‘Which half?’: accounting for ideology in advertising: Liz Mcfall
It may be a bit of a stretch to apply Wanamaker’s - or maybe Lord Lever’s – maxim ‘I know
that half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half’ to
the problem of accounting for ideology in advertising but there are stronger reasons for
doing so than might be supposed. The questions of effectiveness and ideology both signal a
real accounting challenge, one that involves measuring qualities and values rather than
quantities and costs. Invoking the ‘which half’ maxim is also meant to nudge attention back
towards the internal dynamics and practices of the industry when for too many years to
adopt a ‘critical’ perspective has meant to concentrate primarily on the externally visible
texts and products of the industry.
This situation has arisen, in large part, through the definition of advertising as a site of
special, ideological interest. Advertising occupies a ‘special’ location between the realms of
culture and consumption and economy and production. This location has been rigorously
mined in critical theory for its ideological significance in cementing and reproducing a given
social and economic order. With such stakes in play it is little surprise that critical theory
has eschewed the mundane practices, technologies and institutions that make up the
industry in favour of developing analytical frameworks designed to crack the ideological code
of the product itself. Yet these mundane details may still contain the best clues to how
advertising works and why it looks the way that it does.
The chapter begins with a short overview of the way ‘ideology’ has been conceptualised
in key critical accounts of advertising with the emphasis on establishing the elegance and
totalising reach of such accounts. It then moves on to argue that such accounts derive their
cogency from rigid and particular approaches to the character and location of meaning. The
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more critical work on advertising loosened up to accommodate cross and intertextual
accounts of meaning, to accommodate consumer’s resistance, the symbolic dimension of
material practices and institutional sites the less compelling the ideological account became.
The chapter concludes by arguing that a more promising direction for future research is
offered by reasserting the generative significance of internal advertising processes - such as
the industry’s advertising effectiveness awards schemes - in shaping the reality they purport
to measure.
Ideology and critical accounts of advertising
Any discussion of the role of ideology in critical accounts of advertising needs to pay due
regard to Roland Barthes’ discussion of the application of semiotic method to advertising
images. His essay, The Rhetoric of the Image, was first published in 1964 but it set the tone for
critical research, both conceptually and methodologically, well into the 1980s. To this end I
want to take a closer look at Barthes’ take on the ideological character of advertising before
exploring how authors like Williamson (1977), Goldman (1990) and Wernick (1991) moved
the debate forward. These accounts conceptualise the role of ideology in quite distinctive
ways and there may be some nice distinctions between them that will be collapsed but I’m
willing to risk this in order to show the persistence of certain ideas about the relationship
between advertising, meaning and ideology in contemporary societies.
In his famous analysis of a Panzani foods advertisement depicting a string bag spilling out
its contents, Barthes identifies three messages contained within the visual text. The first is
the linguistic message which features the use of denotational and connotational elements to
carry out the two main functions of anchorage and relay. Relay has a narrative action to
carry the story forward but anchorage fixes meaning against the proliferation of multiple and
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undesirable meanings. It is at the level of anchorage ‘that the morality and ideology of a
society are above all invested’ (1977: 40). The second ‘non-coded iconic’ message presents
in ‘absolutely analogical’ fashion objects which appear entirely natural. The function of this
second message, in accordance with structuralist principles, is revealed through its relation
to the third, ‘coded-iconic message’. The ‘non-coded iconic message’s’ special function is to
naturalise the coded message and it is here that the work of ‘semantic artifice’ really kicks
in.
In the coded message there are a series of signs. Barthes isolates at least four including; a
return from the market, ‘Italianicity’, total culinary service and the ‘still life’. Barthes admits
the presence, arising from the image’s place in the magazine and the predominance of labels,
of a further message revealing that the image is an advertisement. In a move consistent with
structuralist semiotics’ fixation with the text, Barthes reaches the rather odd conclusion that
this purely functional information eludes signification, thus a first step to ruling the internal
dynamics of advertising production outside of the construction of meaning is made.
