“The evaporation of the boundary between advertising and programming content on television represents one of the furthest extensions into culture yet achieved by the logic of the commodity. Robin Andersen is fully aware of the significance of this development, which she tracks with great verve and subtlety through its many forms. Equally at home in depth psychology and political economy, she ranges across the map of mass culture to give us a study which is frightening in what it shows but ultimately liberating, as only a critical unmasking can be.”

                                                                  Joel Kovel

                                                                  Bard College

 

Reviewed by Matthew McAllister in Film Quarterly

 

The study of advertising, like media studies in general, has historically been divided into two camps.  One camp, represented by critics such as Ben H. Bagdikian, Herbert 1. Schiller, and Erik Barnouw, is based in political economy.  This perspective focuses on advertising as a funding system for media, and on how the commercial imperative that drives ad-supported media's finances fundamentality defines and limits the content of such media.  The other framework, represented by the likes of Judith Williamson and Andrew Wernick, examines the advertisements themselves-the advertisement-as-text approach.  Such symbolic critics concentrate on how the ideology of the commercial form-like the 30-second spot-represents consumption and society.  In the days when it was easier to at least theorize about the separation of advertising content from nonadvertising content, the academic division between the economists and semioticians of advertising criticism was logical.

Increasingly, however, scholars are recognizing that such a separation of the two intellectual traditions may no longer be effective in explaining modern advertising.  Influenced by factors like deregulation as well as new technologies such as remote controls and pay-per media, advertising has raised the stakes of its social influence, expanding and integrating its economic muscle and symbolic manipulation.  With many new advertising forms, it is difficult to tell the ad from the TV show (or movie or magazine).  Infomercials, sponsored cultural events (like The "Tostitos" Fiesta Bowl or "Mobil" Masterpiece Theater), "Channel One," product placement, and movie tie-ins, among other related phenomena, illustrate that advertising has entered a new phase, and criticism of advertising must follow.  Accordingly, some advertising scholars are combining the political and economic with the symbolic to comprehensively grasp advertising's new purview.

One such scholar is Robin Andersen.  In her valuable book Consumer Culture and TV Programming, she examines how advertising influences the form and messages of television programming.  She spends much time exploring the nature of television and advertising economics, but as she argues that the programs of television are increasingly taking on the look and themes of advertising, she uses the methodology and arguments of cultural studies critics to show the concordance of TV show with TV commercial.

            Consumer Culture is divided into two parts.  The first part contextualizes and elaborates upon why advertising's influence over TV programming is increasing, and details the author's theoretical position, a position strongly influenced by Marxist critical studies.  Chapter 1 highlights changes in advertising in the 1980s, discussing such factors as the decline in network ratings-leading to cuts in personnel and increased servitude toward advertisers-and the development of mega-media conglomerates.  Chapter 2, focusing on the Nike company, takes a broader economic perspective than many traditional political economists who study advertising.  Andersen explores laissez-faire free-trade policies and the betrayal of U.S. labor for corporate profits through downsizing, while contrasting such behavior with the promises of advertising and media content.  As she concludes at the end of this chapter, "The paradox is this: By accepting Nike's offer of empowerment and liberation when we buy a pair of Nike shoes, we endorse and promote the very production practices and corporate policies that preclude our own economic well-being" (67).  The next two chapters explore the increased use by advertising of focus-group research to tap into consumer needs and anxieties, and critique postmodernist views of consumer culture--such as that of Jean Baudrillard--for artificially severing connections between the economic and the cultural.

The second half of the book draws on techniques from cultural studies to show how different television genres are morphing into commercial forms.  As the author notes, this morphing is sometimes obvious, like when "Seinfeld" devotes a whole program to the celebration of Pez or Junior Mints.  However, there are also more subtle convergences between advertising and television programming; much of the discussion in these later chapters looks at the "therapeutic" approach taken by media content and how this approach mirrors advertising's basic selling tactics.  As Andersen argues, advertising is therapeutic in the sense that it decontextualizes social issues by focusing on how individuals may simplistically solve their problems through product consumption.  She scrutinizes television programming that reproduces this strategy by psychologizing social problems and deflecting attention away from structural causes.

Thus the program "thirtysomething," critiqued in chapter 5, not only defined the main characters' social group by "lifestyle"-defining commodity icons, but also tended to present anxieties about social problems as personality flaws solved through talk (or in Michael and Hope's case, yuppie whining).  Such discourse, Andersen notes, reflects the background assumptions involved in "lifestyle marketing." Later chapters focus on the thematic convergence with advertising found in talk shows, mediated politics, coverage of the Persian Gulf War, and reality-based shows like "Cops."

      Andersen has produced a book that persuasively, and frighteningly, accents how truly intertwined broadcasting and advertising have become.  In its conclusion, she briefly discusses possible intervention strategies, such as politicizing consumption and reregulation.  But the author's attempt at an optimistic ending is only halfhearted.  This is understandable.  In an era of Disney/ ABC, tyrannical tobacco companies, movies set almost entirely at McDonald's, and our choice of 15 different versions of "Friends," it frequently appears that the only socially sanctioned option, to any problem, is to buy more Pepsi.

 

 

By Matthew P. McAllister. Dr. McAllister is the author of The Commercialization of American Culture: New Advertising, Control and Democracy, and teaches at Virginia Tech.

 

Film Quarterly Vol. 50, No.2 Winter 196-7. pp. 51-2.