Advertising media planning a brand management approach 4th edition

IBM-Promotional Strategies Exam
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Advertising & Promotion

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This book is dedicated to Dulciebella Caitlin

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Advertising & Promotion 4th edition

Chris Hackley and Rungpaka Amy Hackley

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SAGE Publications Ltd

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© Chris Hackley and Rungpaka Amy Hackley 2018

First published 2005

Second edition published 2010

Third edition published 2015

Fourth edition published 2018

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and

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Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955134

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-47399-798-1

ISBN 978-1-47399-799-8 (pbk)

Editor: Matthew Waters

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Marketing manager: Alison Borg

Cover design: Francis Kenney

Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed in the UK

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Contents List of Photos About the Authors Preface Online Resources 1 Advertising and Promotion under Convergence

Why study advertising and promotion? The changing media landscape for advertising and promotion The challenges for advertising agencies What is advertising? Studying advertising – consumer, managerial and socio-cultural perspectives The role of advertising in brand marketing Brands and integrated marketing communication Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further reading Notes

2 Advertising Theory Why theorise advertising and promotion? Practice-based advertising theory Cognitive information processing theory in advertising Socio-cultural theory in advertising Levels of explanation in advertising theory: cognitive, social and cultural Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further reading Notes

3 Brands and Promotional Communication Branding basics: origins and conceptualisation What advertising and promotional communication can do for brands The strategic brand management process and communication planning IMC planning

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Limitations to IMC Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further reading Notes

4 The Creative Agency Model Advertising agencies as cultural intermediaries The advertising agency in evolution Advertising agencies and the pitch process Account team roles and responsibilities Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further Reading Notes

5 Strategy and Creativity The creative advertising development process Developing a communication and advertising strategy Strategy and IMC planning Creative development The creative brief Campaign evaluation Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further reading Notes

6 Media and Audience Planning Media, messages and readers Media planning – key tasks Media planning terms and concepts Media strategy The media mix – channel characteristics Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further reading Notes

7 Non-Advertising Promotion Non-advertising promotion in IMC

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Branded content Sponsorship Product placement Public relations Other elements of non-advertising promotion Celebrity marketing Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further reading Notes

8 Global Advertising Strategy Advertising and the global economy Cross-cultural communication Standardisation or localisation of advertising and promotion? Cultural tensions around global brand advertising Advertising management in non-domestic economies Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further reading Notes

9 Brands on the Defensive – Ethics and Regulation for Advertising Brands and ethics Ethics and controversy over advertising International advertising regulation Applied ethics and advertising regulation Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further reading Notes

10 Advertising Research Role and purposes of research in advertising Types of advertising research Uses of advertising research Research ethics Chapter summary Case study Useful journal articles Further reading

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Notes Abbreviations Glossary References Index

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List of Photos

1 VW Bug (5)

2 Lynx (25)

3 Strand Cigarettes (44)

4 Guinness (61)

5 Omega Watches (63)

6 Silk Cut Cigarettes (73)

7 Daz Soap (78)

8 Marlboro Man (81)

9 Snickers (106)

10 Gillette (115)

11 Always (138)

12 David Beckham and Armani (161)

13 BMW (165)

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14 Labour isn’t working (197)

15 Wraparound Bus (199)

16 Wonderbra (202)

17 Nike (216)

18 Lucky Strike (226)

19 Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (234)

20 De Beers (256)

21 Levi’s (262)

22 Adidas (265)

23 Benetton (284)

24 Simply Be (300)

25 Diesel (321)

26 Dove (328)

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About the Authors

Chris Hackley was the first Chair in Marketing to be appointed at Royal Holloway University of London, in 2004. Prior to that he was head of the Marketing subject group at the University of Birmingham, UK. His PhD from Strathclyde University (AACSB), Scotland, focused on the creative development process in top advertising agencies. He teaches and researches in advertising, marketing, and consumer cultural policy. Chris has published his work in some 200 books, research articles, features, reports, conference papers and presentations. He has consulted on UK alcohol policy with the UK government Cabinet Office and the Department of Health, and with commercial organisations such as ITV, Sky Media, Channel 4 TV, New Media Group and the Huffington Post on topics including product placement and native advertising. Professor Hackley is a regular contributor to print and broadcast media on marketing and consumer policy topics with more than 100 media appearances and mentions. He has been interviewed on alcohol policy and media policy for BBC TV, ITV, BBC Radio 4 and Channel 4 TV, and his joint research has been mentioned in most UK national newspapers, and also in some overseas publications such as the Melbourne Age, Harvard Business Review and The Times of India.

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Rungpaka Amy Hackley is Lecturer in Marketing at Queen Mary, University of London. Prior to that she was Lecturer in Marketing at Durham University, and before that, she lectured in marketing at the University of Surrey. Dr Hackley’s teaching and research focus on advertising, branding, marketing and consumer culture theory research. Her PhD entailed a cross-cultural study of young consumers’ experiences of TV product placement, and her first publication from her PhD research was the only UK paper cited by the ITV companies in their response to the UK government’s first consultation on UK TV product placement regulation. She also holds a first degree in Mass Communication and a Master’s in Marketing. Dr Hackley has presented her research at international conferences in Asia, North America, Australasia, Europe and the UK, and her work has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Marketing Management, Marketing Theory, Asian Journal of Business and Proceedings of the Association for Consumer Research, among others.

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Preface

We are grateful to the many students, teachers, researchers and practitioners who have contributed in different ways to make this text a successful resource for courses worldwide since it was first published. The fourth edition continues the main themes of the first three. At the time the first edition was published, in 2005, the writing already seemed to be on the wall for advertising and advertising agencies. As digital media changed the world of marketing, and everything else, advertising agencies had to adapt or die. They are adapting, albeit in a business environment that now sees them competing head-on with media agencies, brand consultancies and multi-functional media content producers, all of whom want to eat the advertising agencies’ breakfast by taking their core business. Digital is rapidly becoming the largest category of adspend worldwide and agencies are recruiting new skill sets from across the cultural and communication industries to adapt the creative advertising development process to multi-platform, multi-media executions. Agencies are also building strategic skills in the orchestration of campaigns that utilise multiple marketing communication specialists hired in for the job. Amidst all these strategic changes, the guiding theme of the book remains the same. This is the conviction that the foundational skills of creative advertising development continue to lie at the core of the best work in advertising and promotional communication, and across the connected marketing communication disciplines.

A second major theme also continues in the fourth edition, and this is that distinctions between the advertising and promotional disciplines are blurring in the era of convergence. New, hybrid promotional techniques are emerging that further extend advertising’s logic across the promotional mix. The book therefore takes a thoroughly inclusive perspective on advertising to include any form of promotional communication whatsoever, reflecting the broadening scope and cross- disciplinary ethos of advertising work and practices. It does not include personal selling and merchandising, and therefore is not a book on marketing communications. It focuses on mediated communications, those typically construed by consumers as having a promotional motive, even if that motive may be very subtle.

One of the intentions of the book was and remains to bring out the

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creative/account planning perspective more strongly than is typical in managerial advertising and marketing communications texts that approach the topic from a client/account management position. In addition, it offers a broader intellectual treatment of the subject that attempts to bridge the divide between the managerially oriented texts and the socio- culturally oriented texts. In pursuing this aim the text draws on research perspectives from anthropological and sociological consumer culture research, and from media, cultural and sociological studies, as well as from management perspectives and cognitive science. The fourth edition retains this synthesis and is selectively updated with examples, new writing in each chapter to elaborate on particular themes, and new references to cutting-edge research. It aims to be a comprehensive introduction to advertising promotion for students of advertising and promotion, of marketing and all forms of marketing communication.

This text is designed as a comprehensive introduction to the subject for students of advertising and promotion, marketing, communication and management at advanced undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA levels. Publishing moves too slowly, and advertising and marketing practice too quickly, for any textbook in the area to be fully contemporary. However, the text does include numerous references to books and research papers and links to case examples so that students can follow their own lines of interest to investigate particular topics more deeply. The fourth edition is selectively updated throughout the text to include more research perspectives and an updated and broadened range of references and case examples.

Chris Hackley and Rungpaka Amy Hackley, Oxfordshire, 2017.

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online resources

This Fourth Edition of Advertising and Promotion is supported by a wealth of online resources for both students and lecturers to aid study and support teaching, which are available at https://study.sagepub.com/hackley4e

For Lecturers Discuss chapter by chapter examples using the PowerPoint slides prepared by the authors. Explore the book further with this chapter-by-chapter Tutor Guide that also includes exciting additional materials for teaching.

For Students Watch over 35 videos aligned with the aims of each chapter. They will help you grasp concepts quickly, digest content according to your learning style, and contextualise topics in practical, real-world examples for you to apply to coursework and exams. Each video comes with critical thinking questions to help you extend your knowledge of a topic. Support your reading with some extra knowledge and free open access to SAGE Journals Online. The authors have selected the articles that will help you engage with the relevant research and discussions in Advertising and Promotion, Fourth Edition.

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https://study.sagepub.com/hackley4e
Don’t just read, watch! Author Chris Hackley provides links to some of the most exciting and innovative ads and real-world examples discussed in the coming pages. Surf the net through these links to find relevant websites and helpful links to the industry and different agencies. Remember to reference them in assignments!

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1 Advertising and Promotion Under Convergence

Chapter outline Chapter 1 sets the scene for the fourth edition by noting the key themes of the book. It opens by outlining continuing changes taking place in the advertising environment, especially the convergence of media channels via the internet, the rise in importance of digital media for advertising, and the consequent changes in media funding models. As a result of these changes, advertising practices are also changing, with a shift in emphasis from traditional broadcast ‘spot’ and print display advertising towards brand storytelling, branded ‘content’, ‘native’ advertising and other forms of hybrid promotional communication designed for sharing on social media. The chapter discusses some of the major challenges facing the industry in the convergence era.

Key chapter content Why study advertising and promotion? The changing media landscape for advertising and promotion The challenges posed by digital media for the advertising agency model The blurring boundaries between advertising and promotional techniques Studying advertising: consumer, managerial and societal perspectives Advertising and brand symbolism

Want a primer? Go to https://study.sagepub.com/hackley4e and watch...

