Ad
ertising Agencies
Bibliography
Hower R 1939 The History of an Ad
ertising Agency: N. W. Ayer
& Son at Work, 18691939. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA
Jones P 1999 The Ad
ertising Business. Sage, Thousand Oaks,
CA
Leiss W, Klein S, Jhally S 1990 Social Communication in
Ad
ertising: Persons, Products and Images of Well-being, 2nd
edn. Routledge, London
Lien M 1997 Marketing and Modernity. Berg, Oxford, UK
Miller D 1997 Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. Berg,
Oxford, UK
Moeran B 1996 A Japanese Ad
ertising Agency: An Anthropology
of Media and Markets. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu,
HI
Schudson M 1984 Ad
ertising: The Uneasy Persuasion. Basic
Books, New York
Wells W, Burnett J, Moriarty S 2000 Ad
ertising: Principles and
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B. Moeran
Advertising and Advertisements
1. Denition
The way the terms advertising and advertisement a plateau of eectiveness beyond which it makes no
are dened depends to a great extent on the authors
perspective, training, and agenda. Even so, an en-
cyclopedia entry seems to beg for an authoritative
denition. This article oers the following: an ad-
vertisement is a message paid for, but not delivered, by
the sender, that (a) incorporates technologies or forms
other than speech, (b) appears in a public forum, and
(c) attempts to persuade receivers to behave in a way
that brings direct economic benet to the sender. This
denition allows for most of what is customarily
considered advertising, while excluding other acts or
forms that, while sharing some characteristics with
advertisements, are not generally considered such. For
instance, this denition would not include a salesmans
pitch, but would encompass any brochures he used.
Political speeches, whether made in Parliament or
during the breaks on 60 Minutes, would not be
advertisements because the expected behavioral out-
come is not directly economic. Corporate image
messages would count, even when purchase is not the
object, as such advertisements ultimately have an
economic goal, such as aecting the value of stock by
increasing the prestige of the corporation.
2. Function
The function of advertising likewise will vary in
description based upon the education, focus, and
motive of a particular author. Economists tradition-
ally have allowed advertising into their models only
172
as a form of market information. Their denition of
information, however, is usually limited to prices and
availability. To the extent that advertisements in-
corporate other non-information (such as prestige
claims or sex appeals), advertising becomes an ex-
ogenous variable, constitutive of tastes, and there-
fore present in the system only as noise or interference.
As long as advertisements serve to notify markets of
supply and price, however, the institution of ad-
vertising operates neatly within the range of traditional
economic models. Indeed, to the extent that adver-
tising supports stable demand, allowing producers to
become price-makers rather than price-takers, it
becomes an important aid to microeconomic planning.
The realization of economies of scale that accrue from
such an arrangement, so the argument goes, tends to
reduce prices to consumers in the long run.
Critics and consumer groups often charge that
advertising merely adds to the prices paid by
consumerssometimes raising them as much as
100%but such claims do not hold for most goods in
the long run. For example, simple bar soap was sold
100 years ago in the US at a price that included
advertising expenses equal to direct costs (thus repre-
senting about 50% of each units price). As con-
sumption of soap grew, however, the advertising
expenditures leveled o (advertisement budgets reach
sense to spend at higher levels). Consequently, the
percentage of each units price represented by ad-
vertising steeply declined. Since advertising expense is
only one of the economies of scale created by mass
marketing and production, the total unit price of each
bar of soap also dropped dramatically, allowing many
US citizens to wash regularly for the rst time. Today,
it is only the very extraordinary soap that would
include an advertising expense more than 3 percent of
its unit price. The same is true for most well-
established, mass-produced, and heavily advertised
products.
In the Marxist critique of capitalist consumer
culture, advertisings most central function is to ensure
capitalism continues: by stimulating ever-increasing
levels of demand, advertising forces an always-grow-
ing array of goods into consumers homes, regardless
of need or utility. Here too, advertisements that inform
audiences of availability and prices are not typically
thought problematic. However, the fetishization of
objects by advertisements that name, sing, or tell
stories is seen as a sinister form of industrial magic
through which consumers are made to value products
for the wrong reasons. By adding this dubious
exchange value to the objects use value, advertising
serves to rob workers and pad the pockets of capitalists
with unearned prots.
