than
the image of the woman in the Fidji advertisement with the snake—a phallic
symbol—draped around her neck (fi gure 8.3)? The woman stands there, acces-
sible to the male gaze (the look men give women that reduces them to sexual
objects). She is holding a bottle of perfume that will make her (and all women
who use Fidji, so they think) irresistible to men and thus without recognizing
it, is participating in her own domination and subjugation. In Paradise, we
must recall, Adam was given dominion over Eve, whom he named.
God then casts Adam and Eve out of the Garden. Thus, the return to
Paradise is in effect a return to being dominated by men. So, not only the im-
age of the maiden with the snake but also the text of the Fidji advertisement
are connected with male sexuality and male domination. These images may
also be connected in interesting ways with the unconscious fear that some men
have of female sexuality and the female genitalia. This advertisement then is
one that lends itself to feminist analysis.
Figure 8.3
Analyzing Print Advertisements 165
CONCLUSION
These interpretations are only a few examples of the many different
kinds of analyses that could be made of the Fidji advertisement. Critics and
analysts with different areas of knowledge and expertise could fi nd numerous
other things to talk about in this advertisement—and in most advertisements
and commercials. They are often rich in symbolism and interesting material
for those who have the keys—that is, the theories and the conceptual frame-
work—to unlock their meaning. Advertisements and commercials are richer
in meaning than we might think, and it takes a good deal of work to under-
stand how they communicate ideas and meanings and, to the extent that they
are successful, shape our behavior.
[Dan] Nichols’ McDonald’s spots possess the most accelerated time sense of
any on television. “Quick Cuts” contains more cuts than can be counted:
after repeated views the author had to slow down the tape to count 65 dif-
ferent scenes in 60 seconds. A seven-second segment of this spot contains
fourteen separate scenes, or two per second. Incredible as it may seem, it is
possible for the viewer to perceive these different scenes even though they
go by faster than they can be counted.
The effect on the viewer is a sense of extreme urgency and of the present
tense: the action is thrust into the immediate present because it is rendered
as more alive and exciting than even the most engaging real-life experience.
Nichols taps the “live” associations of television in this way more insistently
than any other director. Because of the sense of urgency and of presentness
which the spots communicate, the viewer actually experiences the exciting
life style which Nichols depicts rather than passively observing events which
occur to someone else.
The excitement communicated by the way of life the viewer thus expe-
riences is associated with the product even though the product is not the
primary subject of the spots. More than promoting a particular product,
these spots advertise an appealing way of life associated with the restaurant,
causing the viewer to turn to the product for gratifi cation.
—Bruce Kurtz, Spots: The Popular Art
of American Television Commercials
Postmodern advertising—characterized by a rapid succession of visually ap-
pealing images (the speed-up effect), repetition, and high-volume, mood-
setting music . . . is much more symbolic and persuasive than informative.
Advertising is an arena in which conspicuous role display and reversal,
preening, and symbolically enticing situations are evident. . . . While mod-
ern advertising presented itself as an unquestionable authority fi gure—a
high priest of sorts—postmodern advertising presents itself as an insider,
an ally of the common person. Modern advertising uses a paternalistic
model; like your physician, it knows what is best for you. Now advertising
is trading in the semblance of godlike knowledge for the role of a funny,
self-deprecatory chum.
—Anthony J. Cortese, Provocateur: Images of
Women and Minorities in Advertising
167
9
ANALYZING TELEVISION COMMERCIALS
The Macintosh “1984” Commercial
Television commercials are much more complex than print advertisements
because they can have many more elements in them: a narrative structure,
dialogue, music, various kinds of shots, various editing practices, and so on.
From Yuri Lotman’s perspective, they store a great deal more information than
print advertisements with photographs do; that is because they are in essence
minivideo or fi lm dramas, and each frame or image in a commercial is, in a
sense, similar to a print advertisement with a photograph in it.
In this chapter I will offer a list of topics to consider when analyzing
commercials and then offer an analysis of the famous “1984” Macintosh com-
mercial, a sixty-second commercial that was recently selected by people in the
industry as the second-best television commercial made in the 1980s. What
follows is a list of things to consider in a “complex” television commercial—
not a simple one in which someone is shown talking about a product and
there’s relatively little in the way of production values or narrative line.
1. What is the plot of the narrative in the commercial? That is, what
happens to the characters? Are there narrative tricks used—fl ash-
forwards or fl ashbacks? What dramatic techniques are used?
168 Chapter 9
2. What characters do we fi nd in the commercial? What are they
like? What are their ages, genders, educational levels, occupa-
tions, and so on? How do they communicate their person-
alities? What roles do they play? How do they relate to one
another?
3. How would you describe the faces of the characters? Their bod-
ies? Their clothing? What about the color of their hair? The way
their hair is styled? Their voices? Their use of body language and
facial expressions when they see some product or service?
4. What do the characters say to one another? Consider the words
they use and the role the dialogue has in the commercial. What
arguments, if any, are made? How does the commercial sell
people? What do you think the target audience of the com-
mercial is? What techniques of persuasion are used by the
characters? What appeals are made? Does the commercial try
to scare you? Appeal to your vanity? Provide valuable informa-
tion? Plead with you?
5. If there’s a narrator, is it a male or female (or child or something
else)? What role does the narrator have?
6. Where does the commercial take place? What signifi cance does
the setting have?
7. Are there any props (objects) used? If so, what are they? Why do
you think they were used?
8. How is color used in the commercial?
9. How would you describe the lighting? Does it vary?
10. How is sound used? Is there music? If so, what kind?
11. What kinds of shots are used? Make a list of all the shots found
in the commercial and try to determine what signifi cance they
have. Are they mostly close-ups or something else?
12. What kind of editing techniques are used? Are there quick cuts,
lingering dissolves, zooms? Tie these editing decisions to the
dialogue and the goal of the commercial.
13. Are there intertextual references found in the text—parodies, use
of famous shots, well-known characters, and so on?
14. In what ways does the commercial rely upon background
knowledge on the part of the viewer/listener? How does it relate
to widely held ideas, beliefs, notions, myths, values, archetypes,
and so on?
15. What role does the product have in society? Who uses it? Why
do they use it? What does it tell us about social, economic, and
political matters? For example, does it refl ect anomie, alienation,
anxiety, stereotyping, generational confl ict, or boredom?
Analyzing Television Commercials 169
These questions are ones we should deal with in analyzing commercials. We
may not need to cover every part of every question, but we should submit the
commercial to as complete an analysis as we can. The nature of the commercial
determines the methods and concepts we use to interpret it.
Consider, for example, a “complex” commercial. It may only last sixty
seconds, but it may have as many as sixty or seventy different images in it, as
well as music, dialogue, print, and human beings with different attributes who
use body language and facial expressions to send some message to us about
some product or service. Every image is loaded with information, even though
we may not realize how much information there is in the image or recognize
how the image is impacting on us.
A SYNOPSIS OF THE TEXT
As the commercial begins, the number 1984 appears on the screen (see
the storyboard in fi gure 9.1). The director then cuts to an extreme long shot
of vaguely perceived fi gures marching through a tunnel joining gigantic struc-
tures. Next he cuts to a long shot of fi gures marching. They all have shaved
heads and are wearing dull uniforms. The fi gures have no expression on their
faces. Then there is an extreme close-up of their heavy boots. A quick cut
shows a blond woman with a white jersey and red shorts, running (fi gure 9.2).
We only see her for an instant. The next cut shows the fi gures again and then
there is a cut to a shot of the woman being pursued by storm troopers. There
is cutting back and forth in the commercial between the blond woman and the
Figure 9.1
170 Chapter 9
troopers pursuing her. Then we see another extreme long shot of the inmates
of this institution sitting in a huge room. They are staring at a gigantic televi-
sion set. A fi gure wearing glasses is addressing the inmates (fi gure 9.3), who sit
gazing at the television image as if in a hypnotic trance. He is talking about the
inmates being free, united, and so on. Then suddenly the blond woman, who
is carrying a sledgehammer, enters the room. She hurls her sledgehammer at
the television screen and when it hits it there is a gigantic explosion. The ex-
plosion creates an image that looks somewhat like that generated by an atomic
bomb. The inmates gaze, dazed and openmouthed, at the screen. Then, a
message from Apple Computers appears on the screen informing viewers that
Apple will be introducing a new computer, the Macintosh, shortly.
THE BACKGROUND
This commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, the distinguished British fi lm-
maker (Alien, Blade Runner) was shown nationally in the United States only
once—during the 1984 Super Bowl—though it (or parts of it) also has been
aired, from time to time, in news features on advertising and the computer
industry. The commercial was created by Apple’s advertising agency, Chiat/
Day of Los Angeles. According to an advertising executive from Chiat/Day,
it cost $500,000 to make and another $600,000 for air time (sixty seconds).
Apple was hesitant to use it and only decided to do so at the very last
minute. An executive in the agency revealed that Apple actually called England
to stop production of the commercial, but by that time the commercial had
already been shot.
Figure 9.2
Figure 9.3
Analyzing Television Commercials 171
The “1984” commercial is a remarkable text. The actors in the com-
mercial were English skinheads, who were recruited to play the prisoners.
(Since 1984, when the commercial was made, skinheads have emerged as a
worldwide phenomenon of disaffected youth who are attracted to right-wing
neo-Nazi organizations.) The “1984” commercial has a look much different
from the average commercial and takes a considerably different approach to the
matter of marketing a product than we fi nd with most commercials.
Ridley Scott, the director (auteur) is a distinguished fi gure in the fi lm
world, and the commercial bears his signature—its look, its narrative struc-
ture, its message all suggest an art fi lm rather than a television commercial.
I believe many “creative” people in the advertising industry are capable of
creating aesthetically interesting and artistically pleasing works (and sometimes
they do) when they are not prevented from doing so by the companies whose
products they are advertising. Of course, a great deal depends on the nature
of the product being sold and the nature (that is, the corporate culture) of the
company selling the product.
In the remainder of this chapter I will discuss some of the most important
images from the text and speculate about how these images generate meaning,
what that meaning is, and how viewers might be affected by these images. I
will also discuss the narrative itself.
It is often held that there is no minimal unit in a television text to deal
with (unlike fi lm, which has the frame). I don’t think this is a major issue as
far as our considerations, since one can always isolate important images and
scenes to analyze, so even though a television text doesn’t have frames, it does
have shots, which serve the same function.
GEORGE ORWELL’S 1984 AND RIDLEY SCOTT’S “1984”
The title of this commercial brings to mind George Orwell’s novel 1984,
and the text of the commercial is based on the idea of totalitarian antiutopias
or dystopias. The ambience of the “1984” commercial is that of a perverted
Insights from Advertising Agencies
It is imperative not to try too many different ways of solving a problem for a client since this costs the agency a lot of money and confuses our customers. There should be, then, only one campaign sug- gested; it must be made to seem to be the only answer to the com- pany’s problems, so the company’s advertising director is sold before he sees the proposed advertisement.
172 Chapter 9
utopian community, a total institution, in which every aspect of people’s
lives is controlled—especially their minds. We see “1984,” the commercial,
in terms of 1984, the book. Here we have an example of what is known in
semiotic literature as intertextuality. That is, we read or interpret one text in
terms of another text, or with another text in mind. The events in the com-
mercial would have far less signifi cance if we hadn’t read or didn’t know about
Orwell’s classic novel 1984.
This concept is explained by the Russian literary theorist M. Bakhtin as
follows:
Every extra-artistic prose discourse—in any of its forms, quotidian, rhetori-
cal, scholarly—cannot fail to be oriented toward the “already uttered,” the
“already known,” the “common opinion” and so forth. The dialogic ori-
entation of discourse is a phenomenon that is, of course, a property of any
discourse . . . .every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape
the profound infl uence of the answering world that it anticipates. The word
in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-
word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the atmo-
sphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by
that which has not been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by
the answering world. Such is the situation in any dialogue. (1981:279–80)
When we write or communicate in any manner we always have an au-
dience in mind, and what we write or say is always connected intimately to
thoughts and ideas that have been communicated in the past. Communication
of any kind is then always dialogic as opposed to monologic and involves a real
or imagined audience and the responses the communicator can expect from it.
In some cases this dialogical aspect of communication is vague and in the realm
of the anticipated; in other cases, it is tied directly to something in the past. This
is the case with the Macintosh commercial and the citation of the Orwell novel.
The title of the Macintosh commercial is also connected to a great deal of
speculation that occurred in America during the year 1984 about Orwell and
his dire predictions. Thus merely seeing the title generated ambivalent feelings.
Would it be about the year 1984 or about the novel 1984? (A number of social
commentators have argued that the year 1984 did not by any means bring the
kind of society that Orwell imagined.) The title left people in suspense.
THE IMAGE OF THE TOTAL INSTITUTION
The fi rst shot resolved any questions that might have been generated by
the title. We see an extreme long shot of gigantic structures connected by a
Analyzing Television Commercials 173
tubular tunnel, in which we can dimly perceive fi gures marching. The scale of
the scene is terrifying. The fi gures are minute and seemingly irrelevant when
contrasted with the huge buildings in which they are incarcerated. One almost
thinks of blood fl owing through veins.
Thus the spatiality of this scene and the images of control and conformity
generated by the columns of fi gures tell us immediately that the commercial,
“1984,” is indeed about an Orwellian world. This is reinforced in the next
shot, which is a long shot of the prisoners, all with shaved heads and heavy,
ill-fi tting uniforms, marching sullenly in columns in a long tunnel.
THE PRISONERS’ BOOTS
A really important shot occurs shortly after the commercial begins when
there is a cut to a close-up of the prisoners’ boots (fi gure 9.4). The heavy,
thick-soled boots, shown moving in unison, refl ect the degree to which the
inmates are under the control of their masters. (This is an example of metonomy,
which confers meaning by association. And, in particular, it is an example of
synecdoche, in which a part can stand for a whole.)
