Mass Advertising As Social Forecast

Fowles asserts that the appeals of mass advertising reflect the motivational state of the targeted audience and that these motivational states anticipate socio-cultural change. Using advertising of 1950, 1960, and 1970, Fowles determined that the unsatisfied motives of Americans do vary over time. From this data, he constructs a forecast of our socio-cultural state in 1980 and predicts an increasingly isolationist U.S.

It has become impossible to imagine our culture without advertising. But how and why did advertising become a determiner of our self-image? Advertising the American Dream looks carefully at the two decades when advertising discovered striking new ways to play on our anxieties and to promise solace for the masses. As American society became more urban, more complex, and more dominated by massive bureaucracies, the old American Dream seemed threatened. Advertisers may only have dimly perceived the profound transformations America was experiencing. However, the advertising they created is a wonderfully graphic record of the underlying assumptions and changing values in American culture. With extensive reference to the popular media—radio broadcasts, confession magazines, and tabloid newspapers—Professor Marchand describes how advertisers manipulated modern art and photography to promote an enduring "consumption ethic."

Now available in a significantly updated second edition featuring two new chapters, Social Communication in Advertising remains the most comprehensive historical study of advertising and its function within contemporary society. It traces advertising's influence within three key social domains: the new commodities industry; popular culture; and the mass media which manages the constellation of images that unifies all three.

Is it possible that consumers exploit advertising even more so than advertising exploits and influences our culture? Author Jib Fowles argues that consumers look to advertising to provide them with images that can assist them in negotiating the personal dilemmas of advanced industrial life. Advertising and Popular Culture is the first comprehensive text to provide a balanced analysis of advertising and its companion, the popular culture, conveyed through the mass media. Reflecting current theories, this thoughtful critique uses excerpts from advertising campaigns to illustrate how modern advertising both draws from and contributes to popular culture. Fowles traces the role of advertising in our culture from its evolution as part of the culture of mass consumption in the late 19th century, the development of advertising agencies, and the creation of a consumer culture to an exploration of the major themes of American advertising. Advertising and Popular Culture represents a fresh and fully elaborated conceptualization of the services that advertising and popular culture provide. This text will be a vital tool in departments and schools of advertising, journalism, and communication where increasing emphasis is being placed on studying the cultural significance of advertising.

The authors suggest that advertisments, while important in our daily emotional self-management, are far more closely linked to the pragmatics of everyday life than their symbolic richness might suggest. Recent trends in advertisment content point to an important shift in our relationship to goods that reflects an increasing preoccupation with risk management.

Timid and retiring, the Victorian housewife was an "angel in the house," or so says the stereotype. But when this angel picked up a popular magazine--The Lady, for instance--she saw in its advertisements images of Grecian goddesses, women warriors, queens, actresses, adventurers. These arrestingly sexual and surprisingly powerful images are the subject of Consuming Angels, a major examination of how Victorian ads shaped social values. Stylishly written and featuring 73 reproductions, this book shows how ads used the hedonistic aspects of Victorian culture to sell their wares, glorified consumerism, and mythologized the middle-class life. Images of aggressive women, Loeb shows, played well to both men and women. And ultimately, these ads helped usher in the twentieth century with the creation of a new community: the community of consumers.

Media semiotics is a valuable method of focusing on the hidden meanings within media texts. This new edition brings Understanding Media Semiotics fully up to date and is written for students of the media, of linguistics and those interested in studying the ever-changing media in more detail. Offering an in-depth guide to help students investigate and understand the media using semiotic theory, this book assumes little previous knowledge of semiotics or linguistics, avoiding jargon and explaining the issues step by step. With in-depth case studies, practical accounts and directed further reading, Understanding Media Semiotics provides students with all the tools they need to understand semiotic analysis in the context of the media. Semiotic analysis is sometimes seen as complicated and difficult to understand; Marcel Danesi shows that on the contrary it can be readily understood and can greatly enrich students' understanding of media texts, from print media right through to the internet and apps.

What does advertising do? Is it the faith of a secular society? If so, why does it inspire so little devotion? Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion is a clear-eyed account of advertising as both business and social institution. Instead of fuelling the moral indignation surrounding the industry, or feeding fantasies of powerful manipulators, Michael Schudson presents a clear assessment of advertising in its wider sociological and historical framework, persuasively concluding that advertising is not nearly as important, effective, or scientifically founded as either its advocates or its critics imagine. ‘Dispassionate, open-minded and balanced ... he conveys better than any other recent author a sense of advertising as its practitioners understand it.’ Stephen Fox, New York Times Book Review First published in 1984.