ABSTRACT
This chapter explores key ideas relating to consumption and advertising from new media studies perspectives. It involves grasping the general contours of consumption and processes of branding. Centrally, the chapter also requires that the consumers understand in some detail how advertising works and how it is changing in light of digital developments in media. Baudrillard argues that the simulative function of consumer society accounts in part for the seeming insatiability and continual dissatisfaction of consumers, and our desire to keep acquiring more ‘stuff’. However, Baudrillard also observes that there is no ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consumption and consumer society. To quote: the consumer experiences his distinctive behaviour as freedom, as aspiration, as choice. Creatives in advertising are dependent, therefore, on the politics and conventions of (digital) culture, fine art, graphic design, media, photography, pop music, subcultural activities, typography, web design/aesthetics, a variety of literary tropes and many other areas of cultural production.