There is nothing crude or simplistic in this account of meaning construction. Semiotics
offers an elegant, nuanced and powerful account of the plural and active nature of the
process of meaning making. Barthes, for instance, acknowledges that the number of readings
will vary between different individuals. The image is a ‘lexical unit’ combining a range of
different ‘lexicons’ or portions of language relating to specific bodies of practice or
technique. Some individuals may lack certain lexicons but it is must be possible for one
individual to have all lexicons referred to in a single advertisement. The tenability of the
method depends on the possibility of a single individual, for example the analyst, ‘owning’ all
the relevant lexical units to enable a complete, structural description. The plurality of
possible readings is contained by the common domain of ideology which ‘cannot but be
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single for a given society and history, no matter what signifiers of connotation it may use’
(Barthes, 1977: 49);
This emphasis on the singular character of the ideological domain is remarkable as one of
the primary sources of trouble for structuralist semiotic accounts from those who have
struggled to square a univocal ideological explanation with the diversity of gender, ethnic,
religious and cultural interests. Yet is also through invoking the ideological nature of
meaning-making that semiotics derives its power as a total explanation of social order. This is
what Barthes means when he refers to the dialectical coordination of semiotics and ideology.
Ideology does not just explain how semiotics as a formal process of signification relates to
given interests, but semiotics explains how ideology works. For instance Barthes maintains
that not all elements within the image are transformed into connotators – there always
remains a certain denotation within the image which acts to naturalise, or in Barthes’ words,
‘to innocent the semantic artifice of connotation’. Coordination is the key here - ideology
bridges between the structural layering of the text, multiple individual readings and the
interests, generally construed as bourgeois, of a given society while at the same time the
relations of signification enable ideology to be disseminated. Semiotically influenced
approaches to advertising, thus, proffer not only a method, but a comprehensive social
critique, what Barthes, with Marx in his sights, called a totalist explanation of social life.
Barthes’ vision of semiotics is quite in keeping with Marx’s ‘ruthless criticism of everything
existing’ that accounts for any phenomena in terms of the determinative action of the mode
of production (Marx, 1978/1844: 12).
The most sustained and the most influential treatment in this vein is Judith Williamson’s
Decoding Advertisements (1978). In order to sell, she explains, adverts have to mean
something and this involves connecting people and objects, making the two interchangeable.
Adverts thereby ‘sell us ourselves’ in a society where the real origins of identity are
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obscured by the distortions imposed by consumption. These distortions conceal the true
production/class basis of identity in false consumption-based distinctions fabricated by
advertising. Williamson uses semiotic terminology to describe the transference of meaning
to products through the currency of signs. This transference is crucial in advanced capitalist
economies because of the need to differentiate basically similar products. To this end,
bizarre juxtapositions of products and objects/ meanings take on a natural status and this is
construed, as in Barthes’ formulation, as an ideological process. Adverts utilise a pre-existing
referent system of meaning, because the product, prior to signification in the advert, has no
meaning. Having captured meaning, the product becomes the signified, so Chanel No 5
equals Catherine Deneuve. This is a step towards the product itself as a signifier of meaning,
having taken over the ‘reality’ from which its meaning was abducted. In this way products
generate the feelings they represent, so Clairol equals happiness; or offer themselves as the
currency for something else, so Anne French equals clear skin equals boyfriends. This process
of meaning making is active and undertaken by the ‘subject’ as ‘it is he or she who completes
the circuit through which, once started ... a current of ‘meaning’ flows continuously and
apparently autonomously’ (1978: 41).
In this way what Williamson labels the ‘vicious circle’ of meaning exchange between
advertisements and subjects progresses through four discreet stages. In the first stage we
create meaning through recognition of signifiers from the referent ‘myth’ system which we
come to associate with the product. The crucial factor here is the implication of the subject
in the exchange process and this provides the key to the ideological nature of the process.
As for Barthes the subject’s active involvement in the formal production of meaning ensures
a simultaneously ideological moment in which constructed meanings appear natural. We
make the exchange and complete the links set up in the advert, in doing so we ‘become’ the
signified. In this second stage, subjects take on meanings from the product.
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Products whose only meaning derives from a re-hash of mythological elements
already present in society, develop such an aura of significance that they tell
something about their buyers and actually become adjectival in relation to them. ...
