Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising

by Judith Williamson

A fascinating account of how the admen achieve their effects.?Stuart Hood

This book sets out not simply to criticize advertisements on the grounds of dishonesty and exploitation, but to examine in detail, through over a hundred illustrations, their undoubted attractiveness and appeal. The overt economic function of this appeal is to make us buy things. Its ideological function, however, is to involve us as 'individuals' in perpetuating the ideas which endorse the economic basis of our society. If it is economic conditions which make ideology necessary, it is ideology which makes those conditions seem necessary.

If society is to be changed, this vicious circle of "necessity" and ideas must be broken. Decoding Advertisements is an attempt to undo one link in the chain which we ourselves help to forge, in our acceptance not only of the images and values of advertising, but of the 'transparent' forms and structures in which they are embodied. It provides not an "answer," but a "set of tools" which we can use to alter our own perceptions of one of society's subtlest and most complex forms of propaganda.

Other books by Judith Williamson published by Marion Boyars are Consuming the Dynamics of Popular Culture and Deadline at Film Criticism 1980-1990 .

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Academic, Psychology, Art, Theory, Philosophy

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure if I was going to finish this – I got stuck and stopped reading, then the library told me it was due Monday and so I plunged back in and am so glad that I did. The problem was that she started talking about Lacan, a psychoanalyst and dead French guy, and every time I read about him I can’t tell if he is a nutcase or a genius. Either way, he makes me feel stupid. So, I started this book about 6 weeks ago, got up to the longish discussion on Lacan, stopped for about three weeks, and then finished it in a rush over the weekend.

I’m going to end this review with quotes from the book – so I’m not going to quote them here, just refer to them if I need to. The main quote below is that to understand ads you need both semiotics (an understanding of how signs ‘mean’) and psychology. By semiotics, she basically means the ideas of Saussure, that a sign is composed of both something that is signified and something that signifies. She makes it clear that neither of these bits of the sign are actually the ‘real’ thing in the ‘real’ world – or what she calls the referent. What is ‘signified’ is the idea of something, rather than ‘what it is’ – that is, the socially constructed idea of a thing, rather than the thing itself. A signifier, in strict Saussurian terms, is a word – but this is a very restrictive idea of a signifier, and today we consider many other non-linguistic ways of signifying. So that a photograph of an African American woman at night with her hands above her head with a placard reading ‘Don’t Shoot’ has a cascade of meanings, not at all restricted to recent events in Ferguson. In fact, the restricted signification of what is happening at Ferguson can only be understood in relation to the history of civil rights within the US and the use of ‘non-violence’ as a tool against oppression. What is signified and what is used to signify combine to make ‘the sign’.

It is important to start here in discussing how signs work – as the author does – because if advertisements are anything, they are signs. But now I’m going to stop following the author’s path and mention some stuff she has had me thinking about, rather than what she necessarily, actually said.

The first is the question of ideology and how it shapes how we understand the world and our place within the world. This is important, because there is a paradox deep in the heart of advertising that makes us stumble whenever we try to understand how it ‘works’. This paradox is why we so often think that only fools and children are affected by advertising, even when we can see that this simply can’t be the case. Even ourselves: clever, witty, cynical (or perhaps just sceptical) and worldly-wise as we are, end up with ‘storage rooms’ full of things we don’t need and can hardly even explain why we bought (or why we continue to buy) so many things we clearly don’t actually need or – given they are gathering dust – even actually want.

