Advertising and Culture, Intellect: Bristol

摘要

Writing a coherent book on two topics as broad as culture and advertising is a difficult task, and doing so within the framework of an edited collection even more so. Chris Wharton approaches this challenge by identifying two key strands of analysis, one comprising chapters that deal with the relationship between culture and advertising in general terms and the other including chapters that look at the role of advertising within specific areas of culture, such as popular music, fashion and political communication. In addition, he also lists the key cross-cutting themes addressed in the book, which range from identity and power to history and technology. Neither the outline of strands nor the discussion of themes, however, manages to offer a sufficiently strong unifying framework for the book. While the introductory chapter does offer brief definitions of both advertising and culture and their interrelationships, it provides little sense of what exactly is distinctive or new about the approach adopted in the edited collection. Wharton's own chapter further in the book develops a more elaborated argument about advertising as culture, taking Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding as a departure point and examining how culture is encoded in adverts and how audiences draw on their own cultural experiences to decode them. One can see how the approach outlined here could be usefully expanded and used as a unifying framework that could provide the basis for a much more interesting and coherent book. Instead, Wharton's collection is much more loosely organized and its strengths lie primarily in (some of) its individual contributions.