Global Advertising, Attitudes and Audiences by Tony Wilson

Author:Tony Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

ADVERTISING—ARTICULATING AGORA—ABSORBING AUDIENCES

Branding is a narrative palette of image and text which persuades intended consumers to immerse themselves in its product-centered places—to become part of its possible counterfactual culture or share its subjunctive sense. They identify with occupants, imagine enjoying the latter's product-focused lives, purchasing coffee or cellphone connection: passing through, they “challenge grinding everyday routines” (Daliot-Bul, 2007: 955). Like media marketed fast food fantasy spaces, advertising's screen brandscapes are extended places of extra-playful otherness (permitted excess) yet simultaneously identifiable. Through understanding inhabitants’ stories, as “co-creators of meaning” (Thompson and Tian, 2008: 596) we come to share a sense of circumstances and occasion, their potent cultural awareness of product.

In the process of identifying with these people's product-emphasizing comprehension of life, we re-shape our own conceptual horizons of interpreting the world, re-reading our categorizing of education, eating and edifying nationhood. Moving to a new vantage point, perhaps, we see universities as not only information but income generating. Through this sequence, our perception emerges as a result of reaching immersive consensus with students already occupying their advertised academic agora as communities of citizens actively realizing purchased consumption.

A brand's consumer address strives to structure our perspectives, the commodified “way we see things, places, and people” (Cayla and Eckhardt, 2008: 217). Ringtones are purchasable cultural icons. Yet branding space into often urban product-centered place may be accompanied by media constructions of “moral responsibility” holding within a “community” of purchasers (ibid.: 216). Convinced consumers develop a relationship as ethical citizens, a sense of moral interconnection or “mutual belonging” (ibid.: 217) and “mediated sociality” (ibid.: 225). Branded telecommunications marketing can remind us to purchase “because so much needs to be said” between friends.

Displacing specific geographical locations, advertised agora on screen may offer space for a “virtual plebiscite” (Thompson and Tian, 2008: 611) of discussion to citizens as well as dining to consumers: like brands these populated places can be transnational. With its extended cultural identity, McDonald's presents as corporate citizen of moral standing, with an ethical purchase, bonding with buyers in happy meals.

Digital agora are spaces for consumer citizens to collect and connect through “intermediated togetherness” (Bell, 2005: 72), perhaps as close companions in “primary social relationships over distance” (Katz, 2005: 173). Yet critically distanced and disingenuous, we can also appropriately ask of advertised “mobilities” (Larsen et al., 2008): “what are we to be connected to—each other, systems of regulation and surveillance, or a marketplace of commodities?” (Lillie, 2005: 47).

Cellphones replaced “location-based with person-based communicative systems” (Geser, 2005: 25), purchasable digital agora of caller involvement through casual, anytime, anywhere linking. “In this way, the mobile can function as a ‘pacifier for adults’ that reduces feelings of loneliness and vulnerability in any place and any time” (ibid.: 26). We are always in potential contact albeit within a temporal horizon of constraint by work and other duties when one switches off or resorts to “silent” mode. Otherwise, we can celebrate with cellphones in extended episodes an increasingly pervasive, “naturalized” (Bell, 2005: 69) immersive ludic life-world of on-screen supportive connection or “convivial proximity” (De Gournay and Smoreda, 2003: 58).

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