Assignment: Social Marketing Assignment
LDE299
Introductionadvertisingandculture.pdf
Introduction – advertising and culture
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This book is about advertising and culture. Advertising is a signifi cant aspect of modern societies and plays an important part in economic activity. It is a highly visible component of everyday life and increasingly of contemporary culture. Th e book considers culture as a broad category of human endeavour and experience. It takes a multidisciplinary approach drawing on media and cultural studies and the study of history and of art history, sociology, politics and political economy for ideas and explanations that can be applied to advertising and culture. Indeed the book’s contributors are drawn from each of these areas of academic enquiry. Th eir contributions represent strands and tensions in the relationship between diff erent aspects of culture, such as fashion, art, popular music, politics and media, and the world of advertising. Th e book raises the question of how, to what eff ect and with what intensity, advertising features – as the Advertising Standards Authority, the UK’s advertising regulator, recently put it – as a ‘common subject’ in our cultural lives. Th e book deals with advertising and culture primarily within a British context, but in an increasingly globalised world many of its themes and issues are relevant to societies where advertising is a growing presence.
Terms and defi nitions
Th is book explores the relationship between advertising and culture and this introduction outlines the book’s scope, content and themes. To begin with, a tentative exploration of the terms central to the enquiry is needed. By its very nature a book titled Advertising as Culture has already brought these two things together as a combination of words in language. It has created a conjunctive relation between advertising and culture, linking and articulating two separate, but now connected, ideas or concepts. We rely on language, not just to deal with concepts but to be able to talk about and share our experiences. Advertising and culture are recognised and experienced in the everyday, sensuous experience of lived reality. We see, hear, read and react to advertising and we live out our lives in and through culture surrounded by its activities and artefacts.
Having established the conjunctive relationship between advertising and culture as represented in language, we need to break them apart, to explore them in their disjunctive existences. Th erefore to begin our exploration of what we mean by these terms we need to remove the conjunctive: that is, take the ‘and’ out of advertising and culture. Th is will enable us to engage with them primarily on their own terms.
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Advertising as Culture
4
So what do we mean by advertising? At one level advertising is a specifi c form of communication that provides information, raises awareness or instigates interest in a particular product or service. As part of marketing the intention is usually, but not always, to increase the use or consumption of the item that the advertisement or advertising campaign is promoting. Th is is usually in the interest of increasing turnover, sales and profi ts but wider social benefi ts may occur. Advertising in this sense is a means towards an end.
Advertising is also an industry with organisational and institutional structure. It is an important part of advanced market economies providing a channel for capital and employment, careers and training in a range of occupations from creative work to fi nance and research. It also has an ideological role; as Judith Williamson suggested a generation ago, it provides ‘structures of meaning’ (1978: 12). At its core is the activity of advertising: of creating advertising campaigns. Th is involves not only individual workers and agencies involved in marketing strategies, promotional and creative work but also organisations that represent the interests of the industry, research organisations, regulatory bodies and a wider media interest.
Advertising output is prodigious. From telephone to television, radio and Internet to billboards and cinema and from handhelds to handbills: it is very much part of the everyday and the everywhere. Advertising has become as Leiss et al. have suggested ‘an integral part of modern culture’ (2005: 5).
So having briefl y explored what we mean by ‘advertising’, we can now pose the same question of ‘culture’. Cultural Studies, according to Jim McGuigan, has made the distinction between, ‘“Culture” with a capital C’ and, ‘lower-case culture as the medium of social communication’ (2010: 2). In everyday use, ‘capital C culture’ is oft en thought of in the way Raymond Williams referred to it as the ‘works and practices of intellectual especially artistic activity’ (Williams 1983: 90). Th is might include what is termed ‘high’ culture, extolled by Victorian thinkers such as Matthew Arnold as ‘the best that has been thought and said’. In today’s world this can appear crowded out by ‘lower case culture’, the popular culture that is increasingly a product transmitted and experienced through a rapidly expanding media technology. Raymond Williams off ered a working defi nition of culture that identifi es three components: the ‘documentary’, the ‘ideal’ and ‘way of life’. Th e ‘documentary’ refers to texts and artefacts, the material aspects of culture and the ‘ideal’ can be the standards and norms of culture against which other cultural elements are compared. Th e ‘way of life’ refers to the forms of behaviour and ‘structures of feeling’ that a ‘people, a period or a group’ have in common. Crucially for Williams each of these is a necessary component to a defi nition of culture. On this basis we can picture diff erent cultural formulations from global to local communities and from social class to gender to artistic or consumer culture. Inserting diff erent documents that are associated with diff erent cultural traditions and imagining ideal forms and how these are important to diff erent ways of thinking, feeling and behaving can help us give shape to the cultures we inhabit and to ones we are less familiar with.
