Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising [Hardcover]

This volume provides a thoughtful and wide-ranging exploration of approaches to the critical study of advertising. Current and impending practices of advertising have in many ways exceeded the grasp of traditional modes of critique, due at least in part to their being formulated in very different historical conditions. To begin to address this lag, this edited collection explores through critical discussion and application a variety of critical approaches to advertising. Authors address a variety of concrete examples in their chapters, drawing on existing research while presenting new findings where relevant. In order to maintain the relevance of this collection past this particular historical moment, however, chapters do not simply report on empirical work, but develop a theoretical argument.

Introduction: Critical Traditions

1. Marketers Influence on Media: Renewing the Radical Tradition for the Digital Age

2. App Advertising: The Rise of the Player Commodity

3. Recovering Audience Labor from Audience Commodity Theory: Capitalizing on the Work of Signification

4. Contradiction and Crisis: The Political Economy of Promotional Authenticity

5. Toward a Critical Ecological Theory of Advertising

Part II: Ideology Critique

6. On the Futility of Advertising Critique: Searching for Alternatives

7. Art for Fun and Profit: The Political Aesthetics of Advertising

8. Control and the Rhetoric of Interactivity in Contemporary AdvertisinglCD