The cultural critics picture of advertising as a
guarantee of long-term prots is sharply at odds with
the way advertisings function is actually viewed in
practice. Though the most obvious reason for a

manufacturer to spend money on advertising is to
stimulate purchase, advertisers are famously skeptical
about the actual impact of media budgets on sales.
They tend to feel vaguely robbed by their advertising
agencies, forced to participate in a pointless display by
social convention. And, indeed, one of the few
generally accepted ndings of the past 30 years of
academic research on advertising eectiveness is that a
direct eect on sales is virtually impossible to dem-
onstrate. So many factors inuence sales that it is hard
to isolate advertisings function to stimulate demand.
And, from case to case, advertisings apparent per-
formance can vary from spectacular to abysmal with
little readily discernible logic.
Accounting practices reect the doubts of the
manufacturing community: advertising cannot be
treated as an investment in capital (like buying a new
plant), but must be treated instead as an annual
expense (like oce paper). Only in the past 5 to 10
years (and only in Europe) has the possibility of
recognizing the long-term benets of advertising in
nancial statements been discussed. The reason for
reconsidering advertising as an investment is the equity
markets valuation of companies with established
brands. Consider that shares in Procter and Gamble,
the largest advertiser in the US, go for more than four
times book value. The price of the stock reects the
nancial communitys belief that some value inheres in
Procter and Gamble beyond the historical cost of its
equipment, patents, and real estate. Probably, the
nancial markets are imputing a value for Procter and
Gambles many brands, most of which are long-
standing leaders in their respective product categories.
Category leadership is at least partly attributable to
Procter and Gambles historical practice of consist-
ently advertising each brand at levels that exceed all
direct competitors expenditures.
Historians have oered the view that advertisings
function is to weaken, even eliminate, the middlemen
in goods distribution by stimulating consumer demand
for products. Once consumers want a particular brand,
they say, retailers are forced to carry it on their
shelves and brokers are forced to provide it to
retailers. While it is demonstrably true that the growth
of advertising as an institution over, say, the past 150
years has resulted in a rationalizing of distribution
systems in a way that is advantageous for manu-
facturers (and, actually, consumers), the notion that
advertising allows makers to control distributors
should not be overstated. Distributors and retailers
retain a great deal of power in the current system and,
in fact, during the last 30 years of the twentieth
century, the shift has been back toward the distributor.
We see evidence of this in the production of private
label brands, the growing power of stores like Wal-
Mart, and the broadscale shift of advertising dollars
spent by companies like Procter and Gamble into
expenditures for trade allowances and the like.
Further, while it is certainly plausible that advertising
Ad
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has had the eect of increased control over distri-
bution, arguing that channel management is actually
the primary function of advertising conates eect
with function.
The conation of the terms eect and function is
also a problem in works that purport to identify the
impact of advertising upon social issues. For example,
many feminists have written about the eects of
advertising on the status of women, frequently falling
into the habit of claiming that advertisings function is
to oppress women. While advertisements may indeed
contribute to the ideology of gender inequality, ar-
guing that advertisings purpose is the oppression of
women seems a misplacement of emphasis.
From the broadest cultural perspective, advertis-
ings function may be more meta-structural than most
social critics would describeor advertisers pay for.
Anthropologists argue that the primary function of
consumption is cultural, not biological, because goods
serve to make the categories of culture visible and,
therefore, stable. Since human cognition demands a
balance between total heterogeneity and total hom-
ogeneity, any system of objects will require an activity
that marks items as being appropriate for certain
users, places, or occasions. In pre-industrial societies,
marking is accomplished through exchange rituals
performed in the presence of the entire tribe. The
chanting, singing, and naming in such rituals can be
uncannily similar in form to modern advertising.