The shot of the boots is meant to intensify the message. (We may even
recall, as another example of intertextuality, the famous shot of the boots
in Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, though the situation in that fi lm was
somewhat different.) Uniforms suggest lack of individuality and depersonaliza-
tion and, in the content of the “1984” commercial, dehumanization. Thus,
the shot of the boots moving in unison strengthens this message by emphasiz-
ing one part of the human being and isolating it from the image of the whole
human being.
The rather sullen and lethargic nature of their marching and the uni-
formity of the prisoners’ feet as they march suggest these inmates have been
reduced to the status of automatons. It is the same kind of reductionism
that occurs when we talk about young people being “college material” or
football players as “horses,” though it is much more exaggerated and in-
tensifi ed here.
Figure 9.4
174 Chapter 9
THE BLOND AS SYMBOL
Into this scene of marching zombies, of dehumanized and radically de-
personalized bodies, there appears for just an instant an image of a beautiful
blond woman who is running down a corridor. She wears a white shirt and
red shorts. We can see her breasts heaving as she runs directly toward us, the
viewers, on the Z-axis of the screen. The blond woman appears for perhaps a
second or two, and then we return to the marching bodies and various scenes
of totalitarian control.
Who is she? We do not know . . . but the fact that she exists tells us there
must be forces of resistance in this totalitarian society, that not all are enslaved.
We see shortly that she is being pursued by a troop of burly policemen who
look terribly menacing in their helmets with glass face masks. Her color, her
animation, her freedom, even her sexuality, serve to make the situation of the
inmates even more obvious and pathetic. Her image functions as a polar op-
posite to the enslaved men and even though we only see her the fi rst time for
a second or two, her existence creates drama and excitement.
THE BRAINWASHING SCENARIO
In this brainwashing scene we have a long shot of the inmates, sitting
in rows, gazing at a gigantic television screen in the front of the auditorium,
where a “Big Brother” fi gure is shown speaking to them. They are mute, ex-
pressionless, and seem almost hypnotized by the fi gure on the television screen.
The message we get from this image is that mind control is an important ele-
ment in the operation of this totalitarian society.
By implication, of course, control of the media (the gigantic television
screen refl ects this) is vital for control of the minds of the inmates—and
perhaps, by implication, everyone. We must ask ourselves, Is this scene a
metaphor for contemporary society, in which we, like the inmates, gaze
in a hypnotic stupor at fi gures who “brainwash” us (or try to, at least)? Is
the distance between the world of the “1984” commercial and American
society less than we might imagine? Questions like these are raised by this
dramatic image.
Is it possible that we are like these prisoners and that we are mind-con-
trolled the way they are? We may not wear their uniforms, have shaved heads,
or be prisoners (or recognize that we are prisoners, that is) in some kind of a
total institution. But that may be because the control is more subtle, the indoc-
trination less apparent. There may be more control over us than we imagine.
That is one of the questions raised by this image.
Analyzing Television Commercials 175
THE BIG BROTHER FIGURE
We don’t see a great deal of the Big Brother fi gure, only several shots
in which we see him spouting ideological gobbledygook to the inmates. The
choice of the actor to portray this character is very interesting. He looks like a
clerk or minor bureaucrat from some organization. He is in his fi fties or sixties,
wears glasses, and is defi nitively portrayed as bland, unanimated, and without
much in the way of personality. He speaks in a low, rather monotonous voice.
Indeed, for all we know, he may only be a minor functionary in whatever vast
organization runs this society.
What we learn from considering this fi gure is that most totalitarian institu-
tions are essentially bureaucratic, held together not by charismatic individuals
but by drab, conformist, rule-following bureaucratic types who do their jobs
in a routine manner and do whatever they are told to do. They are not that
different from the inmates in many respects, although the control exerted over
these fi gures may be less overt. (There may, of course, be charismatic leaders
in totalitarian societies, but we don’t see them in this commercial.)
THE BRAINWASHER’S MESSAGE
Here is a transcript of the message the Big Brother fi gure gives to the
inmates. He speaks it, but it is also shown in captions running across the bot-
tom of the screen.
Today we celebrate the fi rst glorious anniversary of the information puri-
fi cation repentance. We who created from out of this time in all history a
garden of pure ideology, where each worker may loom secure from the pest
of purveying contradictory thoughts. Our communication is enormous. It
is more powerful than any fl eet or army on earth. We are one people with
one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death
and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail. . . .[At
this point television screen is shattered]
Notice the degree to which this rhetoric is garbled and confusing. We
have here a good examination of double-talk or baffl e-gab: words that don’t
add up to anything. He talks about events we know nothing of, though we
can imagine what might have transpired. The language has the ring of politi-
cal indoctrination—there is a “glorious revolution” being “celebrated.” The
language contrasts, starkly, with the scenario in which it is being used. There is
talk in this futuristic, oppressive hyperurban setting of a “garden of pure ideol-
ogy” and the “security” that the workers should feel from all this.
176 Chapter 9
It is communication that is given the major role here . . . it is a more pow-
erful force than the military, it unites the workers/inmates/prisoners into a
collectivity (or is it a mass society?) with “one will, one resolve, one cause.”
And then there is that wonderfully comic line about the enemies of this society
“talking themselves to death.” It is the rhetoric of persuasion, and we have the
sense that the inmates of this society have been exposed to this kind of talk
almost endlessly. That is, they have all been brainwashed by this double-talk.
The language, with phrases such as “information purifi cation repentance,”
is that of mind control and psychic domination, and the commercial does a
wonderful job of imitating it (and perhaps, in a sense, of parodying it). The goal
preached is escape from “contradictory thoughts,” which enables the inmates to
have “one will.” In other words, the essentially human function of considering
options and alternatives is to be obliterated—or has it been already?
THE BIG EXPLOSION
In the “1984” commercial there are several scenes in which we see the
blond woman twirling a sledgehammer (as she prepares to throw it at the
screen) and the police racing toward her (fi gure 9.5). She launches the sledge-
hammer and it smashes into the gigantic television screen. There is an enor-
mous explosion and we see, briefl y, an image vaguely similar to that produced
by an atomic bomb.
The explosion, which destroys the screen image—and by implication the
domination by the mass media of the inmates—is the most signifi cant act in
the commercial. With this act a great blow is struck for freedom . . . and we
are led to imagine what might follow. We are shown very little. Implicit in
this scenario is the notion that once the control of people’s minds by a totali-
tarian regime is broken, the destruction of that regime more or less follows
automatically. This does not have to be spelled out. It is like lancing a boil:
When the system of pressure is punctured, healing can take place. The explod-
ing screen signifi es then the destruction of the totalitarian order that generates
mind-controlling images on that screen.
Figure 9.5
Analyzing Television Commercials 177
THE INMATES’ RESPONSE
After the explosion the commercial cuts to a scene in which the inmates
are shown openmouthed, staring in disbelief at what has happened. They are,
relatively speaking, emotionless and display no affect other than bewilderment
or shock. They have been so brainwashed, we are led to believe, they are in-
capable of any kind of response. At least, in the immediate present.
We hear a low hissing sound, as if air is escaping from the gigantic televi-
sion apparatus in the front of the room. The camera pans the inmates as the
announcement from Apple rolls onto the screen.
THE MACINTOSH ANNOUNCEMENT
We see the following announcement:
On January 24th, Apple Computers will introduce Macintosh and you will
see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”
The brevity and simplicity of this announcement, which takes but a few sec-
onds, contrasts with the excitement and visual richness of the commercial. In
this situation the understatement serves to shout at us and to gain a great deal
of interest. Not only does Apple tell us it is introducing a new computer, but
also that this new computer has enormous political and social implications—
for it has the power to save us from ending up like the prisoners, victims of a
totalitarian state.
There had been an enormous amount of material about the Macintosh in
the press and computer fanzines, so those interested in computers already knew
about it. And when the Macintosh computer went on sale, Apple sold some-
thing like 17,000 the fi rst day, a fi gure far beyond what they had anticipated.
People from Chiat/Day talk about that as if it was the commercial that sold all
those computers—an assumption that is very questionable.
THE HEROINE AS MYTHIC FIGURE
In this micro drama, the blond heroine calls to mind several different
heroic or mythic fi gures from our collective consciousness. First, there is
something of David and Goliath in this story—a small, seemingly weak, and
in this case, female, character brings down a Goliath fi gure by hurling a stone
(sledgehammer) at it. In the commercial there are some close-ups of the Big
Brother/Goliath fi gure which simulate the size relationships between David
and Goliath.
178 Chapter 9
In both cases—the “1984” commercial and the David and Goliath
story—it is a missile to the head that does the job. And with the destruction of
the evil Goliath fi gure, of course, the forces of good can prevail. So it seems
reasonable to argue that the blond represents a female version of David, and I
would imagine many people might see some kind of a resemblance between
the David and Goliath story and the events in this commercial. Here we fi nd
how intertextual readings can enrich an event and give an image a great deal
of cultural resonance.
The woman can also, let me suggest, be interpreted as an Eve fi gure. The
fact that the Apple corporation’s symbol is an apple with a bite out of it tells
us that. But the blond heroine also functions like Eve, for ultimately what
she does is lead to knowledge of good and evil in a reverse Garden of Eden.
Before she shattered the image, the inmates were brainwashed and had but
“one will, one resolve, one cause.” What information these poor souls had
was “purifi ed.” Their state is vaguely analogous to that of Adam before he ate
of the apple. It is the tasting of the fruit that led to Adam’s and Eve’s “eyes
being opened” and that is the beginning of human history, one might argue.
The blond heroine, then, is an Eve fi gure who brings knowledge of
good and evil, and by implication, knowledge of reality, to the inmates. We
do not see their transformation after the destruction of the Big Brother/
Goliath fi gure—indeed, their immediate reaction is awe and stupefaction—
but ultimately we cannot help but assume that something important will
happen and they will be liberated.
It is quite possible that this beautiful blond fi gure may also represent, in
our psyches, the Apple corporation. We know that corporations have different
images in people’s minds—often based on symbolic fi gures in advertisements
and commercials. On the basis of this commercial one might guess that the
corporate image we have of Apple is that of a beautiful blond woman (who
liberates men from political and psychological domination and ignorance).
Much of this would be at the unconscious level, of course.
It’s probably a good image for a computer company to have, since one of
the biggest problems computer manufacturers have is fi ghting anxiety about
technology and the diffi culties of operating computers—Macintosh’s very rea-
son for being, as a matter of fact. If people see Apple Computers as beautiful
blonds, so much the better for the corporation.
PSYCHOANALYTIC ASPECTS OF THE COMMERCIAL
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, the heroine is an ego fi gure who me-
diates between a monstrous and perverted superego fi gure, Big Brother, and
Analyzing Television Commercials 179
the de-energized and devastated ids of the inmates. The id, as it is commonly
defi ned, involves impulses and desires; the superego involves guilt; and the ego
mediates between the two, trying to maintain equilibrium. Ids are needed to
give us energy, and superegos are needed to prevent us from becoming crea-
tures of impulse. Both can, I suggest, become perverted.
In the following, we see how the blond is an ego fi gure.
Id Ego Superego
inmates blond Big Brother perverted normal perverted no energy strong no heart
As an ego fi gure, the heroine has to mediate between the inmates, whose ids
have been weakened and drained of energy, and the brainwasher, whose su-
perego has become monstrous and distorted. One might see vague elements
of an Oedipal confl ict, in which a young female and an older, perhaps even
“fatherly,” fi gure have a very diffi cult relationship . . . to put it mildly.
THE BLOND AS MEDIATOR
One important function of the mythic hero or heroine is to mediate be-
tween opposing forces in an attempt to resolve a basic opposition. The text of
this commercial is very binary, and the blond heroine serves to identify and
highlight the oppositions found in it. There are in essence three characters in
this text. First, there are the inmates who function as one character. Then there
is the Big Brother character (and the police who are part of him). And there
is the blond heroine. Her function is to resolve the oppositions, one way or
another, and she does this.
In the list that follows I will contrast the inmates and the Big Brother fi gure.
Here we are eliciting the paradigmatic structure of the text, which, according
to Claude Lévi-Strauss, tells us its real but hidden meaning (as opposed to the
surface meaning, which we get with a syntagmatic or linear narrative analysis).
Inmates Big Brother
obey commands uniforms regular clothes hairless hair listen speaks brainwashed brainwasher look at is looked at
180 Chapter 9
Inmates Big Brother
mindless calculating dehumanized dehumanizing alienated alienating emotionless heartless
The blond heroine (fi gure 9.6), with her gorgeous hair, her vitality, her en-
ergy, her force, resolves the dialectic by destroying Big Brother and making it
possible (we imagine) for the inmates eventually to regain their humanity. She
also makes us aware of the depths to which the inmates have sunk, for unlike
them she resists, she has a mind of her own, and she accepts danger.
Thus she contrasts with both the inmates and with Big Brother, whom
she destroys. The inmates and Big Brother are reverse images of one an-
other—both drab, depersonalized, and locked into a slave-master relationship
that defi nes each character and on which both may turn out to be dependent.
We can analyze the image of the blond woman with the sledgehammer
at a number of different levels:
The Literal Level: The image we see in “1984” The Textual Level: Where the image fi ts in the commercial The Intertextual Level: The way the image calls to mind Orwell’s
1984 The Mythic Level: The story of David and Goliath in the Bible
Figure 9.6. In this image from the Macintosh “1984” commercial, we see
the blond woman in the gigantic auditorium where the inmates are being
brainwashed.
Analyzing Television Commercials 181
It is possible, in many print advertisements and commercials, to consider
the different levels of meaning an image may have. Even static images in print
advertisements always assume some kind of back story that occurred to bring
the characters together, and they often imply a future story generated by the
product being advertised.
Images, we can see, are resonant and have many different levels of mean-
ing—some of which are not apparent to us when we fi rst see them. The
Macintosh, so Apple suggests, will save us from IBM and MS-DOS, but who,
we may ask, will save us from the Macintosh if it becomes an instrument of
psychological domination?
ALIENATED PROLES
The inmates, workers, prisoners, whatever you wish to call them, refl ect
with terrifying clarity the power modern bureaucratic states have to destroy
humanity and lead people into a state of radical alienation. We have here a
classic case (even if somewhat oversimplifi ed and parodied) of, in Marxist
terms, a mindless proletariat—maybe a classic example of what Marxists call a
Lumpenproletariat—being manipulated by a heartless bourgeoisie.
