1. Underlying Concepts: Culture, Stereotypes, and Advertising
1.2 Advertising and Culture
This chapter sets out to explore the cultural significance of advertising. Huxley already looked at advertisements as “one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.”44 Lears sees advertisements as “fables of abundance,” which have shaped American culture since their emergence:
During the last two hundred years, in the capitalist West and increasingly elsewhere as well, advertisements have acquired a powerful iconic significance. Yet they have been more than static symbols: they have coupled words and pictures in commercial fables - stories that have been both fabulous and didactic, that have evoked fantasies and pointed morals, that have reconfigured ancient dreams of abundance to fit the modern world of goods. By the late twentieth century, these fables of abundance - especially the ones sponsored by major multinational corporations - had become perhaps the most dynamic and sensuous representations of cultural values in the world.45
Advertising and its role in culture have been analyzed by scholars of various schools of thought and cultural theories. The structuralist Barthes read advertisements as modern myths.
Myths, in his view, are systems of communication, which naturalize and purify social phenomena and thus become eternal and unquestionable. Advertising can, if we follow these views, give us an insight into at least certain aspects of American culture.
Advertising, as Goldman and Papson argue, “feeds postmodern cultural tendencies:
fragmented meaning, the celebration of surface, the substitution of fascination for meaning, cynicism, the breakdown of narrative.”46 Such postmodernist views are, in my opinion, reflected in the fragmented images and seemingly disconnected and random stereotypes used in advertising. The rapidly changing depictions foster the distorted picture the American audience receives of its own and other societies.
44 Aldous Huxley, “Advertisement,“ Essays Old and New (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1968) 131. (first published in 1927.)
45 Lears, Fables of Abundance 2.
46 Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising (New York: Guilford, 1996) 140.
Popular Culture
Today, advertising is often seen as an important aspect of popular culture. According to Muskerji and Schudson, popular culture “refers to the beliefs and practices, and the objects through which they are organized, that are widely shared among a population.”47 Williams distinguishes between four possible meanings of the term popular in popular culture. In an earlier sense it described “inferior kinds of work.” Brown and Brown comment on this largely abandonded view:
[…] popular culture has nothing to do with so-called quality, with the ‘good and beautiful’ in life as distinguished from those elements which are considered neither good nor beautiful. Some aspects of culture are positive, some negative, some beneficial, some detrimental. Popular culture, especially in a country like the United States, is the total of all ways and means of life, for better or worse, desired or undesired.48
A more modern view as described by Williams is that of “work deliberately setting out to win favour” and that it is “well-liked by many people.” A fourth possible meaning of “popular”
concerns work that is “actually made by the people for themselves, with which of course, in many cases, the earlier senses overlap.”49
Storey adds two other possible definitions of popular culture, one as a “residual category, there to accommodate cultural texts and practices which fail to meet the required standards to qualify as high culture,”50 and another as mass culture because it is “a hopelessly commercial culture.”51 Inge proposes a broad, but very feasible definition for our purposes:
47 Chandra Muskerji and Michael Schudson, “Introduction: Rethinking Popular Culture,” Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, eds. Chandra Muskerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991) 3.
48 Ray B. Brown and Pat Brown, introduction, The Guide to United States Popular Culture, eds. Ray B. Brown and Pat Brown (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001) 2.
49 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 237.
50 John Storey, An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1993) 7.
51 Storey 10.
[P]opular culture is what we do by choice to engage our minds and bodies when we are not working or sleeping. This can be active – playing baseball, driving an automobile, dancing – or passive – watching television, sunbathing, or reading a book. It can be creative – painting a portrait, writing a poem, cooking a meal – or simply responsive – playing a game, watching a circus, or listening to music. While highly inclusive and perhaps imprecise, such a definition allows for the great diversity of form and wide degree of latitude for engagement of mind and body necessary for any discussion of popular culture in this century.52
As the abundance of definitions and views makes it difficult to define the role of advertisements in popular culture, I conclude the following: advertising is part of popular culture mainly because its purpose is to win the consumers’ favor. For one, it is neither necessarily liked by a majority of people (even though it is admired by some): “Nicht alles oder sogar nur sehr weniges an populärer Kultur ist Ausdruck populären Bedürfnisses. Worauf es ankommt, sind bestimmte wiederkehrende zentrale Motive oder Handlungskonfigurationen.”53 It is exactly these central images that are at the core of this dissertation’s analysis.
