Chapter 8: Audiences and Psychology PDF

# Audiences and Psychology ## Chapter 8: Audiences and Psychology In the previous two chapters, we looked primarily at advertisement texts. Academic advertising studies privilege texts as the main focus of analysis, a tendency emerging from scholars sharing in the assumptions, methods, and approac...

# Audiences and Psychology ## Chapter 8: Audiences and Psychology In the previous two chapters, we looked primarily at advertisement texts. Academic advertising studies privilege texts as the main focus of analysis, a tendency emerging from scholars sharing in the assumptions, methods, and approaches of other cultural, literary, and media-oriented work. Text-focused semiotic analyses are not entirely blind to the moments of reading and reception, and a good deal of textual analysis attempts to build readers and contexts into the picture. However, there is some value in taking reading, viewing, and audiences more prominently as starting points in thinking about advertising: decentring the advertisement-text, seeing it as a restraint upon as opposed to a determinant of meaning-making and the terms of engagement in commercially-oriented communications. A number of valuable approaches have emerged from such a perspective, using various sociological and psychologically-based methods: social psychology, ethnography, and psychoanalysis. ## Readers of Advertisements Readers of advertisements feature in some way in all thinking about advertising. Common sense, critical sense, and commercial sense recognize that readers, listeners, and viewers are the point of advertising communication processes. The most self-absorbed ad creative will acknowledge that advertisements are made to be seen and/or heard, even if the audience she or he might have in mind is a judging panel at the advertising awards, other creatives' professional opinions, or an overbearing client, rather than a supermarket shopper in his or her living room. Other agency staff, planners for example, will represent the audience informally or via research as the proper "target" of any creative output. The advertiser will typically pay for campaign media on the basis of a system predicated on the registered size and type of its audience, costs weighted by the frequency with which people might have an "opportunity to see" (OTS) the advertisement. Certified Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures chart the composition of audiences in some detail, profiling readership along lines of class, gender, and age. Audience numbers provide a "currency" traded between media space buyers and sellers, with "the attention economy" structuring preoccupations and decisions daily across media and advertising industries. Campaign effectiveness research is based on audience surveys in checks of exposure, recall, and attitude changes. ## Psychologically-Based Studies Psychologically-based studies point to the ways advertisements stimulate consumer (and non-consumer) behaviors, or provoke various other effects. Social psychological concepts have been elaborated and applied to advertising via marketing psychology, tracing perception and memory: "cognitive dissonance," brand recall, "likeability," sex roles and ad impacts, and evaluating audiences' "propensity to buy" advertised products. Recently neuroscience-related technologies have begun to permit attempts to record advertising effects on the brain. Efforts are made to harness developments in neuroscience for the benefit of marketing agendas and knowledge development. For some, such developments re-ignite anxieties about advertising research adopting scientific "mind control" techniques, while others raise questions about the appropriate usage of scientific resources and expertise. ## The Importance of Understanding Advertising Audiences Scratching the surface of such hi-tech neuropsychological advertising research approaches typically reveals more doubt than certainty about specific applicability. Socio-political and cultural analysis is also based on understanding the audience. Classic political, economic, and culturally-focused analyses have implicitly and explicitly been concerned with the audience. Even while describing "the masses" or the abstract "subject," critics are ultimately concerned with how people (mis)read and (mis)understand advertising imagery; criticism aiming to disturb the power advertisers seem to gain and exploit in manipulating or corrupting the audience en masse or in segments. Regulators, such as the Advertising Standards Authority, lobbyists, and politicians have depended on their understanding of (anticipated or presumed) audience response and effects, for instance on children's eating habits or adolescent smoking. Interest in such ad responses is sometimes a prelude to legislation or deregulation. Industry authorities and government adapt rules and principles for industry self-regulation for different categories of audience in line with working conceptions of different audiences' vulnerabilities, expectations, and with reference to particular "dangerous" advertising sectors. Advertising industry research is dedicated to understanding advertising and its consumers intimately, testing ads and investigating potential strategies. Despite these varied and sometimes unconnected kinds of attention to audiences, there