INTRODUCTION TO ADVERTISING & SOCIETY

Advertising is:
● Fun and creative
● Harmful: sexist, racist, and oppressive
● Invading our privacy, all the time
● Reflecting, reproducing, and reinforcing what already exists in society

What is Advertising?
● Funded messages aimed at the public
● Paid for communication intended to inform or persuade one or more people
● Type of marketing communication
● Process in which the actual ad is created
● Created through socialization
● Part of a culture and is an art form
- Culture – Consists of the shared symbols and definitions of a particular social
group
- Includes the group’s (nation, ethnicity) customs, arts, social institutions, and
achievements
- Two different types: (1) Material (stop sign), (2) Immaterial (act of actually
stopping)

What is Sociology? → Study of human behaviour in a social context

Core Sociological Concepts

● Social Structures – Relatively stable patterns of social relations
- Our daily interactions are guided by norms (e.g., can’t cut the line)
● Micro – Patterns of close social relations formed during face-to-face interaction
● Macro – Large, impersonal social relations

● Norms – Guidelines of how people should act

- Can be formal (based on written rules) or informal (based on interactions)
● Social Control – Actions by others to prevent or respond to broken norms
- Can be formal or informal
● Values – Guidelines of how we should evaluate the world
- For example, good/bad, fair/unfair, right/wrong, beautiful/ugly

Sociological Imagination
● Critical thinking
● Way of seeing the world
● Created by C.W. Mills in 1959
● Ability to see your “personal issues” as “societal troubles”
● Seeing personal biography as a part of history
- Grasp the interplay of people and society, of biography and history
 ● Divorce:
- Personal trouble (we were fighting and then they cheated on me!)
- Societal issue (Canada has a 40% divorce rate)
● Not an excuse for bad behaviour or a denial of personal responsibility, but the ability to
see that our issues are bigger than just ourselves

Major Paradigms in Sociology

● Paradigms – Theoretical framework for ways of thinking, knowing, and doing research
● Functionalism
- Concerned with macro structures
- Sees society as a system that works well when it is balanced and there is
equilibrium
- Aspects of society function together to create this equilibrium
- Where there is too much “bad” in society, that creates normalessness or a state
of anomie
- Advertising and other media show society’s members how to socialize and
behave
● Conflict Theory
- Concerned with macro structures and group level interaction
- Sees society a groups that are in constant conflict and struggle with one another,
such as class conflict
- Concerned with social inequality
- Sees advertising as a tool of the upper/ruling class to manipulate, persuade, and
control the masses
- Theories of racial inequality and racial representation or misrepresentation
● Symbolic Interactionism
- Concerned with micro-structures and individual level interactions
- Sees humans as social actors who have agency
- See society as being socially constructed
- World is socially constructed from symbols and signs
- Advertising is symbolic of society
- Ads rely on socially constructed/agreed upon symbols and signs to get their
message across
- Concerned with the symbols and signs that are used in ads, such as stereotypes
- Can include semiotics (science of signs)
● Feminist & Gender Theories
- Concerned with both micro and the macro
- See society as being patriarchal
- Just another part of the sexist structure of society
- Promotes and reinforces sexism
- Encourages the sexualization and abuse of women
- Create and exploit insecurities to sell products
How Do Sociologist Study Advertising
● Quantitative research
- Positivistic and empirical
- Deductive
- Research questions and hypotheses
- Using numbers, statistics, hard and tangible
- Methods: Surveys, statistical analyses on secondary data, experiments (rarely
used)
● Qualitative research
- Empirical
- Inductive
- Research questions that guide the project but are flexible
- Methods: Interviews, field research, content analyses

KEY CONCEPTS
● Advertisements and advertising ● Agency
● Culture ● Patriarchy
● Social structures ● Semiotics
● Micro/macro ● Qualitative and quantitative
● Sociological imagination ● Postmodern advertising
● Norms, sanctions, laws ● Advocacy advertising
● 4 paradigms ● Dramaturgy
- Functionalism ● Subvertising
- Conflict theory ● Institutional advertising
- Symbolic interactionsm ● Hybritishing
- Feminist and gender studies
● Class conflict
● Social construction
● Social actions

HISTORY OF ADVERTISING

Medium is the Message

● Focusing on the form, not the content
● How the medium shapes our social world and social interactions
● Newspaper → Radio → TV → Smartphones: How has this changed the way we
interact?
- Lots of examples in society
- Love letter writing was super popular… now a long text message is a red flag