Advertising is also not made by the people themselves: advertisements are carefully produced, analyzed, researched, crafted. Advertising is also insofar tied to popular culture as it touches many of its subjects, which the second part of this dissertation reveals: television, fairs, architecture, the automobile, business, catalogues, children’s literature, ethnic minorities, fantasy, fashion, film, food, toys, housing, magazines, collecting, music, newspapers, propaganda, radio, science, and, of course, television.54
Fluck addresses the crucial popular culture phenomenon of escapism, which advertising also utilizes and is closely analyzed in chapter 4 of this dissertation: “populäre Kultur erlaubt eine zeitweilige Regression vor den Problemen der Wirklichkeit, weil sie diese oft ignoriert oder fiktiv auflöst. […] Populäre Kultur kann so zu einer Form des Eskapismus werden.”55
52 Thomas M. Inge, introduction, Handbook of American Popular Culture, 2nd ed, eds. Thomas M. Inge and Dennis Hall (New York : Greenwood Press, 2002) xx.
53 Winfried Fluck, Populäre Kultur: Ein Studienbuch zur Funktionsbestimmung und Interpretation populärer Kultur (Stuttgart: Mezler, 1979) 37.
54 See: Inge and Hall.
55 Fluck 43.
Whether advertisements are inferior to “high culture” or not is a widely debated topic.
Concerning their purpose and intention, however, they are “not avenues of public enlightenment or cultural enhancement.”56 An important characteristic is their intended contemporary nature.
They are only created for the fleeting moment, and only a few ads remain as cultural knowledge, historical artifacts of popular culture. The messages, images, logos, tunes, and jingles, which are constantly repeated, are common cultural knowledge. Popular culture, and in many ways advertising, however, becomes more and more a global phenomenon that loses its national ties and becomes transnational:
Whatever its political orientation, whether created by people chanting ‘freedom’ or consumed by couch potato masses, popular culture is now fully enmeshed in transnational globalized technoculture. It makes sense, then, to see it as plural, as negotiating among diverse communities involved in a conflictual process of production and consumption.57
Consumer Culture
Advertising is also often associated with a culture of consumerism,which is “a particular kind or degree of consumption; it is consumption that is based upon perceived (psychological) need rather than actual (physical) need.”58 Twitchell puts this more bluntly: “Once we are fed and sheltered, our needs are and have always been cultural, not natural.”59 Bogart even goes as far as to make advertising a central focus of American commercial and consumer culture:
"Advertising epitomizes the spirit of American commercial culture, which ranks material possessions high and assigns them a prominent place in everyday life."60 Mamiya argues similarly as she asserts that “[i]t is through advertising that the ideological claims of consumption are reinforced. Moreover, advertising has become one of the most representative
56 Bogart 69.
57 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994) 340.
58 Heather Addison, “Hollywood, Consumer Culture, and the Rise of ‘Body Shaping’,” Hollywood Goes Shopping:
American Cinema and Consumer Culture, eds. David Desser and Garth S. Jowett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 4.
59 Twitchell 15.
60 Bogart 65.
institutions of American consumer culture.”61 Material success was, after all, a major motivation for many immigrants and has been and still is a crucial part of the so-called American Dream.
First signs of this fairly new cultural phenomenon surfaced in the late nineteenth century but were mainly shaped during the twentieth century. Fox and Lears argue that the “search for the origins of consumer culture should begin by concentrating on the activities of urban elites during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.”62 Advertising played an important part in this emergence and development of consumer culture as it helped to create, shape, persuade, and influence the consumer. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the United States saw a proliferation of amusement parks, an unprecedented show of wealth, and newly emerging department stores, which were referred to as cathedrals of consumption. Other scholars see the 1910s and 1920s as the time of transformation to a consumer culture.63 New consumer-oriented experiences, whose only goal was commercial gain, were offered during this time, such as automobiles, ever larger and more luxurious department stores that offered a growing variety of goods, motion pictures, and increasingly sophisticated advertising campaigns.