1. Advertising and Society to learn

How to define advertising

How promotion differs from advertising 2. Implicit Advertising to learn

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https://study.sagepub.com/hackley4e
What place advertising occupies in the new media landscape

What is shaping the media landscape

The techniques agencies and brands use to stay relevant 3. Implicit Advertising (2) to learn

Additional techniques to exploit the area in between advertising and promotion

… to tackle the video questions at the end of the chapter.

Why study advertising and promotion? The point of departure for this book is the advertising agency and its practices in creating the kinds of promotional communication that have become closely identified with brand marketing and consumer culture under late capitalism. In this chapter, we emphasise the uncertainty that the future holds for the agency model, but we maintain that the advertising agency remains an important institution for several reasons. Since they began as space-brokers selling classified advertising in the (then) new printed publications some 200 years ago, advertising agencies have been behind much of what passes for marketing practice today. Market research, branding, opinion polling, strategic planning and, arguably, public relations (PR) were formalised into disciplines and developed within advertising agencies. Advertising agencies worked hand-in-hand with media owners, manufacturers and other producers to develop today’s promotional culture. During the post-war period, ad agencies in the UK and USA developed ever more persuasive techniques that transformed the realm of consumption (Ogilvy, 1963, 1983; Fletcher, 2008; Griffiths and Follows, 2016). They did not do so in a one-sided application of corporate power, but with the fascinated acquiescence of consumers whom the ad agencies learned to understand (Hackley, 2002). Meanwhile, the various marketing professions bureaucratised as markets grew and they developed their own professional bodies, techniques of expertise, professional examinations and career pathways. Some disciplines that had begun in ad agencies, such as media planning and buying, opinion polling and market and consumer research, were hived off to become independent businesses. Eventually, many sub-disciplinary fields of marketing and promotional communication emerged, each with their own special skill sets, agencies and career paths, such as direct mail and direct response, digital marketing,

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PR, packaging, sponsorship, out of home (OOH) advertising, brand consulting and more. Today, under media convergence we are seeing the circle turn and advertising agencies are once again under pressure to offer an inclusive set of skills and knowledge to brand clients who demand fully integrated campaigns across multiple media channels (Jenkins, 2008).

We do not wish to overplay the role of advertising agencies in marketing – their influence has been greatly diluted as the marketing professions have expanded in the West during the past 100 years. However, they remain a key focal point for exploring the core skills, techniques and roles of advertising and promotional communication in brand marketing. A focus on the work of advertising agencies enables us to examine not only what advertising and promotion produces and why, but also how it is produced. This is important. The working practices of advertising have been neglected both by managerial writers, who focus on the intended ends of promotional campaigns, and by cultural sociologies of advertising, which tend to focus on the outputs, the finished ads (Cronin, 2004). This book is written primarily for students on advertising and marketing-related educational courses, many of whom might have an interest in the persuasive strategies and creative techniques of advertising and promotion, but it is also written for those with a more general interest in the topic and hence it draws on a wider range of cross-disciplinary concepts and literature than is found in some managerially oriented texts.

This chapter begins with some comments about the ways in which the changing media environment under convergence are influencing changes in the practices, techniques and organisational priorities for advertising and promotion. It then goes on to introduce the three perspectives of the book. These are the managerial perspective, the consumer perspective, and the socio-cultural perspective. Advertising and promotional communication constitute a set of managerial techniques and practices designed to manage demand for brands of all kinds. It, and they, frame the contemporary consumer experience to an extent which, according to some, places the advanced economic regions of the world within a thoroughgoing promotional culture (Wernick, 1991; Davis, 2013). The three perspectives allow us to critically examine the topic from the point of view, firstly, of management who have to rationalise and justify communication strategies within organisations. In the book, we ask questions such as what discursive resources do they draw on to do this, and are some techniques more effective than others? Secondly, we take the perspective of the consumer who has always been more closely implicated in consumption

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practices and strategies than some theorists would allow, but now are deeply involved as production and consumption merge via the internet (Toffler, 1980) in a thoroughgoing participative economy (Jenkins, 2008). Consumers are active in co-creating consumption practices (Thompson et al., 1989; Xie et al., 2008; Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder, 2011; Seregina and Weijo, 2017). We do not simply passively receive advertising and promotional communication but we use it to negotiate a sense of location within the multiple branded identities offered to us by advertising (O’Donohoe, 1994; Ritson and Elliott, 1999). Astute brands and their advertising agencies do not simplistically impose their vision of the world upon consumers (Gabriel and Lang, 2008; Zwick et al., 2008). Rather, they tap into and develop and/or exploit consumer cultural myths and ideologies as Holt and Cameron (2010) demonstrate with their case analyses of Coca-Cola, Harley Davidson and many other iconic brands. Consumers can and do resist and re-frame the ideas of consumption that are presented to them in advertising by creating, in effect, consumption sub-cultures (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995; Kozinets, 2002; Hackley et al., 2015). Consumers are not dupes – and advertising effects are more complex than often presumed.

With these three perspectives in mind, the book aims to bring in creative and account planning perspectives that are typically excluded from both the socio-cultural work on advertising and the managerial ‘marketing communications’ texts, in order to re-frame the idea of a managerial treatment of the discipline.

The changing media landscape for advertising and promotion Advertising is undergoing a time of change and disruption as the industry tries to respond to new media funding models and changing patterns of media consumption. Digital is rapidly becoming the biggest category of adspend globally and advertising agencies are thinking laterally as never before to place their creative stamp on new forms of media content that add value for clients, and to retain their hard-earned position as the creative hubs of the marketing industry (Katz, 2016). The variety of creative solutions that agencies are expected to offer is greater than ever before as clients demand cross-media campaigns in many promotional genres. Social media marketing, especially, is a priority. Many brand clients expect advertising and media agencies to be able to extend creative

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campaigns across social media with a huge variety of media content including video, blogs, viral, advergames and more (Ashley and Tuten, 2015; Armstrong et al., 2016). As a result, agencies are hiring a wider range of creative expertise including animators, bloggers, scriptwriters, comedy teams, digital creatives and planners, film producers, app designers and model builders, in addition to the traditional two-person creative team with their skills in word-craft and visualisation. Advertising remains an exciting profession for the very dedicated but there are enormous challenges facing practitioners.

One of the key drivers of these changes is the evolution in media funding models. The somewhat mythologised creative revolution that emerged around Bill Bernbach and New York agency DDB in the 1960s occurred in the context of a traditional media-funding model. In Bernbach’s day, paid- for advertising generated the revenue to fund media channels. The spot advertising paid for television or radio shows, while the classified and display advertising paid for print publications, with a small contribution from the cover charge. As circulation and viewing figures grew, so did advertising revenue. This funding model set the parameters for advertising, since advertisements had to fit particular genre conditions in order to be suitably differentiated from the editorial content in traditional media vehicles such as newspapers and commercial television or radio shows (Cook, 2001). Back in those days, the advertising agencies earned revenue from commission on the media space they bought, before their media buying departments were hived off as separate businesses. In the West, and especially in Madison Avenue, the epicentre of American advertising, the agencies grew fat on this system and the clients paid handsomely for what were seen as great creative ideas that could motivate and inspire the newly affluent consumers of the post-war period.

Today, the traditional media-funding model is no longer the natural order of things. In fact, the world of old media has been turned on its head by digital communications technology. Advertising agencies no longer earn commission on media that they buy (with their client’s money). Today, advertising work is usually billed as a professional service, by the hour. The reason is that mass media has been disrupted by digital communication technology. Media consumption now often occurs via a mobile screen since consumers can access information, news, entertainment and retail choices via a smartphone or other internet-enabled mobile device (Grainge and Thompson, 2015). What is more, consumers are by no means a passive audience to the circus of brand marketing: we

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share, copy, discuss and critique the content we access on social media, and user-generated content (UGC) has become an important factor in advertising strategies (Berthon et al., 2008; Brodie et al., 2013). Media brands such as newspapers and TV and radio channels are struggling to generate sufficient funding through traditional spot and feature advertising sales. They have to seek new revenue streams by digitising their content, and we will discuss examples of how they are doing this throughout the book. For brand advertisers, buying traditional advertising remains as expensive as ever, but the audience reach is not what it was as sales of print publications, along with real-time TV and radio audiences, shrink under the huge magnitude of consumer choice in on-demand services and free-to-access online media.

photo 1 VW Bug

Image Courtesy of the Advertising Archives

Doyle Dane Bernbach of Madison Avenue, New York, produced what is regarded by some as the greatest print advertising campaign of all time when they took on the Volkswagen brief for their new

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Beetle model. It was the late 1950s and the American public were used to big cars. They were not used to buying cars from Germans. The People’s Car was not an easy sell, but Bill Bernbach sold it using irony and self-deprecation in creative ways not seen before in American advertising. Bernbach was credited with starting a creative revolution in advertising that lasted for some twenty years.

Advertising agencies, then, along with brand consultants, media agencies and other emerging players, are renegotiating their relationships with the promotional industries by re-defining the practices of advertising. Hybrid forms of promotional communication that combine elements of sponsorship, advertising, advertorial, brand placement, celebrity endorsement and more are being brought within the scope of advertising campaigns, and advertising agencies are trying to broaden their skill sets to compose and orchestrate strategic campaigns that contain many elements. In addition to the ‘spot’ advertisement that is shared on social media, perhaps in cut-down or re-edited versions, a campaign might include brand-sponsored blogs, sponsored Facebook posts, tweets or Instagram posts, viral memes and videos, broadcasts on YouTube Channels, sponsored video blogs, sponsored sporting or entertainment and activation pop-up events, a native advertising feature article, or any of the many emerging forms of promotional communication. Digital promotion on social media is often linked with retail, payment and delivery by a click or two (Pantano et al., 2016; Srinivasan et al., 2016).

