Advertising, the Media and Globalisation

A World in Motion

John Sinclair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136500978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Werbung

This book offers a critical, empirically-grounded and contemporary account of how advertisers and agencies are dealing with a volatile mediascape throughout the world, taking a region-by-region approach.

It provides a clear, systematic, and synoptic analysis of the dynamic relationship between media, advertisers, and agencies in the age of globalization, and in an era of transition from 'mass' to 'social' media.

Advertising attracts much public criticism for the commercialization of culture and its apparent impact on social and personal life. This book outlines and assesses the issues involved, with regard to how they are manifested in different national, regional and global contexts. Topics covered include:

• advertising as an object of study
• global trends in the advertising industry
• advertising and the media in motion
• current issues in advertising, media and society
• advertising, globalization and world regions.

While maintaining a contemporary focus, the book explains developments over recent decades as background to the globalisation of what it calls the manufacturing-marketing-media complex.

Chapter 1

Advertising as an object of study

Advertising is the key link in the mutually-sustained global expansion of consumer goods and service industries and the media of communication which carry their commercial messages. In most countries of the developed and the developing world alike, the largest advertisers, many of them global corporations, have determined the direction and character of media development because of their demand for the means (that is, the ‘media’) which allow them to reach potential consumers. Media organisations thus stand or fall on their capacity to provide content which will attract such consumers as audiences, as the revenue from advertising provides the major source of income for media owners, and motivates their business strategies.

Understood in this corporate context, it is evident that it is advertising which gives the aptly-named ‘commercial’ media their characteristic look and sound, and orients their content towards the kind of audiences which advertisers want to reach. Much more than the source of the images and brand names which form the surface of consumer culture, advertising is actually the life-blood of commercial media, and the motive force behind media industry development. Yet, also to be taken into account is the intermediary role of advertising agencies, which act as brokers of media time and space, as well as in their more obvious role of devising and implementing advertising campaigns. This triumvirate of advertisers, media and agencies forms the institutional bedrock of consumer culture, an integrated relationship which may be referred to as the manufacturing/marketing/media complex.

Manufacturing, marketing and media

Not all advertisers are manufacturers, of course, for although it is goods of all kinds, from cars to shampoo, that dominate in advertising content, there are important categories of service advertisers which are also prominent, notably retail and finance. The point is that it is the advertisers, whether of goods or services, who are the source of the revenue which is the prize in the elaborate game now being played out between the ‘old’ media of television and print, and the ‘new’ media, notably the internet, and which provides the very conditions of existence for the advertising agencies and the other marketing ‘disciplines’.

Marketing can be thought of as a cultural industry that seeks to connect the producers of consumer goods and services with their potential markets, and indeed, to bring those markets into being. For decades, the conventional wisdom of the marketing textbooks is that marketing is defined by a strategic ‘mix’ of at least ‘four Ps’: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Product refers to the product-market strategy in terms of which a product is designed with a particular target market in mind, a process in which the role of yet another P, packaging, is not to be underestimated. Price is a matter of positioning a product relative to the price behaviour of its competitors in a given market – indeed, in some accounts, positioning in a broader sense, and especially in relation to branding, is another P in its own right. Place has to do with distribution, or ensuring that the product is physically accessible to its target market; so only the final ‘P’, promotion, has to do with advertising as such.

In that light, advertising is just the most visible and public dimension of a much broader but still quite familiar set of practices intent upon harnessing our ways of life to commercial purposes. These include sponsorship, notably of sport and the arts; in-store displays, sales promotions, competitions and giveaways; and direct marketing, such as telemarketing. In the past, media advertising has been referred to in the industry as ‘above the line’, while these various forms of non-media marketing are seen as ‘below the line’. However, particularly given the commercialisation of the internet over recent decades, marketing gurus have since declared that ‘there is no line’ (Cappo 2003: 101). Not only is media advertising ever more incorporated with sales promotions – for instance, television commercials (TVCs) for giveaway toys in McDonald’s – but advertising campaigns are now devised on a ‘cross-platform’ basis, meaning that such campaigns are scheduled to be mounted across traditional media, the internet and perhaps other more direct ‘touchpoints’ where they can reach prospective consumers. Marketing practitioners and textbooks now tend to conceive of advertising in the context of what they like to call ‘integrated marketing communications’. This may sound like just industry hype, but it does express how advertising is now linked in strategically to the other dimensions of marketing, and to other forms of promotion (Belch 2009).

