Advertising

Iain MacRury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134530496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Advertising, once seen as 'the official art of capitalist society' is an increasingly commonplace component of a characteristically promotional culture. Iain MacRury's Advertising offers the means to explore and evaluate this transition with an introduction to advertising for the contemporary reader.Advertising provides a clear and easy guide to a

1
ADVERTISING AND COMMON SENSE

DILEMMAS

What do you already know about advertising? Probably quite a lot; there are a number of sources of information and analysis in circulation, including our everyday knowledge and experience of advertisements. In addition you might have come across professional and technical information, as well as advertising discussions in current affairs coverage and, possibly, academic analysis of advertising. In tone as much as in substance there are some considerable differences between the accounts provided by such sources. Thus the analysis of advertising that circulates in academic writing can differ widely in approach and language when compared with professional industry commentary or newspaper reports. Similarly more popular reflections on advertising, for instance in comedic satire, provide information and analysis in a variety of ways, which we readily consume, and which thus feed our thinking. However none of these modes necessarily deliver coherent or uncomplicated accounts or representations of the advertising genre.

As suggested above, advertising is a genre, an everyday feature and format across contemporary media, alongside other genres and subgenres, such as news, sitcoms, fashion features, celebrity interviews and including films, games and – as yet more difficult to classify – various other Internet communications-based formats. Advertising’s function, as we know, is to promote and often to sell a product, a service or perhaps an idea. We understand ads to be a crucial element in contemporary processes towards the dissemination of information, and we are well aware that ads are paid-for communications intended to win our attention and consent to marketing or other propositions. As private messages appearing in ‘public’ places and framed by more or less creditable host media and in sanctioned spaces – such as on billboards, commercial TV and radio broadcasts or in the press – we perhaps tacitly ascribe legitimacy, and so also a certain authority, to the advertising genre. Such authority is underscored by the typically high production values on show in commercial advertising relative to many other kinds of informal (and unfunded) communications genres we might come across. Further credibility is gained when the people featured in advertising embody, through celebrity, status, look and voice, subtly selected cultural characteristics and styles, signs to authenticate and legitimate the advertising appeal.

However, advertising is also a genre whose legitimacy and authority is always also in doubt. The pervasive presence of ads undermines authority and legitimacy, inviting charges of media clutter, of insistent hectoring and tacky commercialism. If ‘less is more’ in some communications contexts, then, and as a whole, advertising has not taken this maxim seriously – an industry strategy provoking indifference, condemnation and indiscrimination across audiences. In these conditions of ad overkill distinctions between individual advertisements and ‘advertising in general’ can collapse (each one becoming a sign of the other within viewers’ responses and irritability) contributing to intermittent experiences of advertising as a discredited communications genre. Similarly ‘glamorous’ celebrities’ marketing ‘Midas Touch’ can, over time, be seen to erode the very public image and trust upon which this or that personality’s credibility rests. Advertising is part of marketing discourse – of the array of communications and actions designed to manage relations between producers and consumers. As such it has a role to play in providing us with information about and a feeling for goods and ideas in circulation. However the legitimacy of advertising propositions must always be understood to be compromised by audiences’ capacities to assess the advertising promise up against information, ideas and ideals developed and affirmed in our engagements with other discourses; science, politics, family and social custom, religion and so on. Advertising attempts to operate in dialogue with such competing discourses, and mimics and appropriates some of their surface elements, or challenges and undermines their basic assumptions. The point is that advertising communications occur in contexts where our beliefs about advertising’s credibility typically temper the legitimacy that we might confer upon its claims and the seriousness with which we might respond to its initial impacts.

The nature of advertising as a genre then depends to a degree on a tense and dynamic process, one in which individuals and audiences, as well as legislators confer limited or no legitimacy and consent to the genre and its propositions. This tension is evident in the frequent comments made by individual viewers who ‘like’ this or that advertisement, but who also ‘despise’ advertising ‘in general’. Nor is such contradiction restricted to audiences. Advertising industry professionals’ reflections on ‘run of the mill’ or ‘pretentious’ advertising – especially if made by competitor agencies – often echo the scornful indifference that the genre provokes in other audiences.

Academic and journalistic debates on advertising typically feed the maelstrom of opinion about ‘advertising’ ensuring that everyday reception of advertisements is shadowed by a penumbra of debate and dissent – however tacit.