are parallel concerns that "the reader" or "the audience" is always at risk of being forgotten. ## Audiences are Neglected, But Never Really Forgotten Creative practitioners might become too absorbed in professional ambition, their "art," or clients insist on tried and tested methods, neglecting audiences' shifting tastes. Presumptuous academics at times place audiences at arm's length as abstracted critical-theoretical constructs. Regulators police "invented" standards of social taste. Neurological scans do not show "the consumer mind," just traces of excited brain activity. Target audiences are probabilistic estimates. Such objections are rooted within deep-seated inter- and intra-disciplinary debates, and in local professional arguments. "Advertising audiences" are attended to, yes, but like children in a messy divorce, they can be obsessively fought over but also neglected. Thus to say that advertising experts and institutions "forget" the audience is not quite right. More convincing is the argument that says audiences are not routinely given the right kinds of attention so that they can at times be misconceived, misunderstood, and therefore effectively missed out in orthodox and instituted understandings of the advertising process. Consumers discovered by market research are in some senses "imaginary," created as much as explored, artefacts of "administrative research." Frequently, there is a lack of contextual comprehension of "reading" (or viewing or listening) habits. ## The Importance of Understanding the Pleasures of Advertising Among these elusive moments of ad-interaction are those to do with audience gratification. The pleasures afforded in watching or sharing a funny, sexy, or artful ad are readily dismissed or condemned. The industry measures the "likeability" of campaigns in a limited way. This offers a limited account of "the pleasures of the text." O'Donohoe (1995), drawing on a number of studies in the heritage of "uses and gratifications" as well as some primary research with young audiences, outlines some of the kinds of gratifications advertising audiences have reported. These are outlined in Table 8.1 with some additional illustrative points. Alperstein (2003) is also alert to various elements of advertising consumption, including the contribution to the social, cultural, and dream life of audiences, excavating some of the introspection invisible in, but a constituent part of, everyday advertising experiences. In some ways, far from subverting accounts of advertising as manipulation, or dismissals of advertising as trivia, such uses and gratifications might well amplify critics' concerns about engagements with and within ad culture. However, respondents' articulations of activity and "reward" -seeking provide counterpoints to assumptions about passivity and some hints towards thinking about the complex semiotic, affective, informational, and social processes that underscore aspects of advertising reception. Uses and gratification studies underline some of the enjoyable nature of ad watching, pleasures also suggested in the popularity of many programmes dedicated to laughing at or with "the world's funniest ads" and such like. ## The Technological Change in TV Audiences' Viewing Habits The technological change in TV audiences' viewing habits over the last 40 years has contributed to the ways in which advertising and promotion are designed into different media. The availability of Tivo and Digi-box recordable digital TV, alongside more established TV viewing management technologies, together with audiences' ever cited boredom with ads has meant that advertisers continue to fear being squeezed out of reconfiguring audience-media-technology-programming environments. Donaton (2004) and others have argued that advertising must compete more directly with other sources of entertainment, with competitor ads, other promotional modes, and also with media content off and online. ## The Importance of Intertextuality in Advertising Indeed, if promotional communications cannot beat the competition to the audience (and they often cannot), then advertisers must join with the competition, merging with film, programs, websites, magazines, and radio. Such convergences are redoubled and refracted by the convergence of technologies. As your mobile phone becomes your TV and your pop video becomes your advertisement, as your iPod becomes your GPRS PDA and your direct mail becomes a mobile reminder, to talk about ad "breaks" will become an act of nostalgia. Scenarios touting the "everywhere and nowhere" future of advertising provoke (different) anxieties for advertising agencies and in critically-minded consumers. Commercial promotion is rarely long-avoided. Audiences will continue to experience the line between advertising and entertainment blurring and dissolving, with the one genre (advertising) collapsing and morphing into the spaces and flows of others: film, drama, news, concerts, exhibitions, seminars, websites, and broadcast "chat." ## Audiences and Popular Culture Advertising's convergence with broadcast entertainment and other kinds of popular culture formalizes outwardly a "merging" reception researchers have been alert to for some time. O'Donohoe (1997) demonstrates intertextual "leaky boundaries" between advertising texts and the popular cultures