Advertising as Culture

by Chris Wharton

Overview

Penned by contributors from a range of disciplines, including art history, sociology, and media and cultural studies, the essays that constitute Advertising as Culture offer an informed and critical overview of approaches to the study of advertising. These in-depth contributions explore such topics as the conceptual relationship between advertising and culture; the development of advertising through the industrial period; the nature of advertising production and reception; the relationship of advertising to a range of cultural fields such as art, fashion, and music; and developments in digital media practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781841506142
Publisher:	Intellect, Limited
Publication date:	03/15/2013
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	229
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Chris Wharton is a program leader in advertising and media in the Department of Media at Northumbria University, UK.

Read an Excerpt

Advertising as Culture

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By Chris Wharton

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-614-2

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CHAPTER 1

Advertising – a way of life

Tony Purvis

Don Draper: This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want. How do you make your cigarettes?

Lee Garner, Jr.: I don't know.

Lee Garner, Sr.: Shame on you. We breed insect repellent tobacco seeds, plant them in the North Carolina sunshine, grow it, cut it, cure it, toast it ...

Don Draper: There you go. There you go.

[Writes on chalkboard and underlines: 'IT'S TOASTED.']

Lee Garner, Jr.: But everybody's else's tobacco is toasted.

Don Draper: No. Everybody else's tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike's ... is toasted.

Roger: Well, gentlemen, I don't think I have to tell you what you just witnessed here.

Lee Garner, Jr.: I think you do.

Don Draper: Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing is OK. You are OK.

Lee Garner, Sr.: It's toasted. [Smiles]

Lee Garner, Sr.: I get it.

(From: Mad Men (AMC, Lionsgate Television), Season 1, Episode 1 (July, 2007))

Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start. To grow up in that country was to see the shape of a culture, and its modes of change. I could stand on the mountains and look north to the farms and the cathedral, or south to the smoke and the flare of the blast furnace making a second sunset. To grow up in that family was to see the shaping of minds: the learning of new skills, the shifting of relationships, the emergence of different language and ideas. ... Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.

(Raymond Williams 'Culture is Ordinary', in Highmore 2002: 92)

Reading culture

Mad Men (2007–) is a television drama whose characters people a culture in which every aspect of that culture is read in symbolic ways. Don Draper, lead character in the series, knows that the PR/advertising firm Sterling Cooper, if it is to produce effective readings of culture via its advertisements, must make the ordinary and mundane seem extraordinary and magical. It does this via a promise of happiness, something Draper himself has yet to find. But Draper knows he needs to make a living. He knows, too, that the 'mad men' with whom he works are part of the same culture, the one in which the freedom and consumer choice promised in the advertisements make sense only against the backdrop of capitalism's production of oppression and dissensus. Whilst most people do live very ordinary lives, the series exposes how the oppression of some groups, most notably those on low incomes, but also women and African-Americans, experience the culture in ways which throw a clearer light on the actual realities of consumer- capitalism's fantasies of freedom and choice. Nonetheless, Draper's own life is ordinary; and he is believable because his ordinariness is shared by those others whose stories are told in Mad Men's narrativisation of the 1960s.

Williams' observation, that culture is ordinary, is one which refers to the same period as Mad Men. Indeed, his work during this period is written in an attempt to both celebrate this ordinariness and critique the social divisions (based on social class, income distribution, and access to education and housing) which capitalism wrought. The 1950s and 1960s were decades in capitalist history that saw consumerism and advertising become more dominant than in all the previous decades of the twentieth century (Fox and Lears 1983). But they are also decades when the wealth and glamour imagined in advertising is also matched by enormous poverty and social inequality. If the identity of the consumer is one which seems universal, so too are the effects of a free market which ensures that happiness is not quite so universal. Mad Men invites us to re-read the symbolic spaces of culture and to visualise the ordinary and the obvious as the very sites in which happiness and oppression are lived on a daily basis. Williams' view of culture also asks us to think about the symbolic dimensions of our lives in a new way. His reading is one which sees in the activities of everyday life the kernel of community. 'Culture for Williams is not, or should not be, what separates people, but what joins them in community. Culture is not for the discerning few, but for the many. It is characterized by aesthetic and intellectual scarcity only in its alienated, elitist forms' (Brantlinger 1991: 77).

This chapter will examine the ways in which culture, principally in Europe and America, though increasingly Asia and China, continues to be shaped in relation to advertising and advertisements. Central to this discussion is the theory and practice of reading culture. Here, the noun is not intended to signify an activity which is reserved for a privileged few who, equipped with a specific education and learning in (high) Culture, thereby possess greater insights into everyday life. Nor does it make assumptions about literacy where the term refers to the teaching of reading and writing in schools or literacy classes. Nor, indeed, is reading necessarily concerned with learning specific theories and methods by which to read media texts, as sometimes occurs in undergraduate courses dealing with structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics or film analysis. By suggesting that culture can be read, however, the chapter is also proposing that culture is legible but not in ideologically transparent or politically neutral ways. Rather, reading is here used in the sense Paulo Freire deploys the term in his analysis of oppression, and it denotes reading as a critical activity which is always alert to culture's political and ideological dimensions. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) outlines his call for cultural activism grounded in such reading, and it grows out of his experiences working with the poor on literacy programmes in Brazil.

