Which half?: accounting for ideology in advertising: Liz Mcfall http://www.google.iq/url? sa=t&rct=j&q=ideology+of+advertising&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&ved=0CFkQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F %2Foro.open.ac.uk %2F17181%2F1%2FWhich_half_accounting_for_ideology.doc&ei=uxeKUZnACOKr4AS1hYGgDQ&usg=AFQj CNGz3pOZWvEe4RYgO-HHgnlbfLZHQg&bvm=bv.46226182,d.

d2k It may be a bit of a stretch to apply Wanamakers - or maybe Lord Levers maxim I know that half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I dont know which half to the problem of accounting for ideology in advertising but there are stronger reasons for doing so than might be supposed. The questions of effectiveness and ideology both signal a real accounting challenge, one that involves measuring qualities and values rather than quantities and costs. Invoking the which half maxim is also meant to nudge attention back towards the internal dynamics and practices of the industry when for too many years to adopt a critical perspective has meant to concentrate primarily on the externally visible texts and products of the industry. This situation has arisen, in large part, through the definition of advertising as a site of special, ideological interest. Advertising occupies a special location between the realms of culture and consumption and economy and production. This location has been rigorously mined in critical theory for its ideological significance in cementing and reproducing a given social and economic order. With such stakes in play it is little surprise that critical theory has eschewed the mundane practices, technologies and institutions that make up the industry in favour of developing analytical frameworks designed to crack the ideological code of the product itself. Yet these mundane details may still contain the best clues to how advertising works and why it looks the way that it does. The chapter begins with a short overview of the way ideology has been conceptualised in key critical accounts of advertising with the emphasis on establishing the elegance and totalising reach of such accounts. It then moves on to argue that such accounts derive their cogency from rigid and particular approaches to the character and location of meaning. The more critical work on advertising loosened up to accommodate cross and intertextual accounts of meaning, to accommodate consumers resistance, the symbolic dimension of material practices and institutional sites the less compelling the ideological account became. The chapter concludes by arguing that a more promising direction for future research is offered by reasserting the generative significance of internal advertising processes - such as the industrys advertising effectiveness awards schemes - in shaping the reality they purport to measure.

Ideology and critical accounts of advertising Any discussion of the role of ideology in critical accounts of advertising needs to pay due regard to Roland Barthes discussion of the application of semiotic method to advertising images. His essay, The Rhetoric of the Image, was first published in 1964 but it set the tone for critical research, both conceptually and methodologically, well into the 1980s. To this end I want to take a closer look at Barthes take on the ideological character of advertising before exploring how authors like Williamson (1977), Goldman (1990) and Wernick (1991) moved the debate forward. These accounts conceptualise the role of ideology in quite distinctive ways and there may be some nice distinctions between them that will be collapsed but Im willing to risk this in order to show the persistence of certain ideas about the relationship between advertising, meaning and ideology in contemporary societies.

