ABSTRACT
Until relatively recently, critical advertising scholarship has focused on the social signicance of ads themselves. This canon, almost without fail, equates advertising with being visual. It makes extensive use of textual analysis to understand the historical, social, political, and cultural contexts from which ads derive their potency, inspire desire, and perpetuate brand mythologies. This approach sees advertising primarily as a symbolic practice interested in meaning making and sign play, and practitioners of advertising as handsomely paid bricoleurs employed to create novel combinations of symbols to engage and inuence consumers. Through this semiotic-led tactic, critical studies focus on reading advertisements (Williamson 1978; Vestergaard and Schroder 1985; Jhally 1990; Goldman 1992; Dyer 1993 [1982]; Goldman and Papson 1996; MacRury 2012).
