Promotion 453
The charge that promotion debases the
culture has been regularly heard from aca-
demics and media commentators over the
years. Most recently, combined with the accusa-
tion that the most heavily promoted worldwide
brands can indeed manipulate people into
buying products they don’t need and can’t
afford, they have been powerfully levelled by
the authors of No Logo, a virtual manifesto for
counter-insurgency (Klein, 2000), by the
authors of the seminar papers collected
together in Buy This Book(Navaet al., 1997), and
by a journalist’s updating of Packard in The
Manipulators(Robinson, 1998).
From the practitioners’ point of view, this
is alarming sabre-rattling. Such critics seem to
detect an organized conspiracy to corrupt
society, masterminded on Madison Avenue or
in Covent Garden. Supporters of advertising
respond that advertisements in fact hold a
mirror up to our culture, rather than shaping it,
and that the audiences concerned are fully
capable of decoding them in their own way and
forming their own value judgements. They
argue that the critics’ view of popular culture,
including contemporary advertising, is conde-
scending to the populace.
The proposition that advertisers can con-
trol the news media presumes that they will be
unwilling to bite the hand that feeds them if it
deserves to be bitten in the public interest.
There is no evidence that any British advertiser
has ever managed to exert such influence;
indeed, news has occasionally been made by
failed attempts. Nevertheless, observers were
concerned that the introduction of programme
sponsorship might provide companies with
sufficient power to influence editorial com-
ment. In response, the statutory bodies which
control commercial broadcasting in Britain
have both amended their codes of practice
relating to advertising (Independent Television
Commission, 1998; Radio Authority, 2001).
Media owners themselves counter-argue
that advertising revenue guarantees editorial
freedom. Without it, they would need either to
charge prices for the product that would
guarantee its demise or to ask for a government
subsidy. The second solution raises, they point
out, the equally dangerous possibility of polit-
ical control, a familiar obstacle to reporting
matters of public concern in too many other
countries.
What is not clear about the social criti-
cisms of advertising described is why the
critics should assume the worst possible case.
There is a strong hint of the polemic in their
approach to the issues, which seems unneces-
sary in the face of a typically British middle-
of-the-road approach to the business of
producing advertisements. This is not to deny
that promotion of all kinds is sometimes mis-
leading, vulgar, full of innuendo or aestheti-
cally disastrous. However, any practitioner
consciously setting out to inflict such material
on the audience must first deliberately ignore
such well-established regulations as the British
Codes of Advertising and Sales Promotion, the
ITC Code of Advertising Standards and Prac-
tice, The Radio Authority Advertising and
Sponsorship Code, or the Direct Marketing
Association Code of Practice, and secondly
face up to the consequences. For further
details of these and other forms of control
against malpractice, see Baker (1998) under
‘advertising control’, ‘direct mail’ and ‘sales
promotion’. As for manipulation: if the aver-
age Western consumer is not in fact sophisti-
cated enough to cope with advertising, then
the appropriate counter-measure is consumer
educationrather than more constraints. If peo-
ple can be taught to recognize and resist
political indoctrination, there is no reason to
suppose education cannot do the same where
promotional initiatives are concerned.
Readers interested in pursuing socio-cul-
tural arguments for and against advertising
will find an absorbing textbook-length treat-
ment in Fowles (1996).
Having considered the views of profes-
sional observers, we turn now to the attitudes
of the ordinary citizens at whom most promo-
tional initiatives are directed. The Advertising
Association reports, in the most recent of a