Given the proliferation of otherwise homogeneous
goods in the mass-production society, one would
expect to see some mechanism arise for marking these
goods as cultural artifacts. Since mass production was
accompanied in history by the emergence of mass
communication, it is, perhaps, not terribly surprising
that the activity of marking mass-produced goods
would occur in the public spaces provided by the
mass media. Thus emerges advertising as we know it.
3. Form
Today, advertising is highly identied with images.
Particularly in cultural studies, invoking the dangers
of the visual is almost synonymous with advertising
criticism. But advertising is not necessarily, nor even
distinctively, visual in form. Television commercials
that use only the visual dimension are as rare as silence
on a sitcomthat is to say, rare indeed. Instead,
television advertisements, like most other types of
advertising, skillfully integrate more than one sym-
bolic system (speech, writing, numbers, music, gesture,
and so on). In radio, where the visual dimension is
absent, the sound of speech is often elaborated with
rhyme and rhythm or augmented with song or sound
eects. Furthermore, the largest category of adver-
tisements, directory and classied advertisements, are
usually composed entirely of written text. Even here,
however, we see nonverbal dimensions brought to
bear. The addition of color, use of stylized typefaces,
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Ad
ertising and Ad
ertisements
Figure 1
Visual use of speech sound similarity
and strategic placement of written messages in all
forms of print emphasize something cultural critics try
to ignore: that writing is itself an image; the printed
word is, by denition, speech made visible.
Writing systems, furthermore, are not always al-
phabetic in nature, but are sometimes based on
picturing. The rst shop signs operated on a kind of
pictography, even in alphabetic societies, because only
the elites were literate. Thus, the convention of
hanging the shape of a shoe outside a cobblers door,
or painting a striped pole to designate a barber, or
dierentiating taverns by the visual representation of
their names (the Bull in Boots). Critics who insist on
situating advertising in the industrial period argue that
such signs were not a form of advertising because they
were merely information, an announcement rather
than an attempt to persuade. The range of early signs
includes many aggressive, even poetic, pictorial state-
ments, however. In England, the signs became so huge
and outlandish that they began to cause accidents by
falling or blocking the viewin 1762, they were
outlawed.
Today, imagistic advertisements still reach into
common linguistic formsproverbs, colloquialisms,
jargonfor the sense of their message. In the ad-
vertisement in Fig. 1, for instance, the association
174
Figure 2
Adaptation of familiar image
between duck and duct tape has no basis in use: one
cannot buy ducks from amazon.com, nor can ducks be
customers of amazon.com, nor, for that matter, would
duct tape be used on a duck. The association here only
works because, in speech, the phrase duct tape
sounds like duck tape.
The multiform nature of advertising is at least partly
a result of the ongoing struggle to garner consumers
attention. In the early years of advertisings growth in
the USA, most publishers limited advertisements to
ten-point agate type. This policy, known as the agate-
only rule, was an attempt to equalize commercial
competition and a way of saving paper. Inventive
advertisers strained against the agate-only rule by
printing their messages in patterns, sometimes getting
notice through sheer repetition and other times by
using the text to form a picture. When, eventually,
publishers allowed advertisers to make use of images,
the pressure only escalated. Now, advertisers wanted
bigger pictures, more distinctive pictures and, es-
pecially, color pictures. The same struggle occurred in
aural form during the early days of radio. The
competition to stand out, be memorable, or gain
credibility resulted in testimonials by leading radio
stars, jokes woven into the existing program, jingles

Figure 3
Use of visual style to periodize
put in with the music. The Internet advanced in less
than 5 years from a text-only medium to a jumbled
screen oering pictures, words, numbers, sound, ani-
mation, and even video. While the proliferation of
formal features on the Internet was certainly made
possible by technological innovation, it was also
largely fueled by the demands of the new commercial
media, the dot.coms, wanting to coax their reluctant
customers, national advertisers.
