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Contents
Abstracts
Australian Press, Radio and Television Historiography: An Update
Bridget Griffen-Foley
This bibliography updates previous work by Henry Mayer and John Henningham. It is organised according to their categories and is annotated to provide an overview of developments in Australian research in media history.
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Too Soon: The Government’s Media Ownership Proposals
Simon Curtis, Tim Dwyer, Derek Wilding and Helen Wilson
In response to Minister Helen Coonan’s discussion paper on media reform released in March, the authors survey the recent history of media ownership policy with particular reference to the Productivity Commission’s visionary 2000 report on broadcasting. They argue that the present proposals fall short of the plan laid out in this report and are premature pending further development of digital media.
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Advertising and the Media
John Sinclair and Christina Spurgeon
As Media International Australia reflects on its 30 years of existence, perhaps it is fitting to recall that there has not been a themed issue on ‘Advertising and the Media’ since February 1998. This issue looks at that relationship in today’s world.
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Advertising and the New Search Media
Christina Spurgeon
This article takes a co-evolutionary approach to considering the influence of internet cultures and revenue sources on the development of the new commercial search media. The extent to which advertising revenues can be relied upon as a defining characteristic of commercial media in the global era is also problematised. A comparative consideration of the cases of Yahoo!, Google and Sensis pays particular attention to informational forms of advertising and the rhetorical, if not strategic, importance of small advertisers. Also considered are the disruptive impacts of new modes of interaction upon the established social relations of media, advertisers and consumers in the production, circulation and uses of symbolic power. While new search media business models are suggestive of new strategies for civilising advertising and capital more generally, the resilience and adaptability of the advertiser-funded business model provides an important point of historical continuity between the new search media and the politics and economics of modern mass (‘old’) media. The more things change, the more they also seem to be at risk of remaining the same.
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The Trojan Horse: Commercial Sponsorship as Advertising in the UK Context
Deborah Philips and Garry Whannel
This paper discusses the growth of commercial sponsorship in the United Kingdom and the way in which it served to legitimate the routine presence of commercial involvement in the public sector, paving the way for the development of PPP (Public Private Partnerships) and PFI (Private Finance Initiative). The establishment of the welfare state ethos during the 1940s included the principle of public support for cultural activity, although the actual degree of funding grew only slowly. Commercial sponsorship of sport grew dramatically from the mid-1960s and, during the 1970s, arts organisations — short of state funding — were encouraged to seek commercial sponsorship. Gradually, sponsorship became a routine source of funding, seen as an essential form of support for a whole range of cultural activities. Once the Conservative Party, led by Margaret Thatcher, came to power, the utilisation of sponsorship funding became a more integral part of public policy. Sponsorship began to colonise new areas such as education and health, moving from peripheral to central elements of the public sector. Benefiting from the image of corporate benevolence that sponsorship provided, the 1997 Labour government initiated a widespread expansion of private investment in the public sector, through PPP and PFI. The paper argues that sponsorship served to legitimate this colonisation of the public sector by private capital.
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Locating Editorials and Advertising in Wedding Magazines
Raelene Wilding
Unlike other magazines, few people subscribe to wedding magazines and, as most are annual publications, their presence on the publishing landscape is relatively intermittent and unobtrusive. Nevertheless, these publications provide a rich context for examining intersections between advertisements and editorials. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic and textual analysis of wedding magazines produced in Australia. I argue that the distinction between advertisement and editorial is not a useful analytical tool in this context. This is because the vast majority of advertisements and editorial pages in a wedding magazine appear almost identical: page after page of glossy photographs of wedding dresses. Rather, what is striking is the manner in which the magazine editors and advertising clients, in their discussions as each magazine issue is produced, negotiate the fine distinctions they perceive between advertising and editorial content. At stake in these negotiations is not just the economic success of both editor and client, but also their reputations as expert manipulators of symbolic representations.
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The Privatisation of Consumption: Marketing Media Through Sensory Modalities
Timothy deWaal Malefyt
Marketers have heralded a major shift in the way products and brands are currently marketed to consumers. Rather than marketing a product or brand on its rational or functional attributes, such as touting a car’s horsepower, agility or smooth ride, marketers now sell brands on their experiential or emotional dimensions, such as the sensations offered from driving the car brand. This shift towards ‘experiential marketing’ has not only affected the advertising end-product of executions, the advertising research process, but has also spurred new modes and models for advertising media planning. To wit, the linear and sequential model of media persuasion is being replaced by more open-ended, experiential models. Have marketers tapped into a new personalised way to approximate the consumer, or are these merely revised means of objectifying the consumer? This paper explores these dimensions and looks at what the changes in media models and consumer representations mean to marketers.