Spot advertising during commercial breaks on television or radio, classified and full-colour advertising spreads in press publications, OOH and cinema advertising all retain their high profile, audience reach and dramatic impact. But they are now ineluctably part of integrated, multi- media campaigns. The advertising landscape is becoming pitted with many new media vehicles as digital technology reduces start-up costs for print, internet and broadcast media. There are more magazines, television and radio channels than ever before, especially in digital formats. But the audience reach of each individual mass media vehicle has shrunk and this trend is evident all over the world as TV viewing figures and hard-copy newspaper sales plummet. These new media vehicles are not funded by the traditional model, social networking websites being the most striking example. Their business model has been to build ‘traffic’, that is, to elicit millions of users, without conventional advertising, and then to try to devise forms of paid-for promotion that fit the ways their users consume

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the service. So, for example, you have the use of algorithms that monitor Facebook users’ patterns of use and target individualised promotions into their newsfeed, known as programmatic advertising. Successful bloggers who generate sufficient viewer traffic can sell advertising on their sites, as can YouTube channel owners (see Chapter 5 case study). Other digital media brands, especially news brands, are creating sponsored content that is ‘native’ to the page: called native advertising, it takes the conventional ‘advertorial’ and makes it even less easily distinguished from editorial. We will discuss all these techniques later in the book, especially in Chapter 7.

The fragmentation of media audiences Media audiences are ‘fragmenting’ across the vastly increased choice of media outlets and platforms. Mass media cannot compete with the potential audience reach of digital media brands as viewing, listener and readership figures for traditional television, print and radio fall. For example, in the UK and the USA, some iconic newspapers established for over 100 years may cease to exist in the not-too-distant future as advertising revenue falls to unsustainable levels because of the drop in hard copy sales. Underlying the reduction in advertising revenue for traditional media, fewer consumers are paying for print media and more consumers are viewing and interacting with free-to-access media content on mobile phones, PCs, laptops and other wireless devices such as netbooks, iPads and e-book readers. What is more, even when we do encounter ads in our media consumption, we can avoid them with ad- blocking software or simply by watching on-demand video or box sets (Kelly et al., 2010).

Equally problematic for conventional advertising, the internet offers massive potential audience reach for cheaply made and easily targeted ‘viral’ videos and other promotional content, which cost nothing to place on video sharing websites such as YouTube but can generate great reach in ‘earned’ media, that is, media space that is generated because of social media sharing and is free of charge to the brand. Mass media advertising remains important for generating profile and accessing particular groups, but a large proportion of under-35s in developed economies access all their news, information and entertainment via the internet. They rarely watch live TV or buy paper publications and, therefore, they are not in the habit of regularly watching traditional spot or reading display advertising (Bassiouni and Hackley, 2014, 2016; Williams, 2016). Millennial media

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consumption habits are permanent – this generation will never consume media the way their parents did. The prospects for traditional mass media brands are alarming.

All these changes mean that what we understand by ‘advertising’ as a genre of communication is changing, and this has as yet uncertain implications for the advertising industry. Advertising has always been a fluid industry in which creative ‘hot shops’ and talented individuals could thrive, but the core organisational actors in the advertising environment have consistently been the major ‘full-service’ advertising agencies. Over nearly 200 years, since the development of mass consumption print publications in the Western world, advertising agencies have proved to be the most flexible and astute of organisational forms in adding skills and techniques to retain their central place in an evolving media environment (Lears, 1994; Nixon, 2003; McDonald and Scott, 2007). They are well used to having to explain exactly what it is they do to add value, and why the client ought to pay for that. But can they deal with the challenges of new media and the digital revolution? What will the top advertising agencies look like in 20 years? Will they still exist? Will they be hybrid media/advertising/promotion/digital agencies? Will there be fewer big agencies but hundreds of teams of specialists all working under in-house brand managers or specialist brand consultants? Will agencies re-organise to re-focus around creative, digital and integrated media planning, and strip away layers of account management? We are already seeing many of these changes come to pass. Or, on the other hand, will the big agencies expand to embrace a wider range of skills, including scriptwriters, animators, bloggers, novelists, film directors, PR and events specialists, digital creatives and more, to become all-purpose, multi-media branded content creators?

Snapshot 1.1 Convergence and visual social media

In marketing, visual images are immensely powerful (Schroeder, 2002; Campbell, 2013). The truism that a picture is worth 1,000 words is borne out by the huge popularity of Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and many other visual social media platforms. Viral videos, infographics and other visualisations that capture a theme, meme or sentiment can be hugely powerful for advertisers. Visual imagery that is shared on social media can help advertisers in two ways. Firstly, it might incorporate the brand and act as a pseudo advertisement. For example, the ‘selfie that broke Twitter’ tweeted by Ellen DeGeneres at the 2013 Oscars was in

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effect a visual ad for the Samsung smartphone, even though the phone was not seen in the selfie. Secondly, images attract likes, shares and views that give access to a wide audience for algorithm-driven wrap- around and programmatic ads.

Advertising and broadcast ‘media convergence’ The convergence era is with us and, for many consumers, television, print media and radio are all accessed from one internet-enabled device (Jenkins, 2008; Meikle and Young, 2011). What convergence means is up for discussion, but, simplistically, we can take as a starting point the technological developments, and the associated economic changes, that are enabling all media to be accessed on one device and viewed via a touch- sensitive screen (Grainge and Thompson, 2015). As smartphones become cheaper and more ubiquitous, the way that many populations of the world access media is changing profoundly. The dynamics of this change are partly driven by the desire of consumers to keep up with the latest communication technologies and the huge popularity of smartphones is generating vast revenues for providers to invest in the next generation of devices (McLuhan, 1964). This is changing the dynamics of the media landscape as more specialist digital media brands emerge to devise new ways of reaching these consumers with advertising and promotional communication on digital content. As devices get more functionality and wifi availability increases, mobile advertising is becoming the new frontier for brands.

The economic impetus behind broadcast media convergence comes, then, on the one hand, from the shrinking audiences for traditional mass media, and, on the other, the vast potential for digital content to reach tens or hundreds of millions and even billions of viewers worldwide. The internet is a potent force in media and advertising because of its potentially vast audience reach and its capacity for targeting, instant response and audience measurement. Another aspect of convergence is genre confusion, where distinct media idioms seem to merge into each other. TV news, for example, once so austere and clipped with po-faced presenters speaking woodenly to avoid emotionalising the news, is now very showbusinessy indeed with star presenters, stories chosen and edited for dramatic effect, cutting-edge computer-aided graphics and pacey editing. Newsreaders, along with people from almost any other walk of life, can become celebrities through media exposure and subsequently many or most of these ‘celetoids’ become embroiled in marketing initiatives as brand

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endorsers, advertisers and spokespeople (Hesmondhalgh, 2005; Rojek, 2012). The circulation of brands and celebrity within media has accelerated as entertainment becomes an imperative for all media brands. News is sensationalised and showbusiness gossip has become news. There is a mutual need driving the coalescence of entertainment, marketing and advertising on digital media (Wolf, 2003; Hackley and Tiwsakul, 2006; Sayre, 2007). Traditional mass media brands need to find ways to access the huge audience traffic of the internet, while digital media brands sometimes need to tap into some of the impact available to traditional platforms media brands. Audiences respond to celebrity news, so media brands produce more celebrities to try to generate the viewing figures they need (Hackley and Hackley, 2015).

The implications of convergence for advertisers are profound, but there are still many obstacles to be overcome. These include the lack of common software and hardware platforms to carry video, text and audio on all mobile devices, and the fact that consumers don’t really like receiving advertisements on mobile and on social media platforms. To get around the latter issue, hybrid forms of non-interruptive advertising and promotion are emerging that are integrated into the editorial media content, such as sponsored content, brand placement and brand-produced video, blogs and information.

The challenges for advertising agencies The above scenario, then, could eventually result in an advertising environment quite different from any that has gone before. In the movie Minority Report, actor Tom Cruise walks past advertising hoardings in the street that are equipped with facial recognition software and they address him by name, suggesting brands that he might like to consume right now, presumably based on analysis of his past purchasing behaviour. This level of targeting in social media advertising may not be as effective as social media brands claim to advertisers, but it is accountable in the sense that views, clicks, likes and shares can be counted, and boardrooms around the world like to see calculations of return on investment (ROI) for marketing and advertising. Of course, these numbers do not correspond to sales, market share or revenue, but they are often used as a proxy simply because they can easily be measured. Conventional advertising, in the form of a striking 30 second television spot or stunning print display, with below- the-line support from sales promotion and/or direct mail and outdoor

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advertising, is not going away any time soon. But the dynamics of making money out of this communication form for brand clients and agencies are changing. Today, real-time TV audiences have dwindled since those viewers who do still watch TV can record, stream and buy on-demand service to watch their favourite shows whenever they like on mobile devices as well as on digital TVs. As a result, big televised events such as the Superbowl or the Oscars offer increasingly rare large-scale, real-time media audiences for advertisers. The attraction of live audiences of many millions is driving sports business, in particular, through bigger and bigger sponsorship and TV viewing rights deals.

As noted above, if ad agencies want to keep their place at the centre of the marketing world, they have to respond to the new reality of the convergent media environment creatively by re-organising, by evolving new skills and techniques, and by developing new ways to get business. For example, according to some visionaries, web blogs have become the most important source for new agency business, as clients and agencies struggle to find time for the traditional pitching process. Blogging has, in fact, become a key marketing strategy and many agencies have embraced this trend on their own websites (Hackley, 2009a). Many others are placing digital communication at the centre of their planning process by hiring digital account planners in response to the demand from internet providers for many forms of creative content. Still others are adapting to the logic of branding and proclaiming their ability to craft brand stories that will resonate with the relevant consumers and can be shared across social media.

Advertising agencies cannot survive without being able to offer creative digital services, but their problem is that clients do not like to pay for digital. They reason that tweets or Facebook pages are free, and even sponsored posts, programmatic advertising and SEO (search engine optimisation) don’t cost very much. It isn’t easy for advertising agencies (or even for specialist digital agencies) to generate revenue from original digital content. Where digital comes into its own, in the form of branded microsites, games, apps and other branded media content, it can be difficult to offer clients a clear sense of its strategic value. What is more, the ‘freemium’ business model so prevalent among internet brands means that consumers often resist advertising on free-to-use social media websites (Armstrong et al., 2016). Freemium refers to giving away a basic level of information and service in the hope that this will attract clients willing to pay for a higher level of service. LinkedIn, the professional

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networking site, is one example of this approach. Many advertising agencies themselves are using a partial freemium model by offering case studies and other information sources free of charge via their website in the hope that clients will be attracted to pay for a deeper engagement with the agency (as do many law firms, accountants and other professional services companies). Social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube have tried to get their user traffic to accept a certain level of click-through, pop-up, auto-play video or banner advertising, and increasingly they are turning to forms of ‘native’ advertising, that is, sponsored content that is ‘native’ to the page and looks much like normal, non-sponsored content.1 The value of digital native advertising is that it is more acceptable to the media consumer because it does not disrupt the experience of viewing entertainment, reading news features, watching videos and so on, and it implicitly has some of the source credibility of editorial.

