We shall outline the nature of advertising practices, and how it adds to cultural values and meanings to goods and services. Advertising and design practitioners are important in connecting production with consumption. We shall then offer two perspectives to advertising: as ideology or as interpretation.

Jean Baudrillard represents the modern consumer marketing as the engine of the consumer revolution. He makes two points:

• The explosion of consumer goods and services has changed the nature of human society – people’s principal relationships have become those with consumer objects and their associated messages rather than having relationships with other people.
• Consumers relate not to the utility of particular consumer objects, but to a new method of consumption based upon cultural meanings and values associated with particular objects and the consumer lifestyle involved through these.

Baudrillard asserts the centrality of sign-value of commodities in contemporary consumption. Advertising, packaging and design mark out new desires and pleasures for the consumer that have very little to with the utility of goods or their ability to satisfy biological needs. Indeed, advertising, or the system of sign value of commodities, establishes a new dominant form of social communication, in which consumers are forced to consume.

However, Baudrillard fails to suggest how contemporary advertising, packaging and design are different from early industrial times. In fact, there are similarities between the consumer society and the pre-modern society that throws into doubt claims of novelty and difference of contemporary consumer culture.

The development of advertising falls within broader changes in the economy.

Up until 1970s, advances in mass production in the consumer goods sector were linked with the developments in retailing and growth of national advertising and consumer marketing. Advertising, packaging and design were central to balancing the expansion of supply generated by the productivity gains of mass production with consumer demand for new mass-produced products.

In the 1970s and 80s, a crisis in mass production (or ‘Fordism’) led to a new economic era dominated by flexible manufacturing techniques, and new national and international economic regulation. Importantly, flexible specialisation is more marketing-led than mass production. This amounts to greater focus on consumers and being highly responsive to their demands. Recall the lecture on fashion, this means representing the market-place as more diverse in its consumer demands and faster-changing tastes.

In the 1980s, ‘creative advertising’ emerged, and led to a more ‘image-led’ style of advertising. What this meant was producing advertisements that worked directly at the level of identity and desire, and to construct for consumers a vision they can aspire to. It was about constructing an advertisement around emotional selling point of the product. Before, creative advertising, ‘classic advertising’ identified the product’s unique selling point. For example, under classical advertising, a toothpaste unique feature is to make teeth whiter. Under, creative advertising, focus is on how the toothpaste gives self-belief and confidence.

Creative advertising can consist of many features. Imaginative story line, musical scores and dynamic editing and sound to signify a particular ‘way of life’, mood or emotional feel in relation to the product. Or using black-and-white film stock, cinematic forms of lighting, very fast editing and jump cuts and retro-imagery helps to create emotional selling points.

There were two factors that helped to shape creative advertising:

• Media Fragmentation. Media is made up of many different fragments (e.g. newspapers, free newspapers, shoppers’ guides, government and national TV channels, satellites, video records, personal computers, the internet, radio). The emergence of a more segmented media universe meant that audience or readership profiles based on social class categories were insufficiently flexible to grasp the new media audience being organised within this more diverse market-place. Instead attitudes of people were used to categorise consumers into different lifestyles.
• Lifestyles research. Such research is based upon descriptive accounts of attitudes, opinions and beliefs. Lifestyles research can deliver an account of the most acute differences between groups of consumers that cut across class, age and gender.

Advertising to more segmented media audiences and readerships meant that not only was the choice of media important in terms of targeting, but also that advertising representations had to be appropriate for the media space selected. This meant visual style of advertisement became important in newspapers, poster and TV adverts.

More important was the new role given to lifestyle classifications based on attitudes and motivations of the consumers. In representing the consumer marketplace as more diverse in terms of groups of consumers and the cultural differences between groups of consumers, these consumer classifications led advertising agencies to place greater emphasis on a more stylised or aestheticised set of visual codes, producing an identification between the product and a specific segment of customers. Advertising led the way in establishing a new attention to product differentiation and customer choice.

Advertising is often perceived as either the symbol of immoral and exploitative capitalism, or the height of pleasure seeking and interpretation.

Advertising is seen ‘to sell’ a consumerist lifestyle or perspective. Advertising dupes (fools) the consumer, and controls the minds of the general population. Increasingly, advertising renders the population politically passive (similar to the work of Adorno and Horkheimer). According, advertising forms a major social control mechanism in motivating and manipulating the ‘affluent worker’, transforming it into the consumer.

Recently, analyses of advertising have centred on the ‘commodity form’. The commodity form is essentially the mechanism through which advertising creates meaning and ideology. We can identify two interesting dimensions:

First, advertisements are seen to structure wider social meanings so that they produce commodity sign value. In other words, an advertisement takes a human value or emotion, and turns it into a metaphor or symbol that can be commodified. For example, BMW cars associated with success, sexiness and masculinity.

Second, advertising incorporates feminism and ecology into the commodity culture. For instance, advertisements play on women’s increased independence or sexual autonomy, presenting women with products (e.g. make-up and clothes), which can control their appearances, equating this with control over their life and future. This is commodity feminism.

However, this perspective has been criticised on several grounds:

• The perspective offers a simplistic account of advertising. Only a few firms may use advertising as a kind of propaganda. Also the mode of advertising varies enormously from product to product. Most electrical goods are still advertised in textual form such as newspaper and journal.
• In practice, consumers offer resistance and opposition to consumption, and are not passive.
• The power relationship of advertisers and consumers is seen too heavily too favour the advertisers.
• If consumers fall for the values of advertising, they are accused of ‘false consciousness’. Yet, who determines the truth of falsehood of values?

An opposing perspective of advertising as interpretation emerged following the criticisms of advertising as ideology. The starting for a more interpretivist perspective is a certain scepticism concerning advertising’s power and influence.

Nevertheless, advertising only sends one message: it glorifies the pleasure and freedom of consumer choice. It defends the virtues of private life and material ambition. It idealises the consumer and consumption. It holds that freedom, fulfilment and personal transformation lie in the worlds of goods. In effect, this amounts to a severe criticism of the overly propagandist interpretation of advertising as ideology.

If advertising is understood as interpretivist texts dependent entirely in their audience for their interpretation, then this is difficult to reconcile with an analysis of advertising as having an overall ideological function. Nevertheless, we can reconcile both of these perspectives. The key issue is that analysis of advertisements does not necessarily equate with an analysis of advertising. Although there is a strong tendency for an analysis of advertisement to shift towards a more interpretivist perspective, the role of advertising itself is seen almost totally as ideological.

To caution, advertising vary significantly in the techniques they use and the products to which they apply. What is increasingly clear is the sense in which advertising is divisively targeted towards certain status groups (higher managerial and professional occupations) and market segments, and ignores casual workers and those on pension and unemployment benefit.