TOWARD A CRITICAL THEORY OF ADVERTISING

Since the emergence of "critical" media studies in the 1970's, a substantial literature has developed that examines and questions the role of mass communications and advertising within the institutional structures of contemporary capitalist societies. In contrast to "administrative" media studies that focus on how to use mass communications within the given political economic order to influence audiences, sell products, and promote politicians, critical research has addressed the social and cultural effects of mass communications and their role in perpetuating an unjust social order. One facet of critical analyses of advertising -exemplified by Goffman's Gender Advertisements, Williamson's Decoding Advertisements, and Andren, et. al.'s Rhetoric and Ideology in Advertising -- has examined the content and structure of advertisements for their distorted communications and ideological impact. Employing semiotics and/or content analysis, numerous critical studies working at the micro level have examined how advertising's mass communications "persuade" or "manipulate" consumers.

By contrast, works such as Schiller's Mass Communications and American Empire, Ewen's Captains of Consciousness, and Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly present broader historical analyses which locate advertising and mass communications within the history of contemporary capitalism and examine their impact on the larger social and political economic structure. Studies such as these have probed how advertising and mass media have contributed to the development and reproduction of an undemocratic social order by concentrating enormous economic and cultural power in the hands of a few corporations and individuals.

These two facets of critical media studies have generated numerous insights into the conservative social functions and ideological effects of mass communications that were ignored by "administrative research" which tended to focus on the effects which mass communication had in carrying out certain specific tasks (i.e. capturing an audience, selling goods, conveying messages, producing votes for politicians, etc.. One persistent problem, however, has plagued critical media studies and blunted its potential impact on cultural studies and public policy. Very rarely have critical studies of advertising and mass communications adequately articulated the linkage between the macro political economic structure of mass media and the micro mass communication forms and techniques so as to reveal both the socio-economic functions of advertising and the ways that ads actually shape and influence perception and behavior which reproduce the existing social system. The failure to clearly and comprehensively articulate this linkage has often generated an implicit "conspiracy theory" suggesting that a few elites in control of the mass media consciously conspire to manipulate culture and consciousness. This deficiency has plagued critical analyses of advertising and communications which have generally failed to explain how mass communications in general, and advertising in particular, can exercise the power and impact that critical theorists suggest.

A variety of recent books address these problems and in this article we shall point to their contributions toward developing a critical theory of advertising, while also indicating some of their limitations. Several recent books on advertising take an explicitly critical sociological orientation toward advertising as a means of reproducing the existing capitalist society. This literature argues that not only does advertising carry out crucial economic functions in managing consumer demand and in aiding capital accumulation, but it also helps produce the sort of ideological ambience required by consumer capitalism, thus linking, more or less successfully, macro and micro analysis. Some of this literature provides illuminating historical framing of the history of advertising and the consumer society, as well as providing sociological analysis, cultural and ideological critique, and political proposals to regulate or curtail advertising in contemporary capitalist societies.

Consequently, recent critical studies of advertising begin to develop a more adequate critical theory of advertising. In this article, we shall examine some of these contributions and argue that a critical theory of advertising should be developed within the framework of a critical theory of society which combines historical, sociological, cultural, and political analysis. Then we indicate how the recent critical literature on advertising provides contributions to this task, but argue that none of these approaches provides an adequate comprehensive and systematic theory of advertising. To explicate and evaluate recent critical perspectives on advertising, we examine some studies emerging from North America and contrast this literature with the postmodern theories of Jean Baudrillard and the neo-Marxist perspectives, similar to those of the Frankfurt School, of Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Next, we propose a model for developing a critical theory of advertising and combine these theoretical perspectives with some concrete proposals concerning political actions that might be taken against advertising in the contemporary era.
North American Perspectives: The Canadian Contribution
Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products, and Images of Well-Being, by William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, and Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society, by Sut Jhally address the problem of linking media analysis to political economy and social and cultural theory in order to explain how advertising and mass communications exercise their power in contemporary capitalist society. We might see their collaborative work as constituting the Canadian contribution to North American critiques of mass culture and society.

For William Leiss -- a student of Herbert Marcuse -- is in the Department of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Stephen Kline is on the faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, and Sut Jhally (now in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) did his graduate work in Canada. His Codes of Advertising was originally a dissertation (Simon Fraser University, 1984) which he revised and expanded after his collaboration with Leiss and Kline in their collective work.
Social Communication in Advertising (hereafter SCA) opens with a summary of the "debates on advertising and society" which provides a concise survey of the controversies surrounding advertising and of the various analytical frameworks used to address these controversies. The authors' vantage point is to conceptualize advertising as a form of social communication which plays a complex set of roles within consumer capitalist societies. By expanding the concept of the "information" conveyed in advertising beyond that of utilitarian product features to include symbolic meanings, the authors view advertising as an influential form of social communication. This approach provides insights into how commodities mediate social relations and focuses attention on the cultural impact of advertising and its multifarious social functions.