Freire's critique proposes that capitalism's economic inequalities, which are reproduced in the shape of division and oppression, are made credible because of the way they are legitimised and made to appear tolerable. Reality which becomes oppressive, he argues, 'results in the contradistinction of men as oppressors and oppressed. The latter ... must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it ... Functionally, oppression is domesticating' (Freire 1972: 27–8). Commenting on the naturalisation of domestic culture via popular media and advertising, Roland Barthes's Mythologies ([1957] 2000) is one of the first major analyses to consider how oppression becomes legitimised in culture. It is not his claims in the name of structuralist methodology which are significant in Mythologies so much as the instances, the settings and routine activities Barthes actually chooses in his reading of culture. Because palpably obvious, and thus often ignored, his own 'starting point' is the 'falsely obvious' and 'a feeling of impatience at the sight of the "naturalness" with which [media] dress up a reality'(11).

Barthes, like Williams, does not bequeath a theoretical method by which students should read texts so much as he brings to the foreground the oppressive, paradoxically pleasurable dimensions of everyday life dressed up by the mass media. Raymond Williams in 'Advertising: The Magic System' (1980; first written in 1961) shows how the 'magic system' of advertising and its glamour can make us overlook the toil and suffering entailed in all production. When history can pass as nature, assisted by the credible ordinariness of advertisements, and when routines and practices are habituated, so oppression can be legitimised without too much displeasure and remain unaltered. The legitimisation process, argues Freire, where oppression is domesticated, is often achieved via pedagogy, as opposed to propaganda (1972: 41–44), and usually through the form and content of education but additionally in the culture's ways of transmitting information (1972: 45–59). Consumer-driven economies use advertising and product branding (Klein 2000) to transmit information in order to manipulate and influence demand (and thus the flow of money), though it is the impact of schooling which first interests Freire. Focusing on the form and transmission of culture, rather than being overly concerned with its final definition, is one of his most important contributions to cultural theory. However, concise summaries of culture and advertising will be useful in this initial mapping.

Way of life: culture and advertising?

Both terms, whilst open to theoretical contention and dispute, can be summarised with relative ease. Richard Hoggart (1957), Williams (1958; 1961), and more recently Terry Eagleton (2000; 2011), working within the trajectory established by Williams, see culture as a whole way of life. Culture is universal; and although specific ways of life are marked by distinct beliefs and values, culture's universality resides in its closeness to the everyday life (Gardener 2000; Highmore 2010; Sheringham 2006). Yet advertising, too, is arguably universal, close to everyday life, laden with values and ideologies, something brought poignantly to the fore in AMC' s Mad Men. 'I give you money, you give me ideas', advises series lead character Don Draper (Series 4, Episode 7). Here is how the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (the UK's lead industry-professional body) similarly describe their identity fifty years on from Don Draper: 'Advertising presents the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospects for the product or service at the lowest possible cost' (Gordon 2011: 24–25). It is a definition which more exactly appropriates advertising's impersonality in today's culture, and one which moves away from the more innocently conceived notion that defines advertising as notification, warning and information.

The two terms, then, if left to common sense, pass unnoticed. Viewed, however, in the context of oppression, culture as 'way of life' is something for which people are prepared to die (e.g. the 'troubles' in Iraq and in Afghanistan have been constructed in the media as cultural (Lewis 2005; Miller 2004); and historically, it is advertising, deployed as an apparatus of the state, which has recruited large numbers via an interpellation addressed on behalf of a country ('We') which really needs 'You'. (A recent example of how this 'we/you' interpellation, via images and voice-over, is the recruitment video for the Swedish Army:http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/realistic-swedish-army- recruitment-ad).

Culture's universality, often because of mass media, is today experienced in local ways before it is realised geographically or transnationally. Advertising, moreover, is not so much a system used in order to inform or provide notice as it is origin and source of information per se, something which, as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 shows, disturbingly legitimises warfare. People wage war in culture; yet advertising is so inescapably linked to the domain of the political economy as to be in a more uncannily magical position of influence and determination than Williams conceived in his important critique of advertising in 1961.

