Advertising Six Feet Under

Abstract

In May 2003, the UK terrestrial television station Channel 4 launched an advertising campaign to promote the second series of the American television programme Six Feet Under. The images used, depicting live models stylised to resemble corpses, appeared to advertise a (fictional) brand of ‘afterlife beauty accessories’ including ‘wound filler’, ‘lip lock’, and ‘embalming fluid’. The campaign came under the scrutiny of the UK's Advertising Standards Authority when it received complaints from the public. In order to examine the controversy created by the campaign, a small, exploratory study was conducted. The aim of the study was to identify the discourses employed by complainants when articulating their negative reaction to the campaign. First, a thematic content analysis of the complaint documents was undertaken. Then, semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to unpack the discourses identified in the complaint documents. Four of these discourses will be discusses herein; namely, the discourses of advertising, of media altruism, of death as ‘taboo’, and of context, were all employed by the complainants and interviewees to rationalise their reactions to the adverts. Finally, these four discourses are considered within the broader field of the sociology of morals.

Keywords:

• Six Feet Under
• advertising
• complaints
• discourses
• media
• moral outrage
• context

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tony Walter and Jacque Lynn Foltyn for providing feedback on early drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and helpful comments. Finally, I would like to thank the interviewees for their participation in this research project.

Notes

[1] The second series began on the 1 June 2003.

[2] ‘Untargeted media’ are media that can be seen by anybody, such as billboards.

[3] Images reproduced with the kind permission of 4Creative. Photographer: Jenny Hands. Original images in colour.

[4] The Times, Time Out, and The Observer all reported to the ASA that they had received no complaints.

[5] CAP code sections: 2.2, 5.1, 5.2, 9.1, 47.1, 47.2 (CAP, 2003).

[6] The other was for the children's charity Barnardos. Their Silver Spoons campaign comprised four images, all depicting a baby with an object protruding from its mouth (a bottle of methylated spirit, a cockroach, a syringe, a silver spoon). This campaign received the most complaints in 2003 and was deemed by the ASA ‘likely to cause serious or widespread offence’. The charity defended their choice of imagery by stating that they ‘caused distress with good reason’ (ASA, 2004) but the complaints were upheld, nonetheless.

[7] The magazines provided these letters upon request. The ASA refused access to the letters of complaint they had received.

[8] This was done because the complaint documents implied that it had been wholly unsuitable to place the adverts in those particular magazines, suggesting that the advert did not conform to the style of the other magazine content. I was therefore interested to see if any of the participants noticed the advert prior to having it drawn to their attention.

[9] ‘Fisher & Sons’ was the name of the funeral home in which the programme was set. The logo was, therefore, for a fictional (though still potentially recognisable) business.

[10] All interviewees have been awarded pseudonyms.