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it is a final reading response. everything that you need to know I upload a picture of it. it has to be in APA style and include the reference page. And you have to pick a political add as it written in the image. Also, it has to be 5 to 6 pages.

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ADV 442: ADVERTISING & SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY HANDOUT PACK “ I love studying social communication in advertising. It’s like pure honey.” NOW WITH MORE CHEESE Table of Contents Handout Page The Appeal 2 Puffery 3 Disinformation 4 Visuals 5 Magic 6–7 Gender in Advertising 8 – 10 Race & Ethnicity 11 – 12 Global Advertising & Cultural Imperialism 13 – 14 Political Advertising 15 – 16 Databases, Targeting, & Mass Surveillance 17 – 18 On-Line Advertising Atmospherics & Hyperreality 19 – 20 21 – 22 Appropriation 23 – 24 Popular Resistance to Advertising 25 – 26 Views of Advertising 1: Free Market Liberalism 27 – 28 Views of Advertising 2: Left Liberalism 29 – 30 Views of Advertising 3: Marxism 31 – 32 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Databases, Targeting, & MASS Surveillance This unit extends previous discussions of the research function of the full service agency and is related to the broader topic of the role of the social sciences in advertising. Remember that one of the ways the research function developed was as the formal “research arm” of the full service agency. Personnel in the research department regularly use social science techniques to see how people respond to advertising messages. This area of the agency (or independent contractors) work quite closely with creative personnel to “test” campaigns. However, there is another research component of the agency that focuses on where consumers are located and on predicting their behavior, especially in relation to media use. This type of research actually antedates the other kind and goes back all the way to before the birth of the full service agency. George P. Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory, for instance, was a 19th century attempt to document the circulation and readership of various newspapers. Early forms of research into how people were using magazines and newspapers were also undertaken at this time in efforts to “target” consumers most effectively. Basically, the problem was how to locate, group, and track consumers so that they can be made objects of specialized sales communications. A related objective is the prediction of consumer behavior based on previous purchases. In recent years increasingly complex computer databases have been created that allow the targeting process to be pursued in very sophisticated ways. Furthermore, the increasing presence of these technologies in our lives has created new ways to track consumers and to generate records of their everyday interactions. These powerful marketing techniques accordingly raise fears over the loss of personal privacy, commercial intrusions into more areas of our lives, and the pervasiveness and sophistication of new forms of mass control. Four Basic Categories of Consumer Information Databases of consumer information now routinely contain billions of individual records compiled into profiles of individual consumers and market segments. The four basic sources of this information are: l Demographics: in this class, demographics refer to data that describe characteristics of a population, especially when divided into consumer segments. Demographic data describe characteristics like age, income, ethnicity, and geographic location. l Psychographics: data systems that collect and classify aspects of people’s psychological make-up and their lifestyles. SRI’s well known VALS system, which we discussed earlier in the semester, is a wellknown example of a psychographic system. l Behaviorgraphics: sources of data that record behavior, especially past consumer behavior. Nowadays, such records are generated and compiled from many routine consumer interactions, such as surfing the web and credit card purchases. l Geodemographics: these systems integrate information from numerous databases and divide the population into “clusters” of consumers based on demographic, psychographic, and behaviorgraphic variables. The basic claim is that there are clusters of people scattered across the United States who look and act similarly, have similar attitudes, and live in similar neighborhoods. Although they are geographically dispersed, technology now allows these ”segments” to be tagged, tracked, and made objects of specialized sales efforts (including selective political communications). The Claritas corporation’s PRIZM system is a well-known example of a geodemographic database. The sources of information described above are integrated in various ways and support new techniques for monitoring and targeting people with advertising and other sales communications (such as junk mail and telemarketing). The terms listed below help us further understand these data systems and concerns associated with their use. 17 Key Terms l Panopticon (Panopticism): the panopticon was a design for a prison created in 1787 by the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. The highly efficient circular design exposed each inmate to constant observation, but the inmates were never able to confirm whether they were actually being observed from the darkened central tower. Contemporary media theorists use the image of the panopticon in discussions of how contemporary information technologies keep large populations under surveillance. l Surveillance: the process of keeping close watch over a person or group. Traditionally, this type of monitoring has been associated with keeping official watch over a person who is under suspicion, for instance by secret police or undercover agents. Increasingly, this term is used by media theorists to describe the way marketers and other parties observe and track entire populations using computerized systems, including new media systems. l Surveillance Capitalism: a form of capitalism in which the collection and commodification of personal information becomes a lynchpin of consumerism. Surveillance capitalism has become possible with the rise of digital technologies and the pervasive collection of transaction generated information (TGI) l Transaction Generated Information (TGI): information about people’s commercial and non-commercial day-to-day activities produced whenever they interact with computerized systems. TGI is aggregated within computer databases and allows data miners to identify patterns and commonalities among groups of people, as well as to locate individuals and track their behavior. Examples of interactions that create TGI include shopping with credit cards, using supermarket discount cards, surfing the web, using a cell phone, and using an ID card to pass through an electronically monitored door. l Addressability: the ability of computerized devices to identify and selectively communicate with each other because each device can be pinpointed in time and space. In the context of advertising, addressability allows consumers to be targeted with specialized ads whenever they are using addressable media systems, including when they surf the web, use their cell phones, etc. l Data Mining: the process of identifying patterns and commonalities in large quantities of information. Marketers “mine” computerized databases of consumer information to identify ways in which they can segment people into valid consumer groups and identify patterns and commonalities in their behavior. This process allows then allows advertisers to more efficiently match market and audience segments and to make such groups targets of increasingly specialized sales communications. l Segmentation: In this class, segmentation refers principally to the process of dividing the population into groups of consumers. As we have discussed segmentation is the basis for targeting portions of the population with specialized sales communications. The ability to segment media audiences and consumers has been dramatically increased by the development of computerized communications and media systems in the last 25 years. l Targeting: in advertising, targeting refers to ways in which consumers can be made the object of specialized ads based on demographic and psychographic traits. In the last few years, the rise of computerized information systems and databases has produced qualitative leaps in the ability of marketers to track people and target them with specialized sales communications. l Interactive Advertising: forms of advertising made possible by computerized media systems that involve interaction between consumers and the sponsor of the ad. Addressability allows a minimal level of interactivity whereby a communication device owned or used by a person identifies itself transmits personal information to another party who them targets the person with specialized communications. So far, internet applications that allow people to interact with a web page’s content have been the most visible applications of interactivity, but some advertisers look forward to a time when much of the sales environment becomes addressable and interactive. Interactive agents are a form of interactive advertising that uses software programs to imitate real people. Persons using a web site (not necessarily a consumer site), for instance, will find themselves encountering scripted conversations designed to promote a sponsor’s products. l Filter Bubble: in this class, a filter bubble refers to a state of intellectual seclusion that shapes people’s awareness of the world as their exposure to information becomes limited by efforts to organize them into on-line target segments. Filter bubbles arise automatically on-line through mechanized efforts to profile, predict, and match a person’s interests to on-line content and related ads. Another way to phrase this idea is that the commercialized web continually tries to create a reality tunnel that limits the information we encounter. Facebook is an excellent example of this process. 