Advertisements are an interesting entity. They produce and reproduce culture in a very ‘bite-sized’ format and play an important role in the neoliberal imagination. Furthermore, these symbolic representations of consumption are at the perfect juxtaposition of culture and economy. Often, advertisements sell an image or the evocation of a particular emotion. Not only are they a reflection of society, but they also play a hand in producing it in particular formats.

Advertisements: Different Perspectives

Any media has a material framework for a given set of social practices, both enabling and constraining. The complex interactions between different media in the reproduction of social experience plays a key role. While some theorists argue that the role of media is overdetermined in the discourse of cultural globalisation (Hardt and Negri 2000), it is worth not disregarding the authentic, intuitive identification of capitalism’s ideology, which is driven by the consumer-citizen (Mazzarella 2004). More recent theorisation looks at media and mediation as a constitutive process of social life, further deepened by globalisation.

But first, it might be useful to look at the early critical theorisation of advertisements. In Raymond Williams’s essay, he looks at the ‘magic system’ of advertising. He goes back to Marx’s theory of capitalism, enabling the ‘fetishisation of commodities by transforming them into glamorous signifiers.’ The labour behind the production of the said commodity is hidden. Its signifier presents an unreal, imaginary world – such as diamonds signifying true love, cars signifying power and masculinity, and so on. From a system of spreading information, modern advertising has developed into social communication and a cornerstone of modern capitalist business organisation. Calling it the ‘official art of modern capitalist society’, Williams links the economic, social, and cultural impact of advertisements on society (Williams 1980). The 70s and the 80s saw a rise in the popularity of Marxist, anti-capitalist, and cultural imperialism driven interpretations of advertisements and even media as a whole.

Judith Williamson’s 1978 work, Decoding Advertisements, is considered a seminal work in the discourse of advertisements’ semiotic and ideological meaning. She contends that advertisements though being a public media form, deeply influence us privately. Pervading all media but limited to none, advertising forms a vast superstructure with an autonomous existence and an immense influence. Their ubiquitous quality and tenacity serve the purpose of selling things. But more importantly, Williamson argues, they have another function, which replaces that traditionally fulfilled by art or religion.

The strength of advertisements lies in their basic ‘meaning’ making structures – what Williamson calls ‘Referent Systems.’ Referent systems are ideological systems that draw their significance from areas outside advertising. For an advertisement to be effective, the first function it should fulfil is to differentiate between one particular product and others in the same category. Most ads give no real information about the product – in some cases, it’s not possible to either – so the differentiation rests entirely on making a connection with an image drawn from the outside world. Advertisements are constantly translating between systems of meaning, constituting a vast meta-system where values from different areas of our lives are made interchangeable. Thus, the links made between elements from a referent system and products arising from these elements’ place have in the whole system, rather than their inherent qualities (Williamson 1978).

Similar theorisation on advertisements followed in the 80s, building on Williamson’s work. Later work in the semiotic tradition also moved to individual agency and resistance to the complex intertextual meanings in ads. Advertisers can ‘steer meanings’ but cannot guarantee interpretations of what will necessarily guarantee the meanings they intend or prefer.

In more anthropologically informed work, theorists such as Appadurai reject the notion of a material base to meaning and argue that while systems of classification describing the function of objects are an inherent feature for most cultures, such systems are contingent on patterns of use, and thus subject to change (Appadurai 1986).

This also leads to the broader investigation of the institution of advertising upon both culture and economy. The link between the rise of consumer culture with the advent of industrialisation and the consequent transformation of culture and economy has long been made. The Frankfurt School, for instance, argues that capitalist society was a mass, consumer society within which individuals were categorised, subsumed, and governed by highly restrictive social, economic and, political structures that had little interest in specific individuals. For Adorno (1991), most peoples’ lives were lead within the mass, collective entities and structures, from school to the workplace and beyond. ^[i] Advertisements would occupy a central place in the making and remaking of mass culture.

Furthermore, in a consumer society, ‘needs’ are not based on material objects but rather on the social meanings of the good in question. The privileging of symbolic consumption over an instrumental, utility-driven consumption has also been noted by several theorists (Baudrillard 2001; Bauman 2001; Veblen 1899). The current consumption can thus be seen as the ‘desire for difference’ and the expression of identity through displaying the sign values implied by the commodity consumed. This is where advertising comes in – it seeks to promote such consumption through a ‘symbolic exchange of sign values’ (Baudrillard 2001).

