Advertising Flashcards
The mediation of reality
Ads only work in construction with other media and environments in which they are embedded and cannot be understood apart from other media environments
Marshall Mclaugh
What makes Ads so persuasive is the way they use media to fuse together a world of actors and a world of fictions
Daniel J Booristin
News and advertising have blended together to such an extent in popular media that they create an impression in which truthful reporting becomes ambiguous and the difference between a serious newsworthy event and a fabricated PR stunt is indistinguishable
Boorstin: Advertising thrives in celeb culture
Examples: Guess AD
Paris Hilton steps out helicopter, she oozes wealth and glamour
The ad plays her private life out
And this blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy
Mcluhon
Media adds an extra level of mediated experience to things we already know, giving to reality a sense of hyper reality
Ads thrive in the land of extra mediated hyper reality
Detournement
Turning an original message against itself. This idea leads to later strategy of culture jamming.
Detournment can be seen as a strategy for a method of resistance to capitalist culture and raise awareness of corporate ploys and their social effects
An example: WWF advert
The turned element was the portrayal of a toxic industry that can be both a kind of giant urban monument and as the polluted life water of the city
The image reduces the pride we must take in the magnitude of our industrial complexes in to fear that we are poisioning the very environment that is essential to our existance
Saphir Whorf hypothesis
Launguage in this instance is influencing perception and therefore knowledge based on existing though
Edward Bernays
Was intrigued by Freuds notion that irrational forces drive human behaviour. Bernays intended to use these forces to sell produce
He equated smoking with challenging male power
- He linked produce to emotions
- Linked smoking to women
- Linking goods to subconcious desire by using language to hack emotions
Imitative desire
-Ads play upon peoples tendency to desire what other other desire, French theorist Rene Girard argued that we often desire to become the other
Kathleen Vandenberg
Sociological propaganda, Ads function as interactive rituals rather than as one way messages. The essence of a ritual is that people place themselves in communities through imaginative projection toward others
-The AD serves as a similar function, we see a product, we see someone in the AD wanting the product and we want the product