18 TERMS RELATING to On-line Advertising The rise of on-line advertising has transformed the practice of advertising in fundamental ways. The development of the World Wide Web sped up changes that advertising institutions had been undergoing since the 1980s or even earlier. For example, the complexity of coordinating media buying across many thousands of websites accelerated the break-up of traditional full-service agencies in favor of specialized independent firms held by Media Holding Companies. On-line advertising also changed the ways campaigns are distributed and financed. For example, people on the web can be targeted based on individual profiles rather than grouping people into audience segments. The terms below outline some of these developments. ___________________________________________________________________________ UNBUNDLING: the process, beginning in the late 1990s of spinning off the media buying/media research functions of the full-service agencies as separate businesses. MEDIA BUYING COMPANIES (MEDIA COMPANIES): companies that specialize in researching audience demographics, negotiating prices, and purchasing advertising time and space across different types of media. Media Buying Companies identify and collect media inventory to sell to advertisers seeking to mount an ad campaign targeted to specific market segments. PPI (COST PER IMPRESSION): in online advertising, CPI refers to the cost advertisers pay each time an ad is displayed (each impression) to each potential customer. CPM refers to the price for every thousand people who view the advertisement(s). PPC (Pay Per Click, CPC - Cost Per Click): the amount payed to a website’s owner each time a person clicks on an ad. Google’s Adwords is a prominent example of a pay-per-click service. ADSERVER (3rd Party Adserver): these are computer servers owned by media buying companies or related firms that coordinate the delivery of targeted ads to website visitors based on their profiles. Ad serving also tracks ad-related behavior, such as the number of times people click on ads, and are the basis for determining billings to individual websites. PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING: refers to ways in which buying ad space on-line has become automated. Originally, space and time on websites were bought and sold in the traditional manner using human beings to locate appropriate sites and negotiate prices for each ad campaign. Programmatic ad buying automates this process by using databases to select appropriate sites and price out purchases across many websites, often in real time. In effect, some aspects of the practice of advertising are being turned over to machines that coordinate the delivery of campaign ads to profiled individuals that fall within the sought after market segment. WEB BROWSER: are software applications (apps) that allow people to access information on the World Wide Web. Browsers allow people to “visit” web pages and view their content. Some of the most popular browsers are Chrome (Google), Safari (Apple), Internet Explorer (Microsoft), and Firefox (Mozilla). Browsers have a variety of ways to customize one’s privacy settings and to protect one from on-line surveillance. 19 COOKIE (HTTP Cookie): Cookies are small files with ID tags that are picked up by a browser and stored on your computer. Cookies are created when you use your browser to visit websites. Although not all sites use cookies, any website that needs identify you or track your movements will typically use cookies to do so. For example, cookies can do things like remember your registered login for set periods of time, settings for use of sites resources, user preferences, and other types of customization. As you use the WWW your browser will pick up cookies that record the sites you have visited and your activities on those sites (for example, products you have looked at while on-line shopping or shows you watch through streaming services). Cookies can be set to “expire” and disappear after a specific amount of time, but some cookies are designed to remain on devices permanently. Browsers typically provide tools for users to find and delete cookies from their computer. However, a certain kind of cookie, called a ZOMBIE COOKIE, will be recreated from information on personal devices even after a user tries to delete it. The use of cookies clearly presents ethical and privacy concerns. TRACKING COOKIES (Third-Party Tracking Cookies, Persistent Cookies, Permanent Cookies): As the WWW has become more commercialized, new types of cookies have been designed that gather long-term information about individuals’ browsing habits and are the basis for profiling individuals on the web. Commercial websites now commonly deposit cookies created by other companies (third parties) on people’s computers. These third parties are typically firms that create databases of consumer information for advertisers seeking to target individuals rather than traditional audience segments offered by mass media. Current versions of some browsers allow users to block third-party cookies, for example, by indicating that “you do not want to be tracked” in settings. However, declining tracking cookies does not mean that a browser will stop displaying ads, only that these ads will not be individually targeted. Removing ads from the browsing experience requires ad-blocking tools. Note that the use of cookies is actually more difficult on mobile devices. WEB PROFILING (Cookie Profiling): refers to tracking a person’s overall activity online thereby creating a detailed “profile” of their web presence. Profiling is accomplished by using persistent or permanent cookies to gather information about a person’s web activities across all the sites they visit. Marketers are able to profile people by buying advertising rights on thousands of popular websites. The cookies provided by site administrators or third-party firms collect information and send it back to advertising company (or third-party) servers to create a single “profile” of a user. Each profile is the basis for targeting potential customers based on how they browse the Internet. Depending on its level of detail. a person’s web profile will include demographic information, browsing habits, and records of specific searches. As people land on sites that sell advertising space to marketers, they will encounter banner ads targeted to them based on their profiles. Websites that do this make money both by selling advertising space and by selling data collected by their users. AD BLOCKERS: software applications, usually in the form of browser extensions that can block the placement of ads on webpages a person visits. Ad blockers are becoming so popular that they are threatening the commercial basis of many websites. 20 Atmospherics & Hyperreality Atmospherics refers to designed aspects of the physical environment that are designed to attract customers and influence purchasing behavior. The origins of modern atmospherics go back to the late nineteenth century and the development of department stores as opulent “palaces of consumption” (Ewen). Forms of “programmatic architecture,” such as novelty buildings along roadways, also count as atmospherics. After World War II, the development of modern shopping malls and themed shops, like popular restaurant chains, led to the further development of atmospherics, as did theme parks like Disneyworld. Since the 1970s, the study of atmospherics has grown into a research specialty in which people study subtle environmental influences on buying behavior. Based on insights from this type of research, people design environments to increase sales as much as possible, often employing principles that work below customers’ conscious awareness. Contemporary atmospherics also extend the brand image (marketing concept) into physical settings. Everything within the retail space, including the employees, is chosen to match and extend the brand. The field of atmospherics includes a wide range of research specialties, including the following: ● PROGRAMMATIC ARCHITECTURE: ways in which spaces are designed to convey various effects or experiences. Originally this term referred to novelty “mimetic” roadside stores that mimicked whatever was sold inside. The design of both the exteriors and interiors of malls are key examples of contemporary programmatic architecture. ● THEMED ENVIRONMENTS: retail spaces designed to convey a coherent and all-encompassing brand identity by appealing to all the senses. Often themed environments are based on a commodified version of a cultural or historical setting. ● SOUNDSCAPES: aural cues and programmed musical formats designed for use in commercial settings. One type of aural cue is the use of commercial music formats like MUZAK. MUZAK was originally limited to “elevator music,” but over time it has expanded to include programmed selections of popular music as well as sound effects and other kinds of commercially engineered tones. MUZAK is the name of the company that produces this content (http://www.muzak.com/), but the term is also used generically to refer to these programmed music formats. ● AROMACOLOGY: the study of how olfactic cues can be used in commercial settings. Olfactic cues are used to associate the brand with a certain odor that is regularly applied within shops. But this aspect of atmospherics also includes the use of odors to influence purchasing behavior below conscious awareness. ● TEMPORAL CUES: ways is which the passage of time (or its stillness) is communicated in commercial environments. This can be done by using combinations of lighting, aural cues, temperature, and architectural effects. Temporal cues can also be conveyed through the use of props, costuming, and architectural features that suggest a certain period of history. 