Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures, by Bo Florin, Patrick Vonderau and Yvonne Zimmerman

Abstract

Advertising is one of the fields of academic study (tourism being another) in which different disciplinary ecosystems exist in almost complete isolation from each other. In the case of advertising, one ecosystem of research typically springs from researchers working in business studies or marketing departments and is motivated, largely speaking, by a desire to make advertising more effective as a means of selling goods. The other ecosystem of advertising research comes from researchers working in a variety of humanities and social science disciplines who seek to analyse advertising’s relationship to the culture it underwrites and is intertwined with, and the impact that might have upon the individuals and wider society who consume it. Because both the underlying concerns and topics of discussion differ so much between these approaches, these research ecologies rarely intersect with each other—it is only a slight overstatement to argue that, traditionally, those seeking to make advertising more effective rarely considered the wider implications of its practice, while those whose focus is those implications rarely interacted with the advertising industry as a set of institutions and professional practices. In the twenty-first century, there have been some changes of focus as books such as Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe and Sean Nixon’s Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Transatlantic Relations, c. 195169 brought a cultural studies perspective to the advertising industry’s own histories in British and European markets in particular.