Advertising Myths

Seen as corrupting a mythically pure relationship between people and things,advertising consistently attracts social censure. In Advertising Myths, Anne M.Cronin argues that it is better understood as a matrix of transformation thatperforms divisions in the social order and frames classificatory regimes. Thisclassifying function is evident not only in the standard taxonomies of taste andsocial distinction, but also in the making and remaking of conceptual distinctionsbetween humans and the material world, consumers and commodities. Focusing onconsumption controversies, Cronin contends that advertising is constituted bycircuits of belief that ow between practitioners, clients, regulators, consumersand academics. Controversies, such as those over tobacco and alcohol advertising, distil these beliefs and articulate with programmes of social engineering aimed ataltering consumption patterns. This book will be essential reading for students andacademics of advertising and consumption.

Anne M. Cronin is a lecturer in the Sociology Department and at the Institute forCultural Research at Lancaster University. She has also published Advertising andConsumer Citizenship: Gender, Images and Rights (Routledge).

INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF SOCIOLOGYFounded by Karl Mannheim

Editor: John UrryLancaster University

Advertising MythsThe strange half-lives of imagesand commodities

Anne M. Cronin

First published 2004 by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

2004 Anne M. Cronin

Typeset in Times by Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataCronin, Anne M., 1967

Advertising myths: the strange half-lives of images and commodities/Anne M. Cronin.

p. cm. (International library of sociology)Includes bibliographical references and index.1. AdvertisingSocial aspects. 2. Consumer behaviour.3. Consumption (Economics)Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series.HF5821.C76 2004659.1042dc21 2003010028

ISBN 0415281733 (hbk)ISBN 0415281741 (pbk)

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

Contents

List of gures viiAcknowledgements ixList of abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

1 Images, commodities and compulsions: consumption controversies of the nineteenth century 9

Commodities, consuming pathologies and the useless object 11Advertising and the dialectical image 23Signs of the times? Gender, commodities and modernity 26

2 Advertising as site of contestation: criticisms, controversy and regulation 33

Regulating culture 34Instituting beliefs: trade associations and non-governmental

organizations 45Legislating advertising 48

3 Advertising agencies: commercial reproduction and the management of belief 57

Advertising effects and agencies self-promotional practices 59Regulation, promotional rhetoric and commercial practice 64Controversies and regulation 69Understanding advertising 73

4 Animating images: advertisements, texts, commodities 79

Text, commodity, pathology 82Antidotes to advertising and the maladies of representation 97Commodities, persons and ownership 105

5 Advertising reconsidered 113

Cultures of addiction? Consumption, representation and crisis rhetoric 117

A politics of synthetics 122Advertising and taxonomy 127

Notes 134Bibliography 137Index 148

vi Contents

Figures

4.1 Absolut vodka advertisement, Absolut obsession (with permission from V&S Vin & Sprit AB) 84

4.2 Silk Cut cigarette advertisement (razor blade in ice) (courtesy of Gallaher Limited) 88

4.3 Silk Cut cigarette advertisement (knives and blades) (courtesy of Gallaher Limited) 89

4.4 Adbusters spoof advertisement, Absolute silence (courtesy of Adbusters) 92

4.5 Adbusters spoof advertisement, Marlboro country (courtesy of Adbusters) 92

4.6 Drum tobacco advertisement, Its in your hands (courtesy of Imperial Tobacco Limited) 94

4.7 ArtWORKS World Health Organization anti-smoking campaign, Look at Van Gogh and do not smoke. The healing power of art (courtesy of the artists, Komar and Melamid, and the World HealthOrganization) 101

4.8 ArtWORKS World Health Organization anti-smoking campaign, Still life (courtesy of the artist, Lisa Milroy, and the World HealthOrganization) 103

4.9 ArtWORKS World Health Organization anti-smoking campaign (smoking boy image) (courtesy of the artist, Wim Delvoye, and the World Health Organization) 104

5.1 Gucci perfume advertisement, Rush (courtesy of Gucci) 1195.2 Nike Encyclopedia of Addictions image, Case studies that will

make you cry (courtesy of Nike) 1205.3 Nike Encyclopedia of Addictions image, I am addicted to things

that are good for me. I am addicted to things that are bad for me (courtesy of Nike) 121

5.4 Cokane spoof advertisement, How pure are you? Cokane. 100% pure Columbian cocaine (courtesy of the Guardian) 130

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped me in writing this book and I am very grateful for all theircontributions. First and foremost, I would like to thank Claudia Casteada andImogen Tyler who offered support, intellectual commentary, and helped me seethe wood for the trees in some of the trickier moments.