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In his famous analysis of a Panzani foods advertisement depicting a string bag spilling out its contents, Barthes identifies three messages contained within the visual text. The first is the linguistic message which features the use of denotational and connotational elements to carry out the two main functions of anchorage and relay. Relay has a narrative action to carry the story forward but anchorage fixes meaning against the proliferation of multiple and undesirable meanings. It is at the level of anchorage that the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested (1977: 40). The second noncoded iconic message presents in absolutely analogical fashion objects which appear entirely natural. The function of this second message, in accordance with structuralist principles, is revealed through its relation to the third, coded-iconic message. The noncoded iconic messages special function is to naturalise the coded message and it is here that the work of semantic artifice really kicks in. In the coded message there are a series of signs. Barthes isolates at least four including; a return from the market, Italianicity, total culinary service and the still life. Barthes admits the presence, arising from the images place in the magazine and the predominance of labels, of a further message revealing that the image is an advertisement. In a move consistent with structuralist semiotics fixation with the text, Barthes reaches the rather odd conclusion that this purely functional information eludes signification, thus a first step to ruling the internal dynamics of advertising production outside of the construction of meaning is made. There is nothing crude or simplistic in this account of meaning construction. Semiotics offers an elegant, nuanced and powerful account of the plural and active nature of the process of meaning making. Barthes, for instance, acknowledges that the number of readings will vary between different individuals. The image is a lexical unit combining a range of different lexicons or portions of language relating to specific bodies of practice or technique. Some individuals may lack certain lexicons but it is must be possible for one individual to have all lexicons referred to in a single advertisement. The tenability of the method depends on the possibility of a single individual, for example the analyst, owning all the relevant lexical units to enable a complete, structural description. The plurality of possible readings is contained by the common domain of ideology which cannot but be single for a given society and history, no matter what signifiers of connotation it may use (Barthes, 1977: 49); This emphasis on the singular character of the ideological domain is remarkable as one of the primary sources of trouble for structuralist semiotic accounts from those who have struggled to square a univocal ideological explanation with the diversity of gender, ethnic, religious and cultural interests. Yet is also through invoking the ideological nature of meaning-making that semiotics derives its power as a total explanation of social order. This is what Barthes means when he refers to the dialectical coordination of semiotics and ideology. Ideology does not just explain how semiotics as a formal process of signification relates to given interests, but semiotics explains how ideology works. For instance Barthes maintains that not all elements within the image are transformed into connotators there always remains a certain denotation within the image which acts to naturalise, or in Barthes words, to innocent the semantic artifice of connotation. Coordination is the key here - ideology bridges between the structural layering of the text, multiple individual readings and the interests, generally construed as bourgeois, of a given society while at the same time the relations of signification enable ideology to be disseminated. Semiotically influenced approaches to advertising, thus, proffer not only a method, but a comprehensive social critique, what Barthes, with Marx in his sights, called a totalist explanation of social life. Barthes vision of semiotics is quite in keeping with Marxs ruthless criticism of everything existing that accounts for any phenomena in terms of the determinative action of the mode of production (Marx, 1978/1844: 12). The most sustained and the most influential treatment in this vein is Judith Williamsons Decoding Advertisements (1978). In order to sell, she explains, adverts have to mean 19/05/2013 2

something and this involves connecting people and objects, making the two interchangeable. Adverts thereby sell us ourselves in a society where the real origins of identity are obscured by the distortions imposed by consumption. These distortions conceal the true production/class basis of identity in false consumption-based distinctions fabricated by advertising. Williamson uses semiotic terminology to describe the transference of meaning to products through the currency of signs. This transference is crucial in advanced capitalist economies because of the need to differentiate basically similar products. To this end, bizarre juxtapositions of products and objects/ meanings take on a natural status and this is construed, as in Barthes formulation, as an ideological process. Adverts utilise a pre-existing referent system of meaning, because the product, prior to signification in the advert, has no meaning. Having captured meaning, the product becomes the signified, so Chanel No 5 equals Catherine Deneuve. This is a step towards the product itself as a signifier of meaning, having taken over the reality from which its meaning was abducted. In this way products generate the feelings they represent, so Clairol equals happiness; or offer themselves as the currency for something else, so Anne French equals clear skin equals boyfriends. This process of meaning making is active and undertaken by the subject as it is he or she who completes the circuit through which, once started ... a current of meaning flows continuously and apparently autonomously (1978: 41). In this way what Williamson labels the vicious circle of meaning exchange between advertisements and subjects progresses through four discreet stages. In the first stage we create meaning through recognition of signifiers from the referent myth system which we come to associate with the product. The crucial factor here is the implication of the subject in the exchange process and this provides the key to the ideological nature of the process. As for Barthes the subjects active involvement in the formal production of meaning ensures a simultaneously ideological moment in which constructed meanings appear natural. We make the exchange and complete the links set up in the advert, in doing so we become the signified. In this second stage, subjects take on meanings from the product.
Products whose only meaning derives from a re-hash of mythological elements already present in society, develop such an aura of significance that they tell something about their buyers and actually become adjectival in relation to them. ... We are thus created not only as subjects but as particular kinds of subjects, by products in advertisements. (Williamson, 1978: 45)