It was during the 1960s and 1970s that definitions of and relations between culture and advertising were being considered in some detail. Although the work of F. R. Leavis (Leavis and Thompson 1942), and Horkheimer and Adorno (1947), had earlier added to the competing theories of culture and advertising, it was the sheer size of the advertising industry from the 1950s that propelled critical attention. It is also during this period that culture is ambivalently conceived as problem (and thus as cause of modernity's moral decline), and solution (where it is imagined as a way of achieving modernity) (Eagleton 2000). Thomas Merton, Roman Catholic monk and social critic, comments on advertising's power under capitalism and captures something of its contradictory sacred-secular status, comparing it to transubstantiation. In the way that the bread and wine during the mass are transformed, becoming for the faithful 'the body and blood of Christ', so it is with advertising. Merton contends that advertising 'treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments' (Merton [1965] 2009: 232). His comments are insightful and draw attention to form and content together, central also to the work of Marshall McLuhan (1964) and also Freire. Merton writes how the form and content of technological innovation, something which is potentially 'de-humanising and destructive' (Hall 2011: 34), serve to alienate people 'while at the same time summoning them to cooperate in the work of their own alienation. The machinery of alienation is then tightened up, and social control becomes more and more arbitrary' (Merton, op. cit.: 257).

Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) makes similar claims, and it becomes seminal in the emerging anti-advertisement discourse which influenced American cultural criticism during the 1960s. Some of Packard's account is retraced in Ivan Preston's The Great American Blow-Up: Puffery in Advertising (1975) which examines how the exaggerated and deceptive content of some advertisements is received in American law and the litigation culture which ensues. More recently, Rosemary Hennessy's Profit and Pleasure (2000) adds to the corpus of work which critiques media, culture and advertising. She examines particularly the strategies of visibility and visualisation at work in advertising and consumer culture and which, in Hennessy's analysis, operate as forms of oppression. She comments how we read, see and perceive is 'historically produced cultural knowledge' (95) and that how we read and see should not be severed from the 'social relationships of labor and power commodity capitalism is premised on'.

Across much of this criticism, Hennessy rightly comments that Williams' own reading of culture remains seminal. Culture is common and its materiality is 'ordinary', Williams contends. It is, suggests Eagleton, important to us in similar ways to 'personal dignity and security, [and] freedom from pain, suffering and oppression' (2000: 100). Williams and Eagleton stress culture's earthiness and the sense of belonging people have to the land and to each other. 'Culture is something we live for', something associated with 'affection, relationship, memory, kinship, place' (Eagleton 2000: 131). Williams and Eagleton are of course alert to the qualitative and aesthetic judgements which have beset discussion of culture and which has often been heavily inflected by Matthew Arnold's discussion of culture, civilisation and anarchy (Arnold [1869] 1960). Eagleton retraces how 'Culture' has been perceived as an answer and mass culture as a problem. Associated with permissiveness and anarchy, popular-media culture is read in terms of its deficit status, and a return to 'Culture' (more closely aligned with Western-European Civilisation) is the way out of the mess associated with modernity and, today, postmodernity. Historically associated with Leavis, whose specific contribution is frequently misrepresented, the popular culture-as-deficit legacy is alive and well. The hugely popular American drama from the 1980s, Little House on the Prairie (1974–83, NBC; and since 2008, rerun by the Christian-based network CTS), exemplifies how the past is recast as more civilised than America's postmodern, fractured present. Two popular dramatisations with a more nuanced logic of past-present informing their narratives, and which directly reference advertising, are to be found in Channel 4's (UK) series Shameless (2004–) and AMC's Mad Men (2007–), which is explored in more detail later in the chapter. Advertising, moreover, is itself alert to the power of old- and new-world imagery in its campaigns. 'Even the word "new" is charged with extra meaning: however well your old widget performs, a new one MUST be even better! [Advertisements] take great delight in saluting retrofuturism's undeniably appealing sense of style' (seehttp://weburbanist.com/2009/03/29/retrofuturistic-ads-selling-a-brighter-tomorrow/).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgement
Introduction—advertising and culture
      Chris Wharton

1. Advertising—a way of life
      Tony Purivs
2. Advertising research
      John Fenwick and Chris Wharton
3. Spreads like butter—culture and advertising
      Chris Wharton
4. Handbags and gladrags—the rise and rise of accessories in fashion and advertising
      Hilary Fawcett
5. Music and advertising—a happy marriage?
      Judith Stevenson
6. The cultural economy of death—advertising and popular music
      Paula Hearsum
7. Art and advertising—circa 1880 to the present
      Malcolm Gee
8. On-line digi-ads
      David Reid
9. Selling politics—the political economy of political advertising
      Andrew Mullen
10. Media and advertising—the interests of citizens and consumers
      Monika Metykova

Contributor details
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Chris Wharton’s edited collection Advertising as Culture uncovers the important place advertising has come to take in modern society. In particular, the volume looks at how advertising shapes our modern culture, which is deeply and often unquestionably ensconced in the logic of global, market-driven economics."

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