On this basis we can restore the conjunctive: bring back together – reunite the concepts of advertising and culture, perhaps recognising that consumer and media culture are closely
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Introduction
5
related phenomena. For many people advertising, media and consumption are experienced as a common culture (Willis 1990; Williams 1990). A common culture is by its very nature one that is shared but perhaps also as Terry Eagleton, following Williams, suggests: culture is ‘common only when it is collectively made’ (2000: 119). Culture, then, is always contested: whose culture; what meanings does it have; what kind of work does it do and in whose interest? Rojek puts it more strongly: ‘Cultural Studies insists upon conceptualising culture as the intersection of force and resistance’ (2007).
Scope and outline
Th e scope of the chapters that follow are both broad in approach and in subject matter, ranging from fashion through popular music to politics. Two strands are apparent. Th e fi rst deals generally with the social and cultural role of advertising and the second with specifi c areas of culture, such as fashion, where advertising features prominently.
Th e fi rst strand considers how advertising has developed and become an essential economic and social element of a society largely driven by the imperatives of capital. Advertising has a broad set of functions from information to entertainment and from persuasion to myth and mystifi cation. Several chapters are relevant to an exploration of these. In particular ‘Advertising – a way of life’, ‘Spreads like butter’, ‘Media and advertising’ and ‘Selling politics’ deal specifi cally with these matters.
Th e second strand analyses areas of culture where advertising plays a signifi cant part. For instance, advertising draws on the artistic, cultural and technical expertise of workers in areas such as art and design and information technology. It utilises and reappropriates ideas, designs and artefacts produced in these areas and in addition creates its own productions and products that can be analysed using criteria associated with these areas of cultural production. ‘Handbags and gladrags’ deals with fashion, ‘Music and advertising’ and ‘Th e cultural economy of death’ with popular music. Th e world of modern art is explored in ‘Art and advertising’, and that of computing and information technology in ‘On-line digi-ads’. Th e wide range of cultural areas dealt with in the book is symptomatic of the depth and breadth of advertising in contemporary society.
Th e chapter ‘Advertising research’ and to a lesser extent ‘Spreads like butter’ consider the diff erent perspectives and forms of research that might be applied to a society in which advertising is a prominent feature and to advertising’s links with culture.
Chapter outlines
Th e fi rst chapter, ‘Advertising – a way of life’, ‘by Tony Purvis, off ers an analysis of how culture in Europe and America and increasingly in Asia and China ‘continues to be shaped in relation to advertising and advertisements’. Exploring the works of Williams, Barthes,
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Advertising as Culture
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Freire, Merton and Žižek, this chapter off ers a telling critique of contemporary advertising. It opens and concludes with a visit to the sets of Mad Men, a television drama about the world of advertising: ‘Mad Men’s irony goes some way in exposing how these PR campaigns sit jarringly next to cultural oppression and social segregation, and where the same uncanny silences that punctuate the script’s dialogue and sets shout loudly of discontent and division in the culture itself ’.
In Chapter 2, ‘Advertising research’, John Fenwick and Chris Wharton provide a critical introduction to research theory and practice examining a variety of theoretical perspectives, competing traditions and academic approaches that underpin social research as applied to advertising. Th e chapter looks at research design, methods and techniques of enquiry. Advertising research is presented as constituted by both industry enquiry into its own products and activities and by critical research conducted from outside the world of advertising. Th e chapter asks what constitutes research in this fi eld, making a distinction between informal and systematic research and outlines the core components of research: qualitative and quantitative approaches; primary and secondary aspects; sampling; choice of method and analysis of fi ndings; ethics and values. Th e chapter explores the application of research to advertisements and to people and their cultures.