For this to be successful, Williamson maintains, you must already recognise yourself as the kind of subject represented. Adverts address the subject as special, individual, and in this third stage, individuals recognise themselves, and are simultaneously constituted as, particular sorts of subject, at once individuals and part of a group. Finally, through the advertisement, we create ourselves. Having constituted subjects as members of a group, then as individuals, adverts, in their depiction of multiple aspects of the self, break the individual into a fragmented ego to be reunited by the product (1978: 55). Williamson characterises this appeal to a coherent, conscious self as an appeal, not to an inherent subject essence, but to an ideologically constructed consciousness. Fundamentally, ads act ideologically to reproduce subjects in a mould suited to the demands of capitalist economies. While the overt function of ads is to sell, their hidden function is to conserve society in a given form by resolving contradictions and reproducing consuming subjects. These themes crop up in work by authors like Winship (1981), Dyer (1982) and Vestergaard and Schroder (1985) among others. Whatever their other differences such accounts share a baseline understanding of advertisements as ideological in utilising a formal structure of signification that naturalises or innocents the specific, historical condition of contemporary capitalist economies. This view, with some shift of emphasis, also underpins the re-working of semiotic analysis advanced by Goldman (1992) and 19/05/2013 3

Goldman and Papson (1994, 1996). In Reading Ads Socially Goldman begins by identifying advertising as a key institution in producing and reproducing the material and ideological supremacy of commodity relations a system he terms commodity hegemony (1992: 2). This indicates a move away from the Althusserian model of interpellation towards a Gramscian framework. For Goldman, adverts contribute to a system of commodity hegemony because they reproduce a sense of commodity relations as a natural and inevitable part of the lives of different individuals. Goldmans particular contribution to the method is the proposal of the mortise and the frame as structural elements. The mortise and frame function, to steer interpretation in a preferred direction. The term mortise refers to a joining device, a cavity that another part fits or passes through. The mortise formally structures the creation of meaning within the ad through routing the connection between the image as signified and the product as signifier. Through the mortise, irrespective of the content of individual ads, an ideology and practice of commodity fetishism at a deep level of communicative competence is reproduced (1992: 65). The emphasis here is slightly different from many other semiotic theorists in that greater significance is attached to the embeddedness of meaning within the system of advertisements and its extension beyond single texts to products as commodity-signs. Where Williamsons product is blank prior to signification in the advert, Goldmans product is a commodity-sign, carrying meaning from previous advertising and from the system of advertising. Here Goldman acknowledges his debt to an inter-textual account of meaning but, as I hope to show later, there are limits to how far this revision is allowed to modify his application of semiotics. Wernicks (1991) study departs further from earlier accounts by expressing the need for advertising critique to encompass more than the decoding of individual advertisements. An understanding of advertisings role, he argues, needs also take account of the broader promotional system spanning production, marketing and design. Through the notion of artificial semiosis, Wernick points to the emergence in the early nineteenth century, of the industrialised manufacture of meaning and myth, a process culminating in the production of dual character objects or commodity-signs. For Wernick, it is not the symbolic character of objects per se that is new, but the instrumentalized manner in which this character is instilled. In the industrial phase promotion becomes a strategic and integrated aspect of production and the resultant commodity sign an entirely new sort of product with a use-value inextricable from its manipulated image. Again, this is understood as an ideological process in that advertisements act to unite commodities with attributed subject positions.
The commodity they project as the object of desire is simultaneously presented as a cultural symbol charged with social significance; and the ego they seek to engage as the subject of desire is induced to adopt the socio-cultural identity attributed to those who already use the product. (1991: 31)

