ABSTRACT
Advertising has a number of functions. It is useful to recall the multiple ends attaching to various kinds of advertising. This contributes to establishing the quite broad scope of the genre. This chapter sets out some of these many and specific (and less specific) marketing functions of advertising. It should be remembered that the variation in advertising forms and contents is (to an important extent) tied to the particular aim and circumstance that occasions its production. Academic treatments in the past have been accused of understating the variety (and purposes) of advertising communications (we might say its constitutive sub-genres). Thus, a generalised view of ‘advertising’ as always symbolically rich, information ‘lite’ or aesthetically ambitious and (thus) (irrationally) persuasive or seductive (in more or less arbitrary ways) has occluded the existence of arrays of less glamorous and more straightforward and functional modes of advertising communications: product-focused ads, event-focused ads (e.g. advising of retail sales), recruitment ads, simple price-based ads, ‘boring’ ads for everyday marketing. Such mundane ‘sub’ genres have tended to be forgotten (or side-stepped) in favour of a look at just the aesthetically richer emotional appeals for cars, perfumes and holiday destinations – ‘extraneous’, ‘non-informational’, ‘pointless’ ads – highlighted further within critical analyses of the cultural imagery depicted.