Totally real time machine → How history has changed

● Our story begins around 3000BC – Pre-Industralization
- Ancient advertising developed alongside merchant trade of the Silk Road
- Forms of ancient advertising: oral advertisements, billboards, shop signs, and
symbols
 - Real example of Athen’s ‘barker’ advertising in ancient Greece:
● For eyes that are shining, for cheeks like the dawn, for beauty that lasts
after girlhood has gone, for prices in reason the women who know – now
buy their cosmetics from Aesxlyptoe (from sometime around 600 BCE)
- Moral of the story: Nothing has changed
● Dark Ages
- Invention of the printing press developed by the Chinese, ‘perfected’ by
Johannes Gutenberg in 1436
- Mass communication and mass media is made possible in human society
- First newspaper ad in print, 1477
- Spreading of religious doctrine (like the bible) OR other information related to
running of society
- First printed advertisements, newspapers (newsbooks), and magazines (mid
1600’s-early 1700’s)
● Discovery of the “New” World
- Colonialism – Expansion of territory through the acquisition of Indigenous
populations’ lands, as well as the exploitation of those peoples
- Associated with involuntary coercive assimilation by colonial powers
- One of the first organized advertising campaigns in the history of the modern
world
- Advertisements falsely promised a grand new world
- Functional advertisements also popular
● Industrial Revolution (Contemporary Age)
- People moving from the country to live in cities and work in factories
- Terrible conditions
- Slave labour and child labour
- A lot of growth, innovation, invention, and creation
- Massive social and technollogical changes
- Mass production and consumption begins with civil war troops
- Fastly produced → Ready made clothes, canned goods, etc
- Sell goods to masses → More department stores in North America
- Emergence of the ad agency
- Advertising forms: Newspaper, magazine, brochures, pamphlets, patent
medicine, posters at local points of gathering, informal billboards, “sandwich
boards”
- Advertising agencies emerging around 1860, start to gain popularity in later
1800’s
- Middle man: Setting up campaigns and executing them, “media buying”
- Creativity: Pushing the limits of creative arts and technologies
- Research: Advertising agencies as early market researchers
- Types of research → (1) Demographic, (2) Psychological
- Market segmentation: Target markets as being segmented into groups along
certain lines like gender, ethnicity, race, or income or class level
 - Advertisers would then direct their advertisements to groups along these market
segmented lines
- Women = Feminine, pink, soft colours, aesthetics, nice things
- White upper class and middle class women were advertised to more than anyone
else, by far
- Emergence of the brand
- Hard sell – Deceptive products will fix everything
- Soft sell – Product will fix one thing or make it better
- Brandspokes people → Sterotypes easily convery a message
● Roarin’ 20’s
- Radio is introduced to the public
- Advertisements are played over the radio in people’s homes
- Sponsorships and spot advertisements are both featured on radio
- Modernization of the American home
- Automation and modernization of the American home made housewives lives
easier, and manufactures a lot of money
- All of these products save make a women’s life easier
● 1930’s: Depression? → Hard sell
- Economy crashes in 1929
- Hard sell for hard times: Advertisers turn their strategy back
- Focus on low cost or saving money
- Products will soothe insecurities
- Some advertisements were leaning into guilty vices, in “pulp magazines”
- But mostly, advertisements reflected the gloomy and hopeless mood of the time
- WWII: Propaganda Bonanza
- Propaganda is the effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions
by means of symbols
- US and Canada were full of pro-war propaganda during both World Wars
- WWII propaganda could be artistic, colourful, and expressive
- Corporations also took part
● Fabulous Fifties
- Selling the American Dream
- New ways to crash in through the consumer
1. Design new and existing products
2. Pricing and credit increases
3. Planned obsolesce (e.g., new phones)
- Tapping into hidden desires
- Advertisers tried to manipulate through the use of psychological warfare and
mind games
- Just add water → Thought they would be judged, so they added eggs + butter
- Sick and tired of being sick and tired
- Those who did not fit the rigid ideal became fed up with the lie of the “American
Dream”
 - Post-war changes of ideology, recognizing broken elements in America’s
systems
- Post-war boom only for white and middle-class
● Civil Rights & The 1960s
- BIPOC: We want rights and representation!
- Advertisers: No way! Wait, but they have money though…?
- Counter Culture
- Rebellion against the societal norms and values of the white middle and upper
class
- People want to be able to express themselves
- Generational divides, the use of psychedelic drugs
- A personal liberation “do your own thing”
- Vietnam war was going on at the time
● Selling Counter-Culture: 60’s and 70’s
● 1980 & 1990’s
- Television becoming more important to advertisers
- More accessible for everyone
- Expansion of channels
- Shifting Portrayals of Women
● Women as flawless business professionals
● Women as doing a lot for their families and needing “help”
● Woman as super heroes, doing it all
● Sex sells
● 2000’’s – Social, political, and environmental messaging
- Some global ad campaigns remain, but the market is mostly segmented
- Advocacy advertising: Non-profits using advertising to spread messages
- Institutional advertising: Connects a business, corporation, or government to a
social, environmental, political cause
- Hybritisng: Combining advocacy and institutional advocacy

Postmodern Advertising
● Postmodernism: Rejecting the grand and meta narratives of the past
● It is seeing how the entire world can exist with great diversity of ideas, thoughts, and
behaviours
● Modern advertising: Paternal, judgemental, imposing
● Fun, funny, understanding, friendly
● Fast-paced
● Altruistic (in on the joke) and promises utopia (things are getting better)