This bourgeoisie rules by virtue of its monopoly of power and its control
of the media and the manipulation of the consciousness of the proletariat. The
situation in the commercial is one in which the horrors of a capitalist society are
shown pushed to their logical conclusion, where workers are now enslaved and
brainwashed and the society in which they live has become a totalitarian one.
The blond heroine’s actions then symbolize revolution. She stands for the
role of progressive forces (pushed underground in this society) in leading a stu-
pefi ed proletariat out of its chains. Since this proletariat has been brainwashed,
it is incapable of action and is, perhaps, even reactionary. Hence it remains
passive while the revolution takes place, and can only stare in openmouthed
wonder at the destruction of the power structure that enslaves it.
In this scenario, the power of the media is shown as central, and when
it is put out of action, the rest is almost automatic. Interestingly enough, this
message is not too far removed from the overt message of the Apple corpora-
tion—that access to user-friendly computers will prevent a totalitarian society
from coming into being. Apple thus defi nes itself as a revolutionary force in
the quasitotalitarian world of hard-to-use computers where power will be held
by those who know how to function in the information society.
The Macintosh will prevent society from splitting into two groups—those
who have access to computers and are part of the information society and those
who know nothing about computers and are condemned to menial jobs, and
will form a class of workers who will have little economic power or status.
182 Chapter 9
Apple is, in our imaginations, the beautiful blond who will prevent a rigid
information-based class system from evolving and, by implication, a totalitarian
society. The Macintosh brings knowledge of good and evil to humankind—all
it takes is a bite (or is it a byte?).
THE BIG BLUE
It is not too far-fetched, I would argue, to suggest that the totalitarian
society shown in this commercial is an indirect representation of IBM, Interna-
tional Business Machines. Apple sees itself as a small, humanistic, open corpo-
ration battling a gigantic, super powerful, and highly bureaucratic corporation,
IBM. There are two readings to which this insight leads.
Scenario 1: In the fi rst reading, the whole story is about IBM. The Big
Brother fi gure is the corporate leadership, and the inmates are meant to sym-
bolize the IBM workers who are controlled (white shirt and tie, etc.) by IBM.
IBM has a reputation for being rather strict about the way its workers and
salespeople dress, and this commercial may be alluding to the regimentation
identifi ed with IBM.
Scenario 2: The second reading suggests that IBM is the Big Brother and
the American public is the inmates—who have been duped and controlled
by IBM, but who are about to be liberated by Apple and its revolutionary
Macintosh computer.
The battle resolves itself down to one between the beautiful blond hero-
ine and the monolithic monster—a bureaucratic corporation full of faceless
nobodies mindlessly following rules and regulations, and enslaving the multi-
tudes. The Macintosh is the sledgehammer which Apple has to throw against
IBM—a user-friendly machine that will, democratically, make computing
available to all.
A CLEVER MARKETING STRATEGY
Although the “1984” commercial cost a great deal of money to produce
(perhaps three or four times as much as a typical high-budget commercial) and
air, due to the notoriety it attracted, it ended up being a very good buy. We
must remember that it only aired once nationally in the United States—yet
it was the subject of a great deal of media attention and it fascinated the huge
audience that was watching the Super Bowl when it was shown.
As someone in the creative department at Chiat/Day explained to me,
“Good campaigns end up being relatively inexpensive.” A good commercial
Analyzing Television Commercials 183
(and campaign) may cost a great deal to produce and air, but if its impact is
suffi ciently strong, on attention-per-thousand basis it might work out to be
relatively cheap.
Chiat/Day (and Apple) took an unusual approach with this commercial.
It focused its attention not so much on the benefi ts derived from using a Ma-
cintosh but instead on the dangers inherent in not using one. The commercial
wasn’t selling a specifi c product in a direct manner. Instead, it used indirection
to build an image for Apple and Macintosh and, at the same time, cast asper-
sions on its main rival, IBM.
In the course of sixty seconds it created a memorable micro drama (which
is what many commercials are, actually) that worked subtly and indirectly. Like
many commercials, it was highly compressed, with neither a beginning nor
an ending. (Many commercials don’t have a beginning but do show a happy
ending, with someone using the product or service advertised.)
The ending implied in the “1984” commercial focused on the avoidance
of something hateful rather than the gaining of something desirable. In its own
way, there is an element of conditioning involved here; we have a condensed
form of aversion therapy. The argument, like the commercial, is binary. If there
are only two possibilities, Apple and IBM, and IBM (and all that it and its
imitators stand for) is shown to be horrible, one is led to choose Apple. One
acts not so much to gain pleasure (though that beautiful blond attracts us) as
to avert pain—Big Brother and the dystopian world (IBM) that he represents.
The “1984” commercial launched the Macintosh brilliantly. Apple con-
tinued to attack conformity in the business world in its 1985 commercial,
which showed blindfolded businessmen jumping off a cliff like lemmings. But
this ad lacked the polish and aesthetic complexity found in “1984” and it was
followed by a rather meager event—Apple announcing a few minor items in its
campaign to get businesses to purchase Macintoshes. The “1984” commercial
was a brilliant success, but it did not translate into great business success for
Apple for a variety of reasons.
THE “1984” COMMERCIAL AND A
BIT OF SCHOLARLY RESEARCH
In 1991 two communication scholars, Sandra Moriarty and Shay Sayre,
presented a paper at the sixteenth annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of
America, “A Comparison of Reader Response with Informed Author/Viewer
Analysis.” The purpose of this research on the Macintosh “1984” commercial
was (1991:1): “to fi nd out what meanings an audience can derive from a single
showing of a very complex television commercial text, and to test the level of
184 Chapter 9
agreement that exists among the author’s intention, critic’s analysis and reader’s
response.” The sixty-second Macintosh commercial, they point out, had won
thirty-four national and international advertising awards and was commonly
described as “the commercial that outplayed the game.”
The authors say the commercial cost $1.6 million—which differs by a
million dollars from what someone in Chiat/Day told me. In any case, they
quote Lee Clow, creative director for Chiat/Day, who described the com-
mercial as follows:
We placed our audience within the context of Orwell’s view of society, a
place where the dominant computer technology held consumers captive.
The intended message was that Mac would set consumer [sic] free from the
unfriendly technology of the competition. We gave the message impact
with body imagery designed to contrast Apple with the competition. . . . All
you have to do is look at IBM’s historic approach to computers as something
for the few, where they might let you in if you conformed and learned their
language, programming. Then look at how Apple makes computers acces-
sible to people. (1991:7)
This, then, is what the advertising agency that was responsible for hiring Rid-
ley Scott wanted to do.
Moriarty and Sayre then describe an earlier version of my “1984” article
(upon which this chapter is based) as a representative semiotic interpretation
of the “1984” commercial. They then describe the methodology used in
their research:
First, the respondents’ analyses of the commercial will be compared with
the main message points stated by both the creator of the commercial and
the semiotic critic to determine if viewers are getting the point of the
message. Then the signifi cant images identifi ed by the respondents will be
compared with the images noted and interpreted by the critic to determine
if the student readings are the same or similar to the reading of an informed
viewer . . . The respondents’ level of interpretation also will be analyzed to
determine their sophistication in story analysis . . . Finally, it is expected that
differences in the respondents’ readings, if any, will be found more in their
level of interpretation than in their story focus. (1991:8)
The respondents in this study were 200 undergraduate students taking mass
communication courses at two state universities.
The conclusions Moriarty and Sayre reached from analyzing the data from
the 200 respondents are quite interesting. As they write:
Analyzing Television Commercials 185
In terms of the big question, there is rather high agreement between the
student respondents and the critic and creator on the element of the message
that focuses on the introduction of the Macintosh computer. This is par-
ticularly important since advertising researchers know that the miscompre-
hension rate of television advertising message points is close to 25 percent.
Other elements which the creator and critic thought were important mes-
sage points were rarely or barely noted, which suggests that a deep reading
from a fl eeting exposure to a television commercial is probably not realistic.
. . . While the 1984 story line was extremely powerful, the Macintosh mes-
sage was still the focus of their interpretations. While in slightly more than
half the cases they were reading and interpreting the stories at a simple level,
the number that engaged in a more elaborate decoding with some interpre-
tation beyond simply re-telling was higher than the researchers expected,
almost reaching 50 percent. This suggests that viewers of a fast paced, com-
plex commercial may be able to engage in sophisticated interpretation even
from a brief exposure. (1991:21–3)
This conclusion is extremely interesting, for it suggests that a relatively high
percentage of the students were able to interpret the “1984” commercial—and
by implication, all commercials—in a relatively sophisticated manner. The au-
thors suggest their research indicates how important images (and the codes we
use to interpret them) are for generating commercials whose meaning people
can understand.
What this research demonstrates is that large numbers of people don’t
have to know what semiotics is or know the somewhat arcane jargon that
semioticians use to get the message in commercials and other mass-mediated
texts. And that is because we learn how to decode commercials and everything
else as we grow up in a society. We are all semioticians, whether we know it
or not. We are always sending messages to others—via the words we use, our
facial expressions, our hairstyles, the clothes we wear, our body language, and
so on—and interpreting messages others send us. Like the character in one of
Moliere’s plays who didn’t realize he was always speaking prose, we are all
semioticians, with varying degrees of understanding of certain basic semiotic
principles—whether we recognize it or not.
As a society, we are embedded in a culture of consumption. Neil Postman
. . . notes that by the age of forty the average American will have seen well
over one million commercials and have “close to another million to go
before his fi rst social security check.” In order to comprehend the impact
of all this advertising on society we must learn how to see through adver-
tisements, for they are not just messages about goods and services but social
and cultural texts about ourselves.
—Katherine Toland Frith, Undressing the Ad
If our material needs are not satisfi ed, we die from hunger or exposure; if
our social needs are not satisfi ed, we are liable to suffer psychological prob-
lems. Now the crucial point is that in our consumption of goods, we satisfy
both material and social needs. Various social groups identify themselves
through shared attitudes, manners, accents, and habits of consumption—for
instance, through the clothes they wear. In this way the objects that we
use and consume cease to be mere objects of use; they become carriers of
information about what kind of people we are, or would like to be.
—Torben Vestergaard and Kim Schrøder,
The Language of Advertising
187
10
WHERE NEXT?
We have covered a great deal of ground in this analysis of advertising
and its impact on American character and culture. The soft economy
of 2008 and 2009 in the United States meant that companies cut back on the
amount of money they spent on advertising, causing great problems for the
industry. But when the economy shows signs of improving, things will look
up for advertising. When companies have problems, it seems that the fi rst
thing they cut is the amount of money they spend on advertising. A good
case could be made that they should do just the opposite and spend more on
advertising, for it is when the economy is not doing well that organizations
need advertising the most.
Where next? we might ask. Let me suggest, here, two areas of consider-
able importance that are good candidates for further research: drug advertising
and advertising to children. They are both quite complicated and the subject
of considerable controversy.
DRUG ADVERTISING
Advertising is, as I have suggested all through this book, one of the most
interesting, vital, and problematic infl uences on us as individuals and on Amer-
ican society. Take, for example, prescription drug advertising. In recent years
pharmaceutical companies have considerably increased the amount of advertis-
ing they do, which has led to a rapid rise in the prices of certain prescription
drugs. In addition, patients now demand that their physicians prescribe certain
drugs they see advertised, such as Prozac, Allegra, and Viagra. The page spread
in fi gure 10.1, from a many-page advertising insert for a variety of prescrip-
tion drugs, shows an ad for Lantus insulin, with one page set up to look like a
regular article about insulin. The medical profession considers drug advertising
to be a nuisance, at best, and a potential menace, at worst.
A front-page article in the November 22, 2002, issue of the New York
Times, “Madison Ave. Plays Growing Role in the Business of Drug Research,”
F ig
u re
1 0 .1
Where Next? 189
deals with this matter and quotes a scientist, Dr. Arnold S. Reiman, a professor
emeritus from Harvard Medical School, who said, “You cannot separate their
advertising and marketing from the science, anymore.” Advertising agencies
have also bought some companies involved in testing drugs and other areas
associated with discovering new drugs.
It seems, then, that advertising agencies are now infl uencing the kind of
research that pharmaceutical companies are doing, suggesting, it must be as-
sumed, which areas would be most fruitful (profi table). Advertising now dom-
inates our politics and is in the process of dominating our medicine. It turns out
that there is also a relationship between pharmaceutical companies and political
advertising. Pharmaceutical companies have formed a lobbying association, the
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). It gave a
great deal of money to an organization with strong Republican leanings, the
United Seniors Association, which paid for ads in a number of campaigns,
generally supporting Republican candidates whose interests were close to
those of the pharmaceutical industry. Major drug companies are also behind
Citizens for Better Medicare, which spent $50 million in the 2000 election
on television commercials in twenty-six congressional districts. They also gave
the United States Chamber of Commerce $10 million and spent another $27
million in individual campaign contributions, 70 percent of which went to
Republican candidates. This investment paid off handsomely for the pharma-
ceutical industry, which now has an administration that is very receptive to
its wishes. (This material comes from an article by Tom Hamburger, “Drug
Industry Ads Aid GOP,” in the Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2002.)
In 1970 I appeared before a subcommittee of the United States Senate and
gave a presentation on drug advertising. My argument was that drug advertis-
ing follows what I call a “pain-pill-pleasure” model. Someone has a terrible
headache, takes a pill, and in no time fl at, is better. I also pointed out that a
large percentage of advertising in the United States is for drugs of one kind or
another—alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, aspirin, and so on, ad infi nitum. We are,
it can be argued, an over-the-counter and prescription-drug culture, and we
learn, from the many advertisements and commercials we are exposed to, that
if there is a problem, there is always a drug to solve that problem, as if by magic.
It’s not diffi cult to see how people might move from legal, over-the-
counter drugs for minor problems and prescription drugs for health problems
to illegal drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and crack for other problems. The
pain-pill-pleasure model still works, except that there are side effects to be
considered to using illegal drugs, such as addiction or related problems like
getting AIDS from sharing needles, and destroying one’s life.
