ABSTRACT
Most advertisements are highly ephemeral, yet in their efforts to catch the eyes, ears and minds of the public they are finely attuned to the values of their time. Like other fleeting entertainments, such as those provided by reportage of the private lives of public figures, their light narratives will be stamped with the weight of the anxieties which bear upon many of their readers, and with the kinds of hope and reassurance that at any particular time we offer to ourselves. While it cannot be proved that they do this with accuracy, we argued in Chapter 2 that the position of the advertising industry in relation to its clients (for whom it must appear to know about consumers) and to the extensive labours of commercial research give good grounds for assuming that advertisements do embody a high degree of cultural sensitivity. We saw in Chapter 3 that while for some students of advertising this means that advertisement content follows repetitive cyclical patterns, in keeping with cultural cycles, for others the elements of repetition are subsumed within a process of change in which history does not repeat itself; instead new configurations of values and new communicative strategies are seen to emerge. Our own empirical data points in this latter direction. We have found some progressive shifts in value content, and some changes which we think cannot be ascribed to fluctuation.