This is beautifully explained in the book. The one thing we all know about ads is that they tell lies – so, how is it that we get fooled by these ads so consistently? The problem is that the lies are a misdirection, in much the way that a magic trick relies on misdirection. We think that the power of an ad is in convincing us that Brand X really will make your clothes cleaner than Brand Y. But the advertisers know that you know this is horseshit. What you are being sold isn’t this supposed ‘truth claim’ – but the image of the loving wife and mother who is concerned enough about her husband and children that she is prepared to enter into a competition with other mothers so as to present her husband and children looking their best, and looking their best involves radiant white whites and vibrant coloured colours. It is the social stigma of not having the most radiant and vibrant family in the street that the product promises to over come that is really selling the product – not the overt truth claim itself. In effect, ads create idealised worlds and it is these idealised worlds that hail you, that invite you in, and that tell you ‘this is you – you are this kind of person – but to really be this kind of person, you need to buy this particular product.’ Ideology is the assumption that being ‘this kind of person’ is what you, in fact, want to be – and while you might be consciously able to say that you really don’t want to be that kind of person at all, because the world that is presented to you is presented as ‘natural’ and as ‘common sense’, ads attack us in ways that are other-than rational. They attack our reason by presenting perfect worlds that do not appeal to our reason, but to our conception of what it means to be ‘normal’. Whatever effort we are capable of exerting to ‘resist’ these ideal worlds is never quite enough as we are essentially social animals and the desire to assert our place in society is – as with that of the sign discussed above – about creating difference and identity. We need to be different from those whose whites look grey – we don’t necessarily believe Brand X will do that for us – but we buy Brand X anyway, as a kind of assertion of our belief in the need for the effort, even if not in the promised outcome.

The other thing that this book had me thinking about was the Marxist idea of alienation. A quick recap – there was a time when people would be fully involved in the process of producing things. If you were a blacksmith you would make an entire horseshoe. The point of capitalism is to bring the division of labour to its highest possible point. Capitalism could be defined as the system that destroys artisans. This means that people are increasingly alienated from the product of their labour – it is hard to feel that you really ‘made’ a car if your job involves putting in the four screws that attach the left door handle to the left door frame. The pleasure that comes from producing something is alienated from those involved in producing it, who are reduced to ‘cogs’ and who have fewer and fewer skills – their skills having been ‘engineered’ out of the production process. Ironically, the more socialised labour becomes – needing the whole of society to produce even the simplest thing – the more we are convinced we are ‘individuals’. The more capitalism makes us cogs in a machine, the more the ideology of capitalism makes us feel like pure individuals.

The point is that humans like to produce things – but the actual process of production is increasingly closed to us. This means that we are left to ‘produce’ ourselves and we do that by consumption. To become the sorts of people that we ‘are’ we need to buy particular things and these we are sold, not so much by us being told what to buy (what advertising looks like it is doing) – but by being shown images that appeal to our desires, images that actively creating those desires.

Now, I’m not sure how familiar you are with Keats and his Ode to a Grecian Urn. Take one poet, sit him in front of a piece of pottery with paintings on it of a Greek wedding and let his imagination run wild (if not amok). What he notices is that there is a kind of strange paradox involved in the images on the urn. There is the eternally beautiful bride, the husband about to kiss her forever in the fullness of his love and her beauty, the flute player playing silent music under a tree – all of these are highly charged and highly romantic images. But the paradox is that none of these things are ever consummated. The kiss NEVER happens, it is, instead, eternally anticipated. Don’t get me wrong, anticipation has much to recommend it – but you need to remember too that eternal anticipation is the definition of torture. Just ask my mate Tantalus. But it is amazing how many ads display this ‘moment just before’, this ‘moment in anticipation’. And given that the point of ads is to present you with the desire to purchase the product that will ‘satisfy’ this desire, isn’t it obvious that the moment before satisfaction – whether it be of food, drink or sex – would be the moment that would be displayed?

The last one is the difference between Nature and Natural – and why I’ve ended up buying this book. My daughter is going her PhD and for her honours thesis she looked at the differences between Japanese and Western presentations of food. As is explained at length in this book, Claude Levi-Strauss discussed the differences between nature and culture as the differences between the ‘raw and the cooked’. The raw is the stuff we take from nature – but we rarely leave it as ‘raw’. To be integrated into our culture, or into our bodies, in the case of food, it must be transformed in some why – and that transformation involves ‘cooking’. Now, cooking really means ‘transforming’ – not just heating up. In the West we tend to seek to elaborately transform our food – particularly meat – so that what we eat is unrecognisable from the animal from which it is a product. This is not the same in Japan, so much – where there is often an equally elaborate process involved in identifying the food with its origins. What is made clear in this book is that what we always seek is ‘the natural’ – no one ever wants to eat something that is ‘unnatural’, no one ever sold food by stressing how ‘unnatural’ it is. Rather, no matter how artificial something is, we stress its natural credentials, no matter how tenuous these might be.