We are thus created not only as subjects but as particular kinds of subjects, by
products in advertisements. (Williamson, 1978: 45)
For this to be successful, Williamson maintains, you must already recognise yourself as the
kind of subject represented. Adverts address the subject as special, individual, and in this
third stage, individuals recognise themselves, and are simultaneously constituted as,
particular sorts of subject, at once individuals and part of a group. Finally, through the
advertisement, we create ourselves. Having constituted subjects as members of a group,
then as individuals, adverts, in their depiction of multiple aspects of the self, break the
individual into a ‘fragmented ego to be reunited by the product’ (1978: 55). Williamson
characterises this appeal to a coherent, conscious self as an appeal, not to an inherent
subject essence, but to an ideologically constructed consciousness. Fundamentally, ads act
ideologically to reproduce subjects in a mould suited to the demands of capitalist economies.
While the overt function of ads is to sell, their hidden function is to conserve society in a
given form by resolving contradictions and reproducing consuming subjects.
These themes crop up in work by authors like Winship (1981), Dyer (1982) and
Vestergaard and Schroder (1985) among others. Whatever their other differences such
accounts share a baseline understanding of advertisements as ideological in utilising a formal
structure of signification that naturalises or ‘innocents’ the specific, historical condition of
contemporary capitalist economies. This view, with some shift of emphasis, also underpins
the re-working of semiotic analysis advanced by Goldman (1992) and Goldman and Papson
(1994, 1996). In Reading Ads Socially Goldman begins by identifying advertising as a key
institution in ‘producing and reproducing the material and ideological supremacy of
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commodity relations’ a system he terms ‘commodity hegemony’ (1992: 2). This indicates a
move away from the Althusserian model of interpellation towards a Gramscian framework.
For Goldman, adverts contribute to a system of commodity hegemony because they
reproduce a sense of commodity relations as a natural and inevitable part of the lives of
different individuals.
Goldman’s particular contribution to the method is the proposal of the mortise and the
frame as structural elements. The mortise and frame function, to steer interpretation in a
preferred direction. The term mortise refers to a joining device, a cavity that another part
fits or passes through. The mortise formally structures the creation of meaning within the ad
through ‘routing’ the connection between the image as signified and the product as signifier.
Through the mortise, irrespective of the content of individual ads, ‘an ideology and practice
of commodity fetishism at a deep level of communicative competence’ is reproduced (1992:
65). The emphasis here is slightly different from many other semiotic theorists in that
greater significance is attached to the embeddedness of meaning within the system of
advertisements and its extension beyond single texts to products as commodity-signs.
Where Williamson’s product is blank prior to signification in the advert, Goldman’s product
is a commodity-sign, carrying meaning from previous advertising and from the system of
advertising. Here Goldman acknowledges his debt to an ‘inter-textual’ account of meaning
but, as I hope to show later, there are limits to how far this revision is allowed to modify his
application of semiotics.
Wernick’s (1991) study departs further from earlier accounts by expressing the need for
advertising critique to encompass more than the decoding of individual advertisements. An
understanding of advertising’s role, he argues, needs also take account of the broader
promotional system spanning production, marketing and design. Through the notion of
‘artificial semiosis’, Wernick points to the emergence in the early nineteenth century, of the
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industrialised manufacture of meaning and myth, a process culminating in the production of
dual character objects or commodity-signs. For Wernick, it is not the symbolic character of
objects per se that is new, but the instrumentalized manner in which this character is
instilled. In the industrial phase promotion becomes a strategic and integrated aspect of
production and the resultant ‘commodity sign’ an entirely new sort of product with a usevalue inextricable from its manipulated image. Again, this is understood as an ‘ideological’
process in that advertisements act to unite commodities with attributed subject positions.
The commodity they project as the object of desire is simultaneously presented as a
cultural symbol charged with social significance; and the ego they seek to engage as
the subject of desire is induced to adopt the socio-cultural identity attributed to
those who already use the product. (1991: 31)
There is not that much difference between this and Williamson’s (1976) or Goldman’s
(1992) account of how advertising works through an Althusserian model of ideological
interpellation. This is remarkable because at various points Wernick seeks to distance his
analysis from more classically Marxist accounts of advertising’s ideological action. Yet the
distinctions between Wernick and accounts in the latter vein are finally rather subtle. As
mentioned above, Wernick locates advertising within a much broader promotional system
spanning production and design as part of his determination that advertising, however
important, is only one part of an elaborate production system in which signification occurs at
various stages. This doesn’t, in the end, prevent Wernick from adopting a methodological
approach based on decoding individual texts but it nevertheless marks a less restricted way
of thinking about how and where signification occurs. Similarly in his acknowledgement of
the difficulty of disentangling promotional symbolism from other cultural meanings, Wernick
notes;.