Advertisements have also adopted the formal
features of other genres. Early in the century, for
instance, the advice columns of the new national
magazines in the USA were quickly imitated by
advertisers, who used their own experts to give advice
that inevitably involved buying a particular brand.
Today, advertisements like the one in Fig. 2 reach all
the way to fteenth-century Italian art for their
inspiration, leading cultural critics to bemoan the
pastiche that seems to crop up so often in advertise-
ments. However, advertisements like this one (and
others that adapt genres like movies or comics) also
testify to the growth of an elaborate visual vocabulary
among the reading populace.
Ad
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As this visual vocabulary builds, even the images of
the past become meaningful to the readers of the
present. Thus, we see frequent adaptations of older
styles reused to specify a past period. For instance, the
typeface, background and headline in Fig. 3 all
communicate the late 1960s. Yet this advertisement
ran on the back of TV Guide in the autumn of the year
2000: many of those readers would not be old enough
to remember the 1950s or 1960s, but nevertheless are
clearly expected (by the advertisers) to know the style
associated with that time. Achieving specic reference
through subtle variation in the manner of rendering is
a hallmark of advanced pictographies. Advertisements
like these demand a highly developed form of reading
from their viewers, as opposed to the kind of mindless
absorption that most critics attribute to consumers of
the image culture of advertising.
Though references to the visual past appear fre-
quently in advertising today, it is also true that in our
own eraas in others before usmost advertisements
struggle to look modern (and here I mean hip,
new, cutting edge, etc.) The same is true in other
dimensions, such as music: the rst Pepsi jingle was in
the swing style popular on radio in the 1930s; in the
1960s, Pepsi used Motown artists; in the 1980s,
Michael Jackson and Madonna sang for Pepsi. As a
result of this propensity to operate right at the horizon
of a cultures formal style, advertisements are con-
sistently among the most topical, timely, and stylish of
cultural texts. Thus, the advertisements of any period
tend to be, if nothing else, distinctly of their time,
heavily periodized. As Roland Marchand noted, for
instance, the advertisements of the 1930s are markedly
dierent from those of the 1920smore aggressive,
less graceful, more pronounced in commercial intent.
He attributed the dierence to the declining economy.
So, not only do the latest visual styles, celebrities,
tunes, and dances feature heavily in advertisements,
the issues and concerns of the day do as well. This
inuence may occur in pervasive ways, such as
Marchand described, but it also makes itself felt in
very specic, identiable instances. War imagery and
patriotic motifs, for instance, are much more common
in US advertising between January 1942 and August
1945 than they are in the months either immediately
before or immediately after. Fear of disease is the basis
for many advertising appeals following the inuenza
epidemic of 1918; todays advertisements refer to
AIDS and breast cancer. Ideology is also reected:
Thomas Franks Conquest of Cool (1997) has elo-
quently argued that the change in advertising known
as the Creative Revolution had its roots in the
broader political shift that rumbled through the USA
between 1960 and 1970.
If one were to try to theorize an aesthetics of
advertising, therefore, a key characteristic might be
this tendency to focus on the present, even while
evoking the past. Another, which has been noted by
authors like Jennifer Wicke, is that advertising is
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Ad
ertising and Ad
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essentially an aesthetics of economy: saying a lot in a
small space or a short time is nearly always one of the
objectives. Roland Barthes famous observation that
advertising is generally characterizable by its frank-
nessin the sense that advertisements try to seem
naturalis not, in my opinion, supportable. Instead,
advertisings need to defamiliarize its propositions
has created a corpus of texts notable for whimsy,
fancy, outrageousness, and blatant artice. A good
example is a television commercial running now, which
refers to the animal nature of a Jeep by having the car
shake mud and water from itself like a wet dog,
showering its owners in the messy residue. The
fundamental impulse to animate an object in the
context of exchangesomething that is present even
in so-called primitive cultureshere runs directly
into the expressive capacity of early twenty-rst
century technology. A simple metaphorical propo-
sition (a Jeep is like a dog) is transformed, via
computer animation, into an extraordinary ction.
