Racialisation and the cultural politics of advertising.

This thesis demonstrates that advertising is an important and neglected site of
racialisation. It argues that advertising plays a crucial role in the cultural politics
of 'race' but that, in order to examine this role, we need a more subtle
understanding of the production and consumption of advertising meanings.
That the relationship between advertising and racialisation remains understudied
is arguably a result of traditional academic approaches to the media
which have tended to focus exclusively on textual interpretations of media
products by academics themselves. This project has attempted to move beyond
such approaches by investigating the social relations of production and
consumption of British television advertising in a number of sites, in addition to
analysing the content of such advertisements. The project focuses upon young
consumers; this is a group to which advertising most frequently targets
racialised imagery, a group whose 'cultures' have been actively influenced by
racialised minorities, and who are arguably the most 'media literate' of
consumers. It employs a variety of research techniques, including content
analysis, participant observation in an advertising agency, individual interviews
with industry personnel and group discussions with young people in two
contrasting London schools. It concludes that, in contrast to accounts of
advertising that emphasise 'rational' economics, all stages of the advertising
process are rife with racialised meanings.
The thesis shows how advertising is sometimes consumed in different ways
from those intended by its producers, and that there are significant differences
in consumption among different groups of consumers. Such differential patterns
of consumption are not adequately explained by reference to traditional social
categories such as 'race', gender and class; instead relational categories of
difference and distinction have greater explanatory value. The thesis
incorporates an attempt to provide a critical handle on the advertising industry,
and draws attention to the consistent presence of relations of power in the
cultural politics of advertising. It discusses the notion of 'resistance' to such
relations by the young people interviewed and concludes that previous research
has tended to over-simplify, and over-estimate the extent of, consumer
resistance to advertising's dominant meanings.