ABSTRACT
Advertising can be related to activities in marketing under the heading ‘distribution’. However, advertising is a special kind of distribution, working in markets, but also in ‘culture’. Advertising agencies’ creativity serves marketers’ attempts to represent products, brands and services in order to make them more readily acceptable and desirable to consumers: consumers who are physically at a distance, and who are not present to consider and compare goods directly. Advertising addresses (potential) consumers who are at a remove and who cannot enter, there and then, into direct dialogue about services – or have hands-on contact with products. However this is not just a matter of overcoming physical distances: advertising is also concerned with cultural communication. In this sense advertising works to increase (or maintain) the extent to which particular products, services and brand ideas remain or become culturally distributable. Ads make marketed objects more exciting, or perhaps reassure consumers of the acceptability and value of a product, while also reminding or alerting consumers to products’ availability, or prompting consumers about an imminent event – a sale or a product launch for example. To effectively manage this type of cultural distribution requires that advertisers have access to advertising agencies to help them:
• represent products, brands and related ideas appropriately and effectively in relevant markets and cultures;
• know and understand consumers (including how they change); • locate, target and invite potential consumers (distributed in ‘time’
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to products and their associated ideas and promises. To help achieve these ends agencies aim to provide various kinds of marketing intermediation, for example deploying event or product-specific and informative ads or, in other circumstances, deploying more indirect and symbolically rich modes of communication. Consumers are asked to attend to wide variations in styles and types of advertising, which include appeals variously privileging fact, fantasies or various kinds of consumer ‘education’. Such intermediation is advertising’s contribution to the distributive labour of getting goods or services to market, variously moving both products and consumers. It is useful to think of advertising distribution as simultaneously ‘opening up markets’ as a tool in practical commerce and as a genre in cultural communications.