So it is useful to consider for a moment the extent to which the opinions and ideas about advertising, which we might have taken on from any or all these sources, are likely to lead us to draw a variety of sometimes contradictory conclusions about what advertising is and how it functions in society as well as in commercial life. How is advertising represented and thought about in popular TV programmes, for instance in documentaries, comedy and current affairs? In this chapter we will consider some different and contradictory accounts of advertising as they circulate in everyday media genres, and outside the academic critiques which make up the major part of this book.

Advertising is a regular focus for comedy. A four-part sitcom If You See God Tell Him, broadcast by the BBC in 1993, was not a success, in terms of either audiences or critical opinion. It has rarely been repeated. It depicted the misfortune of the main character, Godfrey Spry, a typical suburban sitcom male, played by Richard Briers, who received a bump on the head, lost his memory and could then retain an attention span of just 30 seconds. This resulted in a further (comedic) mental disorder: Spry began to exhibit a peculiar relationship to advertisements; he developed a bizarre literal-minded belief in the promises of all 30-second TV commercials, with various amusing consequences.

What does this comic proposition, the figure of a man whose attention span is cut to the typical duration of an advert, and who thus takes ads’ promises literally, tell us about how we commonly think and feel about advertising? The aim of If You See God Tell Him was to make us laugh. Like many comedies this series portrays an exception that proves the rule. The rule here is that ordinarily, people expect and are expected to retain a ‘natural’ capacity to process and recognise adverts with judgement and to respond appropriately – ‘normal’ people do not take adverts as gospel. Anyone not exercising alert discrimination in the marketplace deviates from this norm. Such attribution of deviance, and its comedy value, depends on the fact that a good part of the common sense about our relationships with advertising assumes a healthy mistrust and a casual indifference. To the audience of If You See God Tell Him Godfrey Spry was laughable because he deviated (quite widely) from this shared, commonsense understanding. He is puppet-like and advertising pulls his strings. Audiences’ laughter – at his vulnerability, loss of autonomy and naïve trust – stands as a sign of, and marks off, a normative sense of our confident scepticism in the face of ads. If You See God Tell Him would make no comic sense unless this capacity to recognise advertisements, and to grasp and manage their generic purposes, formed an important part of our common sense.

But common sense is not simple. The complication? There is another common sense about our relationship to advertising. What is also believed about advertising, at times, contradicts the optimistic ‘water off a duck’s back’ view implicit in our laughter at Godfrey Spry. This can be illustrated by looking again at If You See God Tell Him. According to this other ‘common’ sense, Godfrey Spry’s ‘disorder’ highlights the widely held view that people (including at times ourselves) become, in some sense, ‘gullible’ when faced with advertising. In this alternative reading the comedy is to do with self-recognition. Spry becomes the object of a satire, a caricature reflecting, and reflecting on, individual and social weaknesses. We see society’s faults exposed and personified in Spry. At a personal level, the comedy allows us to reflect on an exaggerated depiction of our own vulnerability to the advertising promise. In this vision advertising is (comically) revealed as ‘a threat to autonomy’: our own and that of others. Undefended against the persuasive powers of advertisements, the comedy warns us, we are all Godfrey Spry. Viewed as satire, If You See God Tell Him is a gentle nudge, a readjustment in the ‘community’, aimed at an apathetic society becoming ever more complacent about the influence of advertising.

When assessing advertising, and its social impact, arguments move back and forth between the first optimistic view and this second more pessimistic one. Regarding this common variability, as much a function of mood, or social habit, as of any definitive evidence, one thing is clear: in establishing what ‘advertising’ is, and our relationship to it, in dissecting its ‘character’, its ‘effects’ and its ‘functions’, common sense cannot provide definitive answers.

While in most cases we have no difficulty in talking about ‘advertising’ – to complain about it, or celebrate it, or just to express our indifference – it is much harder to articulate relationships to advertising with certainty, for example by establishing patterns of cause and effect, either on individuals or in society. ‘Common sense’ recognises many questions about advertising: does it manipulate or exploit us? Does it make us buy things we shouldn’t buy? Does it misrepresent our lives, and so on? But common sense does not reliably offer convincing or coherent frameworks (or the evidence) with which to answer these questions confidently.

PUBLIC OPINION

We’ve been taken over by the advertiser, that’s the trouble. We’ve been brainwashed by packets of detergent. That’s a good phrase: ‘We-have-been-brainwashed-by-packets-of-detergent.’ I’ll come out with that down the coffee bar tomorrow night.

(Tony Hancock from The Succession – Son and Heir 1961)

As part of their work monitoring the overall reputation of advertising, industry bodies, such as the Advertising Association in the UK, periodically track how often members of the public discuss advertising (Bonello 2000). A UK-based survey conducted in 2000 for the Advertising Association reported that:

advertising is not a hot topic of conversation; only 6 per cent discussed it often, compared with family (48%), violent crime (43%), health (35%) and education (33%).