The advent of the internet has transformed the meaning of advertising media. For even if the line between them is being erased, we still need to distinguish between the ‘old’ (sometimes called ‘traditional’ or, somewhat prematurely, ‘legacy’) advertising media of television, radio, newspapers and magazines, cinema and outdoor; and the ‘new’ advertising medium of the internet, for a number of reasons. Whereas the old media deliver a sales message to a prospective consumer, that message has to motivate the consumer to respond at a later time and in a different place: for instance, having seen a TVC, the consumer has to go to a store to buy the product, if the message’s ‘call to action’ is to fulfil its purpose. With the internet, the consumer can respond to an advertising message then and there, such as clicking to add the product to a virtual ‘shopping cart’ and paying on line with a credit card. The point is not just that the internet thus eliminates delay and distance in such consumption transactions, or even that it combines the functions of both advertising medium and retail store, but that it is an interactive medium which has established itself as a transactional space in its own right. The rapid rise of deal-of-the-day services such as Groupon provides a dramatic example.

The interactive properties of the internet have precipitated a shift in the balance of power between advertisers and consumers, just as they have caused the still-dominant advertising media of television and print to lose growth in advertising revenue in favour of the internet. While it is easy to overstate the differences, audiences for television and print can be thought of as aggregated and ‘passive’ in the sense that they have very limited channels for response, whereas internet users individually and actively wield the power of the freedom of (inter)action which the internet has given them. From the advertisers’ point of view, internet users are more focused targets than media audiences, but it is more difficult to engage them before they click away to something else. The media owners, for their part, argue that the large audiences which they can deliver to advertisers are still better value, or offer better ‘ROI’ (return on investment) than the internet, because of their sheer size and diversity, particularly for non-specialised products and services. Meanwhile, the advertising agencies have to convince the advertisers that only they have the expertise to guide them to the most strategic placing of campaigns across both old and new media platforms.

What is clear is that the relatively comfortable relationship which has existed between advertisers, agencies and media throughout the golden age of mass media in decades past – in which the media would offer content that could attract audiences so as to sell access to those audiences to advertisers via the agencies – is a ‘business model’ which has been put under severe pressure by the advent of the internet. Meanwhile, on the internet itself, emergent new business models compete for hegemony. In this environment, not only is there a realignment taking place within the manufacturing/marketing/media complex, but the very meaning of ‘advertising’ as we have known it is in flux.

The meaning of advertising

When we talk about advertising in everyday life, none of the contexts which have been discussed here applies – we don’t bother drawing a line between advertising and other forms of promotion, nor do we distinguish between, say, TVCs and sponsored search results on the internet – it’s all just advertising, particularly in the critical public discourse which marketing attracts. Even in academic critique, the meaning of advertising as an object of study is hazy. Yet it is also selective: advertising content, such as the TVC, has attracted much attention from academic critics because of the rich symbolism of its images, and the inferences which can be drawn about its cultural meanings and presumed effects. By contrast, classified advertising in newspapers, except perhaps for the personal columns, is a barren field for cultural analysis, and hence quite neglected. However, in the context of the current struggle between old and new media, the ‘migration’ of classified advertising from newspapers to the internet is a central issue. So, as with the blind men and the elephant, it is crucial to be clear about what kind of advertising we are talking about in any debate, and to understand the quite different angles from which various academic fields approach advertising as an object of study.

As Liz McFall observes, a ‘textually fixated’ academic approach to advertising has predominated for decades, largely on the assumption that advertisements are ‘prime source material for divining the “spirit” … of the age’. She argues in favour of the study of ‘advertising’ rather than of ‘advertisements’ (2004: 2–3). While it would be blinkered and boring to try to ignore the actual content of advertising, the emphasis in this book is on advertising as an industry, seen in its relation to advertisers and media, and in the context of globalisation.