Many agencies have re-organised their account teams, for example by incorporating digital planners, or in some cases by cutting out a layer of account management. Others have crossed into new areas, for example some direct mail and direct response agencies have expanded their service offer, even producing broadcast advertising. Increasing numbers of media agencies are also trying to move into advertising. As advertising morphs into ‘content’ they see an opportunity to leverage their specialist expertise in media to encroach on the ad agencies’ field of work. Some advertising agencies have developed new revenue streams by re-positioning themselves as ideas companies and developing creative projects as diverse as comics, movies and stage plays. There are ongoing experiments with new agency forms, such as the ‘social-media’ agency that attempts to handle all the brand communication via the internet.

From the client side, non-traditional styles of advertising are taking a greater share of promotional spend because of the need to engage consumers in ways that offer a more clearly defined ROI than traditional advertising. In particular, clients need their agencies to offer an integrated communications solution that offers value and impact by using different communication channels in a single campaign. For example, this may take the form of a television advertisement supported with dedicated brand microsites containing consumer forums, games, access to company information, and creating presence for the brand in other areas through media coverage, sponsorship, branded apps, direct marketing or sales promotion activities. Within the flux of change in the advertising environment, then, advertising agencies cannot be expected to be the

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experts in every communication channel but they are in a prime position to generate and to co-ordinate new models of creative and brand communications strategy.

Snapshot 1.2 Social media brands and the dilemma of monetisation

Social media brands wrestle with the problems of generating operating revenue and profit from their audience traffic. Their offer is free to users, so why should users pay? One solution for some platforms has been the concept of freemium, which means giving away free basic content to encourage consumers to pay for enhanced services, and this has become associated with second-generation interactive services. LinkedIn, for example, the professional networking site with almost half a billion members worldwide that was acquired by Microsoft for $25 billion in 2016, utilises the freemium concept to add value to services that can only be acquired by customers paying a premium. Freemium can generate considerable audience reach through electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) very quickly as new users rush to the site. The problem with this is that it can be difficult to add enough value to the basic service to encourage users to pay, if they’re content with the basic service. Freemium has the obvious advantage over subscriptions in that it does not inhibit the growth of the platform as new users join. Social networking and video sharing websites, blogs and wikis exemplify web-based business concepts that are enriched by open access and free user participation. In many cases, such sites generate huge user traffic, but many (including, notoriously, Twitter) have struggled to monetise this other than by trying to get users to accept a certain amount of paid-for advertising. Twitter, founded in 2007, gained 7 million users in the USA alone in the first two years, a figure that has grown to around 320 million active users worldwide today (2017). It is a free service that generates relatively small revenues from sponsored tweets yet it was valued at $250,000,000 when it raised money in 2007, and subsequently its market capitalisation was estimated at some $35 billion before collapsing in 2016, to somewhere between $8 and $15 billion.2 Twitter has struggled to justify its market valuation with appropriate revenues. The difficulty of translating this audience reach into large revenue streams – in other words, the problem of how to monetise audience traffic – is the key problem of internet business models. Nonetheless, having a huge active user count has a value in itself because of the segmented data this can deliver to advertisers. Facebook, with about 2 billion users, leads the way, with platforms such as Instagram (about 400 million), Google + (300 million), Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter following. As for traditional mass media brands such as TV shows and newspapers, they have a double problem: firstly,

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how to shift their resources to the internet site to make up for losses in print sales and reductions in viewing figures, and secondly, how to generate revenue from their web traffic. A small number of media brands, for example the UK newspaper site MailOnline, seem to have cracked this particular issue with an astute combination of sensational news coverage and showbusiness gossip that entices more than 60 million unique users per day, making MailOnline the world’s most popular newspaper website (Hackley, 2013a).

Can ad agencies survive in the convergent media landscape? If advertising agencies are to survive into the next century, they have to engage with new client priorities and broaden their strategic and consulting skills as well as develop creative branded content, including advertising, that can translate across new media channels. Of course, it is easier to say that ad agencies need to acquire expertise in unfamiliar, non-advertising promotional disciplines, than it is for them to do so. They sit alongside other communication disciplines such as PR, sales promotion, digital and direct mail, OOH promotion, branded content and others, many of which still have their own professional routes, qualifications and skills sets. Nonetheless, difficult as it may be, the logic of media convergence dictates that the disciplines of promotional communication will also need to converge. The battle is on as to which form of agency turns out to be the most fluent at developing brand storytelling and other creative craft skills that address clients’ needs for integrated campaigns. Promotional communication now often entails transmedia brand storytelling that resonates with consumers and translates across media platforms (Jenkins et al., 2013). For example, whiskey brand Jack Daniel’s in its storytelling of American’s hillbilly sub-culture romanticises the sub-culture of ‘hooch’ distilling in a small Tennessee distillery and the ideology of masculinity and anti-industrialism that it supports (see Holt and Cameron, 2010). Coca-Cola’s ‘Content 2020’ initiative demonstrates via YouTube videos how the brand intends to develop storytelling across different forms of content into the next decade. Brand storytelling demands creative craft skills such as scriptwriting, narrative development, characterisation, screenplay development and visualisation that span analogue and digital media.

What will result from the current changes in the advertising environment is

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anyone’s guess, but advertising agencies might well retain their importance, albeit with a very different agency model than is typical today. However, the demise of advertising agencies has been confidently predicted for some 25 years. They’re still here. Since they began as brokers of classified advertising space in the early press publications, they have added many new skills and techniques such as copywriting, creative production, business strategy, brand strategy, consumer and market research and media planning. They have been at the centre of the evolution of marketing as a discipline and they remain in a positive position to continue their evolution into the new, convergent, media environment.

What is advertising? This is a question with two possible responses – a short one and a long one. The short one is that advertising is a paid-for promotional message from an identifiable source transmitted via a communication medium. This, at least, is a typical, and typically narrow, definition of advertising that distinguishes it from the other elements of the communication mix. Advertising is conventionally seen as one sub-element of promotion, which is itself one of the four elements of the marketing mix, the others being product, place (distribution) and price. The marketing mix element of ‘promotion’ embraces any promotional communication, and can include advertising, public relations, personal selling, corporate communications, branded content, direct mail and direct response, point-of-sale (or point-of- purchase) and merchandising, sales promotion, exhibitions, SMS text messaging and other forms of mobile marketing, email advertising, internet banner advertising, all forms of digital execution such as websites, blogs, vlogs and video content, programmatic advertising, social media and more.

There are many forms of advertising execution, and we will explore numerous examples of these in the book. In order to create effective advertising transmitted via print in newspapers or magazines, or on OOH street billboards, on vehicles or on bus shelters, or on any other medium, ad agencies need to deploy a range of medium-specific creative craft skills. TV advertising still presents the highest profile platform for advertisers, with live sports events offering large real-time viewing audiences to advertisers. As seen in the Chapter 6 case study, one of the last major real- time TV advertising opportunities is the American football season finale, the Super Bowl. It has been reported that TV advertisers charged up to $5

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million for a 30 second spot to reach the 100,000 audience.3 Production costs can be even higher, and much thought and planning goes into making a big budget Superbowl TV ad.

Television is by no means the only medium for short advertising films – there is advertising shown in cinemas before the main feature, and, of course, advertising that is produced and aired over the internet and on video sharing websites. Then, there is advertising that integrates intertextually with TV and social media. For example, the Yeo Valley yoghurt brand created a TV ad using a specially created boy band, ‘The Churned’, who sang an original song in a spot during the UK TV talent show The X Factor. The item became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter and a viral hit on YouTube, and the song was an iTune chart hit.4

Forms of advertising and promotional communication such as these are very flexible and can be used for many different kinds of creative execution and many different kinds of appeal. This is where the creativity comes in, to make one ad stand out and get viewers’ attention by being resonant, whether that is because it reflects an insightful truth for its audience, because it is beautifully made and diverting, or because it is funny, striking or challenging. Some advertising may be designed specifically for direct mail or direct response campaigns, while radio advertising is yet another category that demands complex and medium- specific craft skills in order to effectively reach the desired target audience and convince them to take a second look at the brand.

And that was the short answer. The longer answer will take the rest of this book to explore. There are two reasons why the longer answer is important. One is that, to most people, advertising is a word that covers any kind of promotion whatsoever. To professionals in the field, the various promotional disciplines are important because individuals might spend an entire career in one of them as a professional in, say, PR, direct mail, sales promotion, or indeed, advertising. The professionalisation of marketing and management disciplines developed in the post-war period in response to increasing gross domestic product (GDP) in the West and many, including advertising, developed their own professional trade bodies, training schemes, qualifications and scientific techniques (Davis, 2013). But the professionalisation of disciplines is driven by bureaucratic demands and the politics of organisations – for laypeople, for consumers, all promotion is advertising, of one kind or another (Percy and Elliott, 2009). That in itself isn’t a good enough reason to conflate the various

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disciplines of promotional communication under one heading, but along with the next reason, it may be. As noted above, the media infrastructure for advertising is undergoing profound changes driven by digital communication, and this is changing the very way advertising is conceived. Advertising remains an important discipline, but integration is now the watchword, and major campaigns are now typically expected to embrace a number of different media channels, especially digital channels, with different but thematically connected creative executions. In many cases, large organisations treat the different communication disciplines as separate functions with different departments handling, say, corporate communications, direct marketing, advertising or sales. Yet in the new advertising environment, and from a management point of view, the logic of integration is compelling. Media audiences now access more media platforms than ever before, and in different proportions. Newspapers and television still retain their place in the advertising scene, but they have given up a lot of ground to the internet through social media. In response, brand clients want promotional campaigns to be integrated across media channels and across promotional sub-categories. Given the entrenched professional and organisational separation of the various marketing communication techniques and channels, the ideal of fully integrated marketing communication (IMC) management remains only partially realised. As we write, there is a shake-out going on in the promotional communication industries, which include not only advertising agencies but direct mail, sales promotion, media and branding agencies, and even creative hot shops, film studios and digital agencies. The winners will be the ones that adapt most successfully, and most profitably, to the logic of IMC.