(Bonello, Campaign, 4 August 2000)

A similar recent survey (conducted in 2003) reported that only 2 per cent of respondents felt that advertising was a social concern requiring immediate attention (T.O.M Public attitude to Advertising Survey, Advertising Statistics Year Book 2004: 239).

Despite the prominence of advertisements in everyday life, the frequency of advertising issues being in the news, and the interest academics take in advertising, the population (as reported here) does not necessarily privilege it in conversation (relative to other important topics). Nor, according to this survey research, do many respondents class advertising as a serious social problem. Maybe advertising is a topic that interests just the ‘chattering classes’ – marketers around metropolitan water coolers, lifestyle gurus, Sunday paper columnists and academics.

Perhaps excessive analytic emphasis is given to advertising, overstating its cultural significance and social impact at the expense of real issues (Lodziak 2002; Lee 1993; McGuigan 1992), such as the many forms of social injustice. However, a rejoinder to such claims is that our grasp of the facts of social inequality is masked by the normative mythologies of affluence pervading advertising (Schudson 1993) and a tendency encouraged by advertisements to transform general social problems into individuals’ consumption dilemmas (Williams 1980), so that indirectly advertising has extensive influence, rendering (by its distractions) some kinds of thinking and action less available than they ought to be – and compounding social problems.

From another perspective Davidson (1992) observes that people will routinely dismiss the ‘pretentious’ nature of advertising (see also Garfield 2003). However, he disputes the argument that advertising doesn’t matter:

Disdain is only really skin deep, a mantra we are good at reciting but can’t possibly believe. (Witness endless arguments about the technical merits of cars those arguing will never be able to afford, or the hankering of ex-pats for Marmite and cornflakes.)

(Davidson 1992: 48)

Davidson suggests that because people consider consumption (and its meanings) to be important, it should follow that advertising (as a chief source of consumer information and ideas) cannot be trivial – even if people say it is. Right or wrong, what Davidson reveals is the inherent difficulty in distinguishing advertising from consumption, and products from the ways in which they are marketed. Advertising has (of its nature) many ways of collapsing boundaries between its imageries and everyday lives. The problem may be this: when advertising is considered, it can be difficult to establish where advertising stops, and real things start.

Typically it is hard to take advertising (in the sense of advertisements) seriously as culture, as we might a film, a book or a moral debate. The processes that may or may not bind advertisements to broader and more substantive socioeconomic issues are opaque to casual analysis – and heavily contested in academic accounts. So advertising, because of its dispersed and multidimensional nature, does not readily constitute a ‘pure’ object of public or critical attention; it becomes a part of conversations, which may also (and mainly) be about ‘larger’ questions such as the economy, family, education, social justice and health. Critical considerations of advertising that may apply to specific controversial product or service sectors, supermarkets, cigarettes, fast food, alcohol and so on are not necessarily relevant to advertising considered ‘in general’ or in other particular product areas (charities, savings, loans, FMCGs or holidays).

Nevertheless individual advertisements do often lead us to reflections on specific issues: obesity, childhood, the workplace, ethnicity, affluence and poverty, celebrity, health and gender frequently become individual and more collective preoccupations (momentarily) through advertise-ments’ influences. In some such instances individual ads can also become scapegoats, targets upon which to discharge public and private anxieties. This role, as a site of mediated ‘public conversation’ (Richards et al. 2000) and controversy (Cronin 2004a; Winship 2000), is not coherently cultivated by ad-makers, who bear no special responsibility for ‘society’ or its political and conversational agendas. Nor however is the role inconsistent with a general advertising aim: to generate attention (Davenport and Beck 2001). Benetton’s provocative campaigns are exemplary here (see e.g. Falk 1997). If we are to characterise advertising as a kind of conversation then it is probably the case that qua ‘conversation’ it’s a kind of gossip – powerful at times, banal at others, artful, elusive, unreliable and unpredictable in outcome, variably interesting, and based in complex intentions, specific instances and locales. Some travel well, some badly. As such, advertising’s public presence diverges widely from the kinds of public communications which it is routinely compare...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Advertising and common sense
• 2 Advertising agencies: mediation and the creative process
• 3 Marketing, media and communication
• 4 Analysing and historicising advertising
• 5 Advertising and culture
• 6 Signs and textualities
• 7 New forms and intimacies
• 8 Audiences and psychology
• Notes
• Bibliography