In Chapter 3, ‘Spreads like butter – culture and advertising’, Chris Wharton looks at the importance of technology to advertising, the development of diff erent advertising forms and the cultural signifi cance of advertising agencies. Advertising has increased its hold on culture over time, fi lling more spaces, screens and channels than ever before. Th e chapter considers homology: how contemporary advertising ‘fi ts’ with culture. Th is is identifi ed in entifi ed in three stages: fi rstly, in the production and creation of advertising campaigns; secondly, as three stages: fi rstly, in the production and creation of advertising campaigns; secondly, as a highly visible presence in a range of media forms that circulate in social and cultural a highly visible presence in a range of media forms that circulate in social and cultural experience; and thirdly, in advertising’s subsequent reception by audiences who bring their own cultural experiences to bear. Th e chapter is concerned with how advertising enters, fi ts and fl ows through contemporary culture and the kind of meanings it might have for people.
Th e fi t between advertising and culture is represented in several chapters through an analysis of the world of fashion, art and popular music. In the fi rst of these, Chapter 4, ‘Handbags and gladrags – the rise and rise of accessories in fashion and advertising’, Hilary Fawcett looks at the development of fashion-accessory markets in Britain in the post-war period and how advertising adapted to changed economic and cultural circumstances. Women’s magazines are shown to be crucial to the promotion of fashion, to markets and a culture increasingly associated with celebrity and the ‘consumer’s desire for status and identity’ in which easy credit and ‘impulse buying has been condoned and accepted in an advertising culture which justifi es extravagance with “because you’re worth it”’. She concludes that the ‘hedonism and aspiration that has marked consumer cultures in the past twenty years is now up for question’.
Judith Stevenson in Chapter 5, ‘Music and advertising – a happy marriage?’ examines the close relationship between advertising and popular music. Acknowledging the complexity
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Introduction
7
and ambiguity apparent in the reception of adverts that use pop music, she explores the symbiotic relationship between music and advertising. Th e chapter argues that ‘for many people music is an essential part of their lives and an important aspect of identity. Generations are defi ned by popular music’. Research suggests that music is an important factor in the lives of one of the main target groups for advertisers: 16- to 24-year olds. Her themes include music in fashion advertising, connections between Pop Art, pop music and ads with a look at rock band Th e Who and a case study of the motif of the young crowd in contemporary adverts.
In Chapter 6, ‘Th e cultural economy of death – popular music and advertising’, Paula Hearsum explores the triple concoction of advertising, music and death, ‘an intoxicating mix which harnesses the intense and dynamic relationship between a listener, a dead musician and the music itself ’. Th e chapter explores the use of posthumous musical releases, the re- packaging of material to coincide with anniversaries of a musician’s death and the release of biopics, soundtracks and back catalogues which aim to increase sales by advertising the demise of the musician. From Elvis to Amy Winehouse, the ‘industry of death requires all elements of the relationship to work in synchronicity: the advertising industry, the popular music industry, musicians and audiences’.
Chapter 7, ‘Art and advertising from the 1880s to the present’ by Malcolm Gee, is a further exploration of a symbiotic cultural relationship. As advertising expanded and became established in the modern period it ‘appropriated and adapted visual styles and approaches developed in the sphere of fi ne art … fi ne art practices themselves have been increasingly infl uenced by an awareness of the visual characteristics of advertising, and the place that these occupy in modern consciousness’. Th e chapter explores forms of modernism and how the general principle of abstraction and techniques like photomontage were complementary to the aims of advertising. Th e chapter ends with an examination of contemporary practice and concludes that ‘whereas in the 1890s, advertising, via the poster, aspired to the prestige of art, art today is both attracted and threatened by the power of advertising’.
Online computer-based digital advertising is a relatively new experience. David Reid in Chapter 8, ‘On-line digi-ads’, explores the genesis of computing and online advertising, recognising how this has, in its multiple forms, taken hold not just of the newly developing online culture but more widely in the already established world of marketing and consumer relations. Th is is an important area of enquiry recognising a cultural shift where the globalised world searches amongst commodity forms for entertainment, knowledge and education. Th e quotidian culture of the everyday learns to appreciate the real anew and the exciting potential of the virtual takes form as new ways to purchase and consume. Th e chapter provides an overview of digi-online forms.
Advertising and its techniques are not only used by the private sector to promote and sell goods and services to the masses, they are also used by politicians, political parties and governments to promote their products to the public. Politicians seek to convey their personal attributes and personalities; political parties strive to publicise their ideologies, programmes and visions; while governments aim to communicate their messages, policies and services.