of young people. Alperstein (2003) provides numerous examples of the integration of advertising snippets in daily conversations, private "stream of consciousness" moments, of ad segments in dream-like introspection, and of audience's alertness to the intertextual moments. To be advertising literate is to engage, apprehend, and comprehend the flows and significances from screen and page, of brands, celebrities, products, sounds, and styles. ## Consumerism and the Future of Advertising The pleasure in advertising parody mobilized in many contemporary ads to disarm critique is indicative of an ongoing love/hate play of desire and frustration in the face of consumer culture. This is elaborated effectively by campaigning critics using digital technologies readily-available means for producing high-quality "culture-jamming" media output cheaply and quickly. This has allowed activists connected to, for example, Adbusters (see Danesi 2006, 128-9) to provide creditable "spoofs" of advertisements, turning the textual style of advertising back on itself and using modified ad posters as part of an entertaining critique of corporate capitalism. Such "adbusting" activities extend a long tradition of politico-comedic engagement with advertising and can be considered alongside feminist and other activists' ad-oriented art and graffiti popular in the 1980s, which, with some success, raised consciousness about the clichéd representations of women' and other political issues. Contemporary audiences also enjoy the self-parodic gestures often present in commercial advertisements. However, no matter how insightful and creative they are, and however like the ads they parody, the propagandising power of such spoof ads should not be overstated. Whatever uses and gratifications advertising might afford audiences, audiences are liable to report (at the same time) stubbornly refusing to engage with some or even any advertising. This contributes to numerous pressures on traditional advertising and is as much a matter audiences' indifference as their registering any active resistance or "appropriation." ## Advertising in the Digital Age The technological change in TV audiences' viewing habits over the last 40 years has contributed to the ways in which advertising and promotion are designed into different media. The availability of Tivo and Digi-box recordable digital TV, alongside more established TV viewing management technologies, together with audiences' ever cited boredom with ads has meant that advertisers continue to fear being squeezed out of reconfiguring audience-media-technology-programming environments. Donaton (2004) and others have argued that advertising must compete more directly with other sources of entertainment, with competitor ads, other promotional modes, and also with media content off and online. ## The Importance of Place and Time to Understanding Advertising Two recent analyses add something important to thinking about the relations between the reader and advertising text. Costa Merja and Van Zoonen (2002) describe an instance in which a poster is viewed at a bus stop: > It is eight o’clock on a cold winter morning. I am waiting for the bus to the > city-centre, hardly awake and shivering. The bus stop is lit by a huge > billboard just behind me. On it is Jennifer Lopez flaunting her luscious > body and beautiful hair for the international cosmetics firm L’Oréal. An > old man is leaning on the billboard, his head leaning against her shapely > buttocks. A young man comes along and catches the picture of the old > man in a paradisal position. He winks at me, as if we both see a common > meaning in the scene. I start to feel uncomfortable. It’s a bit much for > the early morning: the obtrusive presence of the Latin star Lopez and > her impeccably made-up face and body, the conspiratorial invitation > of the young man to share in the voyeuristic irony created by the > picture in the bus stop. The various framings and re-framings in the ad, brought out by an idle yet dynamic engagement and disengagement, might be read back as a metaphor to set against the account of the transfixed reader. Janice Winship's (2002) paper on "Women outdoors" connects with both discomfort and debate. In it she looks at magazine- and poster-based campaigns, and argues that contexts of reception (magazine/private versus poster/public) are crucial. She observes a scene where a famous Wonderbra advert is set next to a poster ad which engages it in some intertextual banter: > Whilst motorized transport offers a safe cocoon from which to enjoy this > billboard humor for the pedestrian passer-by caught in the imagined > exchange, the site – at a junction on a ring road in Sheffield – more > shockingly throws into relief the private and intimate made public. > Especially for women, the alienating urban environment and > potentially unsafe subway resonate with the memory of nineteenth > century patriarchal precedents – ideas about public women as out of > place, fallen women, the street walker, the prostitute (Wilson 1994). > "Hello boys" becomes a provocative invitation to sexual advance if > not attack. The poster goads onlookers. Indeed someone – workmen, > boys just having a laugh, or could it be feminists? – has thrown > cement to bespatter the danger zone of the breasts. These ways of looking