ABSTRACT
That moment we all know from the opening credits of The Simpsons, when the family crowds together on the couch in front of their television, is an ironic and already nostalgic image of the golden age of mass media now coming to its end. The media have been ‘mass’ to the extent that for generations they have provided a more or less common culture of information and entertainment to a national, heterogeneous audience, an audience that certain kinds of advertisers still gladly pay to reach. Indeed, advertising revenue has underwritten that common culture, and advertisements have been a significant part of it. Television in particular has been the dominant advertising medium, and the television commercial, or TVC, has made its own distinctive contribution to mass culture. For example, the Hovis ‘Bike Ride’ ad in the UK, Wendy’s ‘Where’s the beef?’ in the US, and Telstra’s ‘Not happy, Jan!’ in Australia each found a place in their respective national popular cultures. First it had been the newspaper which formed the nation as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983), and then broadcasting, but especially television, which developed a very public and accessible culture in each nation to which it was introduced; not always but characteristically, and ultimately, on a commercial basis. In this way, the major means of social communication in most modern societies had come to rely financially on funding from the manufacturers and retailers of consumer goods and services, in the form of advertising.