Many people at Lancaster University have contributed to the development of my ideas and provided practical support in reading drafts and grant applications but I would particularly like to thank Anne-Marie Fortier, Adrian Mackenzie,Jackie Stacey and John Urry. I have had many interesting discussions with KevinHetherington and Mimi Sheller about consumption and with Tim Hickman aboutthe controveries over drugs and their consumption. Jane Kilby and Alan Warderead some wobbly drafts for me and provided invaluable comments. My thanks toall these.

Thanks also to Janine Grenfell and Beryl Vernon who supplied a lot of laughs aswell as practical support, and to Damien Cashman for helping me with sometechnological queries. Thanks to all the advertising practitioners who agreed to be interviewed, and also to Geoff Russell of the Institute for Practitioners inAdvertising, Claire Forbes of the Advertising Standards Authority and Tim Amblerof the London Business School.

I would also like to thank all the companies who kindly granted me permissionto reproduce their images: Adbusters (http://adbusters.org), Gallaher Limited, theGuardian, Gucci, Imperial Tobacco Limited, Nike, V&S Vin & Sprit AB. I amalso grateful to the World Health Organization and the artists Wim Delvoye, Komarand Melamid, and Lisa Milroy who allowed me to reproduce their work.

Thanks to people at Taylor and Francis, particularly Gerhard Boomgaarden, andalso James McNally who untiringly answered a barrage of email queries from me.

I would also like to acknowledge the Arts and Humanties Research Board whichprovided me with a grant to complete this book (grant no. AN8471/APN13101).

Abbreviations

AA Advertising Association [UK]ASA Advertising Standards Authority [UK]ASH Action on Smoking and Health [UK]BACC Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre [UK]BAT British American TobaccoCAP Committee of Advertising Practice [UK]EAAA European Association of Advertising AgenciesEASA European Advertising Standards AllianceEAT European Advertising TripartiteFTC Federal Trade Commission [USA]IPA Institute of Practitioners in Advertising [UK]IAS Institute of Alcohol Studies [UK]ISBA Incorporated Society of British Advertisers [UK]ITC Independent Television Commission [UK]NAD National Advertising Division [USA]NARB National Advertising Review Board [USA]TMA Tobacco Manufacturers AssociationWHO World Health Organization

Introduction

For many years, advertising has excited the critical faculties of scholars as much as it has focused popular fascination and social censure. Classically, advertising has been seen as the primary social and commercial mediator between commoditiesand the consumer, products and society. For instance, Jhally (1987: 142) argues that,through advertising, goods are knitted into the fabric of social life and culturalsignicance. In this understanding, advertising operates as a form of intermediarythat translates material products into symbolic social entities and facilitates theirintegration into social networks of people, ideas, practices and institutions. Thus,predicated on its assumed powers to channel consumption practices, advertising hasbeen considered a primary force that mediates social distinctions such as class,subculture, gender, nationality or age. Just as consumption acts are thought toreproduce social classications and their complex inection of power relations,advertising has been framed as the means of translating those capitalist ideals ofincessant acquisition into individual consuming practices that conform to thosesocial stratications. Advertising Myths expands these understandings to considerthe ways in which advertising operates to institute other forms of distinction suchas those between the conceptual categories of person and thing, consumer andcommodity, and normal and dangerous consumption.

In order to explore the contours of this formation, the book analyses the practicesof the advertising industry, the textual artefacts or products of that industry, socialresponses to the dissemination of those products, and the controversies surroundingadvertising as institution and as trope for contemporary society. In the long-runningdebates over these issues, advertising has frequently been framed as a manipulativeforce that fabricates or subverts the needs and desires of the individual. It wasGalbraith who set the tone for many subsequent critiques of this type arguing that,many of the desires of the individual are no longer even evident to him. They havebecome so only as they are synthesized, elaborated, and nurtured by advertising and salesmanship, and these, in turn, have become among our most important andtalented professions (1958: 2). Beyond emphasising the fabrication of the con-sumers repertoire of desires, this account also stresses the power of advertising as an institution and its practitioners key role as cultural intermediaries. But veryfew subsequent studies have taken up this issue and engaged in a detailed analysisof the industry and advertising practitioners.1 More commonly within academic

