ABSTRACT
In the previous two chapters we have looked primarily at advertisement texts. There has been a tendency in academic advertising studies to privilege texts as the main focus of analysis – a tendency emerging from scholars sharing in the assumptions, methods and approaches of other cultural, literary and media-oriented work. Text-focused semiotic analyses are not entirely blind to the moments of reading and reception (Van Leeuwen 2005: 3-14), and a good deal of textual analysis does attempt to build readers and contexts into the picture (e.g. McQuarrie and Mick 1992; MacRury 1997; Stern 2000; Van Leeuwen 2005). Nevertheless there is some value in taking reading, viewing and audiences more prominently as starting points in thinking about advertising: decentring the advertisement-text, seeing it as a restraint upon as opposed to a determinant of meaning-making and the terms of engagement in commercially-oriented communications. A number of valuable approaches have emerged from such a perspective, using various sociological and psychologically-based methods: social psychology, ethnography and psychoanalysis.