There is not that much difference between this and Williamsons (1976) or Goldmans (1992) account of how advertising works through an Althusserian model of ideological interpellation. This is remarkable because at various points Wernick seeks to distance his analysis from more classically Marxist accounts of advertisings ideological action. Yet the distinctions between Wernick and accounts in the latter vein are finally rather subtle. As mentioned above, Wernick locates advertising within a much broader promotional system spanning production and design as part of his determination that advertising, however important, is only one part of an elaborate production system in which signification occurs at various stages. This doesnt, in the end, prevent Wernick from adopting a methodological approach based on decoding individual texts but it nevertheless marks a less restricted way of thinking about how and where signification occurs. Similarly in his 19/05/2013 4

acknowledgement of the difficulty of disentangling promotional symbolism from other cultural meanings, Wernick notes;.
It is almost as difficult in the real world to make a rigorous distinction between the commodity and its manufactured symbolic aura as in the advertising text. What complicates the distinction is that products, even physical and practical ones, are inseparable from language (including visual language) and from patterns of use that are overlaid with ceremonial and cultural significance. (1991 : 32)

This difficulty is related to what Wernick calls the promotional intertext that connects advertisements not only to their commodity-signs but to other ads and a shared cultural vocabulary which is both articulated and re-worked within advertising. Pushing these myriad semantic entanglements to one side, Wernick goes on to claim that the differences between generic cultural conventions attached to products and the specific brand identities that advertisers attempt to construct are nevertheless obvious. This insistence upon the singularity of advertisings role in attaching meanings to commodities, leads Wernick back to the key terms of structuralist accounts.
By addressing individuals always as potential customers, and so attributing them a priori a social identity linked firmly to that role, advertising builds the standpoint of consumption into the design of its every text. ... The consumerist address imprisons the subjectivity it projects into a totally commodified ontology. Being is reduced to having, desire to lack. ... Production as human praxis - the satisfaction of human need through non-alienated self-activity- is obliterated as a thinkable thought. (1991: 35)

Where does it mean?: the trouble with ideology Despite its power, reach and the elegant ambition of an explanation that has the world and its history in its purview, semiotics had by the end of the 1980s its fair share of critics. One of the most obvious criticisms of semiotics concerns the status of the analyst/interpreter, the figure Barthes called the mythologist, the owner of all lexicons. For writers such as Leiss et. al, (1990: 214) and Moeran (1996: 30), semiotics depends entirely on the impressionistic insights of analysts whose abilities to reach the deeper levels of meaning construction varied significantly. Other authors have complained that the semiotician is set apart from the recipient of meaning, mysteriously equipped to stand outside the ideological universe that structures all other interpretations (Cook, 1992; Nava et. al., 1997). For present purposes however the most interesting problem raised by the semiotic explanation of the ideological character of advertisements concerns the location of meaning. A deep paradox on this question runs through semiotic approaches to advertising because while the theory understands meaning as resident within the structural relations persisting across a system of representation on the whole the method tracks meaning within individual texts. The reason for this is clear: the structural analysis of texts as selfcontained, competent entities for analysis presents a complex but manageable task, the analysis of relations which persist across a whole system of representation however is quite a different matter. To make this point clearer it is worth referring briefly to Leymores (1975) semiotic analysis of advertising systems. Leymore defines an advertising system as constituting all the advertisements of competitive brands. To this, she applies algebraic and statistical analysis of the relations between elements to enable her to draw conclusions like good : evil washing powders : not washing powders (1975: 75). This relation demonstrates that the brand closest to the theme, washing powders equal good, is the one that achieves 19/05/2013 5