Under the influence of IMC, advertising creative executions are changing and moving towards a broader category of ‘content’. The goal is no longer only to create short-term sales but to maintain long-term brand presence and market share. Hence advertising is moving closer to publicity and entertainment as brand owners seek to activate the recognition of consumers across different media platforms in ways that are likeable, challenging and engaging, and that generate social media sharing and brand engagement (Wolf, 2003; Thielman, 2014). Brand owners want to create content that is subtly branded but that will engage consumers, whether that is in the form of a 30 second TV advertisement that is then shared on social media, or a tweet or a viral video, or a piece of branded content on YouTube, or a branded game that can be downloaded as an app on a mobile device … the list is limited only by the digital imagination,

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and as varied as the technology. In this book, then, the term ‘advertising and promotion’ is used as an umbrella category for all forms of mediated promotional communication on any media channel or platform.

Blurring the definitions of advertising and promotion The ingenuity of advertisers and the flexibility of advertising as a communication form often render attempts to define it in one sentence trite, or tautologous. As noted in Snapshot 1.2, the internet is creating new forms of advertising that don’t conform to the old definitions. Advertising often sells something, but often does not, since a great deal of advertising promotes not only branded products and services but political candidates and political parties or ideologies, public services, health and safety issues, charities or other non-profit issues. Advertising is often an impersonal communication, distinguishing it from personal selling, but there are many ads that are eye-to-eye sales pitches delivered by actors or celebrity endorsers in a mediated imitation of a personal sales encounter. Advertising is usually paid-for, appearing in a media space set apart for promotional communication. But, increasingly, as noted above, advertisements may be sponsored on social media platforms or shared because viewers actively search out advertisements they may find entertaining or amusing. In other cases, video sharing is utilised to expand the audience for the ad. For example, UK TV aired a novel ad break in which all the scheduled ads were enacted by Lego characters, as a promotion for a forthcoming Lego movie.5 The ad break was posted on YouTube6 with a view to sharing for cross-promotion of the ads, the Lego brand and the movie. This is a novel twist on advertising that is extended through social media, but, increasingly, the mass media advertising is being treated as strategically subordinate to non-advertising promotion that is implicit rather than explicit, such as sponsorship, advertainment, advergames, or product placement. Consequently, attempts to define advertising in concrete and exclusive terms are usually more notable for what they leave out than for what they include.

Advertising can sometimes be distinguished by genre elements that set it apart from other forms of mediated communication (Cook, 2001; Leiss et al., 2005; Danesi, 2006). Overheated sales pitches from improbably coiffed spokespersons, deliriously happy housewives singing irritatingly catchy jingles at the kitchen sink, unfeasibly attractive models excited by

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chocolate confections all spring to mind as advertising clichés. But then again, many advertisements contradict advertising stereotypes. As we have noted above, American advertising guru Bill Bernbach is credited with inventing irony in advertising in DDB’s iconic Volkswagen campaign of the 1960s (see Photo 1). And many advertisements now subvert conventional genres and eschew the rhetoric of over-selling in favour of postmodern irony, understatement or narrative designed to create presence and generate word-of-mouth for the brand, as opposed to trying to sell it (Sherry, 1987; Scott, 1990, 1994a, 1994b; O’Donohoe, 1994, 1997; Tanaka, 1994). Some in the industry today feel that Bernbach’s ‘creative revolution’ has faded away along with the Mad Men and the swinging sixties depicted in the hit TV series, and has been replaced by sterile business accountability, measurement and big data analytics. Others feel that creativity is still around in advertising, but the way it is conceived has to change along with the changes in media infrastructure. Consumers today sometimes like to be passive consumers of entertainment, but often take a much more active part in advertising campaigns, adapting, criticising, re-making, and even contributing to story development when brands crowd-source ideas. User generated content has transformed the notion of how consumers engage with advertising and marketing. The millennial consumer doesn’t just sit in the back row of the movies. She and he have ideas of their own and the means to express them. In such a scenario, creativity in advertising has to be seen as something that is no longer a matter of individual creative genius, if it ever was, but as something that is collaborative, dynamic, iterative, and even participative, to suit the era of the participative economy (Jenkins, 2008).

So, a narrow definition of what advertising is can obscure consideration of what advertising does. We might categorise a given piece of communication as an advertisement in terms of its parallels with a vague and fuzzy mental prototype of what an ad should look or sound like, but the norms of advertising media, genres and payment methods are being revised by changes in the industry (see Rosch, 1977, cited in Cook, 2001: 13). Advertising may be a communication that at some level has a promotional motive, but this doesn’t prepare us for all the kinds of promotional messages we are likely to encounter. Neither can it prepare us for the subtlety of motive that underlies many hybrid promotional forms, such as a post-match interview with a logo-wearing sporting star, a free download of a trial version of a new computer game, free content from a magazine’s website you can download to your mobile phone, or a ‘courtesy’ phone call from your bank. Each can be regarded as a

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promotional communication, or by a lay person as, simply, a piece of advertising. Textbook definitions of advertising are being outpaced by innovations in digital communication technology and by hybrid promotional genres. A realistic study of advertising and promotion cannot hope to put all the parts in neatly labelled packages. And that is no bad thing. Advertising takes the enquirer on a journey that is all the more fascinating because it defies boundaries.

Studying advertising – consumer, managerial and socio-cultural perspectives

The consumer perspective In this book, then, we try to take a 360 degree look at advertising and promotion by taking in three distinct perspectives: these are, the consumer perspective, the managerial perspective and the socio-cultural perspective. Advertising and promotional communication are central to the production of consumer culture (Wernick, 1991; Hirschman and Thompson, 1997; Powell, 2013). It is important for us to educate ourselves about this decidedly contemporary form of communication because of the influence it has on our lives. It is equally important to appreciate that consumers are fully integrated into the consumer culture process. The culture industry revolves around the meaning-making practice of consumers and the most successful brands use their advertising to follow the contours of consumer cultural myth and ideology (Lash and Lury, 2007; Holt and Cameron, 2010). Of course, even though the power of a single advertisement to change individual attitudes or behaviour is frequently exaggerated or misunderstood, advertising is clearly a powerful managerial tool that articulates organisational strategies. Students of business and management, and of other social science disciplines, might profit from learning something of the how and why this tool is deployed, or at least how and why it is justified in brand boardrooms and planning meetings. The managerial perspective is complementary to the consumer and socio- cultural perspectives, since our understanding of advertising is incomplete without an insight into the material conditions from which it emerged (Alvesson, 1998; McFall, 2004; Kelly et al., 2005).

As a consumer, take a moment to think about the advertisements you have seen or heard this week. At whom do you think they were aimed? What,

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exactly, were they trying to communicate? How did they make you feel? Did you immediately rush to buy the brand? Did you tell your friends about the ad or share it on social media? Which medium conveyed the ads? Did you see them on a passing vehicle, on outdoor poster sites, on the television, hear them on the radio, read them in the press, see them on your Twitter feed or Facebook newsfeed, or on some other website? Did you see other forms of promotion on your clothing, smell them in a promotionally enhanced shopping environment, see them on product packaging, on an air balloon in the sky or on the back of a bus ticket? It is difficult to remember more than a few of all the hundreds of promotions we experience each week, at least if we live in urban areas and have access to televisions, smartphones, tablets and computers. Advertising has become such a feature of daily life that sometimes it seems as if we hardly notice it. Advertising often seems to pervade our cultural landscape and we carry on our lives taking it for granted.

We are struck, then, when particular promotional campaigns become topics of general conversation, whether that conversation is critical or approving of the campaign. For example, Coca-Cola aired a TV ad during Super Bowl 20147 in which people of many ethnicities were filmed to a soundtrack of ‘America the Beautiful’, sung in different languages. The ad caused a storm on social media with many supporters lauding its multicultural theme, but many others claiming that it did not reflect their idea of a predominantly white, English-speaking America. Of course, this storm of controversy was the tip of an iceberg of discord around race, nationality and identity, which has been playing out in American politics, as in politics around the world, and continues to do so. At the time of writing, in mid-2017, Nike announced its first high performance sports hijab, the Nike Pro. The social media comment has included high praise for the product from Muslim sportswomen, and fierce objections from some consumers who claim they’ll boycott the brand. From Nike’s perspective, the sports hijab is potentially a vast and lucrative market they would be remiss to ignore, and it has apparently made the decision to engage with the cultural tensions around the hijab. Brand advertising, then, is often dismissed as a trivial, mendacious and irritating form of communication, yet there are times when it catches the cultural zeitgeist and articulates issues of social importance, and social tension, in ways that other media simply cannot do. Of course, one can ask how culturally important debates about the Coke ad or Nike’s hijab are, since, ultimately, we are talking about fizzy drinks or an item of clothing. Yet, the fact that, through advertising, the business of selling fizzy drinks can become

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entwined with some of the most pressing social and political issues of our time says something about the cultural force of brands, and of advertising. It is at times like this we realise that advertising occupies a contradictory social space – we take it for granted, and yet it is sometimes a disruptive and incendiary form of cultural communication (Cook, 2001).

Advertising is, of course, so potent precisely because it is taken for granted. There are frequent press features that reflect our puzzled fascination with the latest iconic or controversial ad. The TV show dedicated to the funniest or most outlandish ads has become a mainstay of popular TV programming in many countries. Advertising has become part of mainstream entertainment, while entertainment media make use of advertising styles and techniques, reflecting advertising’s dynamic character as a perpetually evolving form of social communication (Leiss et al., 2005). The hard-sell ads remain, but there are also new narrative advertising forms of ever-greater subtlety, variety and penetration. Sometimes, deliberately or through serendipity, these advertisements tap into and articulate acute cultural conflicts and, as Holt (2002) suggests, these can sometimes be understood as conflicts of identity. Brands tap into consumers’ senses of cultural identity and it is advertising that often articulates this most powerfully, as Holt and Cameron (2010) demonstrate in many examples, from Marlboro to Harley Davidson. As consumers, we might resist the commercial pressure to express our sense of identity through branding, but it is clear that advertising can excite us with the possibility of new identities (Olsen, 2016).