at ads are alert to the context of reception. This is not, however, to warrant celebration of unfettered interpretive "play." Ads induce anxiety; disturbance as well as humor. But, instance by instance, a picture can be built up of the potentialities the genre opens up for debate, as well as the narrowing it seems at times to usher in. Cronin (2004), emphasising the dynamic "rhythmical" patterns of city time/(s)pace, and advertising's role in ordering and refreshing the city-scapes, suggests that the notion of mobility in textual engagements "can capture the uniqueness of those moments of travel, thought, and embodied experience whether they mesh completely with the commodity time-space' of advertising 'whether they ignore, refract or resist those structuring elements'" (Cronin 2004). ## Inside/Outside and the Consumption of Advertising For some approaches, the dynamics of the "cityscape" and advertising's intervention in its rhythms and flows find a parallel in the "interior world" of the consumer. Marketing psychology predominates in the industry's conception of consumer behaviour and advertising reception instituted in media planning and buying models. However, even within the industry, there is some acceptance of the mechanistic redundancy in some of its working psychological assumptions. This has underpinned a number of appropriations from, collaborations with, and allusions to cultural theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. ## Psychoanalysis and Advertising If close reading of advertisements through semiotics and other kinds of textual analysis are critical acts whose emphases primarily open up the spaces of the object and the text, then psychoanalysis and its various accounts of consuming and experiencing advertisements, in line with aspects of other types of reader-oriented study, attempts to open up the spaces of the subject and desire. Psychoanalysis starts with the subject, free associating about dreams. Advertising typically starts with its objects: products, brands, and target markets. It is probably better to say that relations between subjects and objects are usually on the agenda in both advertising and psychoanalysis. The most famous and best-selling book about advertising, Vance Packard's (1957) The Hidden Persuaders, was a "sensationalist" account of the coming together of a form of psychoanalytic exploration called "motivation research" and the advertising industry. The relationships between the two fields of activity are more complex than the title of one of Packard's magazine articles, "The Ad and the Id." Psychoanalysis is not a tool of commercial mind control. However, an understanding of psychoanalytic concepts can certainly assist in thinking about advertising. ## Psychoanalysis: A Tool for Understanding Advertising So psychoanalysis and advertising are divided, if not by any common language, then by common preoccupations. Frankfurt school critics have described the culture industries in general as "psychoanalysis in reverse." This provides a particularly fitting slogan for the advertising industry if its work is understood to confuse and undermine subjects thinking and desire, or more dramatically, to keep them in "psychic bondage" to delusional engagements with commodities. This is the antithesis of psychoanalysis, which offers, in some sense, to free the subject from the extremities of fetishism and fantasy. Psychoanalysis aims to be transformative in the long-term, working to restore the patients' sense of "goodness" and his or her capacities for relating to the world, its objects, and other people. Advertising, instance by instance, appears to offer shorter-term "solutions" typically related to consumption of available goods. Advertising has largely deserved its place in the latter category, even while being *in toto* and at times a powerful (if elliptical) reminder of the truth value and importance of desire and its objects. ## Advertising, Psychoanalysis, and Desire Advertising and psychoanalysis are both discourses concerned, in their distinct ways, with conceptualizing and addressing questions of "desire," "greed," "motivation," "the unconscious," "symbolic communication," and "suggestion." At some level, both discourses also are concerned with social questions, for example, around familial attachment, gender, generation, status, identity, bodies, belonging, pleasure, leisure, and duty. Necessarily consumption (and non- or anti-consumption) reflect many of these areas of questioning, and advertising indirectly shares, through its imagery and via research, in culture-wide conversations about these topics. ## The Psychoanalytic Approach to Consumption Psychoanalysis, as a discipline and activity, connects with consumption quite directly. It considers patients' self-image and eating disorders as well as disorder made manifest in various kinds of obsessive consumer behaviors: addictions and phobias. Observation by one early pioneer in applying psychoanalysis to culture reveals a now almost commonsensical psychoanalytic take on consumption, as substitute gratification. Thus, Horney wrote: "A feeling of being loved, for instance, may suddenly reduce the strength of a compulsive wish to buy." ## The "Triple-Appeal" of Advertising Seventy years on, one current philosophy of branding, "lovemarks," attempts, in making