success in the market; a powder which deviates from the theme condemns itself to be identified with the signifier of the not washing powders, which is evil (1975: 75). Many of the conclusions that Leymore draws from her analysis are similarly reductive and this is certainly a function of the difficulty of identifying meaning in systems. Leymores algebraic method may enable her to track oppositions and relations across an advertising system but in order to make the task analytically manageable these relations have to be expressed in very simple terms. It would simply not be practicable to conduct a comparative analysis of an advertising system along the lines of Barthes deconstruction of the Panzani ad. Still, this is not the only problem with Leymores approach. Equally troublesome is how the boundaries defining an advertising system should be drawn temporally and in market terms. Semiotic analysis is synchronic, freezing the object of analysis at a moment in time, but individual advertisements reference a whole universe of prior advertising they are not bounded within a given season. The competitive advertising market for many products is also extremely fluid. Soap powder is an exceptionally well-defined market, other markets are drawn not from common product characteristics but from common instances of use. Thus games consoles, mobile phones and mp3 players compete in the same market as teenage Christmas gifts and therefore constitute an advertising system. Markets are structures of mediation constituted through the application of specific commercial practices and technologies that refer back, through market research for example, to the social practices of consumers (Slater, 2002). Locating meaning in advertising systems offers no easy solutions to the problem of attributing meaning externally to relations between elements within a system but conducting analysis internally within individual representations. This problem is exacerbated by the shift towards intertextual definitions of meaning as plural, shattered, incapable of being tabulated (Kristeva, 1984) and located across different systems of signification. Goldman (1992) and Goldman and Papsons (1994; 1996) accounts attempt to accommodate intertextuality whilst retaining a method of analysis focused primarily on individual texts. They accentuate the increasing prevalence since the 1980s, of rapid, absurd and pastiche recombinations of sign values in the mature sign economy of advertising. Opaque messages and techniques like parody and self-mockery proliferate in a spiralling, self-referential generation of intertextual not-ads (Goldman 1992; Goldman and Papson 1996). These shifts are part of an acceleration of meaning prompted by a change in the form and structure of commodity hegemony. Individuated meaning production is accommodated within the logic of contemporary commodity hegemony as the very openness of not-ads blocks counter hegemonic readings (1992: 198). The openness of interpretation wards off resistance at the same time as ensuring the crucial connection between the commodity name and the advertising sign is made. This closed circuit between the commodity name and the reading is crucial to Goldmans account because it maintains the link between ads, meaning and a given economic order, characterised as commodity hegemony. Despite the emphasis on negotiation and intertextuality the account that he and later, Papson, provide remains close to the semiotic explanation expounded by Barthes and Williamson. For the latter, readings are always drawn from a shared ideological universe while for the former; freedom of interpretation ultimately serves, rather than challenges, a hegemonic system. This is an uneasy position. Advertisers steer meanings but cannot guarantee interpretations that will either ratify preferred meanings or produce aberrant meanings (1992: 40). Yet the emphasis on the closed circuit between commodity and reading leaves little space for a truly oppositional reading one that breaks the circuit outside the ideological/hegemonic universe. This tension also characterises Williamson and Barthes accounts. Both stress the active involvement of the subject in the creation of meaning but as Williamson explains, this freedom is not quite what it seems. Freedom is illusory, a position given to you by the advertiser (1978: 71). Subjects may be required to actively 19/05/2013 6