Advertising is largely dependent on consumer culture and is aimed at creating needs.
“Whether or not ads are successful at selling particular products – some ad campaigns succeed and others fail – the underlying message in advertising, which permeates our media culture, is the importance of the values of consumerism.”64 There is an ongoing debate whether needs are created by advertising or whether advertising simply brings out inherent needs and wishes that already exist. In this thesis, however, it is more important that viewers “learn and internalize some of the values, beliefs, and norms presented in media products.”65 Every notion generated by advertising can influence the perception of people, including the presentation of ethnic groups or the promotion of “a culture of consumption, normalizing middle- or even upper-middle-class lifestyles and making buying power a measure of both virtue and freedom.”66
One phenomenon of particular interest is the Super Bowl, which not only offers the most expensive commercials but also attracts much attention from the media and consumers. The
61 Christin J. Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Super Market (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1992) 16.
62 Richard Fox and Jackson Lears, introduction, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, eds. Richard Fox and Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983) xi.
63 E.g.: Addison 4.
64 Croteau and Hoynes 186.
65 Croteau and Hoynes 15.
66 Croteau and Hoynes 186.
spots shown are usually very innovative and are aired for the first time during this spectacle, which Twitchell refers to as the “Advertising Bowl.”67 The price tag alone reveals the scope of this phenomon, as a 30-second spot in the recent 2005 Super Bowl cost 2.4 million US Dollars.68 It epitomizes the very core of commercial culture as Bogart suggests:
Our culture is commercial because of the central place in it of material goods and their symbols. But the term ‘commercial culture’ can be used in another sense, as well, when applied to the flow of ideas and expression that shapes national character and outlook. By this narrower definition, contemporary American culture is commercial because, overwhelmingly, it is produced for sale to meet marketing requirements. In this respect it differs from the cultures of other places and times, in which expression has been valued either as an end in itself or because of the ability to please a patron. Commercial culture assigns no value or meaning to communications apart from their market value – that is, the price that someone is willing to pay.69
According to many people, including many scholars, advertising corrupts society or is simply unimportant and a nuisance. “Those working within the mass culture perspective,” Storey states, “usually have in mind a previous ‘golden age’ when cultural matters were very different.
This usually takes on two forms: a lost organic community or a lost folk culture.”70 Others argue that advertisers dictate the content of the media,71 including entertainment and news.72 As the viewer is not only the consumer of a media product (a TV show, a magazine, etc.), he or she is also a commodity that can be sold to advertisers. In this sense it can be argued that media products are designed to bring the highest profit possible, which almost exclusively comes from advertisers. During the 1980s and 1990s television culture changed into the now common tabloid
67 Twitchell 190. See also: George F. Will, “The Real Game: The Commercials,” Washington Post 28 January 1990:
C7.
68 Stuart Elliot, “Ad Reaction Claims Super Bowl Casualty,” New York Times 3 February 2005: C1.
69 Bogart 66.
70 Storey 10.
71 “The original modern sense of ‘media’ dates, interestingly enough, from its use in advertising trade journals of the 1920s – as in ‘advertising media.’” Today many explanations and definitions exist, for example the depiction of nonprint forms of communication, or “the larger realms of entertainment and showbusiness.” (Daniel Czitrom,
“Dialectical Tensions in the American Media Past and Present,” Popular Culture in America, ed. Paul Buhle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 7.)
72 See: Collins. Also: Baker.
TV culture. Many TV formats, including talk shows, “investigative” journalism, reality TV, and news shows, are often criticized as superficial entertainment, edutainment, infotainment, or simply as trash TV.73
The relationship between advertising and culture is not stagnant; quite to the contrary, it is changing quickly as new forms of media, such as the internet74, create new opportunities and challenges with profound consequences and influence on American popular, consumer, and mass culture.