1. Advertising has a significant collective influence on consumer culture and behavior, even if it cannot be proven to directly cause individual purchases. While any single ad may not make a person buy something, the cumulative effect of widespread advertising shapes consumer demand. 2. Advertisers aim to bypass rational decision-making and appeal directly to unconscious desires in order to influence consumers. Ads are designed using techniques like humor, sexuality, and portraying an ideal lifestyle to create an emotional response. 3. Postmodern culture is characterized by a lack of overriding narratives or rules. Identity and culture are mutable and eclectic, mixing styles in "pastiche." Advertising reflects and contributes to this postmodern condition by blurring reality

1. Consumer Cultures
Advertising in
American Society

2. Consider the cost of making an
advertisement versus the cost of
purchasing air time
Standard 30 second, nationally
broadcast commercial costs between
$300,000-$500,000 to produce
-Got Milk ($370,000 to produce)
Air time could run into the millions of
dollars

3. “Even lousy advertising
works.”
We like to think we can resist advertising’s
influence on us
Can’t show a given ad makes an individual
buy a product or service, or is the primary
force shaping that person’s behavior, but we
can see advertising’s collective impact,
affecting people in general.
“Harry & Louise” campaign against Clinton
healthcare plan eroded support

4. Defining Advertising
Ad agencies buy space & time
Alternative ads
(buses, billboards, sponsors, product
placement, place-based, pop displays)
Designed to attract people with certain values
and lifestyles (demographics &
psychographics)
Tries to stimulate action via desire
(convince, persuade, motivate, act)

5. Clutter
Agencies try to differentiate their
campaigns to break through the
paralysis brought on by information
overload and get the attention of their
target audience.
Honda Cog commercial (6 million to
make, 606 takes, three weeks to film,
three months to make, two minutes
long)

6. Consumer Trust
A small percentage of consumers
trust advertisers; the majority admit
to being influenced by the
recommendations of people in
their social graph (family, friends)
Consumer as more reflexive agent
Cynicism

7. Print Ads & Commercials
Messaris’ “response tendencies” in magazine
ads and commercials; models and
spokespersons look directly at the viewer
(mimic real life to evoke an emotional
response)
The male gaze
Advertising conditions us in the same way
Pavlov was able to train dogs
Industry tries to deflect criticism & gov’t
regulation by citing “weak” media theories

8. Social-Psychological Model
Exposure < Recall
Used by many social scientists to
study advertising’s impact
People are tested to see if they
recall advertisements or change
attitudes or opinions after exposure

9. Psycho-Cultural Model
People’s psyches (unconscious) <
exposed to advertising < Cultural behavior
of People
Corporations assume people are irrational
and respond to messages that avoid ego
dominated, traditional decision making
Messages appeal to Freud’s Id (I want it
now), and avoid the superego (You can’t
afford it/don’t need it) and mediating ego
(you should think about it)

10. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc
Industry uses the argument to
deflect criticism; just because
something happens after
something doesn’t mean it was
caused by it…
Just because Y follow X does not
mean that X caused Y

11. Advertising’s collective
influence
Commercials for alcohol may not be the sole
causative factor responsible for people
drinking, but may play an important,
contributing role.
Public airways are held in “trust” and
broadcast “in the public interest” (is trust
being abused?)
Media so ubiquitous it is difficult to find a
control group

12. Persuasion
Mini-dramas, works or art
Heroes and Heroines (celebrities, athletes)
Sexuality (beautiful women, homoerotic)
Humor (establishes relationships w/others)
Fun (do we feel obliged to have fun?)
Success (class systems and product
knowledge)
Reward

13. Teleculture
Culture is influenced and shaped by
television
Reflects and affects culture
Television has usurped other dominant
figures in the socialization process like
parents, ministers, professors, peers
Teleculture is largely commercials and
plays role in creating and maintaining
consumer cultures

14. Consumer Cultures
A great expansion in commodity production
has led to societies full of consumer goods
and services and places to purchase them
Game of get as much as you can
Lust for consumer products as demonstration
of success and worthiness
The very act of consumption is glamorized
Taste Cultures, Newman Marcus’
couthification

15. Consumer Cultures and
Privatism
Consumer culture is privatistic: focus on
personal consumption; based on private
desires and satisfaction of individual wishes,
not social investment for the public good
(taken to the extreme, the worse things are,
the more opportunities to sell, so market
economy may have implicit stake in social
disorganization and neglect of public sphere).

16. Four Consumer Cultures?
hierarchical or elitist: need for hierarchy but
feel obligation to those below them
individualistic: minimal role of gov’t to
maximize possibilities for individuals in
business, feel little obligation to those below
Egalitarian: critics of status-quo, gov’t must
see to basic needs
fatalist: little economic or purchasing power

17. Classified Advertising
Most important and personal aspects of
our lives dealt with in most mundane
and impersonal formats
Reflect the anonymity and alienation
that pervade our culture
Which is more important, things or
people?

18. The Postmodern
Perspective
Pastiche and mixing of styles is dominant
Beyond modernism (1900-1960)
characterized by a sense that we could know
reality and valid rules govern society
Incredulity toward meta-narratives and lack of
acceptance of great philosophical systems of
order, capitalism in advanced societies
(Jameson)

19. The Postmodern
Perspective
No rules, create and change identity on a
whim
No significant differences in elite versus
populist art, anything goes
Cannot distinguish between reality and
simulations, games
Culture mutation, schizophrenia (related to
signifiers and signifieds)
Advertising in the Age of Irony