The End of the Shock of the New

2021

The American author Charles Bukowski (1904-1984) has become an authorial brand – that is, a complex symbol that projects a set of associations onto commercial products. This brand emerges from interactions between the f ields of creation, production, and reception. Bukowski himself fuelled this interaction by constructing a recognizable, albeit contradictory public f igure: that of the successful loser. Focusing on the Dutch reception of Bukowski as a case study, I demonstrate how cultural producers and suppliers capitalize on this f igure, invoking it to suggest that their products allow consumers to partake in the Bukowskian lifestyle. However, the contradictions inherent in the persona of the successful loser subvert this process. As a consequence, instances of Bukowskian branding appear as normative failures, as their very success belies the values associated

2020

Cultural analysis has been under review by scholars and presents itself today with invaluable tools/methods for the analysis and deconstruction of everyday objects and their sociocultural contexts. In this sense, we approach the object of a marketing campaign for Gucci, entitled “Gucci Hallucination”. The video and associated visual narrative(s) under review underline neo-Victorian readings and backgrounds, mainly through the character of Ophelia. The articulation of approaches in textual analysis within brand communication underlines the potential for interdisciplinary research.

2017

This is primarily a discussion about change, a topic relevant to many industries and, particularly, to students as they prepare for exciting but potentially uncertain futures [1] . It is an occasion to think about the implications and emergence of some new promotional idioms such as branded content, sub genres such as ‘native advertising’, and to consider some new generation, high profile, promotional media forms, notably vlogging. [1] This paper was originally given as a keynote at the Bournemouth University Promotional Communication Conference 2017, an event which features final year students presenting their dissertation projects.

2021

This chapter aims to deconstruct the category of modernity by confronting a prevailing abstracted view on screen advertising with the contingencies of its archival history. Taking as a case study the 1960s 'cola wars' and the marketing of cola soft drinks, the chapter shows how this competition between Pepsi and Coke related to stylistic innovations such as montage sequences, and what relevant mid-level finds can be made regarding one specific Pepsi campaign of that era without indulging in overly general arguments about modernism or modernity.

Cultural History, 2023

This article examines the first emergence of theories of advertising in the psychological language of the nonrational mind in Britain. The theories appeared from the close of the nineteenth century in a new genre of advertising literature: books, essays, pamphlets, course offerings, and periodical publications dedicated to advertising. In dialogue with a forgotten 1911 novel by Oliver Onions, Good Boy Seldom: A Romance of Advertisement, the analysis considers the anxieties that attended the new theories, which attributed unusual power to advertising and therefore challenged perceptions of the capitalist economy as disenchanted and disenchanting. It also shows the efforts that professional advertisers made to reconcile their theories with views of consumers as rational, and of the advertising industry itself as a rationalizing force. Their efforts suggest a misinterpretation by Onions and critics of advertising that he foreshadowed, who portrayed advertising professionals as bold canvassers of the public psyche. In fact, they were insecure and uncomfortable with their terms of expertise, and developed them because mounting criticisms leveled at advertising left them little choice. Nonetheless, Onions captured the lasting power of this transformation. Despite their insecurity, early professionals created a myth still harbored today, that advertisers are masters of subliminal control in capitalism.

Mobilising what Jean-Marie Floch calls the semiotic square, this 10,000-word article explores the tranition from 'this thing' (the car itself) to 'that thing' (the car in the advertisment) and what the concomitant transitivity between a global brand and a national culture can entail through a close textual analysis of British televison and poster pulbicity for the Renault Clio, and in particular for the Clio III. Organised around the ludic rheme, 'Twice the Va Va Voom', and the crtitical valorisation, 'French car, British designers', the advertising campaign, launched in 2005, elaborates a double-code that sets up the idea of the 'country-of-origin' as a contest, pitting Britain, in the guise of Ben, against France, in the guise of Sophie. As such, the commercial identity of the car is performatively imbricated, scene-by-scene, with cultural phenomena from both France and Britain - engineering, food, literature, and romance. Accordingly, I deal with the tension between sameness and difference in Anglo-French relations that the verbal and visual rhetoric of the publicity connotes in the context of the 'entente cordiale'. I take into account the way the ad campaign simultaneously maintains and deconstructs the cultural, social and historical stereotypes that exist on the ‘outside’, addressing sex and gender identities, white nationalism and white foreignness, and the racial blind spots of the advertisement in comparison to the preceeding 'Va Va Voom' campaign, which starred the black footballer Thierry Henry. At the same time, as we observe Ben and Sophie driving their respective Clios around London and Paris in the television advertisement, and the conjunction of London and Paris signified in the poster, the city is objectified as a kind of meeting point or passage for the negotitation of new social relations and networks that enunciate the transition from poltical to commercial globalism in the Single European Market. This research paper was originally delivered as a keynote address for the Design History Society Annual Conference, ‘Writing Design - Process: Object: Discourse: Translation’ at the University of Hertfordshire, 3-5 September 2009.

ACR North American Advances, 2017

International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, 2019

This essay analyses the features of a new semiotic system and of a new language in advertisement and political texts issued by Italian and Russian Futurists. My semiotic approach reveals the avant-garde's intention to 'destroy' the sign and to undermine the traditional relationship between the signified and the signifier, as well as the avant-garde's tendency to reject symbolical representation in favour of iconical and indexical types of representation. The Futurists' special interest in advertising reflects their orientation towards overcoming the border between art and reality and to break down the delineations between a sign and an object of reality. Commercial advertising, political agitation, and revolutionary propaganda offered Futurist artists an opportunity for creating new realities. This essay identifies the main features of 'contamination' as a form of interaction between avant-garde and advertising discourses, such as creating new hybrid genres and text forms. It examines how the Futurists applied avant-garde linguistic tools, such as defamiliarization, neologisms, and multimodality, to political and advertising discourses, and how they used avant-garde communicative strategies in their advertising texts. Furthermore, this essay examines the use of onomatopoeia and 'telegraphic' syntax as the iconical type of representation; it discusses the shift from iconical to indexical signification that can be found in advertising posters. Thereby I show how hybrid texts and new multimodal media operated with a combination of iconical and indexical modes of representation.