In 2009, an article on National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) web site offered
the fi gure of $4 billion a year spent on drug advertising to consumers and
190 Chapter 10
quotes a Nielsen report to the effect that there are eighty drug commercials on
American television every hour of every day. We are bombarded with these
commercials. Anyone who watches 60 Minutes would conclude, from the
commercials on that program (which are almost always exclusively drug com-
mercials), that people in America suffer from an incredible number of ailments
and illnesses. The audience of 60 Minutes tends to be elderly, and they are the
primary target audience for drug commercials. The pharmaceutical companies
now spend almost twice as much money on advertising as they do on research.
CHILDREN AND ADVERTISING
We’re used to subjecting children to advertising here in the United
States, but in Sweden and some other countries, advertising directed toward
children is forbidden. There is, I would suggest, an ethical problem of subject-
ing children to advertising. Until the age of seven or eight, they often do not
understand what advertising is and can’t distinguish between advertising and
regular content. Should we subject these children to advertising? Personally
speaking, I would say no.
A web site that deals with advertising, “Commercial Alert,” offers this
data on young children:
Commercialism is intrinsic to American culture, but marketing to children
has reached an unprecedented intensity. Where there used to be a few TV
Where Next? 191
channels, now the typical home has 78, including 24-hour channels di-
rected at children like Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network. The Journal
of Advertising Research reports that nearly one out of every four children
under age 6 has a television set in their bedroom. The average child sees
between 20,000 and 40,000 commercials a year. (“Kids’ Buying Power
Lures Advertisers,” www.commercialalert.org/news/archive/1999/12/
kids-buying-power)
Young children generally can’t tell the difference between a commercial
and a program until they are around seven, so young children do not realize that
they are being subjected to advertising and have little defense against it. One
effect of subjecting children to advertising is to turn them into whiners. People
in the advertising industry call the kind of nagging children do, to get something
they see on television and want, “pester power.” An article by Martha Irvine in
the Associated Press points out that when parents say “no,” children nag them
an average of nine times before they give in. Some children nag fi fty times.
These fi gures come from children from twelve to seventeen who were
interviewed for a survey on children and advertising. The survey, commis-
sioned by the Center for the New American Dream, revealed that 60 percent
of the children said that even before they reached the fi rst grade they knew
how to manipulate their parents for small things.
Young children, we must realize, have a great deal of spending power,
and also infl uence the spending habits of their parents for everything from new
cars to kinds of vacations to take. I’ve seen fi gures suggesting children infl uence
around $700 billion in adult spending. As Underhill notes:
The marketplace wants kids, needs kids, and they’re fl attered by the invi-
tation and happy to oblige. They idolize licensed TV characters the way
children once were taught to worship patron saints, and manage to suss out
the connection between brand name and status at a very early age. . . . You
no longer need to stay clear of the global marketplace just because you’re
three-and-a-half-feet tall, have no income to speak of and are not permitted
to cross the street without Mom. You’re an economic force, now and in the
future, and that’s what counts. (2000:142)
The following shows the projected evolution of spending power for children
ages four to twelve:
Year Amount of Income
1994 $17 billion 2002 $40 billion 2006 $52 billion
192 Chapter 10
The survey by the Center for the New American Dream also revealed that
children who didn’t have the right kind of clothes felt they wouldn’t be able
to have any friends and would be rejected by other children.
In recent years, as the problem of obesity has exploded in the United
States (and other countries as well), consumer groups have been attacking
cereal makers and fast food restaurant companies for contributing to the
obesity epidemic in young children. They have accused advertisers of using
commercials that sell cereals and other food products to children that are full
of sugar and of luring children into eating foods full of fat, such as hamburgers
and French fries.
Increasingly larger numbers of young children now are suffering from
Type 2, so-called Adult Onset Diabetes, and the arteries of some adolescents
are similar, in terms of the fat blockages in them, to those of middle-aged men.
In addition, there is a diabetes epidemic in the United States, and various con-
sumer groups have argued that the advertising industry is a major contributor
to this and other medical problems. The burden of our unhealthy eating habits
on our medical system and the costs of treating people with these diseases are
growing to astronomical levels.
It is impossible to pin all the blame for our problems with obesity and
diabetes and other medical diseases only on the advertising agencies, but there
is little question that the commercials to which young children are exposed
and the marketing of hamburgers with toys for children have played a major
contributing role in the spread of these diseases.
BATTLING FOR PEOPLE’S ATTENTION
There is a kind of imperialism inherent in the advertising industry; it has
a methodology for shaping desire and seeks to use its methods and powers ev-
erywhere. So there is good reason to investigate advertising and consider what
role it’s been playing, and may play in the future, in America and elsewhere.
There is, ironically, a countervailing force affecting advertising and that is
the work of other agencies, which are engaged in an endless battle for people’s
attention—the fi rst step in getting people to buy something—and which seem
to be willing to do almost anything to get it. Advertising agencies are battling
one another, and as this battle intensifi es, it creates more and more clutter.
This means that ordinary people, deluged by commercials, become victims of
information overload, which sometimes leads them to become confused and
turned off, so to speak.
So there may be a point of diminishing returns that the advertising in-
dustry faces, though, for the moment, as we are subjected to thousands and
Where Next? 193
thousands of print advertisements and television commercials, we have no way
of knowing when a particular advertisement will become a tipping point, a
straw that will break the advertising camel’s back, metaphorically speaking. It
is conceivable, on the other hand, that we can be taught to process an almost
infi nite number of commercial messages, though I tend to doubt that this is
possible. Eventually, there will be a turning point, and people will be unable
to react the way advertising agencies want them to. New technology may
also play a role; with the development of TiVo and other hard disks that store
television programs and delete the commercials, many people are fi nding ways
to avoid commercials in their television viewing. So things are in considerable
fl ux, and much research is needed on advertising’s role in politics, in the lives
of children and teenagers, in medicine—topics I have discussed in this book.
The list of possible subjects goes on and on.
CELL PHONES, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND ADVERTISING
The incredible popularity of cell phones in America, and just about
everywhere, offers advertisers a new “screen” to fi ll with advertisements of
one kind or another (fi gure 10.2). In Japan, people use cell phones to read
Figure 10.2. There are now more than
200,000 apps, each with its own icon.
194 Chapter 10
novels and manga, and now, increasingly, Japanese cell phone users are be-
ing exposed to advertising. Cell phone advertising is common in a number
of other countries, as well. In his book Buying In: What We Buy and Who We
Are, Rob Walker, New York Times Magazine “Consumed” columnist, discusses
cell phone advertising.
He mentions the notion that young people see cell phones as symbolizing
freedom and then points out that marketers are excited about advertising on
cell phones. He writes (2008:128):
“This is the one medium you carry with you,” one marketer says. “Another
says that, yes, television spots just don’t have the reach they used to, but
“The mobile phone is very personal, and it’s always with you.” A third
agrees: “By communicating with consumers through the mobile phone, you
can deliver your message right in their hip pocket.”
Thus a symbol of freedom becomes a selling machine in every pocket.
Ironically, then, cell phones are not instruments of freedom but carriers of
yet another kind of sell, to be exploited by corporations and advertising agencies.
The social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are also impor-
tant venues for monetizing—read selling advertisements. One day in March
2010 Facebook actually had more people using it than were using Google.
Google makes its money by selling advertisements and bringing people in-
terested in products and services together with the companies that make or
offer them. Now Facebook and the other social media sites are trying to make
money from advertising in a way that will not turn off people who use them.
Between cell phone users and social media users, there is an enormous market
that advertisers are targeting.
195
APPENDIX: USEFUL WEB SITES
For those who wish to pursue their investigations of advertising, let me list
some useful web sites to access. Some of these sites will enable you to fi nd
books and periodicals of interest. These web sites and others available on the
Internet can be found by using Google or other search engines, and will enable
anyone interested in doing research on advertising to fi nd a wealth of materials.
Adbusters (www.adbusters.org)
This site attempts to counter advertising’s infl uence on American culture
and society. It and other similar sites attack advertising and often parody some
of the most famous campaigns.
Advertising Age (www.AdAge.com)
This is the web site of one of the more important publications dealing
with the advertising industry. It has news about every aspect of the industry,
from campaigns that are getting under way to matters involving the consolida-
tion of the advertising industry. You can obtain daily copies of a newsletter
from them by applying at the web site.
Advertising Educational Foundation (www.aef.com)
This site has access to a scholarly journal, Advertising and Society Review,
about many aspects of advertising. The Advertising Educational Foundation
made it possible for me to spend three weeks at Goldberg Moser O’Neill in
San Francisco a number of years ago, where I had the opportunity to interview
many people who worked in various positions in the agency.
AdWeek (www.adweek.com)
This is another important site for information about the advertising in-
dustry. Between this site and AdAge.com it is possible to keep up to date on
the advertising industry.
Amazon (www.amazon.com), Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com)
These web sites list a huge number of books that deal with advertising.
You can ask them to list books in terms of date of publication, features, and
196 Appendix: Useful Web Sites
popularity, among other things. In addition, you can often examine a given
book’s table of contents and some sample pages.
Google (www.google.com)
This search engine can help you fi nd an enormous number of sites that
deal with various aspects of advertising. It is the most important, most compre-
hensive, most useful, and fastest search engine. There are many organizations
involved in the business of advertising and assessing its social consequences that
can be found on the Internet. There’s also a good deal of scholarly research—in
the form of articles and data—that can be accessed using Google.
Media Education Foundation (www.mediaed.org)
The Media Education Foundation sells videos and DVDs and provides
study guides on topics such as advertising, gender, diversity, race, health, and
politics.
New York Times (www.nytimes.com)
This web site has many different features, including Stuart Elliott/In
Advertising, which it e-mails, free of cost, to anyone who wishes to receive
it. Stuart Elliott covers advertising for the New York Times and is very knowl-
edgeable about the industry.
197
GLOSSARY
Aberrant Decoding The notion that audiences decode or interpret texts
such as television commercials and print advertisements in ways that dif-
fer from the ways the creators of these texts expect them to be decoded.
Aberrant decoding is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to
the mass media, according to the semiotician Umberto Eco. It has been
estimated that about 25 percent of advertisements and commercials are
decoded aberrantly, that is, not the way the creators of the texts expected
them to be decoded.
Advertisement The word advert means “to call attention to something,”
and thus an advertisement is, for our purposes, a kind of text—carried
by electronic or print media—that attracts attention to, stimulates desire
for, and in some cases leads to the purchase of a product or service. The
convention is that commercial messages in print are called advertisements
and those in electronic media are called commercials.
Aesthetics Aesthetics involves the way technical matters such as lighting,
sound, music, kinds of shots and camera work, and editing affect the way
audiences react to commercials or print advertisements.
198 Glossary
Alienation In Marxist theory, capitalist societies can create huge amounts
of consumer goods, but they also inevitably generate alienation and feel-
ings of estrangement from oneself and others in the society. Alienation is
functional for those who own the means of production and distribution,
since alienation leads to consumer cultures—ones characterized by end-
less and frantic consumption, which people use as an escape from their
feelings of alienation. In capitalist societies, therefore, advertising plays a
central role in maintaining the status quo. See also Consumer Cultures.
Archetype According to Carl Jung, archetypes are images found in dreams,
myths, works of art, and religions all over the world. They are not trans-
mitted by culture but are somehow passed on in a collective unconscious.
We are not conscious of them directly, but they reveal themselves in our
dreams and works of art. One of the most important archetypes is the
hero. Archetypal heroes and heroines are commonly used in advertising
since they resonate so strongly with people.
Artist We will consider an artist to be not only someone who writes, paints,
sculpts, or plays musical instruments, but anyone involved in the creation
or performance of a text. The creative people in advertising agencies are
copywriters, artists, typographers, designers, and so on. Generally speak-
ing, a creative director in an advertising agency assembles teams of creative
artists to work on particular campaigns. Many artists nowadays do not
know how to draw particularly well, but are adept at using the computer
for creating visual images.
Attitudes Attitude, as social psychologists use the term, refers to a person’s
relatively enduring state of mind about some phenomenon or aspect of
experience. Attitudes generally are either positive or negative, have direc-
tion, and involve thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I suggest in this book
that advertising should be examined in terms of its impact on culture in
general rather than being dealt with in terms of attitude change in indi-
viduals or groups.
Audience Audiences are generally defi ned as collections of individuals who
watch a television program, listen to a radio show, attend a fi lm or some
kind of live artistic performance (symphony, rock band, and so on). The
members of the audience may be together in one room or, in the case
of television, each watching from his or her own set. In technical terms,
audiences are addressees who receive mediated texts sent by an addresser.
For advertisers, securing the right audiences is crucial because it doesn’t
pay to advertise to people who either aren’t interested or can’t afford the
product or service being advertised. The media, in economic terms, can
be held to deliver audiences to advertisers.
Glossary 199
Blogs Web logs that individuals use to place their ideas on the Internet.
Some blogs are strictly personal and are a form of electronic diary or
journal while others deal with politics and other topics.
Branding Creating emotional ties between certain products or services and
individuals who will purchase them over the course of their lives. From
a semiotic perspective, brands are signs people use to display their taste or
wealth and to help them fashion an identity. The fact that certain compa-
nies prominently attach their logos to what they make helps users solidify
their sense of style and discrimination and their identities.
Broadcast We use the term broadcast to deal with texts that are made avail-
able over wide areas via radio or television signals. Broadcasting differs
from other forms of distributing texts such as cable casting, which uses
cables, and satellite transmission, which requires dishes to capture signals
sent by the satellites.
Claritas A market research company which argues that there are sixty-six
different kinds of consumers in the United States, each of which tends to
be found in certain zip codes. They argue that “birds of a feather fl ock
together” and give each of the groupings jazzy names such as “Blue Blood
Estates” and “Shotguns and Pickups.”
