READING ADS SOCIALLY
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
- Framing meanings into a currency of signs
- Advertising, ideology & the commodity form
1 SUBJECTIVITY IN A BOTTLE: COMMODITY
FORM AND ADVERTISING FORM
- The commodity form
- The extension of the commodity form
- The logic of the commodity form
- The elements of the commodity form
- The commodity form in ads
- Advertising as social practice
- Ideology in the commodity form
2 ADVERTISING AND THE PRODUCTION OF
COMMODITY-SIGNS
- Building sign values
- Marketing fragrances
- Translating positioning practices into interpretive
procedures
- Commodified social relations in perfume ads
- Commodity-mediated self-other relations
- Commodity-mediated status & lifestyle
- Appellation & pseudo-individuality
- Reification is their most important product
- Mortise-work & the production of commodity-sign
values
- Framing appearances
- The mortise in ads
- The mortise as a set of spatial signifying relations
- Decoding mortise-work
- Preferred & non-preferred interpretations
- Grist for the policy mill
4 LEGITIMATION ADS: THE STORY OF THE
FAMILY & HOW IT SAVED CAPITALISM FROM ITSELF
- Turning paleosymbolic moments into signs
- McDonald's 'history of the family'
- McDonald's revisited
- Ideological images of family life
- Society's cornerstone?
5 ENVY, DESIRE AND POWER: GENDER RELATIONS
AND THE DIALECTICS OF APPEARANCE IN ADS
- Metaphors of control
- A dialectic of desire & power
- Whose gaze?
6 COMMODITY FEMINISM
- Commodity feminism/fetishism
- Femininity, 'feminism' & 'market share'
- Constructing & addressing the audience as
commodity
- Addressing the gaze
- Commodity difference: positioning the meaning of
emancipation
- Photographic hyperrealism: de-glamorization &
'neo-feminism'
- 'Pluralism' & the containment of difference
7 THIS IS NOT AN AD
- The post-mortise stage of advertising
- Is this an ad?
- Frame reflexivity
- Semiosis as a second-order signifer
- To seize the eye!
8 LEVI'S 5O1s & THE 'KNOWING WINK':
COMMODITY BRICOLAGE
- The 'real'
- The jeans market & jeans advertising in the early
1980s
- The 501 blues campaign
- The knowing wink
- 'The Blues' & the power of cultural quotation
- Pleasure in the text
- Imperfection & errant behavior
- Photographic hyperrealism
- Race & class relations
- Gender difference
- Levi's & the art of corporate bricolage
- Mimesis & realism
- Whither commodity hegemony?
9 THE POSTMODERNISM THAT FAILED
- The immediate context: the field of television
consumer-goods ads
- Reebok's commercial text
- Deconstructing surfaces
- Pastiche & schizophrenia
- A crisis of individuality & the corporate oversoul
- The wider context: contradictions of a political economy of
sign values
- Production backgrounded