analyses, an abstracted category of advertising is put to work as a galvanizingtrope that engenders generalized social and cultural criticism. Thus, advertising isused to illustrate a wide range of phenomena or is discursively employed as evidenceof social change in debates such as those over the increasing signicance of visualculture, the commodication of the social, the manipulative inuence of televisionor the erosion of traditional social bonds. Advertisings ascribed function as indexof the social derives from its purportedly isomorphic relationship to capitalism:advertising is imagined to reect and disseminate the ideals of capitalism, whilstsimultaneously embodying and performing the pernicious power of capitalistideologies. Following this logic, Goldman (1992: 2) argues that the textual analysisof advertisements can map the cultural reproduction of commodity hegemonyand offer a precise cartographic transcription of capitalist society.

Part of the appeal of using advertising as a litmus test or index of society centreson the ubiquity of its texts. As Williamson (2000: 11) notes, even if you do not reada newspaper or watch television, the images posted over our urban surroundings are inescapable. Whilst the pervasive quality of contemporary advertising has beenthe focus of much comment, I am particularly interested in the ubiquity of com-mentary upon, and critiques of, advertising. This constant rehearsal of ideas aboutadvertising, and criticisms of its perceived effects, operate in multiple registersincluding that of popular enjoyment and critique, academic analysis, advertisingagencies own rhetoric about advertising, and regulatory and self-regulatory bodies.Advertising Myths focuses on the circulation of beliefs and understandings of adver-tising and asks how we license ourselves to make such claims about and throughadvertising. In this sense, I am taking an oblique stance in relation to the centraldebates around advertising, thus producing an ex-centric analysis. My account,therefore, does not rest on the thorny question of, does advertising work?. This isgenerally framed in terms of an increase in product sales but, as I go on to argue,the question itself circulates within and beyond the industry as a constitutive myth.My question is therefore formulated as, what is the work of advertising? What is the nature of our investments in advertising and in analysing advertising? Howdoes advertising operate as a taxonomy of the social? How does the circulation ofunderstandings of advertising constitute that very persuasion industry?

The title, Advertising Myths, refers to Roland Barthes (1974) notion of mythelaborated in his classic study of advertisements and later taken up in other analysessuch as that of Judith Williamson (2000 [1978]). For Barthes (1974: 129), myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inection. Myth is not a concept, idea orobject, and it does not operate through simple negation or deception instead, mythis a system of communication (Barthes 1974: 109). In his analysis of texts ingeneral, and advertisements in particular, Barthes aims to show how myth puriesand naturalizes social phenomena, giving them an eternal and unquestionablejustification. In this sense, myth does not operate through the denial of a socialphenomenon, but rather through a continual elaboration and dissemination ofunderstandings of that phenomenon. Through this mythologizing process, newarticulations of social meanings are forged and naturalized whilst the very systemof signication by which they were engendered is obscured and thus, things appear

2 Introduction

to mean something by themselves (1974: 143). Barthes and later commentators usemyth to analyse advertisements (textual artefacts) that are generally understood asthe end-products of a long and often unstable process of the circulation of nance,regulatory strictures, beliefs about advertising, and their materialization in textualform. In my analysis, I am using myth to reference advertising as an entire institutionnot merely the textual end-products of its processes, and I am also departing from the classic sense that myth functions through naturalization. Instead, I arguethat the complex circulation of beliefs and commercial imperatives acts to constitutethe institution that is advertising. In parallel, I argue that advertising is used as a trope (by academics, by regulators, by advertising practitioners) for rehearsingunderstandings of the social and social relations. In this sense, advertising itselffunctions as a myth that circulates through multiple sites and articulates diversecommercial and political interests. It operates as a form of currency that constitutesthe social order in discursive, material and economic ways but, in parallel, is alsodeployed as a trope or exemplar for analysing the social.