consumers "fall in love," "irrationally" with brands, to conjoin symptom and cure, with consumption of these ('living' and loveable) brands set as a cure for malaises associated with consuming those, "bad," generic commodified ones. The too ready equation of human relations and market relations is a perennial concern within psychoanalytic accounts of contemporary culture, and in treating some contemporary patients. However, psychoanalysis, with its subtle and varying approaches to the subject, body, desire, and anxiety, is not uniformly a "stick" with which to beat advertising. ## The Importance of Recognizing Conflict in Advertising A major psychoanalytic insight is that people live in conflict, not just with others (as politics, economics, and sociology principally describe it) but also within themselves. Such conflicts are constitutive of all human action and emerge in developmental processes of separation and individuation. Ongoing adolescents and adults develop capacities to acknowledge, learn from, and manage anxious conflict. Advertising (in this culture) becomes one important area of experience where anxiety and desire play out. Cursorily, the resultant character structure emerging from the developmental experience described by psychoanalysis is one where conflict (and pain) are inherent in the healthy person: present but coped with. The art of life becomes the ability to integrate and manage conflict and loss creatively and productively. Of course, determining the "good" is a matter of conflict, and it is not always clear what role advertising has in helping consumers towards "good" consumption. Advertising does provide some legitimation for pleasure and engagement, to set against culturally-affirmed Puritanism. For the unhealthy person, conflict and loss are not managed. Various damaging compensations, substitutions, and evasions prevent thriving: addiction, greed, delusion, and narcissism. Advertising has been implicated as contributory in each of these, often in the generalizing diagnoses of broader cultural critique. ## Advertising and the Psychoanalytic "Principles" It is useful to consider these three "principles" – id, ego, and superego – in their connection to the semiotic character of advertising. The chains of signifying association described by semiotics and the dynamic engagements in meaning described as "unlimited semiosis" are not unconnected to the notion of free association, and specifically "free association," which is also central to psychoanalysis. One useful way of thinking about what shapes and informs the subject's flow of semiosis is to propose that readers' engagements with advertisement texts are (in part) semiotic elaborations, judgments, and interpretations mobilising signs in the service of the (developmentally) configured psycho-dynamics of the pleasure or reality principles. ## Advertising and the "Triple-Appeal" The Patek Philippe ad offers a fantasy vision of oedipal harmony. The commercial element of ownership, as so often in advertising, is euphemised so as to represent the commodity as a gift. Critical examination of advertising, especially when speaking in general terms, often works on the assumption that advertising is socially damaging because of the over-predominance in its aggregated appeals, to just one of the "principles" of subjectivity: desire, rationality, or ethical constraint. The flexibility of psychoanalytic concepts in thinking about advertising and consumption should not distract from the differences between psychoanalysis as a clinical encounter, and psychoanalysis as a useful theoretical resource. One realistically sceptical commentary recently observed in relation to a brand analysis pointed out: "... advertising such as Tango or Peperami and brands like Persil seem to speak to consumers of their deepest values and beliefs," but, he warned, "whatever kind of depth it is that we are concerned with in market research it is not the same as the depth of the Oedipus Conflict, Thanatos or Penis Envy." ## The Future of Advertising The counter-argument remains, however: for Goldman (1992), as with Williamson ([1978] 2002), Lee (1993) McGuigan (1992), and Odih (2007) and in terms similar to Lodziak (2002) - potential moments of popular creativity dissipate in the processes of absorption into the advertising system. The logo cannot provide a legitimate aesthetic signature, no matter what brand advocates and enthusiastic audiences intend or pretend to claim. Advertising is a genre that simulates cultural experience and stimulates nothing but marketing intentions. This debate indicates in outline that there is little commensurability between approaches looking at readers as creative agents, and those critiquing advertising as a "magic system." As Jameson's (1998) irresolution suggests, and as Schor (2007) puts it: "the agents versus dupes framing has been a theoretical cul-de-sac." Schor (2007) provides a useful reminder of the need to rethink wide angle and long view approaches to advertising, alongside continued close-up consideration of consumer/audiences' readings and rituals. Schor (2007) points out some of the difficulties of linking micro-analysis of reader-consumers to macro critiques of consumerism and the economic system. ## Advertising and the Future of Consumption In recent decades, interest in the