REPRESENTATIONS OF WORK IN TV ADS |
Representations of Work in Television Advertising |
Television advertising consists mainly of consumption narratives. This comes as no surprise. TV ads show people mainly as consumers, tourists, leisure and freedom seekers. If one looks at ads as a space where companies offer up their visions of identity construction, one conclusion to be drawn is that personal identity is more likely to be sought in consumption habits and aesthetic preferences than in one's chosen labours. Spouting manufactured philosophical slogans such as "Life's a sport. Drink it up" or "Just Do It," television advertising defines self-realization primarily outside the realm of work. Consumption, play, and leisure are all situated as the opposite of work; these activities are constructed as a world free of compulsion.
Much has been written about the emergence of a consumption ethic as the successor to the Protestant work ethic. The work ethic has become reduced to just one, among many, sets of signifiers that might be selected from as markers of consumer identity. This point is most obvious in truck ads that make frequent appeals to the cult of masculinity and locate it in an ethos of hard work -- physically demanding work -- performed by grimy, rugged, tough, sternfaced men who resemble the trucks they drive. Cowboy imagery blends into images of the working class, targeting what marketers perceive as the demographics of truck drivers. This imagery plays on what David Montgomery (1980) referred to as the cult of masculinity in American working class history. Montgomery observed that the cult of masculinity emerged as a sublimated stance of opposition to bosses' treatment of wage workers in the 1870s after the Civil War. Despite all the labor-altering changes in technology and the shifting composition of the labor force in America over the last century, advertisers have never let go of this imagery. In his book, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon pointed out that "far from being a loner or rugged individualist, [the cowboy] was a wageworker whose task was to ship meat to the cities" (p.220).|
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INTERROGATING ADS
My aim in what follows is to reinterrogate the discourse of consumption -- the chattering ad formulas that we see reiterated day after day after. I want to interrogate these ads not for the purpose of questioning consumption, but rather as a means of telling us something about how work is depicted, or not depicted, in television advertising - an assessment of the dominant imagery of work and production relations in the contemporary television media.
Though the condition of work as a necessity of life is rarely overtly present in the discourse of advertising, neither is it completely absent. The relative invisibility of work narratives in TV ads really comes as no surprise -- given that it is a media vehicle constructed to appeal to the consumer, not the producer. Still, the subjects of work, occupational status, and production sometimes creep back in, now and then as a background setting; occasionally as a correlative for the product in question; or as a device for hailing a particular type of consumer demographic the advertiser wants to address. But work is not often the actual subject of discourse.
What can we make of the advertising traces and snippets, the isolated frames that remind us that there still exists a system of production driven by the human activities of work? The television commercials that I have studied are mostly from the decade of the 1990s, even though I've also drawn on fewer ads from the late 1970s up to the 1990s. As the nature of work shifts from manufacturing to service sectors, as it becomes more technologized by computer and telecommunications networks, how do media representations of work change? How do changes in the representation of work might relate to the dramatic restructurings of the institutional landscape of global capitalism over a comparable period of time?
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