Building the Bridge Between Advertising and Social Change

Abstract

The Internet has increased the media's presence in the lives of Americans by way of social media and video streaming websites. As Americans continue to access endless streams of media content, they are also constantly inundated with advertisements. Whether they are tucked away on the side of a webpage, embedded in newsfeeds, or unavoidable interruptions before video clips, advertisements have become significant in the everyday lives of Americans. Not only are they significant in frequency of appearance, but more importantly, as products of media, they possess meaningful cultural value. Scholar, Douglas Kellner rightfully argues that media and advertising provide the tools for us to forge our identities; our notions of gender, class, ethnicity and race, nationality, sexuality, and of 'us' and 'them.' Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values…and how to conform to the dominant system of norms, values, practices, and institutions"1(Kellner, 7). Due to the significant roles that media and advertising play in individuals identity formation and worldviews, it is necessary to consider the role that ads play in reproducing or maintaining hegemony. Utilizing James Lull's definition of hegemony as "power or dominance that one social group has over others2" (Lull, 33), scholars have argued that advertisers, employed in an industry motivated by profit and once labeled as, "hidden persuaders," have worked in favor of maintaining hegemony and the dominant ideology. (For the purposes of this paper, the dominant group is considered as being comprised of White, middle to upper class men who would like to maintain a capitalist based, patriarchal society and hegemony.) Historically, media corporations and advertising agencies have engaged in exclusive employment decisions by hiring mostly White, middle to upper-class males to fill executive positions. The business sector also has a history of being dominated by White men. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that corporations utilize the media as "tools to perpetuate their power, wealth and status3" (Lull, 33). However, despite the instinct to conclude that media corporations, belonging to and controlled by the dominant group, use their power to reproduce hegemony, recent advertisements challenge this assumption.

Building the Bridge Between Advertising and Social Change by Jaquelin Salg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License