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The Convergence of Political and Government Advertising: Theory Versus Practice
Sally Young
Although they are sometimes confused, in theory government and political advertising are separate and quite distinct. By convention, government advertising — paid for directly by taxpayers — is to be used only for necessary government information campaigns which are neutral in nature and not liable to be perceived as creating a partisan benefit for the ruling party. By contrast, political advertising occurs predominantly during elections, is paid for by political parties or candidates, and is necessarily partisan, persuasive and usually highly emotive in nature. However, in the past two decades these distinctions have broken down. This paper explores the growing links between the two types of advertising at the federal level and concludes that there is a vast gap between the theory and reality of government advertising.
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Globalisation Trends in Australia’s Advertising Industry
John Sinclair
This year’s takeover of Australia’s largest advertising agency, George Patterson Partners, by the British-based global group WPP is just the most recent and dramatic event in a longer-term trend towards globalisation and a complex concentration of ownership in the advertising business. Global advertising groups like WPP, along with their global advertiser clients, are seeking strategically to align the same advertiser with the same agency in each major national market: the phenomenon of ‘global alignment’. Australian agencies are necessarily drawn into the resulting process of consolidation, so much so that it becomes not merely difficult to distinguish between national and international ownership, but almost meaningless. At the same time, there is emerging a greater differentiation of functions amongst agencies, although often coordinated under the one corporate umbrella. Certain agencies are specialising in media buying — that is, the tactical purchase of advertising time and space on behalf of clients — while ‘creative’ agencies provide the content to fill them. Others again are positioning themselves as experts in the burgeoning field of internet advertising. Other current trends include the breakdown of the once-strict boundaries between clients, agencies and media. Advertisers are setting up their own in-house agencies, agencies have acquired their own media outlets, and media are carrying ‘news’ and ‘entertainment’ content which has been prepared by agencies for their clients. Thus even the boundary between advertising and editorial or program content is also breaking down. This paper provides an overview of all these trends, as advertising scrambles to secure its place in the contemporary era of globalisation in a deregulated, post-mass media world.
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‘Truth in Advertising’: The Impossible Dream?
Robert Crawford
For an industry that deals with the public perception of images, it perhaps ironic that advertising itself has long suffered from a severe image problem. The industry has long been equated with exaggerations, distortions and falsities. Critics and the industry alike have looked to the possibility of truth in advertising to redeem its reputation. The discourse of truth in advertising that occurred in the advertising industry ranks during the early twentieth century provides a revealing insight into the way that the ‘magic system’ of advertising has been constructed. Reaching a high point in the 1920s, concerns about truth would recede over the course of the 1930s and 1940s as the industry moved to embrace new forms of technology. By examining the rise and fall of this discourse, this paper reveals the advertising industry’s fervent desire to improve advertising’s status whilst illustrating the way in which technological developments not only affected the industry, but also its ability to ever be completely truthful.
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Going Global: An Analysis of Global Women’s Magazine Ads in China
Hong Cheng and Katherine Toland Frith
Over the past few decades, some women’s magazines have rapidly spread as a global medium. While previous researchers have noted that women’s magazines act as agents of socialisation, perpetuating certain gender stereotypes and institutionalising certain gender conventions, there has been little research on how this global medium portrays women of various races. Combining content and semiotic analyses, this article is an examination of the context and content of ads that have appeared in the Chinese versions of global women’s magazines. The study focused on Elle, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Harper’s Bazaar, all global titles currently marketed in the Chinese mainland. Findings suggest that women of different races tend to be stereotyped in different ways in these magazines, and that Western models are presented in significantly different ways from Asian models. The impact of globalisation on these differences and the implications of the findings for global advertising are discussed.
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REVIEWS
Edited by: Helen Wilson and Kitty van Vuuren
Barlow, David M., Mitchell, Philip and O’Malley, Tom, The Media in Wales: Voices of a Small Nation
Burchett, George and Shimin, Nick, Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett
Cranny-Francis, Anne, Multimedia: Texts and Contexts
Croteau, David and Hoynes, William (eds), The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest, 2nd edn
McChesney, Robert, Newman, Russell and Scott, Ben (eds), The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century
Denney, David, Risk and Society
Franklin, Bob (ed.), Television Policy: The McTaggart Lectures
Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer (ed.), Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy
Goldsmith, Ben and O’Regan, Tom, The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy
Livingstone, Sonia (ed.), Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere
Lury, Karen, Interpreting Television
MacLeod, Susan, Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions
Morris, Meaghan, Grossberg, Lawrence and Bennett, Tony, New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society
Rosenberg, Daniel, and Harding, Susan (eds), Histories of the Future
Sammond, Nicholas, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960
Smart, Barry, The Sport Star: Modern Sport and the Cultural Economy of Sporting Celebrity
Thumim, Janet, Inventing Television Culture: Men, Women, and the Box
Western, Jon, Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency the Media and the American Public
Zayani, Mohamed (ed.), The Al Jazeera Phenomenon: Critical Perspectives on New Arab Media
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