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Advertising as Culture
8
In Chapter 9, ‘Selling politics – the political economy of political advertising’, Andrew Mullen makes the case for a critical political economy approach to the study of political advertising. Developed over a century ago by the state, political advertising has become an important element of the ‘propaganda-managed democracies’ (Chomsky 1995: vi) that have developed in Britain, the United States and other capitalist, liberal-democratic societies. It has proved eff ective in shaping political attitudes, beliefs and behaviours following its pioneering use in selling war in the early part of the twentieth century. It is applied to selling ideas such as capitalism and the nation, political parties, politicians and political candidates. Th e amount spent on political advertising increased signifi cantly as it became an integral aspect of the political system and integrated into public relations and other corporate communication strategies. Ever more eff ective propaganda means that the space within the public sphere for informed and lively debate is constantly under attack and this is made worse by an education system which fails to properly inform citizens about advertising, the media, politics and sociology.
Monika Metykova in Chapter 10, ‘Citizens and consumers – media and advertising’, looks at advertising as a source of fi nance for the media industries. Th e chapter outlines how advocates of privately run commercial media systems argue that this is the way of guaranteeing independence from political and economic interference. Th e market may well serve the interests of consumers, but advertising revenue competition means that audience volumes determine media contents. Th is is likely to privilege consumer interests over those of the citizen. Nevertheless, public service broadcasting has an obligation to civic culture. Regulation is of crucial importance in securing public interest in communication and ASA and Ofcom play a key role in United Kingdom advertising. Th ere has been a general shift away from citizen-oriented regulation with increasing reliance on self-regulation rather than direct statutory regulation. Th e chapter argues against ‘underestimating the connections between the roles that media play in democratic societies, the ways in which they obtain funding for their activities and the regulatory frameworks that governments put in place.’
Th emes and issues
A number of key issues, themes and concepts essential to a critical approach to advertising and culture are identifi ed and developed in these chapters. As an increasing presence, advertising’s forms and infl uences are colonising ever increasing areas of experience forming a ‘way of life’ that although relatively recent is oft en taken for granted. Homology and symbiosis are attached to this and are important concepts to apply to advertising and culture. Th ese are followed by an analysis of ‘power and oppression’, ‘identity’, ‘creativity’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘desire’ associated with advertising. Th e themes of ‘history’ and ‘technology’ are also central to several of the chapters.
Th e idea of advertising as an element of culture and a strategic aspect of a modern way of life is developed from the work of Williams and outlined and explored in Chapter 1,
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Introduction
9
‘Advertising – a way of life’ and Chapter 3, ‘Spreads like butter’. In Chapter 3 advertising homology is linked to this and the fi t between advertising and other forms of culture and the everyday ordinariness of its manifestations is introduced as an essential element of modern culture. Th e symbiotic relation between music and advertising is explored in Chapter 5 and between art and advertising in Chapter 7. Th e power of commodity capitalism is shown, in ‘Advertising – a way of life’, to be closely linked to advertising and culture and functions through oppression and by its very nature helps defi ne and maintain inequalities. Chapter 9, ‘Selling politics’, continues an exploration of the theme of power, as it operates in the overt aspects of political advertising and the machinery of the state but also in its role in securing a more general class-based hegemony. Chapter 10, ‘Media and advertising’, also deals with that aspect of advertising power secured through media funding and the subsequent privilege aff orded to the narrow category of consumer culture over that of civic culture and the wider interests of citizens. Th is chapter also deals with the issue of advertising regulation which can limit the power of organisations and elites in this respect.
