What Do People Do With Advertising?

Abstract

The literature on advertising effects is massively loaded in its assumption that advertising does things to people. This paper asks what is known about what people do with advertising and, more significantly, how could we learn more? A review of 15 years' published research into advertising effects located 619 conceptual or empirical studies. Of these, just over 30 considered the integration of advertising into everyday life. Five thematic questions were found to account for the entire literature. First, what do people do during television commercial breaks? Second, what is the social context of advertising reception? Third, how does advertising find expression in interpersonal communication? Fourth, how do intra-family relationships and processes mediate the effects of advertising on children? Fifth, how are advertisements used by family members in their social interactions? The evidence, though somewhat insubstantial, points to an active audience which manages its relationship with advertising and integrates it into everyday family social practices in productive ways. To learn more, we need to adopt new methods of investigation. The simple stimulus-response, or stimulus-[organism]-response, model so favoured by advertising researchers is inadequate to the task, because of its exclusion of social context. An ethnographic approach grounded in social action theory is recommended.