The Leiss/Kline/Jhally text locates advertising within the larger structure of a "market-industrial economy" where the institutions of media, industry, and advertising converge. A central premise is that "we can grasp the implications of present-day practices best by seeing how they were composed and put into place step by step during this century" (1986, p. 6). Thus a substantial portion of the book involves tracing the historical development of each of these key institutions and how they formed a constellation making advertising an institution with a "privileged form of discourse" (1986, p. 3). The authors describe the "origins of the consumer culture" and the transition "from industrial to consumer society." In this process, the communications media and advertising agencies evolved hand-in-hand into "the modern advertising industry" where advertising is a central institution of the "market-industrial economy."

In a study of "The Theater of Consumption," the authors examine the structure and content of advertisements and their social and cultural impact, using both semiology and content analysis. The first study, derived from Jhally's doctoral dissertation, involves an analysis of television commercials sampled from sports programming targeted to males, and prime time programming targeted to females. Jhally's goal was to illuminate "the differentiated codes used by advertisers in their messages directed at male and female audiences" (1986, p. 176). The study reveals, not surprisingly, that advertisers utilize different codes and strategies to appeal to different audiences and genders. For example, "beauty," "family relations," and "romance" are codes used to address female audiences while "ruggedness" and "fraternity" are primarily male advertising codes.

The second study, conducted by Leiss and Kline, involves an historical examination of magazine advertising (1908-1984) for the trends and uses of audience codes. Following Leymore's semiological analysis in Hidden Myth: Structure and Symbolism in Advertising (1975, Leiss and Kline analyze magazine ads for their use of "person," "product," "setting," and "text." One important trend discerned involves the steady decline in the use of text or copy in ads and the increase in display and illustrations, confirming claims by Daniel Boorstin (1962), Guy Debord (1975), and Jean Baudrillard (1975 and 1983) concerning the increased importance of images in contemporary culture.

A second important trend involves a shift of emphasis within ads away from communicating specific product information towards communicating the social and symbolic uses of products. To illustrate this trend, the authors present 25 ads from different historical periods. For example, a Bull Durham Tobacco ad from the turn of the century "places greatest emphasis upon language --description of the product, promises, and argument" (1986, p. 190, whereas a contemporary Marlboro ad is revealed to have no copy nor product information, just an image that "conveys a range of attributes...to be associated with the product..." (1986, p. 202).
In studies of "Goods as Satisfiers," and "Goods as Communicators" the authors piece together their main thesis. The consumer society has caused a "profound transformation in social life" involving "the change in the function of goods from being primarily satisfiers of wants to being primarily communicators of meanings" (1986, p. 238). In the consumer society, individuals define themselves as consumers and gain fundamental modes of gratification from consumption. Hence, marketers and advertisers generate systems of meaning, prestige, and identity by associating their products with certain life-styles, symbolic values, and pleasures.

Informed by sociological and historical accounts of how market relations erode traditional sources of meaning and anthropological insights into how material things perform social communication functions concerning social standing, identity, and lifestyle, Leiss, Kline, and Jhally have expanded the category of "information" within advertising to include not just functional product information, but social symbolic information as well. It is in this sense that goods function as "communicators" and "satisfiers" -- they inform and mediate social relations, telling individuals what they must buy to become fashionable, popular, and successful while inducing them to buy particular products to reach these goals. As the authors point out, "quality of life studies report that the strongest foundations of satisfaction lie in the domain of interpersonal relations, a domain of nonmaterial goods" (1986, p. 252). But in the consumer society, commodities are important adjuncts to interpersonal relations because they communicate social information to others. "They serve as a 'projective medium' into which we transfer the intricate webs of personal and social interactions" (1986, p. 261).

The significance and power of advertising, according to the analysis presented in SCA, is therefore not so much economic, but cultural. "Advertising is not just a business expenditure undertaken in the hope of moving some merchandise off the store shelves, but is rather an integral part of modern culture" (1986, p. 7). Advertising is significant because, in consumer capitalism, individuals depend on it for meanings -- a source of social information embedded in commodities that mediate interpersonal relations and personal identity. Advertising should therefore be conceived as an important institution in the consumer society because it produces "patterned systems of meaning" which play a key role in individual socialization and social reproduction.