Class From a linguistic standpoint, a class is any group of things that have
something in common. We use the term to refer to social classes, or more
literally, socioeconomic classes: groups of people who share income and
lifestyle. Marxist theorists argue that there is a ruling class, which shapes
the ideas of the proletariat, the working classes. Advertisers are interested
in socioeconomic classes and lifestyles because these phenomena are held
to be the key to selling products and services.
Codes Codes are systems of symbols, letters, words, sounds, whatever, that
generate meaning. Language, for example, is a code. It uses combinations of
letters that we call words to mean certain things. The relation between the
word and the thing the word stands for is arbitrary, based on convention. In
some cases, the term code is used to describe hidden meanings and disguised
communications. Audiences have to decode texts correctly, so advertising
strives to create print advertisements and commercials that are easy to un-
derstand. Despite the best intentions of those who create advertisements,
approximately one quarter of the people decode them aberrantly.
Cognitive Dissonance Dissonance refers to sounds that clash with one
another. According to psychologists, people wish to avoid ideas that chal-
lenge the ones they hold, which creates confl ict and other disagreeable
feelings. Cognitive dissonance refers to ideas that confl ict with ones people
hold and generate psychological anxiety and displeasure. Advertisers strive
200 Glossary
to avoid dissonance and to reinforce beliefs people already hold, as a means
of selling products and services.
Collective Representations Emile Durkheim used this concept to deal
with the fact that people are both individuals pursuing their own aims,
and social animals guided by the groups and societies in which they fi nd
themselves. Collective representations are, broadly speaking, texts that
refl ect the beliefs and ideals of collectivities. Advertisements are designed,
one could say, as collective representations that will appeal to people and
help advertisers shape people’s behavior.
Communication There are many different ways of understanding and us-
ing this term. For our purposes, communication is a process that involves
the transmission of messages from senders to receivers. We often make a
distinction between communication using language, verbal communica-
tion, and communication using facial expressions, body language, and
other means, or nonverbal communication. In advertisements and televi-
sion commercials, both verbal and nonverbal communication play very
important roles.
Consumer Cultures Consumer cultures are characterized by widespread
personal consumption rather than socially conscious and useful invest-
ment in the public sphere. The focus is on private expenditure and leisure
pursuits, and this leads to privatism, self-centeredness, and a reluctance to
allocate resources for the public realm. Advertising is held by many critics
to be a primary instrument of those who own the means of production
in generating consumer lust and consumer cultures and distracting people
from social and public matters. Social scientists Aaron Wildavsky and
Mary Douglas suggest that there are four political cultures, which also
function as consumer cultures: hierarchical or elitist, individualist, egali-
tarian, and fatalist. See also Political Cultures.
CPM CPM is an acronym for cost per thousand, the way advertising is tradi-
tionally measured. It is the number of viewers reached that is critical, not
the absolute cost of running the advertisement. Thus a print advertisement
in a newspaper that costs $10,000 to run, which reaches 500,000 people,
is much more expensive, on a CPM basis, than a commercial that costs
$100,000 to run but which reaches 20 million people.
Critical Research Critical research refers to approaches to media that are
essentially ideological, that focus on the social and political dimensions
of the mass media and the way they are used by organizations and others
allegedly to maintain the status quo rather than to enhance equality. This
contrasts with administrative research. Many books about the advertis-
ing industry written by scholars can be described as examples of critical
research—including this book.
Glossary 201
Cultivation Theory This theory argues that television dominates the
symbolic environment of its audiences and gives people false views of
reality. That is, television “cultivates” or reinforces certain beliefs in its
viewers, such as the notions that society is permeated by violence, that
there are hardly any older people, and that everyone is living in upper-
middle-class splendor. Advertising plays a signifi cant role in cultivating
the American public.
Cultural Criticism The term cultural criticism refers to the analysis of texts
and various aspects of everyday life by scholars in various disciplines who
use concepts from their fi elds of expertise to interpret mass-mediated
texts, the role of the mass media, and related concerns. The focus is on
what impact these texts and the media that carry them have on individuals,
society, and culture. Cultural criticism involves the use of literary theory,
media analysis, philosophical thought, communication theory, and vari-
ous interpretive methodologies.
Cultural Homogenization When people use the term cultural homogeni-
zation, they mean that the media of mass communication are destroying
Third World cultures and regional cultures in specifi c countries, leading
to a cultural sameness, standardization, and homogenization. For example,
McDonald’s has affected the eating habits of many Asian countries and
McDonald’s uses advertising to attract patrons, so advertising plays a role
in this cultural homogenization process.
Cultural Imperialism (also Media Imperialism) The theory of cultural
imperialism describes the fl ow of media products (such as songs, fi lms, and
television programs) and popular culture from the United States and a few
other capitalist countries in Western Europe to the Third World. Along
with these texts and popular culture, it is alleged that values and beliefs
(and bourgeois capitalist ideology) are also being transmitted, leading to
the domination of these people.
Culture There are hundreds of defi nitions of culture. Generally speaking,
from the anthropological perspective, it involves the transmission from
generation to generation of specifi c ideas, arts, customary beliefs, ways
of living, behavior patterns, institutions, and values. When applied to the
arts, it generally is used to specify “elite” kinds of artworks, such as operas,
poetry, classical music, and serious novels. The argument in this book is
that advertising is an important institution and has an enormous impact
upon our culture.
Defense Mechanisms Defense mechanisms are methods used by the
ego to defend itself against pressures from the id or impulsive elements
in the psyche and superego, such as conscience and guilt. Some of the
more common defense mechanisms are repression (barring unconscious
202 Glossary
instinctual wishes, memories, and so on from consciousness), regres-
sion (returning to earlier stages in one’s development), ambivalence (a
simultaneous feeling of love and hate for a person, thing, or concept),
and rationalization (offering excuses to justify one’s actions). I’ve ex-
plained how the ego mediates between id-dominated desires to purchase
products and services and superego attempts to avoid spending money.
Demographics The term demographics refers to similarities found in groups
of people in terms of race, religion, gender, social class, ethnicity, occupa-
tion, place of residence, age, and so on. Demographic information plays
an important role in the creation of advertising and the choice of which
media to use to deliver this advertising.
Dysfunctional In sociological thought, something is dysfunctional if it
contributes to the breakdown or destabilization of the entity in which it
is found. Some critics of advertising argue that it is dysfunctional in that
it diverts the attention of people from public problems to private desires.
Egalitarians They stress that everyone is equal in terms of certain needs,
such as for food, shelter, and access to health care. Egalitarians function
as critics of the two dominant political/consumer cultures—elitist and
individualist.
Ego In Freud’s theory of the psyche, the ego functions as the executant of
the id and as a mediator between the id and the superego (conscience).
The ego is involved in the perception of reality and the adaptation to real-
ity. One aspect of the ego, I argue, is in helping the superego to restrain
compulsive spending, which the id wishes to do.
Emotive Functions According to Roman Jakobson, messages have a
number of functions. Some of them are emotive functions, which in-
volve expressing feelings by the sender of a message. (Other functions are
referential and poetic.) Advertising is an art that makes great use of the
emotive functions of actors to generate emotional responses in audiences
to convince people to purchase products and services being advertised.
See also Poetic Functions, Referential Functions.
Enclavists See Egalitarians.
Ethical Critics Ethics involve our sense of what is moral and correct. Ethi-
cal critics deal with texts such as advertisements in terms of the moral
aspects of what happens in these texts and the possible impact of these
advertisements on those exposed to these texts and on others.
False Consciousness In Marxist thought, false consciousness refers to mis-
taken ideas that people have about their class, status, and economic pos-
sibilities. These ideas help maintain the status quo and are of great use to
the ruling class, which wants to avoid changes in the social structure. Karl
Glossary 203
Marx argued that the ideas of the ruling class are always the ruling ideas
in society. Marxists would argue that the belief many Americans have that
they are “elites” because they can consume at a relatively high level is an
example of false consciousness.
Fatalists They are at the bottom rungs of society—they have little political
or consumer power and can only escape their status as a result of luck or
chance.
Feminist Criticism Feminist criticism focuses on the roles given to women
and the way they are portrayed in texts of all kinds, including one of the
worst offenders—advertising. Feminist critics argue that women are typi-
cally used as sexual objects and are portrayed stereotypically in advertise-
ments and other texts, and this has negative effects on both men and women.
Focal Points Focal points are the fi ve general topics or subject areas we
can concentrate upon in studying mass communication. These are: (1)
the work of art or text, (2) the artist, (3) the audience, (4) America or the
society, and (5) the media.
Formula A formula in narrative theory refers to a text with conventional
characters and actions that audiences are familiar with. Genre texts, such
as detective stories, Westerns, science-fi ction adventures, and romances
are highly formulaic. Many advertisements and commercials are also for-
mulaic, because this facilitates easy comprehension by audience members.
Functional In sociological thought, the term functional refers to the contri-
bution an institution makes to the maintenance of society or an institu-
tion or entity. Something functional helps maintain the system in which
it is found. Defenders of advertising argue that it is functional in that it
facilitates consumption, innovation, and general economic well-being.
Functional Alternative Functional alternative refers to something that
takes the place of something else. For example, professional football can
be seen as a functional alternative to religion. I argue in this book that a
department store can be seen as a modern functional alternative to me-
dieval cathedrals.
Gender Gender is the sexual category of an individual: male or female, and
the behavioral traits connected with each category.
Genre Genre is a French word that means “kind” or “class.” As we use the
term, it refers to the kind of formulaic texts found in the mass media such
as commercials and print advertisements, soap operas, news shows, sports
programs, horror shows, and detective programs. I have dealt with this
topic at length in my book Popular Culture Genres (1992).
Global Marshall McLuhan suggested, many years ago, that as a result of new
developments in technology the world was becoming a “global” village.
204 Glossary
The term suggests that as the result of the growth of the Internet and other
media of communication, people everywhere are linked together like
people in a small village. The advertising industry is now global with giant
mega-agencies that own hundreds of other agencies all over the world.
Google The most important search engine which has used its technological
prowess to become a major force in contemporary American society, as far
as technology is concerned. By selling advertisements on its search engine,
Google has become a very wealthy and powerful company.
Grid-Group Theory This theory is based on the work of social anthro-
pologist Mary Douglas, who argued that there are four (and only four)
consumer cultures or lifestyles in modern societies, based on the degree to
which the groups have weak or strong boundaries and whether members
have few or many rules and prescriptions to follow.
Hierarchical Elitists These people are at the top of the economic and
power pyramid and believe that hierarchy is needed for society to run
smoothly. They have a sense of obligation to those beneath them.
Hypodermic Needle Theory of Media This theory, generally discred-
ited now, holds that all members of an audience “read” a text the same
way and get the same things out of it. Media are seen as hypodermic
needles, injecting their messages into one and all. The fact that a relatively
high percentage of people decode mass-mediated texts aberrantly suggests
that the hypodermic needle theory is too simplistic.
Id The id in Freud’s theory of the psyche (technically known as his structural
hypothesis) is that element of the psyche that is the representative of a
person’s drives. In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud called
it (1965:) “a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement.” It also is the source
of energy, but lacking direction, it needs the ego to harness it and control
it. In popular thought, it is connected to impulse, lust, and “I want it all
now” behavior. Many advertisements appeal to id elements in our psyches.
Ideology An ideology is a logically coherent, integrated explanation of social,
economic, and political matters that helps establish the goals and direct the
actions of a group or political entity. People act (and vote or don’t vote) on
the basis of an ideology they hold, even though they may not have articu-
lated it or thought about it. Some critics argue that advertising is an ideo-
logical tool that members of the ruling class use to distract people from their
problems and convince them that the political order is worth supporting.
Image Defi ning images is extremely diffi cult. In my book Seeing Is Believing:
An Introduction to Visual Communication, I defi ne an image as (1998:) “a
collection of signs and symbols—what we fi nd when we look at a pho-
tograph, a fi lm still, a shot of a television screen, a print advertisement,
or just about anything.” The term is used for mental as well as physical
representations of things. Images often have powerful emotional effects
Glossary 205
on people and historical signifi cance. Advertisers use the power of images
to sell products and services.
Individualists Individualists believe that the basic function of government
is to prevent crime and invasion by foreign powers. They are competitive
and stress the importance of individual initiative.
Intertextuality This theory argues that texts (works of art) of all kinds are
infl uenced to varying degrees by texts that preceded them. Sometimes, as
in the case of parody, the relationship is overt but in many cases, creators
of texts are infl uenced by stylistic practices or thematic ones from earlier
works. We can say, then, that intertextuality involves making allusions
to, imitating, modifying, or adapting previously created texts and styles
of expression.
Isolates See Fatalists.
Lasswell Formula Harold Lasswell was a prominent political scientist.
Considered by some scholars to be the most famous formula in commu-
nication theory, the Lasswell formula goes as follows: Who? Says what?
In which channel? To whom? With what effect?
Latent Functions Latent functions are hidden, unrecognized, and unin-
tended results of some activity, entity, or institution. They are contrasted
by social scientists with manifest functions, which are recognized and
intended. Some critics suggest that the latent function of advertising is to
support the political order, while the manifest function of advertising is
to sell goods and services. See also Manifest Functions.
Lifestyle Literally style of life, lifestyle refers to the way people live—to the
decisions they make about how to decorate their homes (and where they
are located), the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the foods they eat,
the restaurants they visit, and where they go for vacations. Lifestyles tend
to be coherent or logically connected, and they play an important part in
market research.
206 Glossary
Limited Effects (of Media) Some mass communication theorists argue
that the mass media have relatively minor effects on the scheme of things.
They cite research that shows, for example, that media effects don’t tend
to be long lasting and argue that mass media’s strong effects have not been
demonstrated. When they testify before governmental agencies, advertis-
ers argue that advertisements and commercials have limited effects, and
when dealing with clients they argue that they have powerful effects.
Manifest Functions The manifest functions of an activity, entity, or insti-
tution are those that are obvious and intended. Manifest functions contrast
with latent functions, which are hidden and unintended. The manifest
function of advertising is to sell products and services; the latent function
is to sell the political order. See also Latent Functions.
