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FEATURED SITE
- Adbusters. Smart, funny media analysis group aiming to bring real “truth in advertising.” Includes parodies of advertisements, and offers various ways to become a media activist.
GENERAL SITES
- AdFlip.com. Bills itself as the most extensive collection of contemporary and historical print ads online.
- Advertising Age magazine. A useful resource for looking inside the advertising industry.
- Advertising Bibliographies. Excellent set of materials arranged by subcategory, from University of Texas.
- False Advertising. A gallery of nasty ad and logo parodies.
- Gay Issues in Advertising.
GLAAD, a watchdog organization against gay discrimination includes articles and protests on a
variety of topics including gay images in ads. You will have to do a search to find the info needed.
- Commercial Closet. Site on gay advertising, both direct and closeted.
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Zap a Vision. Parodies of television commercials.
- AdCritic. Advertising
Age magazine's ad analyses from a business perspective.
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ONLINE ARTICLES
- Advertisers’ Strategies
to Target Gay Audiences in Attitude and Gay Times. An article by Rebecca Phillips.
- Analysis of Advertisements. A guide on how to go about analyzing ads, by Daniel Chander.
- Objects,
Decision Considerations and Self-Image in Men’s and Women’s
Impulse Purchases. An article by Helga Dittmar, Jane Beattie and Susanne Friese. Survey data revealing gender differences and the importance of image creation in impulse-buying.
- Rhetorical Figures in Advertising Language. An article by Edward F. McQuarrie and David Glen Mick.
- A
Semiotic Analysis of Magazine Ads for Men’s Fragrances. An
analysis of five different magazine ads for men’s colognes, by
Alexander Clare.
- Taking ADvantage (1): I Want It, I Want It Now: Greed and Advertising. A web project by Richard Taflinger, Washington State University.
- Taking ADvantage (2): Ads We Could Probably Do Without. A variety of ads which use sex to sell products, compiled by Richard Taflinger.
- All of Your Insecurities Wrapped up in a Thirty Second Spot. A look at how advertisements affect young women, by Abby Friedrich.
- “Torches
of Freedom”: Themes of Women’s
Liberation in American Cigarette Advertising. A historical analysis,
looking at how women’s liberation rhetoric has been co-opted and/or
reinvented by cigarette companies. Also contains some interesting
case studies in just how far companies may go in trying to push
their products.
This article is available as a pdf file at the author's site.
- Madison
Avenue versus The Feminine Mystique. Another
historical analysis, looking at how advertisers in general (including
some of the cigarette companies in the previous article) have responded
to the modern women’s movement. This article is available as a pdf
file at the author's site.
- Men’s Men and Women’s
Women. Explores the ways that gender is portrayed in TV commercials, depending on who the expected audience of the commercial is. Focuses specifically on four ads from different times of the day/week (so, targeted to different audiences). This
article is available as a pdf file at the author's site.
- Prime-time Pushers. A
look at the recent trend toward more and more television ads for prescription
drugs. “What does it mean for our health care when serious medicine
is marketed like soap?”
- Serious Business. Criticizes pharmaceutical companies for their inaccurate portrayal of HIV/AIDS, in treatment drug ads. For more on this, see also the New York Times article which shows another side of the issue.
- Star-Spangled Business: Labor, Patriotism, and Michael Jordan in a Nike Advertisement. Lengthy
critique of a particular television advertisement from Nike (featuring “Michael Jordan CEO”).
Good analysis of the Nike rhetoric versus the Nike reality.
- Women’s
Bodies in Sports Ads. Brief critique of the way women’s
physiques are depicted in ads for sportswear. Also contains links to
other sections,
looking at things such as feminist rhetoric in ads and specific competition
between Nike and Reebok for female customers. Look at the Glossary for still more analysis.
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ADVERTISING AND KIDS
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SELECTED ADS FOR FURTHER STUDY (with a few ad parodies to ease the task)
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HISTORICAL ADS
- Ad Access. Duke University presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in US and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955.
- AdFlip.com. Bills itself as the most extensive collection of historical ads online, from the forties to the nineties.
- Classic Advertisements Gallery. Includes about twenty ads made between the 1880s and 1930s (two pages).
- Classic Commercials. Extensive links to archives of historical television commercials, many viewable in their entirety online.
- Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920. Excellent resource from Duke University.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
[Few topics on
popular culture can be adequately researched on the web alone. These
reading suggestions are designed as beginning points for further offline
study.]
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Ewen, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass
Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. |
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Incisive look at how advertising and related consumer-oriented
messages have shaped US culture and consumer consciousness.
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Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Packaging the Presidency: A History
and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. |
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Classic study of how advertising techniques have shaped the
American electoral process. |
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Jhally, Sut. The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the
Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. |
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Strong study of how advertising texts shape racial, gender,
and class beliefs and create a “consumer” consciousness.
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Lears, T.J. Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History
of American Advertising. New York: Basic Books, 1994. |
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Richly detailed study of the rise of American advertising in
the context of later 19th and early 20th century American culture.
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Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
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Careful sociological study of the impact of advertising on US.
culture. |
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Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and
Meaning in Advertising. London: Boyars, 1978. |
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The classic text on how advertisements address and create their
audiences. |
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