complete the circuit of meaning in ads but this process is largely predetermined, restricted to the carefully defined channels provided by the ad for its own decipherment (1978: 72). This does not prevent Williamson and Goldman and Papson from claiming that people are wise to advertising and adept at resisting its messages in a move that is characteristic of the awkward fluctuation in semiotics between preferred and open, predetermined and active readings that are at once resisted and irresistible. Goldmans intertextual approach to meaning involves primarily an account of how advertising techniques like parody, pastiche and cross-referencing work without undermining a system of commodity hegemony. These are characteristics of advertising that had, in any case, already been recognised by writers like Williamson (1978: 175-178) and Dyer (1982: 185-7). But the notion of intertextuality is intended to summon up more than simply cross and self-referentiality. It also involves recognition of the transposition of signifying practices across a range of different systems. This means that the regime of signification in advertising shapes, and is shaped by, other regimes like film and television, popular music and literature. While many semiotic theorists acknowledge in principle the play of influence across these regimes, in practice, advertising texts are treated as complete and self-contained systems of meaning. Even where, as in Goldman and Papsons (1996) analysis, more weight is given to cross-referentiality across signifying regimes, the relationship is unilinear with advertising always cast in the role of insatiable cultural appropriator, coloniser or cannibal. A further problem with the textual location of meaning, disregarded even by intertextual accounts, is the relationship between meaning systems and other dimensions of social life and practice. It is all very well to acknowledge how meaning is negotiated across texts but what of the role of practices? Referentiality across film, music and advertising may establish chains of meaning but material practices on both production and consumption sides also produce meaning. Representational work is inherent across the design of retailing, production and distribution systems as well as in shopping, leisure and working practices. Allowing for the symbolic character of practice only exacerbates the already unmanageable task of tracking the ideological content of advertising messages. One of the most acute manifestations of the view that meaning resides in discrete systems of signification arises in the status attributed to the product in semiotic accounts of advertising. Advertising exists prima facie to instil meaning in products. In Williamsons account the only meaning of products is that instilled by the advert, the product is effectively a tabula rasa (1978: 45). The arbitrary connection between many products and appropriated meanings is taken as evidence that ads are free to harvest any attractive referent systems. This is a paradoxical treatment in a theoretical system that privileges the symbolic character of all objects. Advertising meanings somehow take precedence over any other meanings that may be associated with the brand, product or company outside of advertising. This is a singular version of the error which reduces the properties of products not just to their significations (cf. Callon & Muniesa, 2005; Mcfall, 2004) but to their advertising significations. A related problem arises over the status of the producers of advertisements. The intentions, aims and strategies of advertising producers are left out of most critical accounts focused on the problematic of ideology, an omission which springs directly from the semiotic challenge to the idea of originary authorship. Obviously, Williamson argues, people invent and produce adverts, but apart from the fact that they are unknown and faceless, the ad in any case does not claim to speak from them, it is not their speech (1978: 14). The absence of the author is consistent with the theoretical tenets of a method that refers back to a structuralist Marxist conception of social relations. If the consciousness of producers is derived from a common ideological universe the texts they produce necessarily transmit over-determined ideological meanings rendering their explicit intentions of little significance. The tenability of this position has been challenged on the basis that whilst producers clearly do not in any straightforward way dictate the meaning 19/05/2013 7

of advertisements, their specific modes of production are crucial to a robust assessment of advertising (Nixon, 1996, 2003; Moeran, 1996; Miller, 1997; Slater 2002; Cronin, 2004; Mcfall, 2004). Micro-level production practices pale in semiotics next to the ideological role of advertising but the absence of an account of how advertisers actually conduct practice forces semiotic analysis into the business of endless philosophical abstractions about meaning. Excessive abstraction, in fact, haunts the semiotic pursuit of meaning. The assumption that meaning is available for textual analysis to get at raises difficult questions about the character and location of meaning which the emphasis on intertextuality does little to solve. Indeed accentuating the relations and references across different systems of signification only raises more questions about how systems and the boundaries between them should be defined. An even more intransigent problem concerns the connection between meaning and concrete material practices. It is the significance of this relation that writers associated with the actor-network tradition like John Law (2002) are trying to get at in flagging their approach as a sort of semiotics of materiality. Such problems with meaning and ideology also lay behind Foucaults determination to set aside what he considered the futility of semiotics as a task that nothing could limit (in Dean, 1994: 16). Foucault, of course, preferred to think in terms of discourses rather than ideologies as they need no interpretation, no one to assign them a meaning. If one reads texts in a particular way one perceives that they speak clearly to us and require no further supplementary sense or interpretation (1980: 115). This encapsulates many of the criticisms that have been levelled at semiotics regarding the status of the interpreter and the location of meaning. Meaning, for Foucault, is the plural outcome of ongoing, active processes and therefore has no single, ideological core accessible only to the skilled analyst. Accounting for advertising This final section of the chapter sets aside the question of ideology to focus instead on the generative significance of the internal processes of advertising. In particular the aim is to explore some of the reasons why a focus on mundane, production processes, including those designed to evaluate advertising effectiveness might reveal more than might be supposed about the form that advertising takes. This will involve a brief overview of ideas emanating from the sociology and anthropology of economic life that signal the different ways in which tools developed to measure aspects of an economic reality in turn shape that reality. In The Laws of the Market (1998) Callon and his contributing authors make a sustained and persuasive argument that the task of economic sociology needs reframing to not simply assert the social context of economic practice but to explore the ways in which economics, broadly defined, formats or performs the economy. The economy, here is conceptualised as the contingent outcome of a process, a mutual performation, in which the discipline/s of economics, broadly defined to include economic sociology, business and organisation studies and marketing, are implicated through their role in shaping the ways in which agencies calculate. This, for Callon, opens up the sociology of economic life to an exploration of precisely how calculative agencies, in all their diverse forms, have emerged and been formatted.
It is not a matter of giving a soul back to a dehumanized agent, nor of rejecting the very idea of his existence. The objective may be to explore the diversity of calculative agencies, forms and distributions, and hence of organised markets. The market is no longer that cold, implacable and impersonal monster which imposes its laws and procedures while extending them ever further. It is a many-sided, diversified, evolving device which the social sciences as well as the actors themselves contribute to reconfigure. (1998: 51)