Mass For our purposes, “mass” as in “mass communication” refers to a large
number of people who are the audience for some communication. There
is considerable disagreement about how to understand the term mass.
Some theorists say a mass comprises individuals who are heterogeneous,
do not know one another, are alienated, and do not have a leader. Others
attack these notions, saying they are not based on fact but on theories that
are not correct and have not been proven in experiments.
Mass Communication Mass communication refers to the transfer of mes-
sages, information, and texts from a sender (for our purposes, an advertis-
ing agency) to a receiver, a large number of people, a mass audience. This
transfer is done through the technologies of the mass media—newspapers,
magazines, television programs, fi lms, records, computers, the Internet, and
CD-ROMs. The sender is often a person in a large media organization, the
messages are public, and the audience tends to be large and varied.
Medium (plural: Media) A medium is a means of delivering messages, in-
formation, or texts to audiences. There are different ways of classifying the
media. One of the most common ways is as follows: print (newspapers,
magazines, books, billboards), electronic (radio, television, computers,
CD-ROMs, the Internet), and photographic (photographs, fi lms, videos).
Various critics have suggested that the main function of the commercial
media is to deliver audiences to advertisers, and that everything else the
media do is of secondary importance.
Metaphor A metaphor is a fi gure of speech that conveys meaning by anal-
ogy. It is important to realize that metaphors are not confi ned to poetry
and literary works but, according to some linguists, are the fundamental
way in which we make sense of things and fi nd meaning in the world. A
simile is a weaker form of metaphor that uses either “like” or “as” in mak-
ing an analogy. Metaphors are an important element in advertising. For
Glossary 207
example, Fidji perfume had a campaign that was explicitly metaphoric:
Woman is an island.
Metonymy According to linguists, metonymy is a fi gure of speech that
conveys information by association and is, along with metaphor, one of
the most important ways people convey information to one another. We
tend not to be aware of our use of metonymy, but whenever we use as-
sociation to get an idea about something (Rolls-Royce = wealthy) we
are thinking metonymically. A form of metonymy that involves seeing
a whole in terms of a part or vice versa is called synecdoche. Using the
White House to stand for the presidency is an example of synecdoche.
Metonymy is another important technique used by advertisers to generate
information and emotional responses to advertisements.
Mimetic Theory of Art (and Mimetic Desire) This theory, dating from
Aristotle’s time, suggests that art is an imitation of reality. Mimesis means
“imitation.” The theory of mimetic desire, developed by René Girard,
is that people imitate the desire of others and that advertising uses this
mimetic desire to sell people products and services.
Model Models, in the social sciences, are abstract representations that explain
a phenomenon. Theories are typically expressed in language, but models
tend to be graphic or statistical or mathematical. Denis McQuail and Sven
Windahl defi ne model in Communication Models: For the Study of Mass Com-
munication (1993:2) as “a consciously simplifi ed description in graphic form
of a piece of reality. A model seeks to show the main elements of any struc-
ture or process and the relationships between these elements.”
Motivation Research Practitioners of motivation research argue that it is
necessary to determine and understand people’s unconscious and unrecog-
nized attitudes in order to persuade them to purchase products and services.
Ernest Dichter was one of the founding fathers of motivation research,
which, he argued, could be used also for many socially valuable purposes.
Myth Myths are conventionally understood to be sacred stories about gods
and cultural heroes (and in more recent years, mass-mediated heroes
and heroines) that are used to transmit a culture’s basic belief system to
younger generations and to explain natural and supernatural phenomena.
According to Mark Shorer (1968:355), “Myths are instruments by which
we continually struggle to make our experiences intelligible to ourselves.
A myth is a large, controlling image that gives philosophical meaning to
the facts of ordinary life.”
Narrowcasting A medium such as radio with stations that focus on dis-
crete groups of people is called narrowcasting. It contrasts with broad-
casting, which tries to reach as many people as possible. Advertisers use
208 Glossary
broadcasting, but they aim most of their advertisements at the 18–45
segment of the population.
Nonfunctional In sociological thought, something is nonfunctional if it
is neither functional nor dysfunctional, but plays no role in the entity in
which it is found.
Nonverbal Communication Our body language, facial expressions, styles
of dress, and hairstyles are examples of our communicating feelings and
attitudes (and a sense of who we are) without words. In advertising, a great
deal of the communication is done nonverbally. In some commercials,
almost all the information or meaning is communicated nonverbally. You
can see this if you turn off the sound and watch commercials. Notice how
in many commercials, facial expressions and body language are used to
sell the product.
Objective Theory of Art This theory argues that art is like a lamp and
projects a reality (that of the artist) rather than being like a mirror and
imitating reality.
Opinion Leader People whose opinions affect those of others are opinion
leaders. The notion that there are opinion leaders is part of the two-step
fl ow theory of communication. We can adapt this theory and suggest that
some people are fashion and lifestyle opinion leaders, who can be used to
sell products and services. See also Two-Step Flow.
Phallic Symbol An object that resembles the penis either by shape or func-
tion is described as a phallic symbol. Symbolism is a defense mechanism of
the ego that permits hidden or repressed sexual or aggressive thoughts to
be expressed in a disguised form. For a discussion of this topic see Freud’s
book The Interpretation of Dreams.
Phallocentric The term phallocentric is used to suggest societies that are
dominated by males, and the ultimate source of this domination, that
which shapes our institutions and cultures, is the male phallus. In this
theory, a link is made between male sexuality and male power.
Poetic Functions In Roman Jakobson’s theory, poetic functions are those
which use literary devices such as metaphor and metonymy. Poetic func-
tions differ, Jakobson suggests, from emotive functions and referential
functions. In this book I discuss the pseudo-poetic aspects of some adver-
tisements meant to convince people they are having a profound experi-
ence. See also Emotive Functions, Referential Functions.
Political Cultures According to political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, there
are four political cultures in every democratic society. They are: hierarchi-
cal or elitist (based on the notion that hierarchy is important and on a sense
of obligation of those at the top for those beneath them), individualist
(based on the notion that individuals are of primary importance and gov-
Glossary 209
ernment should do as little as possible, except for maximizing individual
initiative), egalitarian (based on the notion that everyone has certain needs
that have to be taken care of), and fatalist (based on the notion that some
people are at the lowest rungs of society and are controlled by those above
them. They can only escape their situation as a result of chance or luck).
See also Consumer Cultures.
Popular Popular is one of the most diffi cult terms used in discourse about the
arts and the media. Literally, the term means “appealing to a large number
of people.” It comes from the Latin popularis, “of the people.” Separating
the popular and elite arts has become increasingly problematic in recent
years. For example, is an opera shown on television an example of elite
or popular culture?
Popular Culture Popular culture is a term that identifi es certain kinds of
texts that appeal to a large number of people. But mass communication
theorists often identify (or should I say confuse?) “popular” with “mass”
and suggest that if something is popular, it must be of poor quality, appeal-
ing to the mythical “lowest common denominator.” Popular culture is
generally held to be the opposite of elite culture—arts that require certain
levels of sophistication and refi nement to be appreciated, such as ballet,
opera, poetry, and classical music. Many critics now question this popular
culture/elite culture polarity.
Postmodernism This theory states that a new kind of culture has developed
in the United States and elsewhere, since approximately 1950, which re-
jected the values and beliefs of the modernist society that had been domi-
nant until that time. One theorist of postmodernism argued that it involves
“incredulity toward metanarratives,” by which he meant the rejection of
the overarching religious, social, political, aesthetic, and moral theories of
the modernist period that have shaped people’s thinking and their lives.
Postmodernism is associated with stylistic eclecticism, a rejection of the split
between elite and popular culture. The theory is very controversial, and
important facets of it are explored in my books Postmortem for a Postmodernist
(a postmodern mystery) and The Portable Postmodernist.
Pragmatic Theory of Art This theory holds that art must do something,
have certain consequences that are held to be desirable. Thus art should
teach or indoctrinate or perform some function. Advertising is a good
example of a pragmatic art: It exists to do something—namely sell goods,
services, and at times, politicians and political parties.
Product Placement Because so many people are using TiVo and other
similar devices to fast-forward through commercials, or are avoiding them
in other ways, advertising agencies are now paying money to have their
products placed in television programs and fi lms, where the audiences for
210 Glossary
these texts will not or cannot fast-forward them out. In addition, advertis-
ers get a “halo” effect since their products become identifi ed with actors
and celebrities.
Psychoanalytic Theory Sigmund Freud can be said to be the founding
father of psychoanalytic theory. He argued that the human psyche had
three levels: consciousness, preconsciousness, and the unconscious, which
is the largest area of the psyche and an area not able to be accessed by
individuals. What is important is that the unconscious shapes and affects
our mental functioning and our behavior. Another of his theories pos-
ited three forces in the psyche: the id (desire), the ego (reason), and the
superego (guilt), which were continually battling with one another for
domination. Freud believed that sexuality and what he called “the Oe-
dipus Complex” play a dominant role in human behavior, even if their
presence is not recognized.
Psychographics In marketing the term psychographics is used to deal with
groups of people who have similar psychological characteristics or profi les.
It differs from demographics, which marketers use to focus upon social
and economic characteristics that people have in common.
Public Instead of popular culture, we sometimes use the terms public arts
or public communication to avoid the negative connotations of “mass” and
“popular.” A public is a group of people, a community. We can contrast
public acts—those meant to be known to the community—with private
acts, which are not meant to be known to others.
Rationalization In Freudian thought, a rationalization is a defense mech-
anism of the ego that creates an excuse to justify an action (or inaction
when an action is expected). Ernest Jones, who introduced the term,
used it to describe logical and rational reasons that people give to justify
behavior that is really caused by unconscious and irrational determi-
nants. We often use rationalizations to justify purchases that are unwise
and unnecessary.
Reader Response Theory (also Reception Theory) This theory suggests
that readers (a term used very broadly to cover people who read books,
watch television programs, go to fi lms, listen to texts on the radio, and so
on) play an important role in the realization of texts. Texts such as adver-
tising, then, function as sites for the creation of meaning by readers, and
different readers interpret a given text differently.
Referential Functions In Roman Jakobson’s theory, the referential func-
tion of speech deals with the way it helps speakers relate to their surround-
ings. He contrasts it with the emotive and poetic functions of speech. See
also Emotive Functions, Poetic Functions.
Glossary 211
Role Sociologists describe a role as a way of behavior that we learn in a
society and that is appropriate to a particular situation. A person gener-
ally plays many roles with different people during the hours of a day,
such as parent (family), worker (job), and spouse (marriage). We also
use the term to describe the parts actors have in mass-mediated texts,
including commercials.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis This hypothesis argues that language is not
something transparent that merely conveys information from one per-
son to another, but something that affects the way people think and act.
Language—for our purposes, language used in print advertisements and
radio and television commercials—is not like a windowpane but more
like a prism.
Secondary Modeling Systems Language, according to Yuri Lotman, is
our primary modeling system. Works of art, which use phenomena such
as myths and legends, function as secondary modeling systems; they are
secondary to language, that is. Lotman also argued that every element in
a text is important and that texts are so incredibly complex they can be
mined continually for new meanings.
Selective Attention (or Selective Inattention) We have a tendency to
avoid messages that confl ict with our beliefs and values. One way we do
this is through selective attention—avoiding or not paying attention to
messages that would generate cognitive dissonance. Thus, we tend to
ignore information that would counsel us not to buy something that we
want to buy.
Semiotics Literally, the term semiotics means “the science of signs.” Semeion
is the Greek term for sign. A sign is anything that can be used to stand
for anything else. According to C. S. Peirce, one of the founders of the
science, a sign “is something which stands to somebody for something
in some respect or capacity.” My book Signs in Contemporary Culture:
An Introduction to Semiotics (1999) discusses many of the more important
semiotic concepts and shows how they can be applied to popular culture.
Sign The basic concept in semiotics, the science of signs that deals with how
we fi nd meaning in images and other kinds of communication. Ferdinand
de Saussure, one of the founding fathers of semiotics, argued that a sign is
made up of a signifi er (a sound or object) and a signifi ed (a concept). The
relation between the signifi er and signifi ed is arbitrary and not natural.
Social Controls Social controls are ideas, beliefs, values, and mores peo-
ple get from their societies that shape their beliefs and behavior. People
are both individuals with certain distinctive physical and emotional
characteristics and desires and at the same time members of societies.
212 Glossary
And people are shaped to a certain degree by the institutions found in
these societies. The question this book considers is, What impact do
advertising in general and specifi c advertising texts have upon societies
and individuals?
Socialization Socialization refers to the processes by which societies teach
individuals how to behave: what rules to obey, roles to assume, and val-
ues to hold. Socialization was traditionally done by the family, educators,
religious fi gures, and peers. The mass media in general and advertising
in particular seem to have usurped this function to a considerable degree
nowadays, with consequences that are not always positive.
Socioeconomic Class A socioeconomic class is a categorization of people
according to their incomes and related social status and lifestyles. In Marx-
ist thought, there are ruling classes that shape the consciousness of the
working classes, and history is, in essence, a record of class confl ict.
Stereotypes Stereotypes are commonly held, simplistic, and inaccurate group
portraits of categories of people. Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or
mixed, but generally they are negative. Stereotyping involves making gross
overgeneralizations. (All Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, African-Americans,
WASPS, Americans, lawyers, doctors, professors, and so on, are held to
have certain characteristics, usually negative.) Stereotypes are used in ad-
vertising because they are thought to facilitate understanding by audiences.
Subculture Any complex society is made up of numerous subcultures that
differ from the dominant culture in terms of such matters as ethnicity,
race, religion, sexual orientation, beliefs, values, and tastes. Often mem-
bers of subcultures are marginalized and victimized by members of the
dominant culture. One problem advertisers face is in trying to reach and
persuade members of these subcultures to purchase products and services
designed for members of the dominant culture.
Superego In Freud’s structural hypothesis, the superego is the agency in our
psyches related to conscience and morality. The superego is involved with
processes such as approval and disapproval of wishes on the basis of their
morality, critical self-observation, and a sense of guilt over wrongdoing.