Advertising in a Globalising World

An overview of institutional positions and the historical development of the advertising industry is also necessary for a more comprehensive understanding of advertising. Contemporary advertising saw a jump in its sheer pervasiveness, along with an arguable increase in its persuasive capacity (McFall 2004). Shifting the focus to advertisers reveals the motivations and rationale behind the advertising industry.

Advertisers do not advertise. They wish to sell their products because their rivals are advertising. They are afraid that somehow, they might lose status – and, perhaps, as a result, market share (which ultimately boils down to status) – by not advertising in the same magazines in which their competitors are advertising (Moeran 1996).

Advertising’s continued importance as a commercial strategy cannot, in this view, be reduced to purely economic or a purely cultural calculation – it is a mix of both. Markets, industries and organisations interplay to produce complex economic and cultural norms (McFall 2004). Thus, advertising agencies occupy an intermediary position between different forms of media that carry ads and clients who wish to advertise. The human relations between the agency and client also factor in here. As an occupational group, advertisers are also an interesting category – they focus on image-driven creative ads centred around ‘Emotional Selling Point’ to pursue economic gains ultimately. The aesthetic is thus turned utilitarian in this formulation (Lash and Urry 1993).

Many ethnographers of the global media have found that the “organic intellectuals” internal to global industries will often deploy substantial models of culture to explain and attempt to predict what works where. One strategy is to use messages and values in ads that are appealing or desirable in particular cultures. Another strategy is ambivalence, using universal imagery and value evocation as the appeal – mostly ‘global’, ‘modern’, and American.

The role of globalisation and transnational media in shaping public discourse has also been discussed. For instance, in India, Chaudhuri argues that media and advertising have undergone a massive transformation from liberalisation in the early 1990s. Her key contention is that advertisements played a key ideological role in recasting public discourse and shifting a cultural consciousness of ‘thrift’ to ‘profligacy’.  The ideological, political nature of media is disguised by the rhetoric of individual choice and freedom seemingly available to the average consumer. Furthermore, the media here also actively promotes a neoliberal paradigm of the state and the market (Chaudhuri 2010). Post-1990s, India saw a dramatic increase in ads in English print media, along with news coverage of advertising, sales, and marketing strategies. A globalising ‘Brand India’ was cultivated, with the emergence of a burgeoning middle class that could now consume ‘global’ goods (Chaudhuri 2010).

The glamourous signifiers of advertising’s magic systems (Williams 1980) can be seen in the images used in advertisements. For instance, ads began to showcase a new image of women as the globe-trotting corporate CEO (though co-existing with more traditional images of the traditional, homely housewife) and greater conspicuousness of male models defining a new template of success and power for men. This recasting of the normative Indian middle class in a globalised economy and redefining of notions of individual identity, pleasure and lifestyle, effectively eclipsed the image of the ‘other India’ – an India of poor men and women, of the Dalits, tribal, and working-class (Chaudhuri 2001).

In this essay, I have attempted to theorise the various dimensions of advertisements and advertising. While it may not be a comprehensive conceptualisation, I use different approaches to examine socio-economic and cultural production. To further contextualise my theorisation, I also explore how advertising is used to sell globalisation – the ideal and the vision – more than the product itself. Is the appeal of such a product its globalised nature itself? Are advertisements producers or products of such corporate globalism?

References:

Adorno, T. W. (1991). The culture industry: Selected essays on Mass Culture. J. M. Bernstein (ed.). London: Routledge.

Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. A. Appadurai (ed.). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge.

Baudrillard, J. (2001). Jean Baudrillard: Selected writings. M. Poster (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bauman, Z. (2001). Consuming life. Journal of Consumer Culture, 1(1), 9-29.

Chaudhuri, M. (2001). Gender and Advertisements: The Rhetoric of Globalisation. Women’s Studies International Forum, 24(3/4), 373–385.

Chaudhuri, M. (2010). Indian media and its transformed public. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 44, 1&2, 57–78.

Fagan, A. (n.d.). Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved on 24^th March 2021, from https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lash, S., & Urry, J. (1993). Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage Publications.

Mazzarella, W. (2004). Culture, Globalisation, Mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33(1), 345-367.

McFall, L. (2004). Advertising: A cultural economy. London: Sage.

Moeran, B. (1996). Japanese advertising agency. Curzon.

Veblen, T. (1899). The theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. London: Unwin Books.

Williams, R. (1980). Advertising: The magic system in Problems in materialism and culture: Selected Essays. London, England: Verso.

Williamson, J. (1978). Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Marion Boyers.

[i] https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/, accessed on 21^st March 2021.

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Sharayu Shejale is pursuing an integrated MA in Development Studies from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.