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It is almost as difficult in the real world to make a rigorous distinction between the
commodity and its manufactured symbolic aura as in the advertising text. What
complicates the distinction is that products, even physical and practical ones, are
inseparable from language (including visual language) and from patterns of use that
are overlaid with ceremonial and cultural significance. (1991: 32)
This difficulty is related to what Wernick calls the ‘promotional intertext’ that connects
advertisements not only to their commodity-signs but to other ads and a shared cultural
vocabulary which is both articulated and re-worked within advertising. Pushing these myriad
semantic entanglements to one side, Wernick goes on to claim that the differences between
generic cultural conventions attached to products and the specific brand identities that
advertisers attempt to construct are nevertheless ‘obvious’. This insistence upon the
singularity of advertising’s role in attaching meanings to commodities, leads Wernick back to
the key terms of structuralist accounts.
By addressing individuals always as potential customers, and so attributing them a
priori a social identity linked firmly to that role, advertising builds the standpoint of
consumption into the design of its every text. ... The consumerist address imprisons
the subjectivity it projects into a totally commodified ontology. Being is reduced to
having, desire to lack. ... Production as human praxis - the satisfaction of human
need through non-alienated self-activity- is obliterated as a thinkable thought. (1991:
35)
Where does it mean?: the trouble with ideology
Despite its power, reach and the elegant ambition of an explanation that has the world and
its history in its purview, semiotics had by the end of the 1980s its fair share of critics. One
of the most obvious criticisms of semiotics concerns the status of the analyst/interpreter,
the figure Barthes’ called the ‘mythologist’, the owner of all lexicons. For writers such as
Leiss et. al, (1990: 214) and Moeran (1996: 30), semiotics depends entirely on the
impressionistic insights of analysts whose abilities to reach the ‘deeper levels of meaning
construction’ varied significantly. Other authors have complained that the semiotician is set
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apart from the recipient of meaning, mysteriously equipped to stand outside the ideological
universe that structures all other interpretations (Cook, 1992; Nava et. al., 1997). For
present purposes however the most interesting problem raised by the semiotic explanation
of the ideological character of advertisements concerns the location of meaning. A deep
paradox on this question runs through semiotic approaches to advertising because while the
theory understands meaning as resident within the structural relations persisting across a
system of representation on the whole the method tracks meaning within individual texts.
The reason for this is clear: the structural analysis of texts as self-contained, competent
entities for analysis presents a complex but manageable task, the analysis of relations which
persist across a whole system of representation however is quite a different matter.
To make this point clearer it is worth referring briefly to Leymore’s (1975) semiotic
analysis of advertising systems. Leymore defines an advertising system as constituting all the
advertisements of competitive brands. To this, she applies algebraic and statistical analysis of
the relations between elements to enable her to draw conclusions like ‘good : evil ≈ washing
powders : not washing powders’ (1975: 75). This relation demonstrates that the brand
closest to the theme, washing powders equal good, is the one that achieves success in the
market; a powder which deviates from the theme ‘condemns itself to be identified with the
signifier of the ‘not washing powders’, which is evil (1975: 75). Many of the conclusions that
Leymore draws from her analysis are similarly reductive and this is certainly a function of the
difficulty of identifying meaning in systems. Leymore’s algebraic method may enable her to
track oppositions and relations across an advertising system but in order to make the task
analytically manageable these relations have to be expressed in very simple terms. It would
simply not be practicable to conduct a comparative analysis of an ‘advertising system’ along
the lines of Barthes’ deconstruction of the Panzani ad.
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Still, this is not the only problem with Leymore’s approach. Equally troublesome is how
the boundaries defining an advertising system should be drawn temporally and in market
terms. Semiotic analysis is synchronic, freezing the object of analysis at a moment in time,
but individual advertisements reference a whole universe of prior advertising they are not
bounded within a given ‘season’. The competitive advertising market for many products is
also extremely fluid. Soap powder is an exceptionally well-defined market, other markets are
drawn not from common product characteristics but from common instances of use. Thus
games consoles, mobile phones and mp3 players compete in the same market as teenage
Christmas gifts and therefore constitute an advertising ‘system’. Markets are ‘structures of
mediation’ constituted through the application of specific commercial practices and
technologies that refer back, through market research for example, to the social practices of
consumers (Slater, 2002).