21 Atmospherics & the Administered Society In his book Coercion (1999) Douglas Rushkoff links the development of atmospherics with efforts to devise scientific and artistic techniques that make people more compliant with efforts to sell them products. This theme links the use of atmospherics with the topic of the administered society, because contemporary atmospherics involve efforts to scientifically influence people’s behavior without their awareness and in ways that override conscious control. Two key concepts related to this theme are: ● THE GRUEN TRANSFER: named after the commercial architect Victor Gruen, who was a pioneer in the design of shopping malls, the Gruen Transfer refers to the moment when, through the influence of atmospherics, a person ceases to be a customer with a particular product in mind and becomes an undirected impulse buyer (Rushkoff, 85). Many architectural effects in malls, themed shops, and other commercial spaces like casinos are purposely designed to elicit the Gruen Transfer. ● COERCIVE ATMOSPHERICS: a term coined by Douglas Rushkoff to describe the study of how floor arrangements, colors, sounds, and even smells stimulate us to buy more (Rushkoff, 89). Coercive atmospherics are a branch of behavioral psychology, which links their use to the theme of the administered society. The Privatization of Public Space A theme closely related to atmospherics is the privatization of public space. Media theorist Herbert Schiller coined this phrase to describe the process of transferring control of public spaces or institutions to commercial interests. Privatization occurs when public institutions, such as museums and sports centers, are commercialized. This means that spaces that were once publicly owned and linked to the ideals of democratic governance and citizenry are appropriated and used as stages for promoting companies and selling goods. This process of commercializing public space changes the social environment in ways similar to the appropriation of popular culture. For instance, selling naming rights to public structures like stadiums, events like museum exhibits, or even subway stops changes the signifying function of these spaces – they cease to refer to the local history of a place and refer instead to powerful commercial and corporate interests. Privatization also involves substituting true commercial spaces like public streets and parks with pseudo-public spaces like malls or even wholly privatized towns like Celebration, Florida. Such spaces, according to Schiller, seem like streets and public squares of the past but are actually private spaces where civil rights are substantially curtailed. Large, enclosed sales spaces like malls are the ideal spaces of a totally commercialized society where powerful parties limit people’s ability to participate as citizens rather than consumers in the workings of their society. 22 One basic way that advertising interacts with the social environment is by appropriating forms of popular culture. When viewed in this way, popular culture supplies a constant flow of new material that advertisers take and incorporate into advertising texts. This process appropriates popular forms and commercializes them through commodification. It has been argued that commerciaization transforms popular culture by separating artifacts from the people who produce them and their original sites of production. Some authors, like Douglas Rushkoff, draw a distinction between culture as a form of popular expression and the consumption of commodified popular culture. A secondary step in this process of commodification is popular re-appropriation. Through reappropriation people take back forms of commodified popular culture and reintegrate them into their everyday lives. An open question is whether re-appropriation can reinvigorate popular culture extensively enough to overcome the pervasiveness of commodification. This interplay between marketing/advertising and popular culture can be thought of as a cycle that proceeds in the following stages: Expression k m Popular Re-appropriation Commercial Appropriation j l Commercialization Ads take pre-existing meanings from the social world to position products in relation to specific market segments. These meanings are communicated through sets of images (signs) that make up popular referent systems. For instance, the famous Marlboro Man campaign makes use of a well-known referent system consisting of items like horses, cowboy hats, lassos, a certain physical type, and so on that signal “the West” to people acquainted with that referent system. Advertisers commercialize these referent systems by incorporating them into advertising texts and inserting the commodity among other signs, thereby suggesting that the product is a natural part of the culture that originates the referent system. In this sense, advertising can be thought of as a technique for cultural engineering that reorganizes the social world around commodities. 23 KEYWORDS: Appropriation & Popular Culture POPULAR CULTURE: The experiences, practices, artifacts, and ideas that make up human beings’ everyday life. Popular culture includes things like the clothing, finding food and cooking, shopping, making stuff, buying stuff, playing or using music, playing sports, hanging out with friends, etc. Occasionally people will contrast two aspects of popular culture: its expressive and its commercial dimensions. Expressive popular culture refers those aspects of life that people actively shape through their direct participation. Commercialized pop culture (sometimes referred to as “mass culture”) refers those forms of popular culture that are manufactured away from popular control and distributed through mass media by the “culture industries.” One problem with this distinction is that today’s popular culture is so commercialized that it is difficult to find instances of popular culture that are free of commercialism. For instance, most of pop music is highly commercialized, but people avidly pursue these commodified experiences. APPROPRIATION: refers to the process of taking possession of something. This term often connotes seizing something illicitly or improperly, as in taking something without consent. CO-OPTATION: a variation on the meaning of appropriation, which means to take control of something by absorbing it. This term suggests that something is politically or culturally neutralized and becomes commonplace and “safe” through assimilation. SELLING OUT: a “vernacular” or everyday phrase, selling out is one way that people commonly talk about the processes of appropriation and co-optation. It typically refers to the idea that artists, politicians, and others have somehow compromised their values in search of wealth and mainstream acceptability. The suggestion is that a person has deviated from an original sociopolitical stance that compromises their credibility. A “sell out” is typically regarded with disdain by an original core group of admirers, though they may become even more successful by selling out. REFERENT SYSTEMS: sets of interrelated signs that express a cultural code. Advertising appropriates referent systems, which then appear as a set of cemmerciali signs in ads. COMMODIFICATION: to turn something into a commodity and make it available on the market, or to use something as an aid in selling something else. Commodification is a form of “commercial appropriation.” Popular culture is absorbed (appropriated) into commercial culture by means of commodification. GREENWASHING: ways in which companies superficially appropriate environmental themes in their advertising to make themselves seem responsible and environmentally aware without seriously changing their business practices or products. RE-APPROPRIATION: to take back and thereby transform a cultural artifact that has been appropriated by someone else. POPULAR RE-APPROPRIATION: (In this class) refers to ways in which people take advertising messages and artifacts, transform them, and incorporate them into their everyday lives. Popular re-appropriation transforms commercial artifacts (at least somewhat) into expressive forms of popular culture. 