Snapshot 1.3 Advertising or storytelling?

The genre conventions of what an advertisement should look like are being eroded (Cook, 2001). Above, we mention Coca-Cola’s ‘Content 2020’ initiative,8 which was intended to express the brand’s intended conceptual shift away from traditional advertising towards iterative brand storytelling on multiple platforms. Contemporary advertising often departs from the conventional sales narrative to tell a story that may be only tangentially linked to the brand. For example, UK bank Nationwide created a 2016 TV advertising campaign9 that consisted of unknown poets reciting poems about their lives to camera in an attempt to generate a sense of authenticity for the brand and move away from advertising clichés. Such campaigns are more accurately described as media content than advertising given that they do not conform to any of the standard genre conventions of an advertisement. They tell a ‘story’,

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about the brand by inference, not necessarily in a conventional narrative arc, but in a way that is intended to engage the consumer emotionally.10 Media content that is entertaining and engaging gets shared and discussed on social media and this gives the brand an increased share of media voice, even if the conversation isn’t specifically about the brand itself. The lack of a direct and explicit product pitch lends such content a stronger sense of authenticity than a more conventional advertisement for consumers who are tired of being oversold to by overbearing brands. In another example, in mid-2013 David Beckham starred with digital reproductions of himself in a piece of promotional content for Sky Sports,11 and he is often seen in imagery displaying brands with no overt promotional pitch. Beckham does dozens of these passive and implicit endorsements, and brands pay him handsomely merely to be seen in his blessed presence (Said, 2013: Hackley and Hackley, 2015). The lack of an overt sales orientation in advertising is designed to build goodwill, presence and authenticity for the brand, and this can translate in the long term to sustained or increased market share.

The managerial perspective For organisational managers, advertising and promotion are seen as indispensable tools for supporting a wide variety of marketing, corporate and business objectives. There are many professionals on the client side who are deeply sceptical about the claims made for advertising as a business tool, unless they are backed up by statistical evidence of attitude change, recall, or, preferably, sales response. Brand managers are usually under pressure to account for their advertising budgets by linking them to sales or market share in the short to medium term. They often have little use for theories of advertising based on building long-term brand equity. This is understandable, because in the long term, they are in a different job, or out of a job. Many others in the marketing business feel that they have to match competitor adspend for fear of losing market share if they don’t. Even though much advertising activity is driven by organisational politics and competitive neurosis, many of the world’s major brands would be hard to imagine without advertising, as Holt and Cameron (2010) document (Kover and Goldberg, 1995).

Neither can it be doubted that the commercial fortunes of some brands, and in some cases the size of entire markets, have been transformed through powerful and creatively compelling advertising campaigns. Even though there are many documented advertising success stories, there are

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persistent questions hanging over advertising’s effectiveness and the genuine return it delivers on investment. As a consequence, the advertising budget is often the first to be cut in difficult economic times and mutual insecurity can colour the relationships between clients and advertising agencies. Like a star-crossed relationship, most high volume consumer businesses can’t live with advertising, and they can’t survive without it.

The managerial uses of advertising and promotion Industry professionals tend to regard advertising as a necessary marketing tool that often does not deliver. It is a means of persuasively communicating with and to large numbers of customers and potential customers, along with other interested stakeholders. But advertising’s ability to persuade people to buy product in the short term is often overstated. Instead, it is often used in much the same way as publicity, to generate and maintain market presence and to reassure consumers, while also reminding shareholders, employees and competitors that the brand remains salient (Ehrenberg et al., 2002).

A strategy of long-term brand building may not always grab the imagination of the brand manager who has weekly sales charts waved in his or her face at the regular board meetings, but soft sell can translate to sales simply by being remembered in the right way by enough consumers. Human beings have a short-term memory capacity of about six or seven items (psychologists call this Miller’s magic number seven, after George A. Miller’s theory about short-term memory). It used to be axiomatic in advertising practice that consumers would typically make a choice between three alternatives for most purchases, and the internet increased this to five. Most purchases are not researched exhaustively, so we will often choose from the brands we can recall without effort, and which are easy to find. Factor in consumer markets of many millions of people, and it seems self-evident that the most memorably, and the most persistently, advertised brands will take the top few places in the market, provided they are readily available, competitive in quality, and subjectively seen as giving value. Given the possibility that sales dynamics might conform to some degree to this kind of loose model, the aforementioned shift from advertising towards non-advertising branded content is easily explained. We should add that this ‘model’ of how advertising works is not one of the many that compete for space in the top journals. It is derived from informal conventional wisdom in the advertising industry and, if it has any

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credence, it has several implications, which we go into in the next chapter. For now, we can simply leave it as given that in spite of the multi-million dollar scientific research projects that have been conducted into how advertising ‘works’, there might just be a fairly prosaic general explanation for the sustained success of the top brands in each market. Having said that, this is a post-hoc explanation that explains relative market share in mature markets protected by financial barriers to entry better than it explains the success of new market entrants.

It must be acknowledged that the purposes advertising serves may differ somewhat under different economic and cultural conditions. In the USA, for example, TV advertising seems to serve its economic function to communicate offers with typically direct and forthright advertising, much of which is focused on relatively local markets. The huge size of the country, the competitiveness of its markets compared to smaller countries such as the oligopoly-dominated UK, and the fragmented nature of its media markets frame the style and content of its advertising, Superbowl advertising being the exception (see the Chapter 6 case study). In the UK, on the other hand, TV advertising tends to be less direct and more of a soft sell: it tells branded stories, and that may be because UK consumers are already familiar with many of the offers in our oligopolistic supermarkets, we just need them to be made to seem more interesting so we’ll keep buying baked beans. Another difference between the advertising markets in the UK and the USA is that state-controlled, non-commercial media outlets (mainly the BBC) occupy dominant positions in the UK media infrastructure, limiting the capacity for advertising and also perhaps limiting the capacity for consumers to tolerate it. That is not to suggest that there are no offer-based retail advertisements in the UK – there are very many, especially before Christmas (for food) and after (for holidays). We are simply suggesting that advertising, and consumers, are subject to regional variations.

The informal theory of advertising as a matter of getting into the ‘evoked set’ of six or seven recalled brands implies that the creative content of the ads is not necessarily of critical importance. There will always be examples of ads that capture the public imagination and build brand presence out of all proportion to their budget, and of branded content that achieves millions of social media shares in days, but these are rare. The truth is, much advertising needs only to be good enough in order to maintain market share and brand presence, and it is quite rare for entirely new brands to break into the top few places in established product or

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service markets because of the financial and technical barriers to entry. While all this is a simplification, it might help explain the popularity of some leading brands of fast food and household detergent whose ubiquitous advertising campaigns are often excoriated for their cliché- ridden narratives and deplorable creative standards, but they are hard to forget and they seem to play a part in the success of the brand.

The socio-cultural perspective The managerial perspective in advertising and promotion is not confined to profit making activities. ‘Social marketing’ is a genre of promotion that addresses issues of social concern, and is typically funded by charities, lobby groups, and government departments (Kotler and Roberto, 1989; Kotler and Zaltman, 1971). Many public services, charities and government departments use advertising campaigns to try to promote their causes or to change behaviour with respect to, for example, alcohol or cigarette consumption, safer driving, sexual practice, domestic violence or social prejudice towards disability or ethnicity. Social marketing, and specifically social advertising, can sometimes shout louder than commercial advertising. In terms of impact, it can do so by shocking audiences into paying attention, at least for the duration of the first ad. Social campaigns are allowed by the regulatory authorities, at least in the UK, to push the boundaries of tasteful depiction further than brand advertising, because of their ostensibly virtuous motives (also see Chapter 9). Ads on UK television depicting car crashes, child abuse and drug taking have been pretty hard-hitting, but their aims of reducing car crash injuries, reducing violent or sexual abuse of children and reducing addiction to illegal drugs are deemed by the UK advertising regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), to be worth supporting and therefore they are allowed to be quite shocking. Whether or not shocking social advertisements are actually effective in achieving their aims, or in merely getting PR profile for the cause, is a difficult question to answer.

In some cases, social marketing and advertising have been turned to commercial use, where a brand decides that linking its values with a cause or a particular charity might help its commercial brand positioning. For example, Unilever’s Dove brand in the UK has created a long running and successful campaign based around the idea that women are misrepresented in cosmetics and personal care products advertising. The Dove ‘campaign for real beauty’12 includes a charitable foundation supporting women’s

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interests and promoted the idea that ‘real’ women need not try to conform to the idealised stereotypes of typical, photoshopped cosmetics advertising (see Chapter 10 case study).

Questions of what kinds of advertising ‘work’ and deliver the best value to shareholders, taxpayers and other stakeholders depend for their answer on one’s perspective. But no one has a definitive answer. The effectiveness of a campaign invariably depends on many factors, including its objectives, its audience, its budget, its timing and media channel, the quality of the creative execution, and many other environmental factors such as market price and competitive behaviour. In Chapter 2 we will examine some of the many theories of advertising that have been developed to try to find answers to the question of how, and if, advertising ‘works’.

Advertising and truth Advertising is regarded by many people as a communication form that is inherently deceitful and debased, and occasionally offensive. Yet, considering the tenaciousness with which corporations pursue profits, remarkably few ads tell literal untruths. Of course, some do, but most advertising satisfies typical social conventions, and regulatory requirements, of tact and truthfulness. It must be acknowledged that this may not be setting the bar high enough. What is more, advertising is particularly good at inferring, as opposed to claiming. In other words, what is not said but is hinted at in advertising can be telling. The interaction of consumers with advertising and promotional communication is usually too complex and subtle to be thought of as, simply, a matter of either fact or fiction. If an ad implies that a man’s sexual attractiveness and social status will be enhanced by shaving with a Gillette razor or deodorising with Lynx body spray, surely this is merely preposterous rather than untrue? Who would possibly take such an idea seriously? To be sure, consumer perceptions and beliefs about brands are self-sustaining to some degree: we believe what we want to believe, sometimes in the face of contradictory evidence. Do smokers really cough less using low-tar cigarettes? Are we slimmer because we put calorie-free sugar substitute in our coffee? It can hardly be denied that there is an important element of wish fulfilment in what we choose to believe in advertising. The advertisers provide the suggestion, and, as consumers, we complete the gestalt. Gestalt psychology refers to the way people complete the circle of meaning from partial cues or prompts. In other words, our inference goes

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beyond the evidence. Advertising plays with the grey area of meaning, using implicit connotation and suggestion as well as making explicit claims (Tanaka, 1994; Cook, 2001). The socio-cultural perspective attempts to delve beneath the literal interpretation of advertising messages to access their symbolic codes and generate insight into their cultural meaning (Mick, 1986; Sherry, 1987; Danesi, 1994; McCracken, 2005).