The expression of a very basic material proposition in
highly imaginative form would also probably be one
of the key principles of an aesthetics of advertising.
For all its ctive properties, however, advertising is
unlike other art forms in one very mundane way.
Advertisements always have one foot on the ground
in the sense that they attempt to inuence a concrete
behavior, usually a purchase. Depending on the
particular government under which it is operating, an
advertisement may also have to accommodate prac-
tical concerns about the product or the status of
exchange in some formal way. Commercials for drugs
that stimulate weight loss, for instance, often represent
attractive possibilitiesfollowed abruptly by disclos-
ure of some rather unattractive side-eects. Many
other products, from toys to cigarettes, must include
warnings or disclaimers about everything from health
risks to whether batteries are included. Regulations on
deceptive advertising, at least in the USA, will tolerate
a range of ction and puery, but the inferences the
average consumer makes about the product must be
concretely true or the campaign is pulled. What that
means, then, is that most US viewers probably do not
expect a Jeep to shake like a dog, even after seeing it on
TV. In fact, looking at the total range of fancy
discernible in advertisements today, viewers must be
making, rapidly and on a daily basis, some fairly ne
distinctions between the ction of the advertisements
and the facts about the products. This, again, suggests
a more skeptical, sophisticated, selective viewer than
many who write about the manipulation of the
populace by advertisers prefer to imagine.
Raising the specter of an aesthetics of advertising
among those who actually make advertisements often
revives a long-standing philosophical debate over
what a good advertisement is. On one side are those
who believe that a good advertisement is one that
sells, even if it irritates every member of the audience.
Famous admen like Rosser Reeves took this position
176
in the 1950s. Others like Bill Bernbach, who led the
Creative Revolution of the 1960s, have argued that a
good advertisement is one that is more creative (that
is, prettier, funnier, more imaginative, or in some
other way a more pleasing work of art), but have also
claimed that aesthetically pleasing advertisements
actually sell more product anyway. Such positions are
hard either to evaluate or defend because of the
previously-mentioned diculty of demonstrating the
eect of advertising on sales. These positions are made
even more problematic by the changes over time in (a)
what is deemed to be a pleasing advertisement and (b)
what is deemed to be a persuasive argument. For
instance, in the 1950s, anything that smacked of
science gave an aura of rationality to the argument.
Today, those same advertisements, with their secret
ingredients, graphic cross-sections, and microscopic
views, look as irrational as the sci- movies of the same
period. Several campaigns of the Creative Revolution,
like Alka-Seltzer and Volkswagen, still appear on
industry best campaigns lists 40 years after they were
created. But others, like the Brani campaign, are a
puzzle to contemporary viewersthe Pucci costumes
and Pop planes arent as fresh to todays eye.
Aesthetic notions are always closely connected to a
cultures morality. Thus, outside the practical world of
advertising, the distinction made between good
advertising and bad advertising is often seated in the
presumed value of information versus the moral
questionability of persuasion. Writers trying to sup-
port such divisions among advertisements often use
the presence of images as the basis for categorizing:
words and numbers tend to be seen as informative or
rational, while images are persuasive and ir-
rational. Even an amateur rhetorician, however, can
come up with examples in which the display of
alphanumeric information (or the withholding of it) is
itself an attempt at persuasion. Further, the visual
presentation of informationeven in the plainest
styleaects its persuasiveness. Finally, information
is often presented in pictorial form, as in maps and
graphs. In many cultures, visual forms are used to
record and transmit widely varied types of data.
Today, writers like Edward Tufte have made us more
aware of the intimate connection between visualiz-
ation and information, whether our objective is
persuasion, mere representation, or facilitating our
own understanding. Therefore, the distinction be-
tween the informativewritten advertisement and the
persuasiveimagistic advertisement seems to rest
mainly on a na$ ve understanding of rhetoric and an
outdated approach to the pictorial.