The study of advertising excited a great deal of research and theoretical critique in the 1980s, but that was in an era in which Marxism and feminism were extremely influential in setting the agenda for media and communication research, and in those distinct but not unrelated perspectives, advertising was seen as a prime instrument for the reproduction of consumer capitalism and patriarchy. As the next section explains, the emphasis in that era fell more on advertisements than advertising as such, a focus of inquiry which was interesting and useful for a time, but which soon reached its limits. In the 1990s, the study of advertising came to be seen within a larger, more anthropological context, framed within the broad context of consumer culture and the society which supported it. While advertising was thus cast in a more general mould, the 2000s have seen a shift of attention towards a quite specific advertising practice, namely that of branding, particularly in its relation to popular culture and new media. Some of the best contemporary academic work is on branding, rather than advertising as such, and its role in consumer culture. This chapter will trace these shifting paradigms in defining advertising as an object of critical analysis and research over the last few decades.

Advertising as a field of study and research

Marxist critiques

In the ‘how-to’ marketing textbooks and the trade journals, there is no doubt that advertising is a commercial practice, whereas in the humanities and social sciences, it is seen as a cultural and social phenomenon, albeit with an underlying economic purpose: a ‘culture industry’ in the critical sense of Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic paradox from 1944 (1977). Even within the Marxist tradition to which they belong, in which advertising is seen as an inherent tool of capitalism, there are some more ‘economic’ and other more ‘cultural’ critiques, for both were elements in Marx’s own analysis.

The question with which Marx began his major work, Capital, was how it could be that goods, or ‘commodities’, which he defined as any objects that satisfied wants, were able to conceal the exploitative real relations between capital and labour under which they were produced. For Marx, labour was the only true source of value, but the ‘mystique’ of the commodity made it seem that the value was in the object itself. To be under this illusion was what Marx famously called ‘commodity fetishism’. Intrinsic to his analysis of the commodity was the distinction between use value and exchange value. Use value was just that – what an object was useful for, its utility – but exchange value was what someone would give for it in exchange: that is, to buy it. For Marx, it was in exchange that the commodity became fetishised, that is, when its illusion overshadowed the truth of the labour that produced it, and particularly because it was being exchanged for money. In practical terms today, we are talking about the difference between what a certain ‘good’ is good for, and the price we are prepared to pay for it. So, Marxists see advertising as having the function of creating the mystique around commodities, thus endowing them with exchange value. This is both an economic and an ideological function.

Marxist critiques of advertising became extremely influential during the 1970s and 1980s, ascribing to advertising an instrumental role in the perpetuation of capitalism, and the power to manipulate the masses, and so control demand. Whereas the Marxist economists Baran and Sweezy took a classic political economy approach in their analysis of the basic economic purposes advertising served for capitalism in its ‘monopoly phase’ (1968), others put more emphasis on the ideological dimension. Stuart Ewen, for instance, saw advertising as ‘an apparatus for the stimulation and creation of mass consumption’ which enabled corporations to assume ‘an expansionist and manipulative approach to the problem of popular consciousness’ through the ‘imperialization of the psyche’ (1976: 81). In such a view, media audiences were seen as ‘cultural dopes’ (Garfinkel 1967) who were attracted by the ‘free lunch’ of entertainment and information, and then ‘sold’ as a ‘commodity’ to advertisers (Smythe 1977). Some even argued that this involved a form of ‘work’ which audiences performed for capitalism, in manufacturing themselves into compliant consumers (Jhally 1987). Thus, there are Marxist perspectives in which the production of audiences is seen to be at least as important as the production of ideology. One authoritative contemporary political economist of communication defines the process of ‘commodification’ seen to be involved in both these dimensions – consumer goods and audiences – as ‘the process of transforming use values into exchange values’ (Mosco 1996: 141).

The ‘cultural turn’

The definitive account of advertising’s function in such transformation of use value into exchange value was Judith Williamson’s influential book of 1978, Decoding Advertisements. She drew on then current semiological methods, the analysis of how meaning is produced within images, to show how magazine advertisements were structured so as to invoke common cultural meanings familiar to readers, and associate them with a given product. That is, she argues that readers are drawn in to an advertisement and must ‘work’ to supply the cultural knowledge it requires to be made sense of, and this involves associating some mythic qualities with the product. The kind of cultural Marxist and semiological structuralism which she applied has greatly influenced and persisted in other more recent work, notably that of Robert Goldman, who has coined the notion of ‘commodity-sign’ to explain how advertisements endow ‘commodities’ (this time, meaning goods and services) with exchange value: ‘Advertising is an institutional process in a political economy of commodity sign-value’ (1992: 224).