The social power of advertising The nice thing about teaching advertising is that it is such an immediate part of daily experience it is relatively easy to get a sense of student engagement with the subject. Few people do not have opinions on advertisements they have seen. This can give the subject of advertising great resonance as a subject of study that is suitable for a wide variety of practical and theoretical treatments. Beyond the classroom, advertising can occasionally have an astonishing power to grasp widespread attention and, in a few celebrated cases, change entire markets. For example, the legendary ‘Laundrette’ ad that agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty created in the 1982 campaign for Levi’s 501 jeans13 used American provenance to revolutionise the denim jeans market in general and sales of Levi’s in particular for the following decade. It has been claimed that the campaign increased sales of denim jeans by some 600%. Other campaigns have become so talked about they have changed language, for example when a campaign for Budweiser beer increased market share for the brand and earned valuable free publicity simply because they added a word (‘Whassup’)14 to the vernacular of American English (and even earned a listing in Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English).15 Advertising has always had the potential to capture the popular imagination in a way that feels a very intimate part of peoples’ lives. Social media now leverage this aspect of advertising, the potential to be talked about, adding an air of cultural charisma to advertising as the most enigmatic of creative industries. For example, in 2015 a picture depicting a dress the colour of which was a matter of argument became a popular social media meme. The UK-based charity, the Salvation Army, produced an anti-domestic violence social advertising campaign depicting a bruised and battered woman wearing a similar dress with the strapline, ‘Why is it so hard to see black and blue?’ The campaign leveraged the popularity of the meme and generated much comment and discussion in the mainstream media. An amusing social media meme and the personal tragedy of domestic violence were linked through advertising in a hugely unlikely but striking

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juxtaposition, illustrating the extraordinary capacity for advertising to sometimes punch above its weight in cultural significance.

Advertising and promotion, then, constitute a vivid cultural presence in capitalist economies, influencing and inter-penetrating social and cultural values. This is important – too many academic studies conceive of advertising in terms of a narrow cognitive influence on individual consumer decision making, but advertising does not exist in a cultural vacuum. It is ineluctably a form of social communication and the socio- cultural perspective draws on concepts and theories from semiotics, cultural anthropology, literary studies and sociology to try to articulate the various ways in which advertising mobilises, exploits and contributes to cultural meanings (Leiss et al., 2005). Advertising agencies know this, and most duly employ people from many disciplinary backgrounds, including cultural anthropology, ethnography and sociology, alongside history, philosophy, psychology, literature, art, aesthetics and business graduates (Hackley, 2013b).

Interpreting advertising: humour and hyperbole One peculiarity of advertising is that consumers are expected to be able to distinguish between untruth and humorous hyperbole, but the advertisers make every effort to blur this distinction. This is just one reason why this sophisticated communication form is rightfully a part of literary academic study. Advertising performs an essential economic function in capitalist economies. It communicates offers to facilitate consumer choice and market competition and stimulate demand, but for it to perform this function well, it demands a relatively sophisticated level of discernment from consumers who have learned the reading strategies demanded by advertising (for example, see O’Donohoe, 1997). Advertising is rarely a significant part of the school curriculum, yet negotiating a way through the advertising landscape is important to the economic and social competence of citizens. Advertising is often accused of exploiting the vulnerable, the less educated, the very young, the very old and those with access to fewer resources. Advertising professionals are sometimes characterised as unwitting tools of capitalist domination, smoothing the way for global corporations to exploit the world’s consumers. What cannot be doubted is that advertising is worth studying, for all these reasons and more, yet the ways in which advertising texts communicate are still relatively poorly understood and under-examined, especially as regards the roles of implicit

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meanings, such as irony and humorous hyperbole. Who can doubt that this is so at the time of writing when ‘fake’ news, propaganda and outright untruth dominate discussion of political advertising and promotion. There has never been so much information available to any who can use the search function on a smartphone, yet the confusion is palpable as voters try to negotiate their way through the claim, counterclaim, smear and innuendo that characterise much contemporary political advertising. Advertising has been accused by some of contributing to this confusion by normalising the crass persuasive strategies of brand advertising until voters can no longer relate to reasoned political argument.

To take a lighter example of a campaign that exploits innuendo, a long- running theme used by the male personal care brand Axe, known as Lynx in the UK, implies that men who use Lynx/Axe become instantly irresistible to women (see Photo 2). The ads assume that the viewer will understand that it is all just a joke: the plots are clearly intended to be funny. Lynx is pointing at the narrative conventions of male grooming brands and laughing at them with the viewer. But the high production standards of the ads show viewers that, in fact, the marketing campaign is deadly serious. Viewers agree – Lynx is the leading brand in several male grooming product segments. Could it be that knowing the ads are not serious strengthens rather than weakens the message, that using Lynx deodorant might just make the user more sexually alluring to the woman of his dreams? According to some theorists it is enough that audiences are aware of the implied message in an ad for the communication to be persuasive – they do not have to believe it. The area of implied meaning in advertising is very difficult for regulators, since this is exactly the area advertising exploits. It is conventional wisdom that 90% of face-to-face communication is dominated by implicit signals, body language, facial expression, tone, gesture and so forth. Why, then, do advertising regulators often focus on the literal message in advertisements, ignoring the other 90%?

photo 2 Lynx/Axe

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Image Courtesy of the Advertising Archives

Axe (branded as Lynx in the UK and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, and China) launched a line extension of their deodorant with a TV campaign called ‘Even Angels Will Fall’, in 2010. With beautiful videography the films told a fantastical story of angels tempted by the man wearing Axe body spray, evoking the Biblical story of The Fall. Advertising claims that are implied rather than explicitly stated are not usually taken seriously by regulators, especially if they are preposterous. Enough men did seem to take the claims seriously enough to make Axe/Lynx the biggest men’s toiletry brand in the world. In 2016 Lynx/Axe updated to a fourth-wave feminist re-brand.

The issue highlights the problem advertising regulation has with implicit meaning in advertising. In many cases, especially in areas of public concern such as alcohol advertising, the ASA has made judgements on the implicit meaning that could be read into advertisements, even though the explicit content of the ads did not contravene any of the ASA codes of practice. Researchers have drawn attention to the rhetorical force in advertising of what is implied rather than explicitly stated. Tanaka (1994) argues that ‘covert’ or implicit communication allows advertisers to make claims that they could not get away with making explicitly. The point here is that implicit communication is not accidental or incidental to advertising but a carefully considered element of advertising creative strategy. As

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McQuarrie and Phillips (2005) note, some advertising messages that would be illegal if verbalised can, instead, be implied visually. Crucially, researchers say that we do not have to consciously believe implied meanings in ads for them to register with us: we only have to understand what the implied message is in order for it to appear persuasive.

Advertising’s contested cultural status Advertising is a topic that often inflames public debate, dissent and disagreement. Advertising is blamed, by some, for many social evils. It is blamed for causing obesity, for causing anorexia, for causing bad manners, reckless driving, excessive drinking – the list is long. Yet, paradoxically, advertising is also widely regarded as trivial. It tends to occupy a lowly status in our cultural hierarchy, beneath popular art, literature, movies, even stand-up comedy performers. Yet its lowly cultural status is belied by our fascination with it. We enjoy TV shows about the funniest ads and we often talk about the latest ads in our daily conversations. Cook (2001) notes this duality about advertising’s cultural status. It is regarded as both trivial and powerful, banal and sinister, amusing and degrading. Even though advertising is a familiar form of communication in developed economies, we still struggle to come to terms with its contradictions. In spite of its putative triviality, it is clearly a powerful cultural presence.

Although the level of popular interest in advertising is great, there is little consensus about its role in society. Some argue that it corrupts cultural life with its insistent, hectoring presence cajoling us to buy ever-greater quantities of goods and services. Advertising intrudes into ever more social spaces, both public and private. Many schools, especially in the USA, now accept fees to give exclusive rights to commercial organisations to advertise and sell their goods on campus. Even religious observance is not immune from advertising’s influence. Advertising-style slogans in brash colours promoting religious observance can be seen outside many places of worship. Evidently, advertising influences the communication norms of the very culture of which it is part. But while some have a political objection to advertising in all its forms, many people are irritated not by advertising in general but by what they see as its excesses, whether these are to do with its ubiquity or with the offensiveness of particular creative executions. Even acknowledging advertising’s unique ideological force in promoting consumerism as a lifestyle, legitimising capitalism and framing everyday experience does not necessarily imply an extreme anti-

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advertising stance (Williamson, 1978; Marchand, 1985; Elliott and Ritson, 1997; Wharton, 2015). Few can deny that advertising is intrinsic to the creation of wealth through capitalism. Many would argue that it has an equally significant role in the free and untrammelled expression of ideas, a socially progressive exchange of ‘ideas for living’, to adapt John Stuart Mill’s phrase.16 In the USA, advertising is protected under the first amendment of the constitution as a branch of free speech. Of course, there are also counter-arguments that position advertising at the nexus of a capitalist system of domination that commodifies social relations and stifles human creativity rather than articulating it (Lash and Lury, 2007; Davis, 2013).