Consequently, the "marketplace" should be seen as a "cultural system" (1986, p. 263ff.) and not just as a mechanism for moving commodities and money. Furthermore, it is cultural symbolism and images that provide crucial insights into the nature and functions of advertising. The authors' analysis of the "persuasive" form of modern advertising indicates how cultural forms of social communication create meanings through non-discursive visual imagery which come to shape consciousness and behavior subtly by sanctioning some forms of thought and behavior while delegitimating others. For instance, advertising conveys through its images positive presentations of assertive "masculine" behavior and images of well-groomed and fashioned men and women who want to be successful in the dating and romance game. Thus, advertising presents proper and improper images of behavior and role models for men and women. The result is a culture where image plays a more important role than linguistic discourse, for while verbal imagery is discursive, visual imagery is non-discursive, emotional, associative, iconic, and fictive.

In these ways, advertising plays a key role in the transition to a new image culture, and thus in the transition from a discursive book/print culture to a figurative media culture. In this media culture, domains of social life ranging from religion to politics fall under the sway of the reign of images. As the authors point out, "iconic representation," or persuasive images, have a greater impact in decision-making, "affective opinion," and behavior than verbal discourse, and can be absorbed without full conscious awareness and without being translatable "into explicit verbal formulations" (1986, p. 244). Consequently, the authors suggest that advertising is a form of social communication which promotes non-communication, or what Habermas calls "systematically distorted communication." Distortions result from techniques that are nonrational, nonlogical, imagistic, and that affect individuals subliminally and unconsciously. Advertising promotes "commodity fetishism" and a fetishized consciousness that invests goods, services, and individuals, etc. with symbolic properties, associating products with socially desirable traits.

Studies of commodity fetishism and the extension of other Marxian categories to the analysis of advertising is the focus of Sut Jhally's Codes of Advertising. Jhally takes as his starting point the analysis of the commodity in Marx's Capital and applies the categories of exchange value, use value, surplus value, commodity fetishism, etc., to studies of advertising and the communications media. He provides a detailed and insightful explication of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, while applying the concept -- and other Marxian categories -- in interesting and provocative ways to a vast amount of material. In so doing, he provides a sharp critique of Baudrillard's attack on Marxism in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign and The Mirror of Production, demonstrating conclusively through a wide range of quotations that Marx does not, as Baudrillard claims, naturalize needs, use values, etc. Rather Marx provides a powerful critique of bourgeois apologetics which claim that capitalism is legitimate because it provides people with what they want and fulfills their pre-existing needs. Against this ideology, Marx argues that needs, use values, and ideologies are historically produced under capitalism and thus serve as essential elements of social reproduction.
Consequently, Jhally attempts to demonstrate how traditional Marxian economic categories and analyses can be used productively to analyze advertising and mass communications and can be combined with semiological analyses of codes and the production of meaning. Both SCA and Jhally's Codes provide much useful analysis of how advertising produces consumers and how the consumer society reproduces itself. But while Jhally's use of Marxian categories to analyze advertising as an institution is often illuminating, he sometimes resorts to a somewhat vulgar Marxism, as when he insists on interpreting media communication simply in terms of the exchange value and use value produced by capital, rather than analyzing the interactions between media content, forms, institutions, social and political environments, and the uses of the media by the audience. While he provides a critical political economy framework to analyze the social and economic functions of advertising and mass communcations, he is less successful in analyzing how audiences themselves decode the ads and what specific meanings and effects are produced by the interaction between ads and audiences. Although he carries out an "empirical study" of advertising codes and fetishism (1986, p. 144ff), his study is highly quantitative and abstract and fails to provide analysis of specific meanings, ideologies, or effects produced in the actual ads which he studied -- none of which are analyzed in any detail. Moreover, Jhally fails to offer any proposals concerning public policy aimed at the regulation of advertising, or suggestions concerning how a society might be organized without wasteful advertising for socially unnecessary products.

