ABSTRACT
Every day and for most of our lives we see and hear many advertisements. Even if you don’t read a newspaper or watch television, and walk around the streets with your eyes down, you will find it impossible to avoid some form of publicity, even if it’s only a trade display at a local store, uninvited handbills pushed through the letter box or cards displayed in the window of the corner newsagent. We usually take advertisements for granted because they are so pervasive, but many people, not least among them the advertisers themselves, claim that they are one of the most important influences in our lives. Not only do advertisements sell goods and services, they are commodities themselves, ‘the most ubiquitous form in which we encounter commercial photography’, according to a critic of advertising, Judith Williamson (1978, p. 57). In a sense advertising is the ‘official art’ of the advanced industrial nations of the west. It fills our newspapers and is plastered all over the urban environment; it is a highly organized institution, involving many artists, writers and film directors, and comprises a large proportion of the output of the mass media. It also influences the policies and the appearance of the media and makes them of central importance to the economy. Advertisements advance and perpetuate the ideas and values which are indispensable to a particular economy system. Advertisers want us to buy things, use them, throw them away and buy replacements in a cycle of continuous and conspicuous consumption.