24 Popular Resistance to Advertising & Sales Communications The term POPULAR RESISTANCE is used in media and social theory to discuss ways that people respond to forces of oppression in their lives and in the world around them. Resistance refers to forms of opposition to those in power. This concept has strong political connotations and sometimes refers to ways that people consciously organize for social change, for instance, by engaging in demonstrations, boycotts, or other types of explicit political activities. But in media theory this concept has also been extended to cover activities that are not overtly political or traditionally considered “political.” Some media theorists argue that people can have oppositional readings of media texts such as TV shows, so that even when people are using media that are controlled by a few powerful corporations, their reflective interpretation of media messages would be considered a form of resistance. Some of the activities that fall under the concept of the ACTIVE AUDIENCE, which you may have encountered in other communication classes, could be seen as forms of resistance. The institutions and practices of advertising are also objects of popular resistance. Many groups see advertising and sales communications as social problems that need to be redressed in some way. These problems include the connection of advertising with environmentally and socially damaging forms of consumer lifestyles, problematic content in advertising – for instance, the persistence of repressive gender ideologies in ads – ways in which consumer surveillance infringes on personal privacy, the targeting of children, the privatization of public space by commercial interests, and the degradation of democratic politics by sales techniques. The ways in which people respond to these issues, both as individuals and groups, comprise the field of popular resistance to advertising and sales communications. These forms of resistance can range from organizing for social change on a global scale to modifying ads in public spaces to disrupt their consumerist messages. Popular resistance to sales communications draws on established political traditions. People from a broad range of political viewpoints recognize popular resistance and civil disobedience as occasionally necessary to preserve freedom and human dignity. Common forms of resistance to advertising & sales communications l CITIZENS GROUPS: groups of concerned people unaffiliated with government or official political organizations who work together to bring about some change in the law, public policy, or company activity. Student groups that engage in political activism for various causes on many college campuses are examples of citizens groups. l ACTIVISM & CITIZENS ACTION CAMPAIGNS: these are grassroots political movements of citizens who organize to bring about social change. The tools of action campaigns include demonstrations, boycotts, petitions, letter-writing campaigns, publicity stunts, media literacy programs, guerilla theatre, and performance art, etc. l MASS DEMONSTRATIONS: Nonviolent gatherings of people espousing a political cause. Demonstrations typically involve rallies, marches, speech-making, guerilla performances, and/or sit-ins. As Naomi Klein explains, the contemporary anti-corporate resistance movement uses such tactics to publicize the oppressive conditions under which people who produce consumer goods (and who remain invisible in advertising) are forced to live and work. 25 l CULTURE JAMMING: “The practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages” (Klein, 280). More broadly, culture jamming refers to several ways of modifying mass media messages and intruding on consumer environments so that people are startled into moments of reflection. Culture jamming aims to “shock” people out of the everyday frame of mind that accepts consumerism as natural (Lasn). l DEFACEMENTS: a form of vandalism designed to alter or damage ads that are placed in public spaces (billboards, bus stops, etc.). Some community and religious groups have been known to organize demonstrations in which they deface billboards that target their communities with tobacco and liquor ads and some forms of culture jamming involve defacing ads. l SKULLING: defacing ads to make the head of a model look like a skull. Skulling has a striking effect and is used to disrupt consumerist messages in the environment. It has been encouraged as a form of everyday audience activity directed at the fashion industry. l SUBVERTISEMENTS: ads with anti-marketing messages designed to disrupt the flow and “light buying mood” associated with commercial television and other commercial media. Subvertisements aim to increase consciousness of and resistance to consumerism. l GUERILLA PERFORMANCE (GUERILLA THEATRE): forms of street theatre typically directed at unsuspecting audiences and intended to draw attention to a social or political issue. Guerilla performances involve tactics such as satire, parody, and overt protest as forms of social critique. Sometimes these types of performances take place within stores and are designed to disrupt the taken for granted features of consumer environments. l SHOP DROPPING: The opposite of “shop lifting,” this is the act of covertly placing modified products on display in retail stores, especially with the intent of altering the consumer environment. Shop dropping is somewhat related to performance and installation art. People continually develop new ways to respond to the prevalence of advertising and other marketing messages in our environment. These are only a few examples. Maybe you know of others or have developed your own strategies of resistance. 26 Views of Advertising 1: “Free-market Liberalism” Reference article: Sandage, Some Institutional Aspects of Advertising Free market liberalism is a powerful economic ideology that to one degree or other is the basis for many contemporary institutions. This theory has several components that relate to the role of advertising in society. This view celebrates capitalism and is associated with classical economic theory. Many ”conservative” ideas are associated with the philosophy of free market liberalism. A theory of the market and the individual (Acquisitive Individualism) l Society is (or should be) nothing more than a voluntary association of individuals pursuing the satisfaction of their wants. l “The market” is (or should be) the central institution linking human beings to each other. l Economic exchange in the marketplace is the fundamental way in which people satisfy wants. l The only way to create a prosperous social order is to reduce governmental intrusions into the economy, thereby “freeing” the market. A psychology and theory of rational behavior l “Wants” are personal preferences and originate mostly within the individual. l People are most happy when they can satisfy their wants at the least cost. l Individuals are rational economic actors who follow a “deliberative sequence” to make decisions: 1. a person recognizes a want 2. searches for a means to satisfy the want 3. evaluates competing alternatives, and 4. makes a decision l People (sometimes unconsciously) engage in the deliberative sequence to optimize the satisfaction of wants while minimizing their costs. Note that in this model of decision-making, the primary purpose of advertising is to inform consumers by given them information they can use to evaluate their buying options. The content of advertising is assumed to be information-centered and to facilitate rational decision-making. The informative content of ads relates, in this theory, to the traditional rational appeal. A theory of consumer capitalism and advertising According to free market liberalism, individuals are considered to be the basic decision makers in a capitalist economy. This idea is called the theory of consumer sovereignty, and the main point is that production follows the aggregated demand created by millions of consumers individually trying to satisfy their wants. 