Advertising and Society

This week focuses on what ads teach about race, class, gender, and sexuality as a kind of secondary messages beyond the overt messages promoting products and services. For example, an orange juice commercial may promote the health benefits of orange juice but it also is likely to show the product in its context of use at breakfast. The imagery in the ad will lay out who does the serving, who cooks the breakfast, who gets to sit and be served, what a family should look like, and so on. Through analysis of these secondary messages, we come to learn that advertising instills ideas about gender, race, social class, and sexuality. We will also study the depiction of these themes in the popular TV program "Mad Men," allowing us to talk about how these issues were managed in the lives of ad agency people as well as in the ads they produced.

Sexual imagery permeates modern advertising, but does it actually help see goods and services? The verdict on this is not a clear yes or no. But there is another very important question wrapped up in all this: what kind of sex does advertising sell? Some scholars believe that advertising teaches us a great deal about sex itself, plays a significant role in defining our culture’s ideas about what is sexy, and helps shape our ideas about sexuality.

The present moment in advertising history is one of great turmoil. The TV commercial is rapidly fading from its preeminence as the major advertising format. The once mass audiences for television programming and accompanying ads are already diminished by the proliferation of channels, the ability of consumers to time shift, and so on. It is the Internet however that is transforming advertising and challenging its very existence. Social media, consumer written ads, popup ads that are highly targeted to consumers on the basis of their purchasing and surfing habits, and so on make the future unpredictable. One author predicts its demise in his book, "The End of Advertising as We Know It." We will examine emergent trends in the seemingly never ending battle of finding the best means of establishing communication between companies and their prospective clients.