The book explores these ows of beliefs and interests by focusing on controversyabout, and regulation of, advertising and takes as a specic case study the adver-tising of the dangerous commodities of tobacco and alcohol. Using case studiesof advertising, rather than presenting a broad account, offers a nuanced analysis ofadvertising processes and outcomes and avoids the tendency towards generalizedclaims about advertisings social and commercial impact. At the same time, thefocus on issues of controversy distils more general perceptions about advertising,such as its manipulative powers and insidious reach, and thus presents a usefulpoint of entry for the analysis of advertising in general. The sub-title of the book The strange half-lives of images and commodities resonates in (at least) threeways. First, the association of atomic half-life draws parallels with the way in whichadvertising is commonly imagined to erode the social, engendering a kind ofradioactive decay as the traditional bonds of sociality are corrupted and increasinglyreplaced with a contaminated, commodified web of social relations. Goldman(1992: 8), for instance, argues that advertising has a dissolving influence onculture. The case study of tobacco and alcohol advertising, with the associativeideas of risk, ill-health and addiction, further resonates with ideas of the erosion andcontamination of both the individual subject and the social order. Furthermore,circulating understandings of dangerous consumption extend beyond the centralinstances of addiction to substances such as alcohol and drugs and come to encom-pass other consuming practices such as shopping. In his classic account, Ewen(1988: 248) argues that contemporary capitalist societies are characterized bypathological consumption and the continuous cultivation of markets, obsessive/compulsive shopping, and premeditated waste. The half-life of images is alsointended to reference Appadurais (1986) and Kopytoffs (1986) important analysesof commodities through the framework of the social life of things. My approachto the circulation of beliefs about advertising resonates with their analysis of thebiographies of commodities as they both ow between diverse sites and alter theirsymbolic status in the process: ads too have social lives. Advertisements uncertainstatus as both material products and insubstantial, mobile signs casts their social

Introduction 3

lives as complex, protean and only half-appreciated. And lastly, the half-life ofimages and commodities is intended to signal the way in which advertisements arecommonly imagined to animate commodities, or at least the process by whichcommodities come into the lives of consumers. Advertising is thought to enliventhe commodity, to spark an active relationship between consumer and commoditywhich reects both on the agency and personhood of the subject and the ambiguous,animated, half-alive status of the commodity. This relationship is one of the centralconcerns of the book: I explore how myths of advertising constantly recount andrearticulate understandings of what it is to be a person by elaborating conceptualrelationships to the categories of thing and, more precisely, commodity. Theimagined animation of commodities by advertising troubles those distinctionsbetween the categories of person and thing and becomes the site of controversyand regulation. Throughout the book, I examine how academic, popular and regu-latory debates about the nature of advertising operate as circulating myths thatconstitute that taxonomic order and provide a lightning rod that channels a rangeof concerns about contemporary Euro-American societies.

In this analysis, I avoid making claims of grand epochal shifts in the realm ofconsumption and advertising. I am not suggesting that advertising today has reachedits zenith of persuasive impact or social signicance, nor that it embodies the veryspirit of the moment. As Raymond Williams (1980) has noted, many historicalperiods have imagined themselves to be the age of advertising. Neither am I claiming that the controversies around advertising for dangerous or addictivecommodities such as tobacco and alcohol represent a new move to a culture of addiction: it is certainly not the case that the contemporary articulation ofadvertising and consumption represents a radical break with past formulations.Indeed, Foucault has argued that we must recognize that the time we live in is notthe unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history where everything iscompleted and begun again (1990c: 36). Registering this caution, contemporaryconceptualizations of advertising can nevertheless offer an important analytic sitefor tracking the development of particular modes of understanding the shiftingclassications of person, commodity and image.

Chapter 1 situates these mutating categorizations within the context ofnineteenth-century Euro-American societies. Whilst contemporary academic andpopular accounts attribute considerable social power and commercial impact to advertising thus framing it as key site of controversy nineteenth-centuryperceptions held that advertising was significantly less influential. To examine this disjuncture, the chapter focuses on key consumption controversies of the period with a particular focus on the shifting classifications of kleptomania oroniomania (compulsive shopping). It analyses how the framing of such practicesas deviant, and in some cases pathological, impacted upon the incipient norms ofconsumption in the new industrial societies. The unhealthy, pathological, or deviantbodies of kleptomaniacs and oniomaniacs became a source of fascination andcontestation as well a site of social control they became tropes for the elaborationof what it meant to be human in rapidly developing capitalist societies. As OConnorargues,

4 Introduction