The code violations we have discussed thus far are based on extensive familiarity with television codes and television texts. An increasing proportion of ads in the 1980s presumed this media literacy by recirculating the form and content of previous ads, and transforming these into signifiers of media reflexivity and commodity difference. Self-referential intertextuality in TV advertising is a function of four decades of television history and the ubiquitous presence of television and advertising in our lives. Television has become the hegemonic medium in the U.S. - 99% of all households have a television and it's on an average of seven hours a day per household. We live in a sea of signs in which it is ever more difficult to differentiate one sign from another. Viewers who have a history of media consumption also have a history of negotiating the positioning strategies used by advertisers - this permits advertisers to call on viewers' memories, as well as their hostility towards the most formulaic and invasive advertising strategies of the past.

Textual allusion relies on a banking approach to knowledge - it requires that we collect and recognize discrete units of information (as in the game Trivial Pursuits). Ads which rely on self-referential intertextuality demand a degree of reflexivity about the system of advertising; they thus speak to a higher form of media literacy where viewers are asked to generalize and abstract from specific texts. Contemporary culture is turned into a giant mine for intertextual references. Any text can become carved up into component signifiers, there to be appropriated to augment the symbolic exchange value of any commodity. Appropriating narrative moments or scenes from films (e.g., 9 1/2 weeks in GM ads, "We Build Excitement"; or the Dairy Board's unabashed rip-off of Risky Business) turns the meaning of any text into a floating signifier. Under these circumstances, the name of the game for viewers becomes name that sign - seeing how abbreviated the signifier can become before they can no longer recognize its source. Viewers who possess more comprehensive familiarity with popular culture can better recognize the twists and ironic nuances available in ads these days. In this sense, advertisers have tried to restore the pleasure in reading texts. To recognize the ad text is to feel literate and may be a source of ego enhancement; or it may make us feel a part of an 'in crowd' who are privy to a full understanding of the multiple layers of meaning (note the similarity to going backstage).

This Nike ad joined cinema and basketball referent systems by drawing on Spike Lee's character of Mars Blackmon, along with that of Nola Darling, from his film She's Gotta Have It.

Media intertextuality is certainly not new to advertising. Historically, the most common and vulgar form is the celebrity spokesperson - their presence summons forth the value they have accumulated as a star and attempts to transfer it to the product. Equally pervasive is the use of the celebrity as character, where their role is referred to in the commercial (e.g., Karl Malden as all-knowing ex-television cop who warns tourists in behalf of American Express traveler's checks). But this form of intertextuality requires no reflexivity. In the late 1980s, however, the use of celebrities has become mixed with media reflexivity. Karl Malden now appears on the television screen in the tourist hotel room, and Michael Jordan and Spike Lee self-reflexively play with mixing multiple referent systems for Nike. These ads rely upon our knowledge of celebrity-ness, ad-ness, and the reputed powers of commodities as the basis for spoofing all of the above.

Intertextual references work as a hook to anchor the association of the commodity with the everyday life of the consumer. One way to do this is through musical referents. In the early 1980s, advertising jingles gave way to the non-jingle. Jingles were short musical phrases repeated over and over; they were commissioned specifically for the advertiser's purpose and were keyed to memorization. In the non-jingle, the music no longer seems to emanate from the commodity, now the latter must draw on (import) an outside referent system. Whereas the jingle aimed to elicit name recall, ads now aim to transfer or exchange value from the music to the product. This manifests the same tendency in music that we have already observed with images - the tendency towards purer forms of sign value. Music, like images, has been broken down into signifier and signified. Any given musical style could be chosen for the currency its signified could lend to the commodity in question. Advertisers in the 1980s recognized that rock and pop constitute independent referent systems that already have value. TV ads began to draw on previous mass media musical hits as a method of hailing various target audiences. Thus, addressing so-called 'Yuppie' target group members, advertisers pulled out pop-rock classics from the 1960s. Since the music of that generation had mixed with the phenomenology of everyday experience, its use as a signifier evoked nostalgia as well as a sense of collective aesthetic identity. They were playing our totem group.

Pepsi adapted Robert Palmer's music video as a means of boosting Pepsi sign value.