27 Advertising is thought to fit into this theory in the follow ways: l Manufacturers study people’s wants and design products to satisfy their pre-existing or emerging desires. l Afterwards, advertising informs people about these alternatives. l Without advertising it would be difficult for people to make good decisions in a complex consumer society. l So, advertising does not manipulate people: it educates them about useful alternatives. l Social order and democracy would be threatened without advertising. According to this view, ads have substantial informative content that people use to make rational consumer decisions (Ads influence steps 2 & 3 of the deliberative sequence, but have no substantial impact on steps 1 & 4). People who adopt this free-market viewpoint consider advertising to be a beneficial aid to economic development. By distributing information to consumers, ads help expand markets and make them more efficient and rational. Thanks to advertising, consumption rises to the level of industrial production, but does so naturally. The common motto associated with this viewpoint is that “advertising follows, it does not lead,” – that is, advertising does not define or modify individual wants, it reflects them. There is no way to consistently inflate economic demand or artificially expand consumption. In this view the market is inherently stable and rational (if not interfered with). Free-market liberalism also redefines democracy in terms of the market and advertising. Consumerism and democracy are thought to naturally coincide in the form of “consumer democracy,” a type of society in which personal freedom is identified with “freedom of choice,” or the ability to satisfy wants in the marketplace free from government intrusion. Political debate is thought of in terms of a “marketplace of ideas” in which people rationally “buy into” a particular viewpoint publicized using the commercial mass media and organized like a typical product campaign. As Sandage argues: “This is a consumer-oriented concept. It recognizes the right and power of consumers. It is consumer democracy. It harmonizes with political democracy. It can be truly effective only when communication is adequate to bring consumers to the level of understanding and a knowledge of alternatives available. Full and honest disclosure, with competition available to provide knowledge of alternatives, can provide such communication. Society expects advertising to perform this function.” Policy recommendations Proponents of the free-market viewpoint argue for policies they believe will create a better society: l Deregulate (liberalize) markets as a way to allow people to satisfy their wants more efficiently. l Limit governmental regulation of advertising and emphasize personal discipline and responsibility in consumer decisions. l Create a “weak enforcement regime” in which companies are urged to voluntarily police their activities and government agencies are reluctant to intrude on business operations. Keywords l The Theory of Consumer Sovereignty l The Deliberative Sequence l Consumer Democracy 28 Views of Advertising 2: “Left-Liberalism” Reference article: Jacobson & Mazur, Commercialism Although there are many variations in these viewpoints, “Left Liberalism” is a mainstream political philosophy that like “Free Market Liberalism” has influenced the development of many institutions in the United States. This view accepts capitalism as an efficient and potentially equitable way to organize society, but tends to argue that the market should be regulated to operate properly and for the good of everyone. In contrast to the extreme individualism of free market liberalism, left liberalism recognizes a social dimension of human life. Exponents of this political/economic/social theory have articulated a broad critique of advertising’s role in society. A theory of society and the individual l Human beings are social creatures who need others to develop fully as individuals. l Because humans are social creatures, wants are shaped in part by social conditions. l Although the market is an important institution, society is not synonymous with the market (for instance, government is not and should not be part of the market). l The market must be regulated to function efficiently and to protect individual rights and liberty. A theory of commercialism, corporate capitalism, and advertising Corporate capitalism and the planned economy: l Extreme consumerism is a distortion of healthy human life; one in which commercial values have become artificially over-emphasized through commercialism (the tendency of capitalism to turn everything into commodities – things that can be bought or sold). “When confined to appropriate limits, the business side of life can coexist with family, religion, recreation, and other facets. But when unleashed and allowed to grow without restriction, commerce adds an “ism” and becomes a philosophy – “commercialism” – that destroys the previous balance…. Commercialism teaches us a lesson that is at war with the teachings of our founders. And that commercial message is this: To be a citizen means no more than being a consumer – patriotism and commercialism are one and the same thing. Hunter College professor Stuart Ewen says that the captains of commerce are moving us from a citizen democracy to a “consumer democracy.” In such a world, the citizen’s most cherished right, indeed his or her duty, is to consume.” (Jacobson & Mazur, p. 13) l Commercialism is closely related to corporate capitalism, a type of society in which corporations become politically and economically powerful at the expense of individual freedom and social wellbeing. 29 l In corporate capitalism public institutions are weakened and turned into expressions of corporate interests (the “privatization” of culture). l In contrast to the deliberative sequence associated with Free Market Liberalism, Left Liberalism argues for a “revised sequence” (John Kenneth Galbraith) in which a few large corporations have a lot of power to set prices and manipulate consumption patterns by means of advertising and sales communications. So corporate planning, based on techniques like planned obsolescence and price fixing, displaces consumer sovereignty. Commercialism and advertising: l Advertising is a technique for artificially expanding consumption. l Generally, advertising is not designed to inform people so they can make better decisions, but is a kind of deceptive propaganda for commodities that makes extensive use of techniques like puffery, promises of magical deliverance from our cares, innocuous breaking of norms, etc. l Advertisers increasingly employ scientific techniques in an effort to manipulate (rather than inform) people. l Marketers and advertisers have no misgivings about using these advanced techniques to target people, including children, with feelings of inadequacy and longing. l Advertising is part of a broader consumerist culture focused on expanding consumption (fashion obsolescence, design ensembles, the marketing concept, etc.) l Advertising redefines basic human needs, like the need for love or security, in terms of commodities. Policy recommendations l Establish a “strong enforcement regime” to regulate markets and the practice of advertising with the goal of creating a more equitable and just society. l Strengthen public institutions by adequately funding them and protecting them from commercial intrusion (schools, government, media, etc.). l Encourage people to organize and participate as citizens in the political system (the consumer movement). l Regulate (broadcast) media in line with the idea of the “public airwaves” and to ensure as much participation by the public as possible. l Regulate advertising to protect the general public and specific groups, like children, against deceptive practices or to prevent excessive influence on media content. Keywords l Commercialism l Privatization of Culture l The Consumer Movement l The Revised Sequence 30 Views of Advertising 3: “MarxisM” Reference article: Kellner, Advertising and Consumer Culture In contrast to “Left (Progressive) Liberalism” and “Free Market Liberalism,” Marxism has not substantially shaped public institutions within the United States. However, Marxist critics and those influenced by Marxism have articulated a well-developed analysis of the advertising’s role within consumer capitalism. The basic Marxist view is that capitalism is the most advanced form of society achieved so far. However, this type of society is still based on forms of oppression. The most fundamental division in capitalist societies is between people who own or control the means of production (“capitalists”/employers/the ruling class) and wage laborers who must sell their labor to live (employees/workers/wage laborers). One result of this antagonism is that a lot of effort must be expended to maintain order within capitalist societies and keep class relations at least partly stable. This antagonism underlies the Marxist analysis of consumerism and advertising. A Theory of the “Administered Society” l Capitalism is the first type of society to be faced with the problem of “too much” (Marx): the productive capacities of society are always expanding and must somehow be absorbed. l Although free market liberals often tout the “law of supply and demand,” we actually live in a society where supply continuously exceeds demand. Marxists and others call this contrived situation “artificial scarcity.” l This economic arrangement generates what is called “the problem of realization” Within capitalism “profit is only extracted when goods are sold in the marketplace and the value of goods is converted into a usable form (money). Once the basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing are satisfied for most people, capitalism faces the problem of “realization,” of making sure that huge numbers of goods produced beyond this minimal level are consumed. If capitalism cannot overcome this, it will collapse, because if goods cannot be sold there will be no further investment in production, resulting in a stagnant economy.” (Leiss, Kline & Jhally) l Because of the tendency toward overproduction and the problem of realization, capitalism tends to be unstable. Capitalist societies have to be consciously integrated by social institutions ruled by the ruling class. l The ruling class has responded by creating an “administered society,” a type of society where science is used to manipulate human beings by displacing social antagonisms onto consumerism. Advertising as Technology & Ideology l Marxists stress how the institutions of marketing and advertising are used to shape culture in capitalist societies. l Sales communications are examples psychotechnologies (Theodore Adorno), marketing techniques designed to induce people to consume. l Advertising is a form of capitalist ideology: ads redefine life in terms of products while disguising the role that people play in creating their own society (commodity fetishism – Marx). 