advertising audience has come in particular from feminist scholars who have articulated a double-pronged attack on advertising, but also on some of the assumptions, values, and methods informing advertising criticism. Traditions of ad critique have routinely cast advertising as eroding the public's capacity for rational discourse in general and consumers' individual capacities for reasonable decision-making in particular. Feminist critics have asserted that such critiques are complicit with a gendered set of (de-)valuations of "masculine/feminine" (Fuat Firat and Dholakia 1998: 76) implicitly marking "the feminine." "The consumer," coded as feminine, is regarded as less capable of judgement and more prone to the irrational impulse. She is the subject/victim of ad culture and a key vector for the cultural success of consumerism. Dissatisfaction with a generalising and gendered positioning of advertisers' passive victims and coupled with the post-modernist tendency to challenge ordered hierarchies of cultural value drew researchers to return to the "real" audience, part of a growing preoccupation with, and revalorisation of, the concrete and particular instance, over and above abstracting or systematic generalisation in methods of audience inquiry. Real readers' engagements with advertising were explored, not via survey, not via conjecture, and not via market research on ad effects, but by talking to readers directly about experiences of advertising. ## The "Real" Audience It is clear that industry and academic researchers have become increasingly concerned that some of their working assumptions were faulty. Talking to readers fostered a more flexible, dispersed, and uncertain approach, more willing to accept the incomplete, provisional, particularised, and contingent nature of cultural consumption. In the industry, the growth of qualitative and ethnographic research methods was partly a product of this new vision. In academia, the work was largely successful in contesting those arguments which had routinely posited textual and ideological domination, jettisoning notions of readers as individuated "islands of cognitive and affective response, unconnected to a social world, detached from culture, removed from history and biography" (Buttle 1991: 97). ## Advertising and Postmodernism Specifically preoccupied with questions of cultural consumption, Nava and Nava (1992) explored readers' aesthetic experiences and critical reflections on the outputs of the advertising industry. In particular, this study opened up interesting suggestions about how some creatively ambitious advertising might change culture: ads working not exactly "against the grain" (in the manner of Adbusters) but nevertheless having discernible (cultural) impacts beyond the typical intentions of marketers. Nava and Nava (1992) by talking to and working with young people, examined the proposal that advertising literacy might constitute a kind of "cultural capital" - a developmental resource or creative capacity. The study emphasizes some similarities between advertising and other quasi-legitimate popular cultural media arts, especially film and pop music. Rather than working to define or defend a distinction between art and advertising, the analysis traces its ad-reading participants' line, one that allows no absolute discontinuity between advertising and more legitimate cultural forms: > The very fact of excluding advertising from the sphere of art forms and > identifying it as other, as defined predominantly by its material > concerns, serves not only to differentiate and cleanse other forms, it > also obscures the material determinants which operate across all of > them. Art, entertainment, and cultural production of many kinds are necessarily implicated in the contemporary commercial system. To classify advertisements as inescapably of a wholly and distinctively non-cultural and non-aesthetic genre even into and beyond moments of consumption and circulation fails to acknowledge crossovers, commonalities, and links evident at the levels of production and texuality between ads and popular media. ## Advertising and the "Triple-Appeal" The self-consciously arty ads under discussion in the study were of the kind typically aimed at the young "media savvy" audience. The study reports how ad-connoisseurs critically assess the latest offerings, demonstrating readerly "agency," developing decoding skills and pop-culture capital. Teen audiences take pleasure in some ads and are "discriminating" – i.e., not "dupes." Advertising reception is not a matter of docile interpretation and consumerist assent. It becomes an event for consumer/proto-producers who "watch and rewatch the commercials" sharing a developing expertise. Cultural "comparisons and connections will be made" – interactive intertextual exchanges as part of sociable everyday exercises in critical-cultural expression and engagement. One question relevant here, and echoing Lodziak's (2002) arguments above: "so what?" is, "What does it matter if young people find ads enjoyable and challenging?" The reply offered by Nava and Nava (1992) posed a challenge to a series of long-established assumptions and conclusions about advertising and its cultural place. The critical engagement brought to advertising by some young audiences does have a consequence, Nava and