The nostalgia boom in musical intertextuality convinced many advertisers that the rock 'n' roll generation of the postwar period perceived a vast difference between pop music (non-authentic) and rock (authentic). Soon, Michelob ads began to tap the meaning of rock 'n' roll - as defined by Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood - and the meaning of MTV videos. Whatever else we might say of Robert Plant's ad for Coke or Robert Palmer's deadpanned-sex video for Pepsi, they obviously sought to simulate state-of-the-art rock videos. However, audience members who have invested part of their aesthetic identity in a particular text or genre or performer may deeply resent the way in which the authenticity of the above is compromised by commodification.

Advertisers tap into rock because it already has value - which is particularly important in the transfer of value to a product. Whereas the jingle allowed maximum recall, in the newer music the critical issue is the transfer or exchange of value from the cultural referent system (e.g., Eric Clapton) to the named product. The jingle hailed a less sophisticated television viewing audience. Though the agenda for moving from the jingle to 'real music' was to signify a departure from over-packaged artifice, the movement also represents a more highly developed stage of commodification, rather than a move away from it. As the average life of ad campaigns has shortened to thirteen weeks, the jingle no longer fits the demands of the marketplace because it requires a longer period of time in which to establish its value by implanting itself in the collective memory of the viewing audience.

Each form of intertextuality is based on abstracting a slice or even a particle of a musical text, a photographic style, or a scene from a previous mass-media production. The signifier is the bracketed text and the signified becomes the 'appreciation of American pop culture' attached to the commodity in question. For instance, Coor's and Hershey's ad campaigns hurl myriad abstracted signifiers at viewers to a staccato beat. Each signifier is a reminder of a previous cultural production or a star or an event, now reframed as an "American Original" (Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Sugar Ray Leonard, Neal Armstrong on the moon). Each discrete signifier (e.g., Monroe) is also made to stand for something larger, American pop culture history. Coor's attempts to cumulate the value of these icons and thereby transfer to itself the meaning of an "American Original." Coor's thus identifies itself as both an essential moment in this cultural formation and a means to it.

This constant process of remythologizing pop culture is grounded in a pervasive process of intertextual circularity. Intertextuality means substituting other texts for experience in daily life as a reference system (Lefebvre, 1971). Ads increasingly depend on viewer recognition of previous media texts in order to establish marginally differentiated meanings. As a greater proportion of time is spent consuming texts, textual consumption replaces experience as the social capital necessary for successfully transacting social relationships. "I saw" replaces "I did" in the society of the spectacle (Debord, 1977). But, intertextuality does not just refer to other texts, it ransacks and devours them in the relentless search for sign values (see Fiske, 1989: 123). As a result, collective memory is no longer grounded entirely in history or social context, but also in the perpetual process of abstracting and rerouting meanings. The process of recycling and rerouting cultural fragments in search of new exchange values, ironically contributes to a collapse in the hierarchy of cultural value. As Marx prophesied, "All that is solid melts into air" (see Berman, 1982).

We cannot underestimate the cultural impact of the constant process of decontextualizing signifieds, turning them into signifiers, and redirecting them toward other signifieds. Our desensitization to this fact makes it possible for a firm like ITT to appropriate the modestly populist lyrics of the Jefferson Starship's song "We Built This City," and convert them into a corporate musical slogan: "We Built This Business." Since history has little meaning within mass culture even the texts banned in one historical period can find their way back when fragments of the texts are retrieved in the context of an ad. Donovan's "Mellow Yellow" was blacklisted by the FCC as a drug song in the 1960s, but in the 1980s it serves as the background wallpaper for margarine ads.

Intertextual Inbreeding - When the Subject is Ads

But the advertising industry can no longer content itself with merely appropriating bits and pieces of culture from other fields. In order to one-up themselves and their competitors, advertisers have turned toward our store of knowledge about advertisements themselves. Some campaigns become predicated on viewer familiarity with previous ads in the campaign, such as the Bo Jackson ads for Nike. Initially, this campaign merely demanded that viewers know about Jackson as a sports figure who tries to play more than one professional sport. But as the campaign unfolded, the narrative of each ad drew upon previous ads in the sense that each previous ad became the referent for a new joke about the Bo Jackson legend.