Even for many who accept the economic inevitability of advertising, though, its forms and styles provide particular sources of annoyance. ‘Pop- up’ internet ads, autoplay videos, programmatic algorithms that link ads to our social media browsing, uninvited SMS texts and email ‘spam’ are a continuing irritation for many internet users. Unwanted junk mail annoys millions of householders daily. Roadside poster sites are sometimes accused of polluting the urban environment or even of distracting drivers and causing road accidents. Even conventional spot advertising is intolerable to many people because of its ‘interruptive’ nature – it interrupts the flow of the entertainment or news programming we were watching. Consumers go to some lengths to avoid advertising interrupting their enjoyment of media. In addition to intruding on our private time and visual amenity, advertising can be a source of ethical transgression. Organisations are often accused of using advertising unethically for commercial advantage. There is persistent criticism of advertising’s effect on children’s health and moral development, a topic discussed at greater length in Chapter 9. The rise of ‘pester power’ as a marketing technique and the distortion of childhood values into those of adults are two of the trends that ad agencies have been accused of initiating, or at least exploiting. All these issues reflect concern with the social responsibility, ethics and regulation of advertising.

The diversity of views advertising attracts reflects its role at the centre of what Wernick (1991) called ‘promotional culture’ (see also Davis, 2013; Powell, 2013). Within promotional culture, we grow accustomed to spending significant sums of money on items that are not essential for survival. We associate happiness with consumption, indeed, in many ways we define our existence in terms of consumption. As advertising and promotion make continuous consumption of inessential branded items a

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culturally normalised practice, other competing cultural values that encourage abstention from consumption are relatively reduced in status. Today, at least in advanced economies, over-indulgence is the norm and waste is everywhere, in spite of powerful movements against environmental waste and resistant to the global dominance of consumer culture. Changes in cultural norms and practices of consumption in some countries (such as, in the UK, the relative decline of families eating home- cooked meals together at a set time) to some extent may reflect the influence of promotional culture. Deeply held values and practices are undermined and finally overthrown, partly, though not entirely, under the influence of advertising. Advertising’s apparent triviality as a sub-category of popular art should not distract us from its profound cultural influence in framing and changing, as well as reflecting, the way we live.

According to some critics, advertising offers the illusion that one can live ‘the good life’ by buying material goods (Belk and Pollay, 1985a). Yet advertising is also an easy target to blame for the weaknesses that have characterised humanity since its beginnings. Advertising and promotion are, in the end, necessary to economic growth, wealth creation, and consumer choice. How we manage the advertising that we make and see has deep implications for the wider world in which we live and it is incumbent on consumers, managers, advertising practitioners and policy makers to have a better understanding of the ways in which advertising wields its influence, in order to make informed choices about advertising policy, regulation and practice. Advertising is both a managerial discipline with profound implications for the wider economy and for the general standard of living, and (arguably) one of the most far-reaching cultural forces of our time.

The role of advertising in brand marketing It is important to appreciate advertising’s place within an inter-connected tissue of mediated communication. Marketing communications in general, and advertising in particular, are sometimes seen as the major source of competitive advantage in consumer markets (Shimp, 2009). Other elements of the marketing mix occur prior to promotional communication, yet it is the communication that stamps the brand identity on a market. In a world of near-instant communication and rapid technology transfer, it is difficult for brand owners to police their global intellectual copyright. The brand has to stand out as a communication, so that consumers will

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recognise it and actively seek it out for the symbolic values it represents (Gardner and Levy, 1955). In this way, successful branding creates a quasi-monopoly and a basis for earning what economists call ‘supernormal’ (i.e. higher) profits. In a sense, it is a mere tautology to draw an equivalence between the most successful brands and their promotion. It makes sense for the most successful mass-market brands to protect their market share by spending more on advertising than rivals can afford. Coca-Cola, for example, seems to owe much of its success to its advertising (Holt and Cameron, 2010). Much of the advertising paid for by major brands is not about persuading individuals to buy, but it is about building a market presence and, in the case of some iconic brands, a cultural presence (Holt, 2004). Many people have never owned a Mercedes, shaved with Gillette, or walked in Jimmy Choos, but many of those people would be able to describe the brand values if asked, and they might buy it if they had the means to do so. All the totality of communication about and around a brand informs the cultural meaning of that brand for both consumers and non-consumers.

Brand management is a painstaking art and attention to detail is often paramount for brand management. Decisions on pricing, design, packaging, distribution outlet and even raw materials are often taken with one eye on the brand’s core values and how these might be perceived in the light of media coverage of the brand. As we note, the term media coverage now includes citizen journalism, internet publications, weblogs, video blogging, chatrooms, Facebook pages and scores of other social media forums, as well as copy produced by professional journalists for established print publications, band blogs or other digital publications. It is an overstatement to argue that communication is all there is to brand marketing, but it is a truism that advertising and marketing communications have assumed a key importance in the destiny of brands and their producing organisations (but see Wells, 1975; Schultz et al., 1993).

Advertising alone does not make the brand but the successful consumer brand is, nevertheless, closely identified with its portrayal in advertising and other marketing communications media. The brand ‘image’ and its symbolism have come to represent dynamic and enduring sources of consumer interest (and company revenue) that brand management are keen to try to shape or control (Levy, 1959; Ogilvy, 1983). Marketing communications do not simply portray brands: they constitute those brands in the sense that the meaning of the brand cannot be properly understood

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in separation from the consumer perceptions of its brand name, logo, advertising, media editorial, its portrayal in entertainment shows, peer comment on social media and the other communications associated with it. Whether brand A is better designed, more attractive, easier to use, or more useful than brand B is frequently something that cannot be decided finally and objectively. It is usually, to some degree, a matter of opinion. This is where advertising acquires its suggestive power. It occupies a realm in which consumers are actively seeking suggestions to layer consumption with new social significance. Advertisers offer us this symbolic material. As consumers we are not passive dupes being taken in by exaggerated claims, we are complicit in our own exploitation. We get something out of being sold intangible dreams and unrealisable fantasies. We find that life becomes more interesting when our choice of deodorant or sugar substitute becomes a statement of personal identity and lifestyle aspiration. We must do.

Functionality, symbolism and the social power of brands In order to understand the role of advertising in brand marketing it is important to focus not only on the promotional sales message but also on the symbolic meanings incorporated into the brand (Gardner and Levy, 1955; Levy, 1959; Mick and Buhl, 1982; Belk, 1988). Brands have functionality – they do something for consumers, they solve problems. They also have a symbolism that is largely articulated through advertising and promotion. Brands communicate symbolically in the sense that they are signs or combinations of signs (words, music, colours, logos, packaging design, and so on) that convey abstract values and ideas. For consumers, the world of marketing is a kaleidoscope of communication, the component parts of which are impossible to disentangle. When commentators say that marketing, and marketing communications, are inseparable, they are making an important point (Schultz et al., 1993: 46; Leiss et al., 2005; Shimp, 2009: 4). Every aspect of marketing management (price, distribution, product design) can carry powerfully suggestive symbolism. In an important sense, consumers occupy a symbolic economy in which the meaning of symbols is negotiated and traded through a mediated market. Marketing in general can be understood as the management of meaning, and marketing meanings are mobilised primarily through advertising and promotion, in all their forms (McCracken, 1987, 1990).

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Anthropologists have long noted the importance of ownership and display of prized items for signifying social identity and status in non-consumer societies. In economically advanced societies, brands take this role as a ‘cultural resource’ that enables and extends social communication (Holt, 2002: 87; see also Belk, 1988; Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998; McCracken, 2005). The influence of brands is such that even resistance to brands has become a defining social position. The ‘social power’ of brands refers to the meaning that goes beyond functionality and is a symbolic reference point among consumers and non-consumers alike (Feldwick, 2002: 11). This symbolic meaning is powerfully framed by advertising and sustained through other forms of communication such as word-of-mouth, public relations, product and brand placement in entertainment media, sponsorship and package design, and through the brand’s presence in social media.

Those marketing professionals more concerned with logistics, supply chain management, order fulfilment, customer service operations, quality management, production engineering and the many other concrete and prosaic activities that bring products and service to the market might not experience marketing in such terms on a daily basis. Brands are material entities and they have functional attributes. But they operate in a consumer plane in which the functional and the symbolic interpenetrate. We might convince ourselves that our purchases are based on a cold-eyed appraisal of a brand’s material and functional qualities, but the market dominance of some brands over other, equally functional but less symbolically resonant ones, tells a different story. One marketing legend holds that Pepsi consistently beats Coke in blind taste tests. Whether or not this is true in all cases, it articulates the truism that a brand is far more than a tangible product.

The functionality of a brand, then, refers to what it does: the symbolism of a brand refers to what it means. One is not necessarily implied in the other. Advertising and promotion are central to the creation and maintenance of the wider symbolic meaning of brands. This wider meaning can give brands a cultural presence that goes beyond purchase and ownership. Brands such as Marlboro, Mercedes-Benz, Gucci, Prada and Rolls-Royce have powerful significance for non-consumers as well as for consumers. Branded items are recognised, and they carry a promise of quality and value. But the symbolic meaning the brand may have for friends, acquaintances and strangers cannot be discounted as a factor in its appeal. For example, a simple item of clothing such as a shirt will sell in far

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greater numbers if it is bedecked with a logo that confers a symbolic meaning on that item. Wearing a branded shirt, as opposed to an unbranded one, can be said to confer a symbolic status on the wearer because of the values of affluence and social privilege and taste the brand represents (Schor, 1998: 47, cited in Szmigin, 2003: 139). As with implied meaning in advertisements, we may be fully aware that this, seen literally, may be a risible or preposterous notion, but that does not necessarily undermine the communicative force of the brand’s symbolism. Brands have a cultural resonance that is not limited to their materiality (Schroeder and Salzer-Morling, 2005; Danesi, 2006: Campbell, 2013).

Marketing is replete with symbolism in many forms. Marketing activities of all kinds can be seen to combine signs that resonate with cultural meanings (Williamson, 1978; Umiker-Sebeok, 1987; Barthes, 2000). The futuristic design of a Dyson vacuum cleaner or the clean, aesthetic lines of an iPod have the powerful appeal of implied values that are very important to the consumer. A Rolex watch might be a well-made jewellery item with time-keeping utility but the Rolex brand is best known as an ostentatious symbol of wealth. Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, Madison Avenue, New York, and Knightsbridge, London, are home to many designer stores because these locations have become culturally identified with prestige retail outlets. The location and architecture of the retail outlet, as well as the price, can often carry a powerful symbolism for the brands.