mind body soul final
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EIU4126Module1Representations.pptxRepresentations, Multiculturalism, and Mass Media
Keep this in your thoughts throughout the class!
Has there ever been an institution so reviled as modern advertising, so hectored, so blamed for the ills of society?
Yet has there ever been an institution so responsible for conveying ...the most alluring, the most sensitive, and the most filled with human yearning?
-James B. Twitchell, Adcult USA
Keep this in your thoughts throughout the class!
The ad industry has managed to mainstream pornographic images and desensitize the populace into accepting the humiliation of women in advertising. Pornography implies the use of sexuality as if it were some kind of commodity for sale (Strnad, 1993).
Famous Quotes
“Advertising blasts everything that is good and beautiful in this land with a horrid spreading mildew” Herman Wouk
“Advertising’s contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Advertising is the cheapest way of selling good, particularly if the goods are worthless.” Sinclair Lewis
Definitions
Ad Deconstruction: is the analysis of advertising in such a way as to reinterpret implied meanings.
Marginalized Groups: Women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, people who identify as LGBTQ, people with disabilities, others?
What is Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective and global cultural narrative.
In other words, advertising is created to remove our objectivity about the world and possessions; advertising attempts to remove cultural and global differences to make us one.
What is Postmodernism
Postmodernism emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial; challenging these dichotomies.
Postmodernism has influenced many cultural fields, including literary criticism, sociology, linguistics, architecture, visual arts, and music.
Ideology
An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (think: world or societal view), it is often a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of the society (a "received consciousness" or product of socialization).
What is Advertising?
“A paid, mass-mediated attempt to persuade”
“A specific message that an organization has placed to persuade an audience”
A message that has been called to the attention of a public audience, especially by paid announcement.
What is Advertising?
Advertising more than art, literature, or editorials
Allows us to track our sociological history: the rise and fall of fads, crazes, and social movements; political issues of the times; entertainment, vices, food, and scenes of how the social life was and should be lived.
The only institution comparable in scope and magnitude was the Roman Catholic Church of the early Renaissance (Twitchell, 1996).
Branding
The process of differentiation…the core of advertising!
What distinguishes similar products is not ingredients, but packaging. (Shampoo)
Branding seeks to nullify or compensate for the fact that products are fundamentally the same and interchangeable.
Spending
How much is being spent to tell you how to think and feel?
Any guesses…
Spending
Advertising is a $180 billion-per-year industry.
Average number of advertisement and brand exposures per day per person: 5,000+
Average number of “ads only” exposures per day: 362
Average number of “ads only” noted per day: 153
Average number of “ads only” that we have some awareness of per day: 86
Average number of “ads only” that made an impression (engagement): 12
Consumers are remembering fewer ads after seeing so many day. This forces marketers to become more shocking in their advertising.
Nostalgia Industry
This type of advertising is based on the embellishment or recreation of the past for commercial purposes.
It does not truly represent our history and is one of the most opaque masks of white cultural dominance.
Appears to show whiteness as the lost innocence and everyone is white.
Magical thinking is at the heart of both religion and advertising (James Twitchell)
In the past advertising promised instant access to desire and love; consequently advertising seems to assume a belief in magic. (You buy the car you get the woman)
In modern advertising (to market a brand), advertisers use a very soft sell where the product is NOT the focus in most cases.
United Colors of Benetton Ads
Attempts at racial harmony and a “global village” look.
Many ads do not even show the products, but attempt to capture social issues that are at the cutting edge
Benetton has a reputation for provocative advertising, with shocking visuals to attract the reader’s attention.
United Colors of Benetton Ads
Many of the Benetton ads are so controversial they have been banned-
A black woman nursing a white baby
HIV/AIDS ad
Death Row inmates
A nun kissing a priest