4. How Ad
ertisements Work
There are almost as many theories about how adver-
tisements work as there are advertisements them-
selves. Several famous admen have published their

own treatises on how to make an eective adver-
tisement. There is little agreement among them. Few,
however, would subscribe to the theories that have
been popular among academics. For instance,
Freudian theories popular among cultural critics of
the late twentieth century would inspire little more
than laughter among those who actually produce
advertisements. After a brief irtation with Freudian
notions in the late 1950s (an approach known in the
business as MR, which stands for motivation re- becomes utterly redened.
search), the advertising industry abandoned attempts
to sell products through subliminal cues, such as
phallic symbols or hidden images of genitalia. Such
approaches, having proven ineective, are now
thought to be ridiculous. Shirley Polyko (who wrote
the Does she or doesnt she Clairol advertisements produce sales for advertisers. These researchers design
of the 1960s) ridiculed these attempts in her memoirs,
published in 1975 (Polyko 1975). She recalls that a
TV spot introducing a womens shaving cream was
changed to accommodate a psychoanalysts sugges-
tion: after the woman shaved, her legs should rise
slowly as she leaned back in her chair, a position
normally associated with an activity other than shav-
ing. The product was a bomb: It turned out no
woman at that time, rising legs notwithstanding, was
interested in paying for a shaving cream when she
could use her husbands or a bar of soap that was
readily at hand(Polyko 1975, p. 98). Cases like this
one eventually put the MR people out of business.
Purchase behavior, as it turns out, is better ex-
plained by such pedestrian matters as price, practices,
and preferences than by phallic imagery. So, in some
ways, the subliminal advertising and motivation re-
search fads of the fties were displaced by a greater
understanding of the reasons people consume. In The
Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard (1957) accused
advertisers of manipulating hidden needs to sell
products, sparking a national controversy. Packards
eight hidden needs were then thought to be irrational
or even immoral as a basis for buying. Today, these
needsfor self-esteem, for safety, for recognition
are no longer particularly hidden, but are popularly
accepted as being essential to human mental health.
Further, scholars investigating consumption from a
more anthropological point of view, like Mary
Douglas and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, have now
published material emphasizing the complexity of
consumption in all cultures, by all humans, and at all
times. This literature richly and repeatedly illustrates
the myriad of ways that people use material posses-
sions to express themselves, to make connections with
others, to protect their families, to enculturate their
children, and so on. The tendency in Western post-
industrial thought to insist on material life being
properly separated from the spiritual or social does
not hold up well under the weight of this evidence. A
more sophisticated perspective now recognizes that
people usually consume for social reasons even when
they are satisfying biological needs: we eat dinner with
Ad
ertising and Ad
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our families because we need both nurture and
nutrition. Indeed, the more inquiry is done on the
dynamics of consumer behavior, the less currency is
held even by the traditional split between needs that
are biological (and therefore real) versus those that
are social (and therefore false). With this in mind, it
becomes increasingly dicult to insist that advertising
either plays on hidden needs or that it makes us buy
things we dont needbecause the notion of need
Elsewhere in academia, however, a dierent kind of
psychology still tries to explain how advertisements
work. Experimental psychologists in applied areas like
advertising and marketing have tried hard to identify
specic formal cues and appeals that will consistently
experiments that attempt to determine whether color,
happy music, or big type work better to sell us goods
than black and white, sad music, or small type. After
nearly 30 years of study, not a single generalizable
nding has emerged from this research. The new
psychological theories of how advertisements work,
therefore, are no more likely to win the respect of
advertising professionals than the old, Freudian ones.
