1 Still, the cultural contradictions continue to proliferate. Advertising efforts to deny media hegemony draw on new media technologies such as video synthesizers, computer/video linkages and digitized images that permit still greater manipulation of frames. Television has become increasingly dominated by the fetishism of technique. The prototype of fetishized TV is MTV which cultivates media reflexivity and jadedness by relying upon familiarity with television codes to subvert and one-up those codes. MTV cuts up the codes and edits (pastes) them into an ever-ironic pastiche of the code.

2 "Come backstage with me darling, and I'll show you the wires and the gizmos. You'll like that! You'll be in on the secret. And that's part of the secret, see - American audiences love to be in the know. They love to go backstage. They want to see the machinery that fools them, the back projections, the special effects. Right? Right! They don't realize that showing them the machinery is the show, and while they're hypnotized by the gears going round, the microchips blinking on/off, while you let them see the marketing surveys that reveal their kinky emotional ratchets and levers, you can really get your hands deep down into their pockets. They get hypnotized thinking they are learning how the rubes get hypnotized" (Canton, 1986).

3 Judging by the reaction, many rock 'n' roll fans felt betrayed that Clapton had sold out. He later apologized to his fans, explaining that he was abusing alcohol at the time.

4 The jerky and searching camera can signify differing moods. With rapid-fire editing techniques, it can convey a sense of energy, but without editing it can connote the strained tedium of daily life. Witness the difference between AT&T ads which dwelt on a single scene to draw out the anxiety and tension of work in the corporate world, whereas Michelob combined the restless camera with flashy editing practices to furnish a feeling of gritty glamour in leisure life.

5 Advertising for airlines and rental cars aimed at business people communicates a hyperreal style by creating a sense of blurred, rapid horizontal camera movement through negative space - space-in-between - flash-panning past hypersignifiers, fragmented glimpses of décor or objects such as flight schedule monitors, baggage and mechanics' limbs in motion. Space-in-between is designed to pass through as rapidly as possible. It is space governed by norms of efficiency, and emptied of warmth, personality or desire. These scenes have their semiotic flip side in personal touch scenes which punctuate these rapidly paced vignettes aimed at the postmodern nomad: e.g., a flight attendant takes a traveler's drink, careful not to wake him.

6 This produces opposing interpretive tendencies. Hypermagnified objects and gestures are presented to viewers loaded with significance. After being freighted with layers of meaningful association from years of viewing ads, even skimming across the surface of magnified signifiers can bring forth meaningful associations to well-versed viewers. On the other hand, hypersignifiers are by nature spectacularly decontextualized and hence confusing.

7 When pop and rock 'n' roll music saturated ads in the late 1980s, advertisers turned to opera to find differentiated musical soundbites.

8 The Energizer campaign is thus both critical and parasitic - it has lampooned ads for soaps, deodorants, network trailers and Slim Whitman-style record offers.

9 The Sprite ads were actually shot by the high school students who appear in them. They used a video camera given them by the Burrell agency of Chicago. On the other hand, the Surf ads by Ogilvy & Mather were mock-up home movies that featured not actors/real people.

10 Advertisers no longer presume a consensus about social definitions of need. Trendy magazines, such as LA Style and Details, catering to the avant-garde, now openly mock the meaning of consumption. Meanwhile, advertisers (e.g., K-Mart) aiming at working class audiences seek to reassure viewers that the needs they service are not manufactured, but correspond to those of actual people like yourself.

11 Could it be that in the political economy of sign value this declining half-life of sign value is structurally homologous to the rule of the declining rate of profit for capitalism in general?