A study of advertising in our society and culture, this book shows how advertising encompasses the three most influential domains of our lives; industrial technology, popular culture and mass media. The authors present an account of the attacks on advertising and the counter-arguments for it, and they explore the context in which advertising is created within agencies. Their book offers a theory about how advertizing connects goods and symbols in the consumer society, and a number of reflections on the implications of advertising for social issues and social policy.

Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products and Images of Well-Being

Stephen Kline

William Leiss

Sut Jhally

Nelson/Routledge

Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products, & Images of Well-Being

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

METHUEN

<p>In a marketplace that demands perpetual upgrades, the survival of interactive play ultimately depends on the adroit management of negotiations between game producers and youthful consumers of this new medium. The authors suggest a model of expansion that encompasses technological innovation, game design, and marketing practices. Their case study of video gaming exposes fundamental tensions between the opposing forces of continuity and change in the information economy: between the play culture of gaming and the spectator culture of television, the dynamism of interactive media and the increasingly homogeneous mass-mediated cultural marketplace, and emerging flexible post-Fordist management strategies and the surviving techniques of mass-mediated marketing. Digital Play suggests a future not of democratizing wired capitalism but instead of continuing tensions between "access to" and "enclosure in" technological innovation, between inertia and diversity in popular culture markets, and between commodification and free play in the cultural industries.</p>

Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing

Computers & Technology

Nick Dyer-Witheford

Greig de Peuter

Games & Strategy Guides

McGill-Queen's University Press

In this work, Stephen Kline provides a detailed history of marketing to children, revealing the strategies that shape the design of toys and have a powerful impact on the way children play. Stephen Kline looks at the history and development of children's play, culture and toys, from the teddy bear and Lego to the Barbie doll, Care Bears and the globally popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He profiles the rise of children's mass media - books, comics, film and television - and that of the specialty stores such as "Toys "R" Us", revealing how the opportunities to reach large audiences of children through television was a pivotal point in developing new approaches to advertising. Contemporary youngsters, he shows, are catapulted into a fantastic and chaotic time-space continuum of action toys thanks to the toy merchandisers' interest in animated television. In a chapter on advertising design, Kline looks at the imagery and appeal of toy commercials and at how they provide a host of stereotyped archetypal figures around which children can organize their imaginative experience. In a re-examination of the debates about the cultural effects of television, "Out of the Garden" asks whether we should allow our children's play culture to be primarily defined and created by marketing strategies, pointing to the unintended consequences of a situation in which images of real children playing in the normal course of their lives in narratives about and for the young have all but been eliminated.

Out of the Garden (Culture & Communication in Canada)

Verso Books

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Books by Stephen Kline