The functions of the superego are largely unconscious and are opposed
to id elements in our psyches. Mediating between the two and trying to
balance them are our egos. The superego, in my application of Freud’s
theory to advertising, is what tells the ego (and the id) that some product
or service that the id longs for is not needed. The id says, “I want to buy
it!” The superego says, “Don’t buy that!” And the ego helps the superego
deal with the id.
Suspension of Disbelief It was the English critic Samuel Coleridge who
fi rst used the phrase “suspension of disbelief” to describe what happens to
Glossary 213
people when they become involved with works of art and start identifying
with characters in these texts. Thus, in plays, fi lms, television shows, and
commercials, they forget or “suspend” their recognition of the fact that
they are members of an audience and become involved with the charac-
ters they are observing.
Symbol Literally speaking, a symbol is something that stands for something
else. The term comes from the Greek word symballein which means “to
put together.” Advertisers use symbols because they have powerful emo-
tional effects on people. Think, for example, of all that is found in three
symbols: the cross, the Star of David, and the crescent. In C.S. Peirce’s
theory of semiotics, there are three kinds of signs: icons, which commu-
nicate by resemblance; indexes, which communicate by cause and effect;
and symbols, whose meaning must be learned. Advertisers make use of
symbols because of their power to affect human emotions.
Taste Cultures Sociologist Herbert Gans’s theory that there are a number
of taste cultures in America, “each with its own art, literature, music,
and so forth, which differ mainly in that they express different aesthetic
standards.” Basic to his argument is the idea that all taste cultures are of
equal worth.
Teleculture The concept of teleculture suggests that television has become
a dominant infl uence on society and helps shape both individual behavior
and cultural institutions. Our culture used to be passed on through books,
parents, teachers, and others, but they have been supplanted by the char-
acters we see on television or in other media.
Text For our purposes, a text is, broadly speaking, any work of art in any
medium. Critics use the term text as a convenience—so they don’t have
to name a given work all the time or use various synonyms. There are
problems involved in deciding what the text is when we deal with serial
texts, such as soap operas or comics. In this book I use the term to stand
for print advertisements, radio and television commercials, and any other
kind of advertising or commercial messages carried by any medium.
Theory Theories, as I use the term, are expressed in language and systemati-
cally and logically attempt to explain and predict phenomena being stud-
ied. They differ from concepts, which defi ne phenomena that are being
studied, and from models, which are abstract, usually graphic in nature,
and explicit about what is being studied.
Two-Step Flow This refers to a theory of how mass communication
reaches and affects people. According to this theory, in the fi rst step the
media infl uence opinion leaders, and in the second step the opinion lead-
ers infl uence others. Applied to advertising, this suggests that large num-
bers of people are infl uenced by certain style and fashion leaders. People
214 Glossary
identify with others, which is why celebrities, supermodels, and actors are
often used in advertising. See also Opinion Leader.
Typology We will understand a typology to be a system of classifi cation of
things that is done to clarify matters.
Uses and Gratifi cations This sociological theory argues that researchers
should pay attention to the way audiences use the media (or certain texts
or genres of texts, such as print advertisements or radio and television
commercials) and the gratifi cations they get from their use of these texts
and the media. Uses and gratifi cations researchers focus, then, on how
audiences use the media and not on how the media affect audiences.
Values Values are abstract and general beliefs or judgments about what is
right and wrong, and what is good and bad, that have implications for in-
dividual behavior and for social, cultural, and political entities. There are a
number of problems with values from a philosophical point of view. First,
how does one determine which values are correct and good and which
aren’t? That is, how do we justify values? Are values objective or subjec-
tive? Second, what happens when there is a confl ict between groups, each
of which holds a central value that confl icts with that of another group?
Values are part of the VALS—values and lifestyles—marketing system.
Youth Culture Youth cultures are subcultures formed by young people
around some area of interest, usually connected with leisure and entertain-
ment, such as rock music, computer games, hacking, and so on. Typically,
youth cultures adopt distinctive ways of dressing and develop institutions
that cater to their needs. Simon Frith discusses this topic at length in his
book Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock and Roll (1981).
Youth cultures and young people, though they may have “antiestablish-
ment beliefs,” are particularly susceptible to the entrapments of advertising.
215
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
In this section I deal with a number of books that offer different approaches to the
matter of interpreting advertisements and understanding their social, cultural, and
ideological signifi cance. Many of the books use and apply semiotic theory, often in
combination with other approaches, since it has become the most important means of
deconstructing particular advertising texts and campaigns. There are many books on
advertising that I could have cited. I’ve chosen those that I feel are accessible and that
offer a variety of approaches to the subject. The regular bibliography (which follows
this section) lists hundreds of books that students interested in the subject can consult.
Anthony J. Cortese. Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising, Second
Edition. 2004. Rowman & Littlefi eld.
Cortese deals with important themes such as the semiotics of advertising in social
life, postmodernism and advertising, and the representation of marginalized groups
in America (such as blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, gays and les-
bians). He offers a systematic methodology for a sociological analysis of advertising.
Marcel Danesi, Interpreting Advertisements: A Semiotic Guide. 1995. Legas.
In this slender volume of 111 pages, Marcel Danesi offers an overview of semi-
otic theory and then applies it to analyze a number of advertisements, showing how
semiotics can be used to “deconstruct” advertisements and fi nd all kinds of interesting
things in them.
Stuart Ewen. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer
Culture. 1976. McGraw-Hill.
This important book deals with advertising’s impact on social life in America
and its functions as an instrument of social control. It has sections on “Advertising as
Social Production,” “The Political Ideology of Consumption,” and “Mom, Dad and
the Kids: Toward a Modern Architecture of Daily Life.”
Katherine Toland Frith, ed. Undressing the Ad: Reading Culture in Advertising. 1997.
Peter Lang.
As the subtitle of this book suggests, it is focused on the relationship between
advertising and culture. It contains theoretical chapters on advertising and others that
deal with specifi c advertisements for products such as those for Diesel jeans.
216 Annotated Bibliography
Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson. Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertis-
ing. 1996. Guilford.
The authors of this volume argue that advertising can be seen as involving “sign
wars” or “sign competitions,” which suggests a semiotic and sociological approach
to the industry. They argue that advertising agencies are involved in a brutal war
with other agencies to make their signs and advertisements—whether for sneakers or
any other product—dominant. The book combines semiotic theory and sociological
analysis of the advertising industry and of particular advertising campaigns.
Wolfang Fritz Haug. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Adver-
tising in Capitalist Society. 1986. University of Minnesota Press.
As the subtitle of the book suggests, Haug offers a Marxist interpretation of the
advertising industry and an indictment of its use of sexuality as a means of exploiting
those who are exposed to advertising. Haug’s focus is upon capitalism and its impera-
tives in “bourgeois” societies as they relate to advertising.
Montague Kern. 30-Second Politics: Political Advertising in the Eighties. 1989. Praeger.
An excellent overview and explanation of how political advertising has evolved
with a focus on some important and controversial political campaigns in the United
States in the 1980s.
Marshall McLuhan. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. 1967. Beacon.
McLuhan’s book was fi rst published in 1951 and can be regarded as a path-
breaking work, a true classic, that focused attention on the role popular culture played
in American culture. The book deals mostly with advertisements though it does discuss
some comic strips and other aspects of popular culture. What McLuhan does is to use
the tools of literary analysis and aesthetics to analyze the cultural signifi cance of several
dozen advertisements. His style is jazzy and his insights are penetrating.
Paul Messaris, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. 1997. Sage Publications.
This book is useful because it focuses upon visual phenomena and the role they
play in advertising. Thus it provides an important theoretical perspective involving
applied media aesthetics on how images can be used to persuade people and to affect
their emotions.
Greg Myers. Ad Worlds: Brands/Media/Audiences. 1999. Arnold.
Myers covers a wide range of topics such as how ads work, brands, globalization,
the Internet, audience research, and promotional culture. It was written for British
readers but its insights can be adapted to advertising in the United States and other
countries.
William M. O’Barr. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising.
1994. Westview.
O’Barr’s book is the same size as McLuhan’s and the design of the book and
analytical focus suggest a similarity with McLuhan’s. His focus is on the way adver-
Annotated Bibliography 217
tising presents “others” to the world, especially in travel advertising and advertising
dealing with people in other cultures, and on explicating the social ideologies found
in this advertising. O’Barr describes himself as being heavily infl uenced by Marxism
and semiotic theory.
Torben Vestergaard and Kim Schrøder. The Language of Advertising. 1985. Basil
Blackwell.
The focus in this book is on linguistic communication in print advertising,
but the authors are aware of the importance of visual images and deal with them
as well. Among the topics covered are verbal and visual messages, the structure of
advertisements, strategies for dealing with sex and class differences, and ideological
aspects of advertising.
219
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225
30-Second Politics: Political Advertising in
the Eighties, 110
Abrams, M.H., 58
Absolut vodka advertisements, 10
“A Cultural Theory of Preference
Formation,” 46
advertising: Americans annoyed by, 8;
appeals to id elements in psyches,
14; central institution in American
society, 30; children’s advertising,
190–192; communication process
and, 55–87; creates product
knowledge, 19–20; drug advertising,
187–190; Herbert Gans on, 34;
illusions about resisting, 3; impact
on American society, xx; Joe Camel
cigarette advertisements, 103;
Jonathan Edwards and problem
of free choice, 82–83; Key on
subliminal images, 73; Latin root
of word, 1; McLuhan on, 23–24;
McLuhan’s use of art criticism and
literary analysis, 24; money spent
on by media, 68; money wasted
on, 1; non-advertising forms
of advertising, 86–87; Pavlov’s
theories and, 74; payment of
workers in, 10–11; problem of
clutter, 7; pseudo-poetic appeals
to illiterati, 99–100; psychological
profi le of people in, 2; psycho-
cultural perspective on, 13; as pure
connotation, 54; role in socializing
young, 26; role of “creatives” in,
10; sex appeal and gender appeal,
101–102; sexploitation in, 94–96;
and sexuality, 89–107; sexuality
and cigarette advertisements,
104–105; size of industry, 1;
social-psychological model, 12;
and suspension of disbelief, 76–77;
teaches us about consumer goods,
32; tries to avoid superego elements
in psyche, 14; use of brain scans, xx;
use of psychiatry and social sciences,
xx; way agencies work, 6–7; way it
conditions us, 9
Advertising Age, 11
Ad Worlds: Brands/Media/Audiences, 64
Alien, 170
“All Consuming Passions for
Consuming,” 69
America: as quintessential consumer
culture, 42–43 ; taste cultures in,
33–34 ; Warner on six classes in, 20
Ansolabehere, Stephen, 109
Apple Computer, xiii
Aristotle, 77
Askegaard, Soren, 37
Bakhtin, M., 172
Bamossy, Gary, 37
Barnouw, Erik, 150
Baudrillard, Jean, 18–19, 22–23, 54
Baxter, Richard, 5
Beckett, Jamie, 125
Berger, John, 44, 91
Berkeley, George, 70
Bible: Adam and Eve, 157–158; snakes
and women, 157
Bilefsky, Dan, 80
INDEX
226 Index
Blade Runner, 170
Bourdin, Guy, 89
brands: belief in power of, xv; branded
individuals, 75–79 ; consumption and
self-alienation, 81; power of brands,
75 ; teenagers belief in, xv; use of in
marketing ourselves, 79–81
Brennan, Bridget, 101, 102
Brown, Jerry, 118
Bud Light, 86
Bulgari Connection, 86
Bush, George W., 120
Buying In: What We Buy and Who We
Are, 194
Cabana Cachaca liquor advertisements,
16
Calvin, John, 4
“Case of the Closet Target,” 75–76
cell phones and social media, 193–194
Checchi, Al, 113, 114
Chiat/Day Los Angeles, 170, 184, xi
children and advertising, 190–192
Clinton, Bill, 5
Clow, Lee, 184
Clustering of America, 136
Coen, Robert J., 126
“Commercial Alert” web site, 190
Commercialization of American Culture:
New Advertising, Control, and
Democracy, 124
Commodity Aesthetics: Ideology and
Culture, 87
Communication Models: For the Study of
Mass Communication, 58
communication theory: comparison of
models, 60; focal points and study
of media, 56–58; Jakobson model,
59–60; Lasswell formula and, 55;
problem with Lasswell formula, 58