So, professionals approach the creation of adver-
tisements in much the same way they always have: as
a common-sense attempt to persuade their cultural
kindred to buy a product. True, they have a great deal
of information about our needs, desires, and dis-
satisfactionsand they do put that knowledge to use
in crafting their messages. To that extent, advertisers
may have some edge over the amateur persuaders we
meet in everyday life: Girl Scouts who try to sell us
cookies, preachers who try to get us to tithe, and
ospring who try to make us buy toys. Nevertheless,
advertising professionals basically work with rhetori-
cal principles as old as Aristotle: after studying their
audience, they oer information and arguments they
believe will be convincing. They aect a character they
think will match up with the audiences self-image. For
sweetening the proposition, they throw in melodies,
jokes, and pictures. At the workbench level, this
practice, for all the devilry attributed to it, is only a
garden variety of rhetoric.
Like any other attempt at rhetoric, some of these
practical eorts fail. Some sink dramatically, like
Shirley Polykos advertisement for shaving cream.
Few produce the kind of powerful propellant critics
claim for this institution. The public and its pundits,
though, continue to believe that advertisers have some
secret power to manipulate them. Some of this
suspicion is the advertising industrys own fault. In
promoting their abilities to press and potential clients,
advertising agencies have consistently overclaimed for
their own skills. Their bravado, coupled with con-
tinued attempts to nd magic formulas, makes the
public justiably wary.
Many myths thus continue about the power of
advertising, lending fuel to the general discomfort with
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commercial culture. For instance, the 1950s story of
subliminal advertising, in which unsuspecting US
movie patrons were persuaded to buy cola and
popcorn by ickering messages undetected in the lm,
is retold today as if it really happened. In actual fact,
the whole event was a scam. James Vicary, the man
who claimed to have accomplished this feat, was an
unemployed market researcher when he reported his
story to the press in 1957. While reporters and, soon,
Congressmen investigated the validity of his claim,
Vicary collected retainers from some of the nations
largest advertisers. But his claim quickly began to fall
apart. First, the theater owner said no test had been
done on his premises, as Vicary had claimed. Then,
Vicary failed to produce the eect for a Congressional
committee. Suddenly, less than 6 months after his
name rst appeared in the papers, Vicary disappeared.
His closets and his checking account were left empty.
He was never heard from again. Though many
researchers have attempted to replicate his study, the
purported eect has never been repeated. Even if
Vicary was a charlatan, though, the true story does
show that advertisers in the USA were willing to pay
huge sums to learn how to advertise subliminally. So,
however false this cultural myth may be, the suspicion
of corporations that lies behind its continued viability
is not without foundation.
5. Conclusion
Advertising seems to touch every aspect of life in the
postindustrial world. As both form and institution,
advertising is blamed for an array of social ills ranging
from the mundane to the millennial. The poor standing
advertising has in the global community at the opening
of the twenty-rst century is not based on the real
existence of any secret formula, economic equation, or
covert conspiracy. It is certainly not based on any
demonstrable eect on prices, social conditions, or
even sales. Rather, our attitudes toward advertising
are probably a response to the rapid changes in
everyday life brought about by industrial commerce,
and are intensied by the knowledge that, at least
some of the time, advertisers will make extreme
attempts to have their way with the public. Never-
theless, the human mind, being far more subtle and
sturdy than many theories would suggest, has shown
remarkable resistance to all such attemptsthe ex-
plosion of consumer culture notwithstanding. Our
discomfort with advertising is also profoundly situated
in ethnocentric prejudices against commerce, material
comfort, sensual pleasure, and images. Rigorous
thinking on the subject of advertising is rareat least
partly because we are blinded by these very fears and
prejudices. Looking forward in a globalizing mar-
ketplace, however, should impress upon us the need to
break out of such constraints.
178
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
See also: Advertising Agencies; Advertising: Eects;
Advertising: General; Advertising, Psychology of;
Media Eects; Media, Uses of
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L. Scott
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Advertising, Control of
Advertising is a form of communication between a
rm and its customers, that uses independent media to
communicate positive messages about a good. Firms
supply it to generate sales and to counter their
competitors advertisements, but there is also a de-
mand for advertising because consumers lack infor-
mation, and much of it comes from advertisements
that help lower inevitable search costs, that is,
consumers expenditure of time and money to select
what goods to buy.
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7