ABSTRACT
Until the 1990s, researchers studied advertisements in accordance with the underlying and largely unquestioned assumptions (Stern 1992, Stern 1993) that language neutrality enables transmission of the ‘same' information to all recipients and that meaning can be universally and ‘correctly' comprehended by all consumers, notwithstanding the tendency of some consumers to miscomprehend some messages. These assumptions are embedded in the modernist premise of a single right reading in which consumers respond to stable advertising text. Only within the last decade have advertising researchers challenged these assumptions, introducing feminist and multicultural ideas about reading that cast doubt on the existence of stable language and universally comprehensible meanings.