31 l Advertising and the broader mass culture help maintain the hegemony of the ruling class because people understand their lives and possibilities in terms that maintain capitalism. Hegemony insures that oppressed people contribute to their own oppression by sharing elite definitions of reality. In the case of consumerism, people “buy into” definitions of success that plunge them continuously into debt, and this cycle of consumption, debt, work, and more consumption keeps the system going. The Self & Consumer Capitalism l In consumer capitalism, people develop a “commodity self,” in which they increasingly define their sense of identity through mass-produced goods. l The commodity self is a kind of pseudo-individuality – a superficial individualism that doesn’t translate into substantial control over one’s self and one’s life. As Kellner (p. 253) notes: “… the individuality offered by consumer culture is a pseudo-individuality, constructed and promoted for the purposes of manipulation and social control. Thus to be genuinely free and individual, one must free oneself from a whole system of pleasures, consumption, and entertainment administered by the power structure.” l People also understand their lives in terms of the “marketing orientation” (Erich Fromm); meaning that our actions and relationships are experienced through economic categories and as offering chances for profit. “In the market concept of value, the emphasis is on exchange value rather than on use value, this has led to a similar concept of value with regard to people and particularly to oneself. The character orientation which is rooted in the experience of oneself as a commodity and of one's value as exchange value I call the marketing orientation. In our time the marketing orientation has been growing rapidly, together with the development of a new market that is a phenomenon of the last decades - the "personality market." Clerks and salesmen, business executives and doctors, lawyers and artists all appear on this market.” – E. Fromm, Man for Himself, pp. 69-70. Approach to Policy According to Marxists, there are inherent problems that make capitalism unstable and which cannot be fixed by government regulation. Furthermore, the State (government) is to a large extent an instrument of the ruling class and tends to further its interests. So, regulation is a naïve, liberal approach that will not improve life past relatively narrow limits. Regulation can be useful and can further social justice to a degree, but beyond this superficial level, substantially regulating the market will produce economic crises. So: l People must organize broadly as workers and with other progressive groups to expand human rights and reform and transcend capitalism. l People must also work to strengthen existing civil institutions that guarantee access to information, education, and that are the basis for participating in and expanding democracy. Keywords l The Administered Society l Artificial Scarcity l Psychotechnologies l Ideology l Hegemony l Commodity Self l Pseudo-Individuality l The Marketing Orientation 32 ADV442 Handout Packet Compiled by Professor V. Berdayes Department of Communication Barry University Miami Shores, FL 33 iPolitics This selection is from Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2007. The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge "to be active" to "participate" to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. -Siavoj Zizek, The Parallax View In the spring of 2006, as the nation's political parties trained their sights on the upcoming midterm elections and, farther down the road, on the next presidential election, the chosen weapon of at least one candidate was the database. An advisor for former first lady Hilary Clinton announced plans to create a $10 million company that would amass as much detailed information about prospective voters as possible. As one news account suggested, the data-mining push, heavily funded by financier and outspoken Bush administration critic George Soros, would help close the database gap between Democrats and Republicans. Although Democrats have historically had an edge over Republicans when it comes to grassroots, getout-the-vote campaigning, the GOP's successful adoption of target marketing technology reportedly made a significant difference in the 2002 midterm elections: "For the first time in recent memory, Republicans ran better get-out-the-vote programs than Democrats .... Democrats have become increasingly fearful that the GOP is capitalizing on high-speed computers and the growing volume of data available from government files and consumer marketing firms-as well as the party's own surveys-to better target potential supporters." 1 t 187 l [ 188 ] CHAPTER SEVEN Suggestively, the Democrats proved highly effective at using the Internet to raise campaign funds-thanks at least in part to their legacy of grassroob campaigning, which was facilitated and amplified by the social networking capacity of the Internet and, famously, by the Meetup.org Web site in particular. What the Republicans did more effectively, thanks in part to database tools and the strategies devised by consultant Karl Rove, was to target campaign spending. If Democrats were better at harnessing the power of social networking, the Republicans did a better job of marketing. Political campaigning, to put it in slightly different terms, has entered the database world, a realm of asymmetrical data gathering, data mining, and target marketing. As one pair of researchers describes it, "the panoptic aspect of such political surveillance ... reflects the extent to which the political and the commercial are inherently intertwined and inseparable under current articulations of American democracy." 2 This connection perhaps explains why the business-oriented Republican Party was more effective in its database-driven marketing campaign. The flip side of the championing of privatization by post-welfare state neoliberalism is the ongoing adoption of private-sector strategies for political purposes. In the era of electronic mass media, this is far from a novel strategy; political consultants have long made careers out of finding ways to use electronic media to market their candidates. The point is not merely to observe that politics has become a form of marketing-this happened quite some time ago-but rather to consider the impact on the political process of emerging interactive marketing strategies facilitated by monitoring techniques and technologies. This chapter first outlines some of the trends in political marketing and then develops a theoretical framework for a critique of mass customized politics. Finally it draws on this framework to critique the impact of data-driven forms of separation, sorting, and surveillance on democratic politics, arguing that not all participation is democratic in character. The Political Promise of New Media The mobilization of the promise of interactivity comes into its own in the realm of politics-the realm from which the popular reception of new media as tendentially democratic is drawn. The sentiments of new media theorist and game designer Celia Pearce neatly complement those of ubiquitous !POLITICS I 189 l political consultant and cybercelebrant Joe Trippi. Both, for example, invoke the promise of technologically facilitated democratic revolution. As Pearce notes, "The digital age introduces a new form of international socialism, a new kind of democracy that Marx never even imagined."' The political and economic elites that have developed and promoted the technology have, she suggests, spun the Web into rope for their own hanging: "The Newt Gingriches of the world, who have inadvertently popularized the thing that will be their undoing should be very, very afraid. Because when it comes right down to it, an online underclass is much more powerful than an armed underclass."4 Joe Trippi evinces a similar revolutionary fervor: "Every institution that doesn't understand that the technology is finally here to allow people to reject what they're being given and demand what they want had better start paying attention. The revolution comes for you next."s The story of the political deployment of the Internet is, according to Trippi, a story of the revitalization of democracy: "Most of all it's the story of people standing up and making themselves heard. It's the story of how to engage those Americans in a real dialogue, how to reach them where they live, how to stop selling to them and start listening to them." 6 This opposition is, as I have been arguing throughout the course of this book, not just a false one, but a usefully misleading one. It suggests that technologies that facilitate "listening" necessarily empower those invited to disclose information about themselves. However, the emerging model of data-driven relationship marketing undermines the opposition described by Trippi: the sellers are able to sell more effectively precisely because they are able to listen more efficiently. In the end, the