Locating meaning in advertising systems offers no easy solutions to the problem of
attributing meaning externally to relations between elements within a system but conducting
analysis internally within individual representations. This problem is exacerbated by the shift
towards intertextual definitions of meaning as ‘plural, shattered, incapable of being tabulated’
(Kristeva, 1984) and located across different systems of signification. Goldman (1992) and
Goldman and Papson’s (1994; 1996) accounts attempt to accommodate intertextuality whilst
retaining a method of analysis focused primarily on individual texts. They accentuate the
increasing prevalence since the 1980s, of rapid, absurd and pastiche recombinations of sign
values in the ‘mature sign economy’ of advertising. Opaque messages and techniques like
parody and self-mockery proliferate in a spiralling, self-referential generation of intertextual
‘not-ads’ (Goldman 1992; Goldman and Papson 1996). These shifts are part of an
acceleration of meaning prompted by a change in the form and structure of commodity
hegemony.
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‘Individuated meaning production’ is accommodated within the logic of contemporary
commodity hegemony as the very openness of ‘not-ads’ blocks counter hegemonic readings
(1992: 198). The openness of interpretation wards off resistance at the same time as
ensuring the crucial connection between the commodity name and the advertising sign is
made. This ‘closed circuit’ between the commodity name and the reading is crucial to
Goldman’s account because it maintains the link between ads, meaning and a given economic
order, characterised as commodity hegemony. Despite the emphasis on negotiation and
intertextuality the account that he and later, Papson, provide remains close to the semiotic
explanation expounded by Barthes and Williamson. For the latter, readings are always drawn
from a shared ideological universe while for the former; freedom of interpretation ultimately
serves, rather than challenges, a hegemonic system.
This is an uneasy position. Advertisers ‘steer meanings’ but cannot guarantee
interpretations that will either ratify ‘preferred’ meanings or produce ‘aberrant’ meanings
(1992: 40). Yet the emphasis on the closed circuit between commodity and reading leaves
little space for a truly oppositional reading – one that breaks the circuit – outside the
ideological/hegemonic universe. This tension also characterises Williamson and Barthes’
accounts. Both stress the active involvement of the subject in the creation of meaning but as
Williamson explains, this freedom is not quite what it seems. Freedom is illusory, a ‘position
given to you by the advertiser’ (1978: 71). Subjects may be required to actively complete the
circuit of meaning in ads but this process is largely predetermined, ‘restricted to the carefully
defined channels provided by the ad for its own decipherment’ (1978: 72). This does not
prevent Williamson and Goldman and Papson from claiming that people are wise to
advertising and adept at resisting its messages in a move that is characteristic of the awkward
fluctuation in semiotics between preferred and open, predetermined and active readings that
are at once resisted and irresistible.
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Goldman’s ‘intertextual’ approach to meaning involves primarily an account of how
advertising techniques like parody, pastiche and cross-referencing work without undermining
a system of commodity hegemony. These are characteristics of advertising that had, in any
case, already been recognised by writers like Williamson (1978: 175-178) and Dyer (1982:
185-7). But the notion of intertextuality is intended to summon up more than simply cross
and self-referentiality. It also involves recognition of the transposition of signifying practices
across a range of different systems. This means that the regime of signification in advertising
shapes, and is shaped by, other regimes like film and television, popular music and literature.
While many semiotic theorists acknowledge in principle the play of influence across these
regimes, in practice, advertising texts are treated as complete and self-contained systems of
meaning. Even where, as in Goldman and Papson’s (1996) analysis, more weight is given to
cross-referentiality across signifying regimes, the relationship is unilinear with advertising
always cast in the role of insatiable cultural appropriator, coloniser or ‘cannibal’.
A further problem with the textual location of meaning, disregarded even by intertextual
accounts, is the relationship between meaning systems and other dimensions of social life
and practice. It is all very well to acknowledge how meaning is negotiated across texts but
what of the role of practices? Referentiality across film, music and advertising may establish
chains of meaning but material practices on both production and consumption sides also
produce meaning. Representational work is inherent across the design of retailing,
production and distribution systems as well as in shopping, leisure and working practices.