Sign wars are direct attacks on the sign of an immediate competitor, and presume viewer recognition of the sign values generated by other advertisements. For example, Stroh's attacked the signifier of Bud Lite (Spuds Mackenzie) by having 'Alex' do dog imitations; in a Converse ad, Isiah Thomas drives past Michael Jordan (the sign of Nike); Macintosh did it to IBM by using the cane of Chaplin to 'hook' the IBM off stage. These attacks on competitors differ substantially from previous rounds of advertising where Avis would directly attack Hertz by positioning themselves as trying harder to serve the customer, whereas the more recent Pepsi putdown of Coke in a futuristic account of the archeology of the 20th century has to do entirely with the un-memorability of Coke as a sign. With greater frequency, the attacks have become aimed against the sign and not the product or the service. This is a potent reminder that today the sign value of commodities tends to outweigh even the use value of the product - or put another way, the sign value is now the use value (see Haug, 1986).

When the unit of intertextuality becomes the sign value itself, advertisers try to siphon off the value or the salience of a competitor's advertising. Asics is a relatively small player in the shoe industry, so their agency produced a sign wars ad that appropriates and then negates the sign value of Reebok's "Pump It Up" campaign. Set on a playground, a taller ballplayer is talking 'trash' to a smaller player who is lacing up his Asics shoes. One scene later the Asics' player dunks on the larger player, and this scene immediately cuts to the bigger player using first a bicycle pump on his shoes, and then as his frustration builds, an air compressor to pump up his jump. Note well that this advertising joke is predicated on viewer recognition that Reebok hypes its shoes as having pump technology. A year later the sign wars in the sneaker industry had escalated as Reebok ("Pump Up and Air Out"), LA Gear ("Anything else is just hot air"), British Knights ("Your mother wears Nikes") all took aim at the sign of Nike (see Magiera & Sloan, 1991).

Another approach used in recent ad campaigns relies on viewers' prior knowledge of a media genre and its codes, conventions and reading rules. Then by exaggerating or otherwise violating those conventions they poke fun at the genre and at advertising. A 1988 Ragu ad campaign attempted to disguise its ad-ness (or textual deniability) by appropriating and foregrounding the structural codes of the situation comedy genre (including the laugh track, the lighting, the character interactions). The texture of the images and the presence of sit-com codes momentarily disguises the boundary of the ad. The Ragu ad asked viewers to deconstruct the genre which it mimics on the second viewing. The first viewing alerts the viewer, toward the end, that it really is an ad. Only on subsequent viewings does it call upon the viewer to compare it to the genre; it may also generate some reflection on other advertisements by calling forward the differences.

Intra-genre knowledge of the advertising form has also been invoked as the very condition on which interpretation of specific ad campaigns hinge. Energizer and Bugle Boy have produced attention-getting campaigns which turn the usually unspoken grammar and syntax of ads to become part of their narratives. The Energizer battery campaign features a drum-pounding bunny who wears sunglasses and "keeps going and going...and going." The ad apparently ends, and another ad begins for a mannered wine called Chateau Marmoset in a setting full of aristocratic ambiance, when suddenly bursting into the scene is that damned rabbit. In this ad, the pleasure of the text comes from poking fun at art and the upper social class (the bunny becomes something of a masked avenger of the working classes). It also comes from poking fun at formulaic ads - the bunny transgresses and violates the boundary markers that separate the reading of each ad.

The joke in this Bugle Boy tells us that it is the jeans, and not you, that is the object of desire.

Bugle Boy ads poked fun at the narrative of the commodity self that predominates in most jeans advertising - put the jeans on and the self stands out. The right jeans, so the narrative usually goes, make you popular, attractive and desirable. The constant equation between subject and commodity not only drives up the narcissistic ante, it has also gradually, and paradoxically, led to a displacement of the subject by the commodity. Now, the commodity stands centerstage, casting subjects in its likeness. This is the wry focus of the award-winning Bugle Boy ad. A young Adonis stands along a deserted Western highway, trying to hitch a ride as a fast car zooms past. It suddenly screeches to a halt and comes back to him. The power window whirrs down and a beautiful young woman is revealed. The young man confidently inquires, "yes?" To which she replies, "Are those Bugle Boy jeans you are wearing?" Smiling self-confidently he replies, "why yes, yes they are." To which she smiles and says "Thank you." The electric window rolls up and she drives off while he is left standing alone. The ironic twist is that she is attracted to the aesthetics of his jeans and not to him. What once was the logic of the commodity self has created its own cultural contradiction: the message is one about the decentering logic of commodity consumption -- put the jeans on and they steal the show and the subject becomes background.