marketing-based model enlisted by the Republican Party triumphed, whereas the high-profile challenge by the Dean campaign, managed by Trippi, famously went down in flames, fanned by the viral spread over the Internet of the candidate's famous screech speech. The facts not withstanding, the general promise of empowerment outlined in Chapter 1 has been explicitly taken up by scholars studying the role of media in politics and, according to one account, "a number of theorists have argued that such technologies may help contain or provide the public sphere necessary for true participatory democracy."' Cybercelebrants are engaged, perhaps unwittingly, in parroting the litany of claims that have greeted each new electronic medium in the twentieth century, from the telegraph to cable TV. It is worth rehearsing some of these claims to provide a [ 190 j CHAPTER SEVEN bit of historical context for the current enthusiasm bubbling up around the democratic potential of new media. What emerges from a survey of the celebratory responses to new media technologies during the twentieth century might be described as a form of repetition compulsion: a stubborn ahistorical reiteration of the mantra that any device that facilitates the transmission of information is inherently democratizing, not least in the sense that it enhances mutual respect and understanding-resources for collective action and reasoned deliberation. In their early history of the telegraph, for example, Charles Briggs and Augustus Maverick wrote that the device "binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth." 8 An early fan of radio directly applied this line of thought to the new medium: "How fine is the texture of the web that radio is even now spinning! It is achieving the task of making us feel together, think together, live together." 9 Speaking of the medium that would, toward the end of the twentieth century, become dominated by figures including Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, another commentator observed, "Radio might even produce a new kind of politician, a man without the ordinary tricks of delivery, but possessed of a quiet, logical persuasiveness." 10 As for TV, authors Barry Schwartz and J. G. Watkins predicted cable TV, the medium that provides us with Fear Factor, Blind Date, and professional wrestling, would not only "create great access to information; it will also greatly assist self-identity, democratic processes, educational environments and community cohesion." 11 l\tledia scholar Vincent Mosco has devoted an entire chapter of his book, The Digital Sublime, to the utopian predictions surrounding electronic media, and he draws on the work of another noted scholar, James Carey, to sum up his findings: "As Carey ... notes, starting with the telegraph we observe a renewed triumphalism asserting that every improvement in communication would end isolation, link people every-where, realizing in practice the 'Universal Brotherhood of Universal Man."' 12 Just a little familiarity with history adds some grains of salt to our reception of claims, such as those of futurist William Wriston's, that "the force of microelectronics will blow apart all monopolies, hierarchies, pyramids, and power grids of established industrial society," or author George Gilder's assertion that the personal computer will become "a powerful force for democ- iPOLITICS I 191 I racy, individuality, community, and high culture." 11 New media technologies have done a much better job of assimilating themselves to the interests of established political and economic hierarchies than blowing them to bits. Even as cybercelebrants hype the revolutionary power of blogs and social networking, media moguls like Rupert Murdoch enlist the rhetoric of revolution as a marketing strategy. Shortly after buying the social networking site MySpace for half a billion dollars, Murdoch observed, "Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it's the people who are taking control. ... We're looking at the ultimate opportunity.... The internet is media's golden age." 14 Given the historical context, it is perhaps testimony to a persistent case of technological amnesia that media theorists still feel confident making claims like, "Far from the telescreen dystopias, new media technology hails a rebirth of democratic life." 15 New media guru Howard Rheingold is more circumspect, noting that whether the Internet comes to serve as an online agora or a virtual panopticon will depend on who controls it and for what purposes. Still, his outlook remains on the whole more optimistic than pessimistic, and he insists, "The political significance of computer mediated communication lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political hierarchy's monopoly on powerful communications media, and perhaps thus revitalize citizen-based democracy." 16 Considered in the abstract, enhanced interactivity, information access, and the ability to build community over long distances certainly sound like positive, if not necessarily revolutionary, additions to the media landscape. The argument of this book is, however, that an abstract consideration of such technologies is both incoherent and misleading: incoherent because it makes claims diametrically opposed to the evidence supplied by concrete applications; misleading because it implies that actual applications are determined by the technical capabilities themselves-that, for example, the Internet, by its very nature, ought to be inherently threatening to centralized, hierarchical power relations. The real question that needs to be addressed is how new media technologies are being turned to political ends not in theory, but in practice. And this practice increasingly takes place within a context characterized by the accumulation of control over information facilitated by the digital enclosure. Thus, any consideration of political uses of new media needs to explore [ 192 ] CHAPTER SEVEN not just the capabilities theoretically available to individual users, but the actual application of these capabilities in the age of "digital capitalism." 17 It is one thing to say with Joe Trippi that the Internet could be the "most democratizing innovation we've ever seen," and quite another to consider the ways in which it is being used as one of the most powerful technologies for centralized information gathering, sorting, and management that we've ever seenY The following sections consider the ways in which the Internet has been enlisted by politicians and their consultants as a tool for management and marketing-a model borrowed from and based on target and relationship marketing. An important consequence of the political adoption of this model is, as one group of researchers notes, "an opening up of the market for political information." 19 Political consultants-never far behind the marketers-have realized for some time that market-research algorithms can yield information useful not just for selling products, but for recruiting voters. The problem was finding cheap and efficient ways to gather and sort the information. One political consultant, for example, recalled how research revealed several decades ago "that Mercury owners were far more likely to vote Republican than owners of any other kind of automobile-data that was so constant across the country ... that it couldn't possibly have been the product of chance. 'We never had the money or the technology to make anything of it. ... But of course, they do now."' 20 Generating the type of information useful to political parties requires accumulating as much information as possible about voters in order to sift through it and discern reliable patterns of voting behavior that might be exploited by political operatives. Just as background details like education level, place of residence, and reading habits help predict what type of products a consumer is likely to buy, they can serve as reliable indicators of which hot-button political issues voters care about-at least, that's what political consultants are telling parties and candidates. As the former head of the Republican National Committee put it, "We can tailor our message to people who care about taxes, who care about health care, who care about jobs, who care about regulation-we can target that way."" 1 The clues and cues that guide targeted political marketing campaigns are not always obvious, but they can be extracted by sifting through large databases for unexpected or unanticipated correlations. One Republican consul- !POLITICS I 193 I tant commented, "The microtargeter would tell me, 'You know, if you own a Ford Explorer and you garden and like the outdoors and you're over 50, there might be a high likelihood that you care about tort reform.' ... I don't know how they do this, and I was skeptical, but it works." 