By contrast, the "Conclusion" to SCA examines advertising for "its proper place within a democratic society" (1986, p. 302), and raises some serious questions about modern advertising practices. One is "that the discourse about goods today is too narrowly controlled by commercial interests, and that it should be framed more broadly.... we do not believe that any single institution should control the public discourse about goods" (1986, p. 306). Another issue involves advertising's impact on overall media content, i.e., "the avoidance of 'controversial' subjects, banal program formats, stereotyping of audience segements, {and} ownership concentration in media industries" (1986, p. 307). The authors also point to "the reduction in rational appeals" (1986, p. 309) and the increasing use of "persuasive" communication techniques in marketing, politics, corporate "image-building," and other domains of public discourse.
These are all significant issues concerning advertising and democracy, though, unfortunately, the authors of SCA offer few suggestions about "what is to be done," and generally present a liberal, Social Democratic perspective on advertising. Although they quite correctly "suggest that it is time to change the focus of attention from advertising practice to the set of institutional relationships through which advertising is tied to the social issues that concern us most" (1986, p. 306), they do not adequately develop this insight and suggest what advertising practices and institutional relationships must be examined and changed. And while they tend to ground study of advertising in historical analysis, their historical perspective fails to situate the trajectory of advertising in terms of specific developments within capitalist society itself and its specific functions in the process of capital accumulation and social reproduction. For a more systematic framework and multidimensional analyses along these lines, one needs to turn to European theorists such as Wolfgang Haug, while for analysis of the shift to the growing importance of image in contemporary societies one might turn to the French postmodernist theory of Jean Baudrillard.

Continental Perspectives: Haug and Baudrillard
Wolfgang Fritz Haug's Critique Of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society continues the German tradition pioneered by the Frankfurt School and examines mass communication and advertising as key elements within capitalist dynamics and social structure. Currently Professor of Philosophy at the Free University in Berlin, Haug has been editor of the independent Marxist journal (Das Argument) since 1959 and is author of two books on commodity aesthetics and mass culture which have been translated into English (1986 and 1987). As Haug explains, his task "was to derive the phenomena of commodity aesthetics from their economic basis and to develop and present them within their systematic connections" (1986, p. 8). Guided by the effort to expand Marx's critique of capitalism, Haug develops Marx's concept of "secondary exploitation" showing how citizens of contemporary capitalism are not only exploited in the production process, but also in the process of consumption.

Haug argues that what he calls "commodity aesthetics" shape the values, perceptions, and consumer behavior of individuals in contemporary capitalist societies so as to integrate them into the lifestyles of consumer capitalism. The concept of commodity aesthetics emerges within "the problem of realization" (i.e. capital accumulation, the realization of surplus value) and the tension between "use-value" and "exchange-value." The concept describes the ways that aesthetics are integrated into the production, distribution, and marketing of commodities. More specifically, commodity aesthetics refers to "a beauty developed in the service of the realization of exchange value, whereby commodities are designed to stimulate in the onlooker the desire to possess and the impulse to buy" (Haug 1986, p. 8). In other words, commodity aesthetics uses aesthetics to sell products and consumer capitalism in the form of advertising, packaging, marketing, and display. Much like Boorstin, Debord, and Baudrillard, Haug emphasizes the importance of image and appearance in contemporary society, and reveals how they are connected to the sales effort and to the capitalist political economy.

Commodity aesthetics involves the promise of happiness engineered by advertisers through the consumption of images which appeal to human needs and sensuality. Just as Horkheimer and Adorno discussed "the culture industry," and Enzensberger "the consciousness industry," Haug criticizes the "illusion industry," or "distraction industry," for being tools of domination which exploit people's needs and manipulate them into accepting consumer capitalism. "Since the vast majority of people can find no worthwhile goal within the capitalist system, the distraction industry appears to be a good investment for the system as a whole, as well as for competently run private capital.... With shades and shadows the illusion industry populates the spaces left empty by capitalism, which only socialism can fill with reality" (Haug 1986, pp. 121-22).Haug's critique is grounded in analysis of the ways that the capitalist economy uses advertising to maximize profit and this focus on the fundamental processes of capitalist production separates his work from analyses such as Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders that criticize only "appearances" and "techniques" of advertising and obscure their relation to "normal capitalism."

"Packard does not as much scratch the surface of the real causal relationships in this complex" (Haug 1986, p. 143). For Haug, many current analyses of advertising are flawed by assuming that an evil conspiracy on the part of marketers is the cause of "advertising excesses." However, there is no "systematic theory for corrupting the masses" (Haug 1986, p. 54). The real cause of commodity aesthetics lies not in individual motivations or conspiracy but is a logical result of an "unrestrained economic fuction" (Haug 1986, p. 108) that has been developing historically; i.e. the pressure to maximize capital accumulation or to go out of business. Haug's key insight is that manipulation is less a technique than an historical process whereby the capitalist system forces corporations to maximize their profits by all means available and to create needs to buy products that individuals do not really need.

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