Nava suggest. Audiences gradually influence an (insecure) advertising industry, because creative practitioners seek the critical approval from savvy audiences. Pressure from (youth) audiences and sharing values and discussions with and within such discriminating groups encourages creatives to work to "produce ever more subtle and sophisticated advertisements." These in turn generate "more discriminating audiences," developing an informal iterative process of ad production-consumption-critique-ad production, which becomes cyclical and dynamic. Audiences watch the latest ads, apparently not acknowledging the advertised products; indeed, as part of their appropriation of anti-consumerist sensibilities, many ads (in a somewhat complex contradiction) might feed anti-market sentiment as much as advocating consumerism. The result, in aggregate and incrementally, is that cultural and creative elements of advertising "art" become detached from the avowed (commercial) function of the advertising genre. This is in part (merely) an extension of a well-worn observation about ads offering more than the programmes they surround (e.g., Enright 1988: 48-50; McGuigan 1992: 120). But Nava and Nava (1992), drawing on Frederick Jameson (1998, 1991), pose this question: > To what extent can postmodern forms be considered oppositional > or progressive? Is there a way in which they can resist and contest > the logic of consumer capitalism? Detached (at the point of consumption) from commercial intentions, advertising is theorised here, in the context of evidence from reader-respondents, as possessing a surplus semiotic resource. Ads provide a 24-hour aesthetic playground, a nursery-like enclave, in which adolescents (of all ages) can develop and rehearse, not precisely media literacy but a portable critical perceptual apparatus, inheriting an "elite type of engagement" that is anti-realist and anti-authoritarian, ostensibly even anti- or post-consumerist. ## Social Psychological Themes The casually emergent sensibility is, however, neither elitist or exclusionary because it remains connected to, and indeed dependent upon, the sites, rhythms, and fashions of popular youth and other oppositional cultures. This argument tentatively offers up the possibility of advertisements contributing not just pleasure and escapist gratifications, but lining up amongst the occasions for disruptive and exciting moments of cultural engagement and challenge. ## The Future of Advertising and Consumption Some of the loss of confidence in the creative and marketing force of traditional main media ad formats began in the late 1980s. Audiences, whether apathetic, anomic, or alienated, have nevertheless continued to fuel a global expansion in consumer-goods centred culture. Outside the living rooms of TV teens, wired housewives and switched-off thirtysomethings, advertising remains a key signature defining the look and feel of the real and "hyper-real" market environments - of cities, streets, and shopping malls. ## Inside and Outside and Advertising Two recent analyses add something important to thinking about the relations between the reader and advertising text. A sense of the places and times in which texts are read and access to readers' narrative account broadens the notion of the audience. The various framings and re-framings in the ad, brought out by an idle yet dynamic engagement and disengagement, might be read back as a metaphor to set against the account of the transfixed reader. ## The Importance of Advertising in Shaping Cultural Narratives It is useful to consider these three "principles" – *id*, *ego*, and *superego* – in their connection to the semiotic character of advertising. The chains of signifying association described by semiotics and the dynamic engagements in meaning described as "unlimited semiosis" are not unconnected to the notion of free association, and specifically "free association," which is also central to psychoanalysis. One useful way of thinking about what shapes and informs the subject's flow of semiosis is to propose that readers' engagements with advertisement texts are (in part) semiotic elaborations, judgments, and interpretations mobilising signs in the service of the (developmentally) configured psycho-dynamics of the pleasure or reality principles. The *Patek Philippe* ad offers a fantasy vision of oedipal harmony. The commercial element of ownership, as so often in advertising, is euphemised so as to represent the commodity as a gift. Critical examination of advertising, especially when speaking in general terms, often works on the assumption that advertising is socially damaging because of the over-predominance in its aggregated appeals, to just one of the "principles" of subjectivity: desire, rationality, or ethical constraint. ## Psychoanalytic Theories of Advertising and Consumption For instance, criticism of advertising that proposes rational action as the optimal mode of consumer choice (and social organization), characterizes advertising as preventing proper deliberation and calculation by representing products in the glamorous shadow of irrelevant seductions (id) or by appeals to obsolete, guilt-inducing, and "primitive" traditions or value systems (superego). On the other hand, social visions privileging tradition or encouraging the extension and elaboration