ABSTRACT
I want to discuss in the following pages whether there has been a significant change in the conventional code of advertising. In order to address this issue it needs first to be contextualised within the broader history of modern advertising over the last hundred years. This will be done only in outline (for a more detailed account see Falk 1994, Chapter 6) in order to give a sense of what I mean by the conventionality of modern advertising and how the code defining its boundaries has evolved during this century up to the emergence of what I call ‘the Benetton-Toscani effect’ in the late 1980s. This is the moment when Luciano Benetton and his art director Oliviero Toscani made their first transgressive moves in the field of advertising.
