The dominance of advertising in everyday life carries potent cultural meaning. As a major force in the rise of "image based culture," advertising spreads images that shape how people live their lives. While scholarship on visual images has advanced our understanding of the role of advertising in society, for example in revealing how images of extremely thin female models and athletic heroes shape ideals and aspirations, images circulated through lagnuage codes--or "verbal images"--in advertising have received less attention. Imaging in Advertising explores how the verbal and visual work together to build a discourse of advertising that speaks to audiences and has the power to move them to particular thoughts and actions. In this book, Fern L. Johnson presents a series of case studies exploring important advertising images--racial connotations in cigarette advertising, representations of cultural diversity in teen television commercials, metaphors of the face appearing in ads for skin care products, language borrowed from technology to sell non-technology products, and the illusion of personal choice that is promoted in many Internet web sites. Johnson argues that examining the interplay of verbal and visual images as a structured whole exposes the invase role of advertising in shaping culture in 21st century America.

The mute gestures of advertising images are frozen for posterity by photographers and illustrators, gestures that, for better or worse, perpetuate a certain aesthetic and eventually become emblematic of a period. The images of today display the values of a society that has more interest in the body than the mind. They are technoenhanced labyrinths of unattainable appearances that leave women and men feeling horrified, estranged, and restricted by unrealistic, silent mandates. Measuring Up looks at advertising as more than just a way to extract money from unsuspecting people but as a vehicle for conveying the larger views of a confining, body-obsessed culture. By weaving theoretical and textual insights from feminist and cultural studies with the voices of real women and men, Measuring Up offers a unique reception analysis of the effects of repetitious exposure to advertisements of perfect bodies in our everyday lives. Shields examines a particular, complex relationship between the idealized images of gender we see in advertising and our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior in relation to these images. The study is unique in presenting audience reception in terms of ethnographic data, not textual interpretations alone. Measuring Up engages with and informs current theoretical debates within these sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory literatures: feminist media studies, feminist film theory, critical social theory, cultural studies, and critical ethnography. This is an important work that explores the forms and channels of power used in one of the most insidious and overt means of mass influence in popular culture.

Talking dogs pitching ethnic food. Heart-tugging appeals for contributions. Recruitment calls for enlistment in the military. Tub-thumpers excoriating American society with over-the-top rhetoric. At every turn, Americans are exhorted to spend money, join organizations, rally to causes, or express outrage. Image Makers is a comprehensive analysis of modern advocacy-from commercials to public service ads to government propaganda-and its roots in advertising and public relations. Robert Jackall and Janice M. Hirota explore the fashioning of the apparatus of advocacy through the stories of two organizations, the Committee on Public Information, which sold the Great War to the American public, and the Advertising Council, which since the Second World War has been the main coordinator of public service advertising. They then turn to the career of William Bernbach, the adman's adman, who reinvented advertising and grappled creatively with the profound skepticism of a propaganda-weary midcentury public. Jackall and Hirota argue that the tools-in-trade and habits of mind of "image makers" have now migrated into every corner of modern society. Advocacy is now a vocation for many, and American society abounds as well with "technicians in moral outrage," including street-smart impresarios, feminist preachers, and bombastic talk-radio hosts. The apparatus and ethos of advocacy give rise to endlessly shifting patterns of conflicting representations and claims, and in their midst Image Makers offers a clear and spirited understanding of advocacy in contemporary society and the quandaries it generates.

For upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in communication and media studies