Th e importance of social identity to an analysis of advertising is raised in Chapter 5, ‘Music and advertising’, where identity and identifi cation with popular music and advertising texts, particularly by young people, is examined. In Chapter 4, ‘Handbags and gladrags’, the place of fashion and fashion advertising is explored in the construction of femininities. More generally, in ‘Spreads like butter’ identity is explored as one important element of decoding strategies manifest in advertising readings. ‘Advertising – a way of life’ off ers a broad analysis of the theme where identity is associated with consumption rather than other shared experiences based on the productive aspects of work and labour. Th e critical tools of culture and audience theory are shown not so much to undermine the industry’s preoccupation with brand-related consumer identities, but used by the industry to identify a larger market share. ‘Media and advertising’ is concerned with consumer and citizen identities. Investigating identities is a theme of Chapter 2, ‘Advertising research’, where both critical research and advertising industry research are shown to share similar methods of enquiry if not the same ends. Th e nature of creativity as it is channelled through the technical means of advertising production and the organisation of advertising agencies is examined in ‘Spreads like butter’. It is further explored in Chapter 7, ‘Art and advertising’, through reference to artistic styles, techniques, applications and outlets in the area of art and graphic design which have impacted on advertising. Pleasure and desire are recurring themes in the book where the overstated promise of happiness and the confl ation of desire with need are discussed in ‘Advertising – a way of life’ and linked to Raymond Williams’ analysis of advertising as a ‘magic system’. Th is theme recurs in Chapter 6, ‘Th e cultural economy of death’, in relation to the popular music industry and in ‘Handbags and gladrags’ with fashion and fashion advertising. Two further areas remain to be mentioned: history and technology. To a greater or lesser extent history features in each of the cultural areas that comprise our enquiry. From an outline of social and economic developments associated with modern political advertising to the relationships and crossovers between technical and aesthetic features of modernist and postmodernist art, design and advertising. Th is latter is explored in ‘Art and
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Advertising as Culture
10
advertising’, and in ‘Spreads like butter’ some of the technological changes that made modern advertising possible are explored in terms of their formal rhetorical possibilities. Chapter 8, ‘On-line digi-ads’, deals with a variety of online advertising forms and technologies that place advertising and promotion in the midst of a very contemporary way of life.
Conclusions
Advertising is a very visible part of the modern world we inhabit. Culture builds on existence – it creates a way of life; of knowing, exploring and appreciating the world. Th is book explores how advertising and culture sit alongside each other and oft en overlap. Its themes of ‘history’, ‘technology’, ‘a way of life’, ‘homology’, ‘power’, ‘oppression’, ‘identity’, ‘creativity’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘desire’ are important to a study, understanding and analysis of advertising and culture. What we make of this ‘way of life’ and this analysis will depend on a number of factors – primarily on our visual and mental image of advertising, culture and society. Th is and any reconfi guring of that image or the reality that lies behind it will depend not just on that analysis but on our stake in the social and economic order and our place in the world.
To return to the initial premise of this introduction, advertising and culture are not synonymous: a distinction between the two can be made. Th e culture of a people or a community in its widest sense has, or given the pace of globalisation is soon likely to have, advertising as a signifi cant part of it. In Williams’ terms advertising is a documentary element which pervades culture in a highly visible way and as a way of life where thought and behaviour associated with promotion and competition defi ne the industry, its products and social eff ects. In addition advertising competes with other cultural elements for attention and allegiance. It aspires to the ideal.
But is it possible to imagine culture without advertising or with only a minimal connection? In developed societies increasingly sophisticated advertising constantly requires culture to draw on for ideas, references and creativity as a space outside of its own self-referential and insular limitations. In many ways it needs a life world outside of its own to exist.
Over time, advertising changes and develops: changing function, content and style. It exists, like everything else, within poles of possibilities between advancement and disappearance. Its trajectory appears to increase its spread and intensity across time and space. However, targeted regulation like that in the city of Sao Paulo has curtailed the excesses of outdoor public advertising. Technological innovation especially the Internet and virtual development traverses traditional boundaries, with distinctions between cultures and economies, public and private spheres, domains and spaces becoming indistinct or even turned inside out. Advertising either elbows out non-commodity form, crowding out cultural space or mellows, fi nding gentler forms and accommodations and a soft er mode of address. In the mean time, advertising and culture are here to be studied – together or apart.
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Introduction
11
References
Eagleton, T. (2000), Th e Idea of Culture, London: Blackwell. Leiss, W., Kline, S., Jhally, S. and Botterill, J. (2005), Social Communication in Advertising,
London: Routledge. McGuigan, J. (2010), Cultural Analysis, London: Sage. Rojek, C. (2007), Cultural Studies, Cambridge: Polity. Williams, R. (1983), Keywords, London: Fontana.
(1990), Culture and Society, London: Hogarth Press. First printed 1958. Williamson, J. (1978), Decoding Advertisements: Meaning and Ideology in Advertising, London:
Marion Boyes. Willis, P. (1990), Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young,
Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
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