Like Williamson, Goldman concentrates on advertisements rather than advertising. For even if they use the rhetoric of political economy, these writers’ object of study is really signification, or how meanings are produced within advertisements, and they analyse these meanings with little or no reference to the advertisers or agencies which produced them, nor the media in which they are placed. The 1980s saw considerable growth in the number of studies of this kind published, particularly with the impetus given by feminist scholars’ critical interest in the changing representation of women in advertisements. Similarly, the identity politics which flourished in that decade and into the 1990s encouraged many studies of how the subordination of ethnic minorities and ‘others’ was signified in advertisements (O’Barr 1994; Frith 1997). Indeed, such semiological work fairly dominated the field of advertising studies over that era, the 1990s being the decade of the ‘cultural turn’. This was defined by a broad movement away from classical Marxist political economy in favour of ‘an increasing concern with symbolic systems, systems of meaning and the self-reflexive’, which put the study of advertising at ‘centre-stage’ (Miller 2002: 172–73).

Ethnographic studies

Yet by the mid-1990s the semiological trend had largely exhausted itself, and a more industry-oriented approach was coming to the fore. This had the overall benefit of taking advertising ‘as an entire institution not merely the textual end-products of its processes’ (Cronin 2004a: 3), which more particularly meant close attention being given to the dynamic relationships within what has been referred to here as the manufacturing/marketing/media complex. In the field of anthropology, the empirical work of the time employed that discipline’s characteristic methodology of ethnography, which usually involved the researcher working in an advertising agency as a participant-observer. Thus, Brian Moeran spent a year in an anonymous agency in Tokyo, observing how organisational conflicts within the agency and in its relations with its clients were negotiated in the conduct of certain campaigns in which he participated (1996). Again, Daniel Miller’s extensive study of material culture and consumption in Trinidad involved him in sitting in on meetings between agencies and clients, though more as a ‘fly-on-the wall’ than a participant (1997). A few years later, Steven Kemper’s Buying and Believing (2001) appears, in which he draws on interviews with advertising and media personnel, and ethnographic studies of consumers’ households. Next we have William Mazzarella’s Shovelling Smoke, ‘an ethnographic study of globalizing consumerism’, based on his participant observation in particular campaigns in an international agency in the city formerly known as Bombay (2003). Miller’s, Kemper’s and Mazzarella’s studies in particular exemplify a recent shift which will be examined below, namely the setting of the study of advertising within the wider analytic framework of consumption in general.

Instead of the Marxist view of monolithic manipulation wielded by a smoothly functional apparatus of capitalism, all of the ethnographic studies show the highly contingent character of the advertising business, and the delicate relationships which agencies must manage not only with their clients but also between their own divisions, notably the ‘creatives’ (copywriters and art directors) and the ‘suits’ (the executives managing the clients’ accounts). Interestingly, the studies are all in non-Western settings, but the structural tensions, both internal and external, are common, and found in both ‘global’ and ‘local’ agencies.

Meanwhile, back in the West, there were also sociologists whose research directly engaged them with the actual practice, and practitioners, of advertising at this time. Sean Nixon examined the aftermath of the 1980s ‘creative revolution’ in Britain through interviews with young creative personnel in London. In a period when British advertising was being held up as an exemplar of the nation’s ‘creative industries’, and its corporate leaders were being awarded knighthoods, Nixon’s focus was upon the cultural formation and lifestyles of the (mostly) young men involved in the brash ‘new lad’ style of advertising of that era, the mid- to late 1990s. Apart from the insight it affords upon advertising as a highly-gendered practice, Nixon’s study demonstrates the relevance of ‘informal cultures and subjective identities of advertising practitioners’ (2003: 5) in understanding advertising as a social institution, as the TV series Mad Men was later to do so well, but in the form of a compelling dramatic narrative.

Anne Cronin is another British sociologist of this era who approached the study of advertising via interviews with advertising personnel (2004a). She finds them to be preoccupied with the legitimacy of ad...