Allowing for the symbolic character of practice only exacerbates the already unmanageable
task of tracking the ideological content of advertising messages.
One of the most acute manifestations of the view that meaning resides in discrete
systems of signification arises in the status attributed to the product in semiotic accounts of
advertising. Advertising exists prima facie to instil meaning in products. In Williamson’s
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account the only meaning of products is that instilled by the advert, the product is
effectively a tabula rasa (1978: 45). The arbitrary connection between many products and
appropriated meanings is taken as evidence that ads are free to harvest any attractive
referent systems. This is a paradoxical treatment in a theoretical system that privileges the
symbolic character of all objects. Advertising meanings somehow take precedence over any
other meanings that may be associated with the brand, product or company outside of
advertising. This is a singular version of the error which reduces the properties of products
not just to their significations (cf. Callon & Muniesa, 2005; Mcfall, 2004) but to their
advertising significations.
A related problem arises over the status of the producers of advertisements. The
intentions, aims and strategies of advertising producers are left out of most critical accounts
focused on the problematic of ideology, an omission which springs directly from the semiotic
challenge to the idea of originary authorship. ‘Obviously’, Williamson argues, ‘people invent
and produce adverts, but apart from the fact that they are unknown and faceless, the ad in
any case does not claim to speak from them, it is not their speech’ (1978: 14). The absence
of the author is consistent with the theoretical tenets of a method that refers back to a
structuralist Marxist conception of social relations. If the consciousness of producers is
derived from a common ideological universe the texts they produce necessarily transmit
over-determined ideological meanings rendering their explicit intentions of little significance.
The tenability of this position has been challenged on the basis that whilst producers clearly
do not in any straightforward way dictate the meaning of advertisements, their specific
modes of production are crucial to a robust assessment of advertising (Nixon, 1996, 2003;
Moeran, 1996; Miller, 1997; Slater 2002; Cronin, 2004; Mcfall, 2004). Micro-level production
practices pale in semiotics next to the ideological role of advertising but the absence of an
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account of how advertisers actually conduct practice forces semiotic analysis into the
business of endless philosophical abstractions about meaning.
Excessive abstraction, in fact, haunts the semiotic pursuit of meaning. The assumption
that meaning is available for textual analysis to ‘get at’ raises difficult questions about the
character and location of meaning which the emphasis on intertextuality does little to solve.
Indeed accentuating the relations and references across different systems of signification only
raises more questions about how ‘systems’ and the boundaries between them should be
defined. An even more intransigent problem concerns the connection between meaning and
concrete material practices. It is the significance of this relation that writers associated with
the actor-network tradition like John Law (2002) are trying to get at in flagging their
approach as a sort of ‘semiotics of materiality’. Such problems with meaning and ideology
also lay behind Foucault’s determination to set aside what he considered the futility of
semiotics as ‘a task that nothing could limit’ (in Dean, 1994: 16). Foucault, of course,
preferred to think in terms of discourses rather than ideologies as ‘they need no interpretation,
no one to assign them a meaning. If one reads texts in a particular way one perceives that they
speak clearly to us and require no further supplementary sense or interpretation’ (1980: 115). This
encapsulates many of the criticisms that have been levelled at semiotics regarding the status
of the interpreter and the location of meaning. Meaning, for Foucault, is the plural outcome
of ongoing, active processes and therefore has no single, ideological core accessible only to
the skilled analyst.
Accounting for advertising
This final section of the chapter sets aside the question of ideology to focus instead on the
generative significance of the internal processes of advertising. In particular the aim is to
explore some of the reasons why a focus on mundane, production processes, including
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those designed to evaluate advertising effectiveness might reveal more than might be
supposed about the form that advertising takes. This will involve a brief overview of ideas
emanating from the sociology and anthropology of economic life that signal the different
ways in which tools developed to measure aspects of an economic reality in turn shape that
reality.