The point being that when we stress how ‘natural’ something is, this is ‘natural’ within the meaning system of a particular culture, it is ‘natural’ after some form of cultural transformation, some kind of ‘cooking’. In our cultures ‘natural’ means something quite different from ‘nature’. You know, and quoting another dead poet, unlike the ‘natural’, nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’. It isn’t exactly a welcoming place for us. Nature is where life is ‘savage, brutish and short’. But natural is quite another thing. It is a place where cows sort of smile in giving up their milk, it is the sort of place where birds help to comb the hair of young women who have just washed their hair under a waterfall. Natural has less to do with ‘nature’ and much more to do with ‘culture’.

The best of this book is all of the stuff I haven’t told you about. Like Ways of Seeing or Gender Advertisements or Culture and the Ad – lots of this is really about literally decoding various advertisements. As she says, and perhaps one of the main things I learnt from this book, ads are like jokes – they never quite say enough to be understood, they always leave it to the reader to fill in the gaps. She decodes ads with a virtuosity that is truly breathtaking. It is a pleasure to witness and, although this book is getting on – it was first published in 1978 – like the other books mentioned above, it still has so much to offer in helping to understand advertising. I’m buying this to pass on to my daughter – but if you can get hold of it, it is worth the effort. Rightly a classic.

Some quotes:

So we see all of this ad’s signifying process embodied in the form, the arrangement of signifiers: why should there by the two frames, and the car spilling from one to the other, if not to transfer its meaning, and why should the colours be the same? The answer does not concern ‘aesthetics’ or ‘lay-out’ in themselves, but the interchange of values and significance. Page 32

This can be clarified as follows: there is a big difference between saying something is true (which admits the potential of the opposite), and saying that the truth of something need not be questioned – which admits nothing, and claims nothing either. In ideology, assumptions are made about us which we do not question, because we see them as ‘already’ true … page 41

This is a very important point, because the emphasis on individualism in ads reflects the social need for us to be kept separate: the economic and political world as it exists at present depends for its survival on keeping its participants fragmented. This is the function of ideology: it gives us the assurance that we are ourselves, separate individuals, and that we choose to do what we do. Page 53

What the advertisement clearly does is thus to signify, to represent to us, the object of desire. Since that object is the self, this means that, while ensnaring/creating the subject through his or her exchange of signs, the advertisement is actually feeding off that subject’s own desire for coherence and meaning in him or her self. Page 60

Absences and jokes are not fundamentally different features of advertising. Freud quotes Theodor Lipps on jokes: ‘A joke says what it has to say, not always in few words, but in too few words—that is, in words that are insufficient by strict logic or by common modes of thought and speech. It may even actually say what it has to say by not saying it.’ Thus jokes involve an absence: what is absent is meaning. We must break through to it; a joke appears absurd until we have penetrated to its ‘point’, to what is behind its condensed and flawed surface. Indeed, condensation, one of the essential features of a joke, inevitably involves absence, that of the ‘full’ meaning, the things condensed. And an actual absence in an ad, as in a verbal puzzle (like crossword clues) always implies that something should be there, in other words that something is meant. Page 72

I have concentrated on examining the ways in which advertising, as an ideological system, has appropriated systems of signification and psychic processes (which is why both semiology and psychology are valuable in the world of ‘decoding’ ads): these two areas merge where we ourselves become signs, part of an exchange system. Page 73

This is why ideology is so hard to pin down or unravel: because it constantly re-interprets while only claiming to re-present reality. And in the sign’s setting itself up as a simple representation of ‘reality’, it contributes to ideology’s claim to ‘transparency’ and ‘obviousness’. Page 74