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Despite the clumsiness of the term, performation offers a way of rediscovering the generative significance of advertising processes. This follows from the insistence in other sociologies of economic life that economic practices shape the reality they set out to measure. As Peter Miller drawing on the context of accounting practice explains, accountancy tools are largely improvised and adapted to the tasks and materials at hand (1998: 190). No general principle defining what should and should not be measured exists, rather the relevant reality is constantly renegotiated and reconfigured in accounting. To practice or perform calculations accountants require tools and tools shape the meaning of the objects they are applied to. This is a point also made by Law (2002) in his account of the role of spreadsheets and the Thatcherite culture of enterprise in creating a category of real costs and by writers like Cochoy (1998, 2003) in relation to marketing practices and the formation of markets and marketing categories. This work sits rather uneasily with critical accounts of the ideological potency of advertising. When Michael Schudsons Advertising: the uneasy persuasion first appeared in 1984 it was one of the first to take issue with overstated claims about the power of advertising. Advertisements, he suggested ordinarily work their wonders, to the extent that they work at all, on an inattentive public (1990:3). In this, Schudson gave voice to a sentiment that industry practitioners had been citing in their defence for years, that within the industry itself considerable uncertainty exists about whether and exactly how advertising actually works. This lack of certainty is an ever present undercurrent and surfaces frequently in the debate over whether creativity or effectiveness is the ultimate aim of advertising. When the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) selected Advertising Works as the title for the publications series that accompanies their annual effectiveness award scheme it was at least partly in reference to this debate and the need to reassure clients. That such reassurance is even necessary doesnt accord all that well with structuralist or post-structuralist explanations of the ideological or hegemonic effects of advertising. Ethnographic and historical accounts of advertising (Nixon, 1996, 2003; Moeran, 1996; Miller, 1997; Cronin, 2004; Mcfall, 2004) offer a glimpse of advertising as an inward-looking and self-referential culture. Advertising communities, like other interpretive communities, work with their eyes far more closely fixed on the competition than on the audience. The specific nature of everyday practices, technologies and institutions that make-up these communities are potent forces shaping the nature of the product they create. Systems like the IPAs Advertising Works effectiveness awards scheme can be viewed in this light as tools that ultimately shape the reality they purport to measure. Having achieved an effectiveness award, campaigns in the mould of Carexs washer or walker or Phones4us Scary Mary or Wonderbras Hello boys, go on to shape rules, practices and categories for future campaigns (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising 2003; Baker, 1995). Advertising is a fast-moving, faddish and introspective business where techniques and innovations can rapidly take on the status of established knowledge shaping the form of future campaigns. The notion of performativity has some salience in this context in signposting the relationship between knowledges and practices in the ongoing constitution of markets. Advertising, both product and practice, is materially imprinted, or performed, by its own institutional practices and dynamics. This is no mere tautology but an acknowledgement of the plural ways in which the institution of advertising, its norms, practices and award schemes, self-generate or perform, the knowledges and practices which define it. An informed, critical account of advertising is one that takes seriously these norms, practices and institutions and resists the temptation to dismiss them in the pursuit of providing a broader, ideological explanation. References Baker, Colin 1995: Advertising Works 8, Henley on Thames: NTC Publications Ltd Barthes, Roland 1977: The Rhetoric of the Image. In Image - Music - Text. London, Fontana 19/05/2013 9