Consciousness Industry, 126
Consumer Behaviour: A European
Perspective, 37
Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 31
consumer cultures, 29–53; agony of
choice, 85–86; classifi ed advertising,
51–53; Craigslist.org and classifi ed
advertising, 53; cultural criticism
approach to, 29–31; defi ned, 31–32;
founded on human sexuality, 91;
four different kinds described, 45–51;
four political and consumer cultures
described, 47–48; importance of
lifestyles, 31–32; John Berger’s Marxist
critique of advertising, 44; lifestyles
shape consumption, 49; maximizers
and satisfi zers, 85–86; mimetic
desire, 44–45; needs fi nite, desires
infi nite, 42–44; privatism and, 39–40;
shopping as a transforming experience,
43; television videos of “hauls,” 70
Cortese, Anthony J., 78, 88, 166
Course in General Linguistics, 50
Critique of Commodity Aesthetics:
Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising
in Capitalist Society, 28, 84, 124
Cultural Criticism, xxiii
Cultural Theory, 46
Culture Against Man, 99
Davis, Gray, 113–117
Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and
Meaning in Advertising, 89
department stores: functional alternatives
to cathedrals chart, 41; Neiman
Marcus and “couthifi cation,” 40–41
Dichter, Ernest, 72, 128
Dior, Christian, 89
Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction and
Democracy, 115
Douglas, Mary, 46, 48–51
Drewniak, Marcin, 80
drug advertising, 187–190
“Drug Industry Ads Aid GOP,” 189
Dun’s Review, 131
Edwards, Jonathan, 82–83
Eisenberg, Lee, 125, 130
Index 227
Eisenhower, Dwight David, 115
Eisenstein, Sergei, 173
Elliott, Stuart, 126, 141
Ellis, Richard, 46
Ellison, Sarah, 87
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 52
Enzenberger, Hans Magnus, 110,
126–128
Eskew, Carter, 123
Essential of Mass Communication Theory,
58, xxiii
Everyday Life in the Modern World, 64
Facebook: number of members, 9; tool
for selling advertising, 194
Farrell, Greg, xxiv
Featherstone, Mike, 31
Feinstein, Dianne, 113
Female Eunuch, 94
Fidji perfume advertisement, 150–165;
analyzing print advertisements, 152–
154; feminist interpretation of, 164–?;
Lotman’s ideas on textual analysis,
151–152; Marxist interpretation
of, 161–162; myth model applied
to, 162–163; psychoanalytic
interpretation of, 157–160; semiotic
interpretation, 155–157; sociological
interpretation of, 160–161
Finn, Bridget, 145
Foerster, Norman, 83
Ford, Tom, 101
Freedom of Will, 83
Freud, Sigmund, 13, 39, 71, 72, 77,
103, 121, 159, 163
Frith, Katherine Toland, 186, 187, xxiv
Galerianki or Mall Girls, 80
Gans, Herbert, 33–34
Garber, Marjorie, 103
“Gender Advertisements,” 97
“Generation M2: Media in the Lives of
8-to-18 Year Olds,” 66
Girard, René, 44, 45
Goffman, Erving, 97
Going Negative: How Political
Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the
Electorate, 109
Goldberg, Fred S., 11, xi, xxiii
Goldberg Moser O’Neill, 12, xi
Goodman, Ellen, 86
“Got Milk” campaign, 2–3, 10
Greer, Germaine, 94
Gruber, Selina, 143
Hall, Trish, 143
Hamburger, Tom, 189
Harman, Jane, 113, 114
Harper’s Bazaar, 90
“Harry and Louise” ads, 5
“Hate, Greed and Aggression,” v
Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, 84, 87, 124, 161
Henry, Jules, 99
Herman-Cohen, Valli, 89, 106
Hidden Persuaders, xx
Hingis, Martina, 65
Howard, Niles, 131
How Customers Think: Essential Insights
into the Mind of the Market, 38–39, 128
Huffi ngton, Michael, 113
humor: “halo effect” and advertising,
16; techniques of humor chart, 18;
use in advertising, 16–18
“In a Shift, Marketers Beef Up Spending
Inside Store,” 87
“The Industrialization of the Mind,”
110
INSEAD: The European Institute of
Business Administration, xxii
Internet: advertising on, 8; and social
media, 27; and teleculture, 21
Interpublic, 127
Itow, Laurie, 131, 134
Iyengar, Shanto, 109
Jagger, Bianca, 47
Jakobson, Roman, 59, 60
228 Index
Jameson, Fredric, 36
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 115
Jobs, Steve, xiii
Johnson, Mark, 61
Johnson, Philip, 34
Journal of Advertising Research, 191
Jung, Carl, 71
Kaiser Family Foundation, 66
Kern, Montague, 110–111
Key, Wilson Bryan, 73–74
Kurtz, Bruce, 67, 68, 166
Kurtz, Howard, 123
Lakoff, George, 61
Language of Advertising, 186
Lasswell, Harold, 55, 60, 61
Lauren, Ralph, 65
Law and Order, 86
Lefebvre, Henri, 64
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 179
Living Proof Cream Hydracel
advertisement, 96, 98
Los Angeles Times, 117, 118
Lotman, Yuri, 151, 152, 167
Love is a Many Splendoured Thing, 100
Lutens, Serge, 157
Lyotard, Jean-François, 35
MacAllister, Matthew P., 124
Macintosh “1984” commercial, 167–
185: alienated proles, 181; allusions
to IBM, 182–183; background of
commercial, 170–171; Big Brother
fi gure, 175; blond as mediating
fi gure, 179–180; brainwasher’s
message, 175–176; brainwashing
scenario, 174; heroine as mythic
fi gure, 177–178; image of total
institution in, 172–173; levels of
analyzing blond heroine image, 180;
Orwell’s 1984 novel and, 171–172;
prisoner’s boots, 173; psychoanalytic
interpretation of, 178–179; scholarly
research about, 183–185; synopsis
of text, 169–170; topics to analyze,
167–169; voted second-best
television commercial in 1980s, xxii
Mademoiselle, 106
Man and His Symbols, 71
Marcus, Stanley, 41
“Marketers Put a Price on Your Life,”
xxiv
marketing society, 125–149; blogs
and marketing, 144–145; Claritas
typology, 138–140; comparison of
typologies, 147–148; demographics
and psychographics, 129; illusion of
willpower, 128; illusions of freedom,
126–128; magazine choice and
consumer taste, 140–142; Maslow’s
theory of needs, 130; statistics
on advertising, 125–126; types
of teenage consumers, 142–144;
universal typology, 145–147; VALS
typology, 130–136; zip codes and
kinds of consumers, 136–138
Marx, Karl, 127–128, 161–162
Maslow, Abraham, 130, xvi
McCain, John, 118–119, 122
McGreevy, Patrick, 118
McLuhan, Marshall, 23–24, 57, 147
McQuail, Denis, 58
Mechanical Bride, 23–24, 147
media: weak media theory and escape
from regulation, 14; weak or
powerful debate, 14
Media Analysis Techniques, xxiii
Messaris, Paul, 8–9, 92–93, 108, 150
metaphor: defi nition of, 61; importance
in everyday life, 61; metaphor and
metonymy chart, 62; seashell game,
63
Metaphors We Live By, 61
metonymy: defi nition of, 61; metaphor
and metonymy chart, 62; use in
advertising, 61
Moriarty, Sandra, 183, 184
Index 229
Murray, Rick, 144
Myers, Greg, 64
Myth and Modern Man, 96
National Public Radio (NPR), 189
Neiman Marcus: “couthifi cation”
hypothesis, 40–41; department stores
and cathedrals chart, 41
Nelson, Emily, 87
New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis, 13–14
New York Daily News, 70
New York Times, 68, 126
Nichols, Dan, 166
Nofziger, Lyn, 117
Obama, Barack, 118–119
“Ode to W.H. Channing,” 52
Ominicom, 127
Orwell, George, 171–172, 173
Packard, Vance, xx
Paradox of Choice, 85
Patai, Raphael, 95
Pavlov, Ivan, 9, 74, 75, xxi
Peirce,C.S., 155
People of Plenty, 30–31
Pepto-Bismol, 86
Poizner, Steve, 118
political advertising, 109–123; 1998
California Primary, 113–114; 2002
California campaign for governor,
116–117; 2010 California campaign
for governor, 118; categories of,
115; changes in nature of, 111; cost
of presidential campaigns, 118–119;
death of the tobacco bill, 122–123;
emotional basis of party politics, 120–
121; four stages in typical campaigns,
111–113; positive appeals and their
negations chart, 119; questions raised
by California 1998 Primary, 114–115
Popular Culture and High Culture: An
Evaluation of Taste, 33
postmodernism: as advanced form of
capitalism, 36; as cultural mutation,
38; de-differentiation and, 37;
defi ned, 34; impact on commercials,
37; Jameson on, 36; Lyotard on, 35;
“Obsession” television commercial
and, 37; pastiche as basic art form,
35; simulations dominant, 35
Potter, David, 30–31
“Primping or Pimping,” 89, 106
Procter & Gamble Co., 87
Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology
and Symbolic Expression, 108
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, 4
Protestantism and capitalism: Max
Weber on, 4–5; wealth as a sign of
God’s love, 5
Provocateur: Images of Women and
Minorities in Advertising, 78, 88, 166
“Psychoanalysis,” 71; consciousness,
preconscious and unconscious chart,
72; Dichter on role of unconscious
in decision making, 72; Freud on the
unconscious, 71; id, ego, and superego
relationship, 77; Jung on willpower,
71; Key on role of unconscious,
73; levels of consciousness, 72;
unconscious shapes behavior, xxi
Publicis, 127
Puritan ethic, 4–5, 19; hard work and
absentation in workforce, 19; wealth
a sign of God’s blessing, 4
Reagan, Ronald, 115
Reiman, Arnold S., 189
Riordan, Richard, 117
Riviere, Joan, v
Roslaniec, Katarzyna, 80
Rothfeld, Michael, 118
Ruskin, Gary, 68
sacred: merged with profane in middle
ages, 42; relation to profane, 42;
230 Index
unconscious religious basis to modern
behavior, 42
Salary Wizard, 11
San Francisco Chronicle, 89, 125, 136
San Francisco Sunday Examiner and
Chronicle, 131
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 50, 155, 156
Sayre, Shay, 183, 184
Scholes, Robert, 59
Schrøder, Kim, 186
Schwartz, Barry, 85–86
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 117, 118
Scott, Ridley, 170, 171
Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to
Visual Communication, xxiii
semiotics: concepts are purely
differential, 50; importance of
oppositions, 50; relationships basic,
50; signs composed of signifi er and
signifi ed, 50; signs defi ned, 50
Semiotic Society of America, 183
sexting, 107
sexuality and advertising, 89–107; male
preferences of physical attractiveness,
92–93; problem of clutter, 103–107;
sex sells cigarettes, 102; sexually
explicit fashion ads, 89–90; stereotypes
generated by advertising, 93; subtexts
of ads involves desirability, 91; thin
models and status, 93; use of anxiety
to sell, 96, 98
Shoptimism, 125
Signs in Contemporary Culture: An
Introduction to Semiotics, xxiii
Signs of Our Times: The Secret Meanings of
Everyday Life, 37, 54, 105
Simon, Bill, 117
Solomon, Jack, 37, 54, 105
Solomon, Michael, 32
Solow, Martin, 75–76
Spengler, Marie, 131
Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate, 150
Spots: The Popular Art of American
Television Commercials, 67, 166
Strategy of Desire, 72, 128
Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction,
59
Structure of the Artistic Text, 151
Subliminal Seduction, 73
Super Bowl: cost of commercials in, 2;
television commercials and, 24–26
Survivor, 86
“Suspension of Disbelief as a Bridge
between Media and Consumption,”
76
System of Objects, 22, 54
taste cultures: each are valid for
members of, 33; Herbert Gans on,
33–34; problems posed to advertising
agencies, 34
teleculture, 21–24
television commercials: Baudrillard on,
22–23; consuming as a “reward,” 20;
and ethos of success in America, 19;
heroes and heroines in, 15; humor
in, 16–17; as mini-dramas, 15; most
powerful form of advertising, 15; part
of teleculture, 26–27; sexuality in,
15–16
Theater of Envy, 44
Thompson, Michael, 46
Troy, Helen of, 45
Twitter, 194
Underhill, Paco, 43, 128, 191, xv
Undressing the Ad: Reading Culture in
Advertising, xxiv, 186
Ungaro, Emmanuel, 89, 90
Vestegaard, Torben, 186
Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in
Advertising, 8–9, 92, 108, 150
Walker, Rob, 194
Wall Street Journal, 74, 75, 87, 88, 117,
189
Walters, Dan, 117
Wanamaker, John, 1
Waning of the Middle Ages, 42
Index 231
Warner, W. Lloyd, 20, 33
Ways of Seeing, 44, 91
Weber, Max, 4–5, xvi
Wegner, Daniel, 128
Weiss, Michael, 136, 137, 138
Weldon, Fay, 86
Wernick, Andrew, 108
Westen, Drew, 120, 121
“When It’s All Too Much,” 85
Whitman, Meg, 118
Why She Buys: The New Strategy of
Reaching the World’s Most Powerful
Consumers, 101
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping,
43, xv
Wildavsky, Aaron, 46–48, 121
Wiley, Norbert, 76, 77
Williamson, Judith, 89
Windahl, Sven, 58
WPP, 127
Young & Rubicam, xi
YouTube, 70, 194
Zaltman, Gerald, 38, 39, 128
Zollo, Peter, 100
233
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arthur Asa Berger is professor emeritus of broadcast
and electronic communication arts at San Francisco State
University, where he taught from 1965 until 2003. He at-
tended the University of Massachusetts, the University of
Iowa, and the University of Minnesota, where he received
a Ph.D. in American studies in 1965. He wrote his disserta-
tion on the comic strip Li’l Abner. During the 1963–1964
school year, he had a Fulbright scholarship to Italy and
taught at the University of Milan. He spent a year as visit-
ing professor at the Annenberg School for Communication
at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in
1984 and taught a short course on advertising in 2002 as a
Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Heinrich Heine Univer-
sity in Düsseldorf, Germany.
He is the author of numerous articles, book reviews, and books on the
mass media, popular culture, humor, and everyday life. Among his recent
books are Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon,
Jewish Jesters:The Art of Comedy Writing, and The Portable
Postmodernist. He has also written a number of myster-
ies: Die Laughing,The Hamlet Case, Postmortem for a Post-
modernist, The Mass Comm Murders: Five Media Theorists
Self-Destruct, and Durkheim Is Dead: Sherlock Holmes Is
Introduced to Social Theory. His books have been translated
into German, Swedish, Italian, Korean, Indonesian,
Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. He has lectured in more
than a dozen countries in the course of his career.
Berger is married, has two children and four grand-
children, and lives in Mill Valley, California. His wife
teaches philosophy at Diablo Valley College.
- TITLE PAGE
- COPYRIGHT
- CONTENTS
- FOREWORD
- PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
- PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- CHAPTER 1. ADVERTISING IN AMERICAN SOCIETY
- CHAPTER 2. CONSUMER CULTURES
- CHAPTER 3. ADVERTISING AND THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS
- CHAPTER 4. RUNNING IT UP A FLAGPOLE TO SEE IF ANYONE SALUTES
- CHAPTER 5. SEXUALITY AND ADVERTISING
- CHAPTER 6. POLITICAL ADVERTISING
- CHAPTER 7. THE MARKETING SOCIETY
- CHAPTER 8. ANALYZING PRINT ADVERTISEMENTS or: Six Ways of Looking at a Fidji Perfume Advertisement
- CHAPTER 9. ANALYZING TELEVISION COMMERCIALS: The Macintosh “1984” Commercial
- CHAPTER 10. WHERE NEXT?
- APPENDIX: USEFUL WEB SITES
- GLOSSARY
- ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