Of course, the physical ordering of nature and the product of images of order go hand in hand: to know is to classify, to classify is to order, to order to overcome. Page 112

So the movement is all in one direction: society never looks back over its shoulder, as it were, to take an unshielded look at the nature that supplies the physical and ideal needs. It looks onwards, into the mirror which seems to reflect that background of nature, but only succeeds in bring into focus the image of society itself. Page 136

When these two meanings are elided the result is the paradox of desiring the inevitable—or to put it more mildly, wanting things to be how they already are. In this way the whole confused but symbolically resonant area of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ is denied recognition of its material function in our lives by being made to perform an ideological one. Page 137

…the image of magic in advertisements denies the fact that the product is produced, removing it from its real place in the world at the same time promising a product from the product. We are allowed to be producers only by being consumers. Thus we can produce by proxy, merely, since we buy the product, and it will then produce the magic result—beauty, love, safety, ect. Page 142

We need a way of looking at ourselves: which ads give us falsely…: we need to make sense of the world: which ads make us feel we are doing in making sense of them (hermeneutics). Page 170

So the basic structure of ideas surrounding advertising is, in fact, that of dishonesty and exploitation. Page 174

It is the images we see in ads which give them significance, which transfer their significance to the product. This is why advertising is so uncontrollable, because whatever restrictions are made in terms of their verbal content or ‘false claims’, there is no way of getting at their use of images and symbols. And it is precisely these which do the work of the ad anyway…” Page 175

We recreate ourselves every day, in accordance with an ideology based on property—where we are defined by our relationship to things, possessions, rather than each other. Page 179

['Izzat Radzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Edited: 21 Jan, since someone recommended a book, which actually would be a better compliment to this]

Brilliant, in a way of 20th century (1976) writing on the media. Have the thought this would compliment Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business or Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. But, a friend suggested Baudrillard's The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, which from a brief overlook, is the perfect one to continue after this book.

All the time while reading this, I got this vibe that resonates at times; either from Žižek writings (or lectures) or Walter Benjamin.
This is because; from Žižek, Judith critique of the so called 'natural' products in ads are truly in-line with Žižek's critique of the group/movements/companies/ads promoting so called organic products/foods.
Or actually, in her manners of writing, where truly one can mistake that this is written by Žižek himself! How (one might say; since she wrote before him) or in what way? Maybe by reading this you will get my point.
With Benjamin meanwhile, I got the sense while reading, that her point is an extension of Benjamin points on aura, surrealism (or surrealist movement) and latest; on history (since just recently I finished
Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's 'On the Concept of History'. This is especially true in chapter 7 (Time: Narrative and History) discussion on history and the movement from past or to the future. Only at the end of the book realised she did refer to him!

Definitely need to pick-up on Levis-Strauss, Althusser and/or Lacan's (since Freud is too big of a figure) psychoanalysis writings to further see into the framework of object-image, signifier-signified.

Felt truly invigorated by this read.
8/10, recommended!

[Kate Madrid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marx, Freud, Lacan, Althussar, et al

Fairly straightforward late 20th century Marxist/structuralist engagement with semiotics in advertising. I was mainly interested in the choice of ads (a choice, in itself, ideological) and was not disappointed. Good sampling and reproduction (even in the Kindle version) of the historical period of advertising. The tobacco and alcohol ads were most interesting to me.

[James]

Peter Bradshaw

[soren]

only read 34 pages for class

[Dayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has loads of interesting insights to offer into the ways in which advertisements shape our thinking and personalities. Creating artificial wants and needs and creating a certain ideological worldview of mindless consumers. the book is for anyone who has ever wondered what advertisements are really selling. Introduces all the major psychological-formal techniques that abstractly underlie all advertisement and propaganda, very carefully crafted and used by the designers. Helps to understand this stuff as it is constantly being bombarded on you from cradle to the grave and definitely shapes vast majority of peoples mentality.

[SHAMAH HAVUROVI · Rating 3 out of 5]

I need full version in pdf form

[Macalester Linguistics]

A 9.0