In The Laws of the Market (1998) Callon and his contributing authors make a sustained
and persuasive argument that the task of economic sociology needs reframing to not simply
assert the social context of economic practice but to explore the ways in which economics,
broadly defined, formats or ‘performs’ the economy. The economy, here is conceptualised
as the contingent outcome of a process, a ‘mutual performation’, in which the discipline/s of
economics, broadly defined to include economic sociology, business and organisation studies
and marketing, are implicated through their role in shaping the ways in which ‘agencies’
calculate. This, for Callon, opens up the sociology of economic life to an exploration of
precisely how calculative agencies, in all their diverse forms, have emerged and been
formatted.
It is not a matter of giving a soul back to a dehumanized agent, nor of rejecting the
very idea of his existence. The objective may be to explore the diversity of
calculative agencies, forms and distributions, and hence of organised markets. The
market is no longer that cold, implacable and impersonal monster which imposes its
laws and procedures while extending them ever further. It is a many-sided,
diversified, evolving device which the social sciences as well as the actors themselves
contribute to reconfigure. (1998: 51)
Despite the clumsiness of the term, performation offers a way of ‘rediscovering’ the
generative significance of advertising processes. This follows from the insistence in other
sociologies of economic life that economic practices shape the reality they set out to
measure. As Peter Miller drawing on the context of accounting practice explains,
accountancy tools are ‘largely improvised and adapted to the tasks and materials at hand’
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(1998: 190). No general principle defining what should and should not be measured exists,
rather the relevant reality is constantly renegotiated and reconfigured in accounting. To
practice or perform calculations accountants require tools and tools shape the meaning of
the objects they are applied to. This is a point also made by Law (2002) in his account of the
role of spreadsheets and the Thatcherite culture of ‘enterprise’ in creating a category of ‘real
costs’ and by writers like Cochoy (1998, 2003) in relation to marketing practices and the
formation of markets and marketing categories.
This work sits rather uneasily with critical accounts of the ideological potency of
advertising. When Michael Schudson’s Advertising: the uneasy persuasion first appeared in 1984
it was one of the first to take issue with overstated claims about the power of advertising.
Advertisements, he suggested ‘ordinarily work their wonders, to the extent that they work
at all, on an inattentive public’ (1990:3). In this, Schudson gave voice to a sentiment that
industry practitioners had been citing in their defence for years, that within the industry itself
considerable uncertainty exists about whether and exactly how advertising actually works.
This lack of certainty is an ever present undercurrent and surfaces frequently in the debate
over whether creativity or effectiveness is the ultimate aim of advertising. When the
Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) selected Advertising Works as the title for the
publications series that accompanies their annual effectiveness award scheme it was at least
partly in reference to this debate and the need to reassure clients. That such reassurance is
even necessary doesn’t accord all that well with structuralist or post-structuralist
explanations of the ideological or hegemonic effects of advertising.
Ethnographic and historical accounts of advertising (Nixon, 1996, 2003; Moeran, 1996;
Miller, 1997; Cronin, 2004; Mcfall, 2004) offer a glimpse of advertising as an inward-looking
and self-referential culture. Advertising communities, like other interpretive communities,
work with their eyes far more closely fixed on the competition than on the audience. The
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specific nature of everyday practices, technologies and institutions that make-up these
communities are potent forces shaping the nature of the product they create.
Systems like the IPA’s Advertising Works effectiveness awards scheme can be viewed in
this light as tools that ultimately shape the reality they purport to measure. Having achieved
an effectiveness award, campaigns in the mould of Carex’s ‘washer or walker’ or Phones4u’s
‘Scary Mary’ or Wonderbra’s ‘Hello boys’, go on to shape rules, practices and categories for
future campaigns (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising 2003; Baker, 1995). Advertising is a
fast-moving, faddish and introspective business where techniques and innovations can rapidly
take on the status of established knowledge shaping the form of future campaigns. The
notion of performativity has some salience in this context in signposting the relationship
between knowledges and practices in the ongoing constitution of markets. Advertising, both
product and practice, is materially imprinted, or performed, by its own institutional practices
and dynamics. This is no mere tautology but an acknowledgement of the plural ways in which
the institution of advertising, its norms, practices and award schemes, self-generate or
perform, the knowledges and practices which define it. An informed, critical account of
advertising is one that takes seriously these norms, practices and institutions and resists the
temptation to dismiss them in the pursuit of providing a broader, ideological explanation.
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