Callon, Michel (ed.) 1998: The Laws of the Market. Oxford: Blackwell Callon, Michel & Muniesa, Fabian 2005: Economic Markets as Calculative, Collective Devices. Organization Studies 26 (8) 1229-1250 Cochoy, Frank, 1998: Another discipline for the market economy: marketing as a performative knowledge and know-how for capitalism. The Laws of the Market. Callon, Michel Cochoy, Frank, 2003: On the captation of publics: understanding the market thanks to Little Red Riding Hood. Workshop on market(ing) practice, Stockholm, June 14-16 Cook, Guy 1992: The Discourse of Advertising, London, Routledge Cronin, Anne 2004: Regimes of mediation: advertising practitioners as cultural intermediaries? Consumption, Markets and Culture, 7(4): 349-369 Dean, Mitchell 1994: Critical and Effective Histories: Foucaults Methods and Historical Sociology. London, Routledge Dyer, Gillian 1982: Advertising as Communication. London, Routledge Foucault, Michel 1980: Power/ Knowledge, Brighton, Harvester Goldman, Robert 1992: Reading Ads Socially. London, Routledge Goldman, Robert & Papson, Stephen 1994: Advertising in the Age of Hypersignification. Theory, Culture and Society. 11, 23-53 Goldman, Robert & Papson, Stephen, 1996 Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising. New York: Guilford. Granovetter, Mark 1985: Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology 91, 481-510 Kristeva, Julia 1984: Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press Institute of Practitioners in Advertising 2003: AREA Advertising Works 5 Law, John 2002: Economics as Interference. Cultural Economy. du Gay, Paul & Pryke, Michael (eds) London: Sage Leiss, William, Kline, Stephen & Jhally, Sut 1990/1986: Social Communication In Advertising. London, Routledge Leymore, Varda Langholz 1975: Hidden Myth: Structure and Symbolism in Advertising. London, Heinemann McFall, Liz 2004: Advertising: a cultural economy. London: Sage Marx, Karl 1978/1844: For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing. In Tucker, Robert C. (ed) The Marx Engels Reader New York, London, Norton Miller, Daniel 1997 Capitalism: an ethnographic approach. London: Berg Miller, Peter 1998 The Margins of Accounting. The Laws of the Market, Callon, Michel Moeran, Brian 1996: A Japanese Advertising Agency. Surrey, Curzon Nava, Mica; Blake, Andrew; MacRury, Iain & Richards, Barry 1997: Buy This Book: studies in advertising and consumption. London, Routledge Slater, Don 2002: Capturing Markets from the Economists. In du Gay & Pryke (Eds) Cultural Economy. Vestergaard, Torben & Schroder, Kim 1985: The Language of Advertising. Oxford, Blackwell Wernick, Andrew 1991: Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology And Symbolic Expression. London, Sage Williamson, Judith 1978: Decoding Advertisements. London, Marion Boyars Winship, Janet 1981: Handling sex. Media, Culture and Society 3, 25-41.

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