of hedonism or enchantment might question the rationalistic character of some advertising appeals and their problem solving or cost-benefit approach to life – as well as the limited or repetitive nature of the pleasures and values indexed in most advertising. The flexibility of psychoanalytic concepts in thinking about advertising and consumption should not distract from the differences between psychoanalysis as a clinical encounter, and psychoanalysis as a useful theoretical resource. ## A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Advertising Nevertheless, the capacity of psychoanalytic conceptions to capture the dynamics of the psyche-soma, the hybrid body/mind posited by some psychoanalytic thinking that constitutes the subjective site for the movement of meaning and semiosis, ensures psychoanalysis has a relevance, alongside other means aiming to capture something of the complexity of audiences' experiences of advertising. ## The Future of Advertising and Consumer Culture Ads seemingly carry some of the mythic functions of traditional colloquial and folkloric genres - conveying truisms and affirming everyday "wisdom" - that serve cultural communication. A recent campaign for mortgage products uses a hot air balloon in the shape of a house as a metaphor. It makes a straightforward rational set of proposals about the product, but the accompanying film offers a glimpse into an emotional world of anxiety and desire. This is routine in the richly crafted and carefully made ads that cross audiences' TV screens daily. The journey begins with the house shaped and painted hot air balloon alone, high in the stormy sky (symbolic sign of difficulties). The viewers will idly follow it into clear open skies, and down over streets of secure looking terraced homes. Perhaps some of the audience will read the balloon as both an iconic sign of a house – a containing accommodation for a young couple and an adventure – and others (simultaneously) as a symbolic one, referring to the mortgage that supports home ownership. We might also imagine, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the way the ad figures and indexes the movements ups and downs of life in ways that might resonate in subtle ways, with embodied feelings of holding and being held. ## Conclusion: Audiences and Advertising The *Rock-a-Bye Baby* nursery rhyme is a classic evocation of the benign *superego*, protective, nurturing, and authoritative. It also euphemizes the economic fact of purchase, and perhaps offers a "response" to the anticipated "reality-based" objection provoked by what is probably an expensive and (in pragmatic terms) unnecessary purchase. ## The Future of Advertising Advertising depends on engaging attention by tapping consumers' desires, anxieties, and apprehensions about novelties, indulgence, ongoing insecurities, and guilt. They excite us (when they do) because they touch on and dramatise dilemmas we might relate to: are we depriving ourselves of sensual indulgence? Have we spent too much money? Are we damaging the planet? Are we excessively consumerist? We hardly turn to ads for "advice," but, invited or not, ads can open up some of the interior monologuing connected to everyday life and thought, and propose forms of engagement and dialogue with the world and its objects, through consumption. Consumption that is, of course, of this product, and preferably now! The ad also helps to provoke and resolve tensions to secure a sign (a brand symbol) as a locus for credibility, security and trust. Necessarily truncated, advertisements' narratives echo some of the basic story-patterns found in nursery rhymes, fairytales, films, and other cultural forms. The work of placing products within engaging stories has become a prominent element of marketing, including advertising, with brands routinely now thinking about the relation between the brand story and consumers' life stories. Arguments continue to be raised against advertising as cultural-representational form that has typically evaded or occluded anxiety-provoking material, producing and facilitating complacency and evasion. However, the presumption that the genre comprehensively excludes meaningful engagements with audiences' underlying preoccupations (death, loss, and other anxiety-provoking ideas) is questionable. One example cited in Chapter 7 explicitly seeks the shock value of Death Row and criminality to arrest attention. Many ads allude gently but assuredly to serious emotional and ethical issues and dilemmas. Advertising is commonly understood (often deservedly) as a brake on thinking, an empty diversion, and a cluttering out of ideas. As they seek our attention and credibility, everyday ads can and do produce pauses for thought. ## Understanding Advertising Audiences One of the characteristics of advertisements that renders them so significant in the study of culture is their unavoidable presence in public space. Whatever particular goods they may be promoting, they set an agenda for our everyday experience in their use (usually through skilfully constructed rich and powerful imagery) of psychosocial themes. They do not create these themes, insecurity of various kinds, envy and guilt, are not foisted upon an innocent public by manipulative copywriters. But they do articulate these themes in specific ways that help to