22 The result is a change in the mode of address adopted by political campaigners-instead of tailoring a general message designed to maximize common appeal and minimize offense, the goal is to target individuals and groups based on key motivating issues-to provide not a generalized, blurry portrait of the candidate, but a customized, high-resolution perspectival portrait that can be modified to meet the interests and concerns of specific audiences. During President George W. Bush's second term, the prevailing political wisdom was that Republicans under the leadership of former direct-mail consultant Karl Rove had the database edge-and were using it very much in keeping with standard marketing strategies that were based as much on emotional as on rational appeals. During the 2002 elections, one report stated, "Consultants working for the Republican National Committee developed strategies to design messages targeting individual voters' 'anger points' in the belief that grievance is one of the strongest motivations to get people to turn out on Election Day." 23 Detailed databases allowed for some significant changes in campaign strategy. Whereas the prevailing political wisdom had been to avoid districts heavily populated by opposition party voters, target marketing allowed for tactical poaching: "The advantage of data-based targeting is that political field operatives can home in on precisely the voters they wish to reach-the antiabortion parishioners of a traditionally Democratic African American church congregation, for instance." 24 The result, in short, is the attempt to manage masses of voters, Taylor style, by disaggregating them. This niche-marketing approach requires the same asymmetry of information in the political as in the commercial realms: the accumulation of detailed information about consumers combined, ideally, with a corresponding lack of information about alternatives (or undesirable aspects of the product being pushed) on the part of consumers. Conservative field operatives picking off the abortion foes in a traditionally African American church congregation want to make sure to avoid touching on the other campaign planks that might alienate these voters and make them hesitate to become one-issue voters. [ 194 ] CHAPTER SEVEN As in marketing, so in politics: compiling detailed information about voters in a cost-effective manner largely depends on their entry into the digital enclosure. In theory, political operatives could develop detailed databases about voters by going door to door, conducting in-depth interviews about everything from political preferences to shopping habits, and compiling public and private records, but the cost would be prohibitive-not least because voters would likely find the process disturbingly invasive. By contrast, the privatized digital enclosure provides access to extensive databases of information gathered for other purposes. Like marketers, political data miners can avail themselves of the migration and accumulation of information in marketing databases. Moreover, they can harness emerging interactive technologies to the ends of political research. Consider, for example, the case of Knowledge Networks, an instant polling company founded by two Stanford political scientists who realized, as had market researchers before them, the information-gathering capability of interactive communication technology. Knowledge Networks turned the TiVo model of interactive content delivery into an instant political polling mechanism by spending millions of dollars to equip more than 40,000 homes of selected viewers with Web TV s. The viewers received the interactive TV device-their portal into the digital enclosure-free of cost in exchange for agreeing to spend ten minutes a week answering pollsters' questions over the Internet. 25 In order to raise the more than $40 million needed to purchase, install, and link the 40,ooo-plus Web TVs that form the virtual infrastructure of Knowledge Networks' digital enclosure, the professors had to make it dual purpose: a system for both market and political research. Political polling is, perhaps not surprisingly, a few steps behind commerce when it comes to the development of relationship marketing-a process that Knowledge Networks pushes toward its logical extreme: always-on information gathering. In addition to the weekly polls, the Web TVs gather detailed information about viewing habits and Web surfing behavior that can be used to create profiles of the respondents. The device that is used to gather instant responses to, for example, the performance of candidates during a political debate also collects a constant stream of information about viewers even when they aren't directly engaged in the polling process. The invitation to participate in the process of instant online polling, in other words, doubles as a perhaps less iPOLITICS I 195 l obvious inducement to enter into a relationship characterized by always-on monitoring. The use of interactive TVs as a polling tool is continuous with a longstanding tradition of the deployment of communication technologies that provide access to the private sphere as a means of simultaneously extracting information from it. As we saw in Chapter 3, the early polling and ratings industry embraced the telephone as a technology for catching people at home and gathering information about them in discrete bursts: the radio show that they happened to be listening to at the time of the call, which products they had recently purchased, and, eventually whom they planned to vote for. Recent debates surrounding government surveillance in the United States have demonstrated that the telephone remains an important monitoring technology-one that promises, thanks to the development of cell phone networks, to become increasingly individualized and continuous. In addition to the telephone, specially equipped radio and television sets can become monitoring technologies, thanks to the invention and development of Audimeters and then People Meters. Digital TV and the Internet represent both the continuation of this trend and a quantum leap forward in information gathering technology thanks to their built-in interactive capability. Whereas telephone surveys, Audimeters, and related devices require the audience's active consent and participation, interactive networked technologies come with a built-in, passive information-gathering capacity that promises broader coverage and decreased audience awareness of monitoring practices. Nielsen households, for example, have a constant reminder that information about their viewing habits is being gathered: the requirement to fill out viewing diaries, or to punch in when they are watching TV. TiVo viewers, by contrast, receive no such reminder. As in the case of the Internet, the monitoring that takes place is largely passive in the sense that it is generated as a by-product of using the technology itself. The result is what might be described as a passive form of interactivity-what the philosopher Slavoj Zizek has described (in a different context) as "interpassivity." 26 The machine does the interacting for us. Viewers are active in the sense that they are always providing information about themselves-but not critically active in the sense of being aware that monitoring is taking place and how the information is being used. I 196 l CHAPTER SEVEN In the political context, the smooth functioning of niche campaigning depends on this precritical or passive form of participation. The effectiveness of niche campaigning depends, at least in part, on voters not realizing that they are being provided with a customized appeal, one that may look very different from those received by voting groups with different political views from their own. As researchers who have studied this new breed of political research tools have noted, even when participants are informed about the information-gathering capability of their Web TVs (which the researchers liken to spyware that covertly gathers information about online activity), over time, this awareness tends to fade into the background: "Spyware is sometimes installed with the generally underinformed agreement of the user, who often later forgets about its presence." 27 In addition to the information collected through dedicated devices like those installed by Knowledge Networks, political researchers, like marketers, are able to make use of information that people disclose both offline, in the form of public records and proprietary databases, and in the form of the "free" information that millions of Internet users post online. Thus, for example, the popular press has highlighted the ways in which personal information posted online to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook has been used for research purposes and background checking by police and potential employers. A student who posted a photo of himself drinking beer in his dorm room to his Facebook site, for example, found himself accused of violating university policy, an accusation supported by evidence he had supplied himself. 2R Thanks to the ease with which digital files can be transported, large amounts of data gathered, for example, by the state for driver registration or property tax records can be imported wholesale into commercial databases and used for target marketing purposes (depending on local laws, some of which charge hefty fees for information gathering, restricting it to well-heeled corporations; or they place other restrictions on the availability of some public records). The information that we enter into magazine subscription forms finds its way into direct-mail databases, and the information we enter into online forms can rapidly be assimilated into marketing algorithms. Perhaps one of the defining characteristics of the digital enclosure is that within it, information constantly flows and migrates. This does not mean, however, that it can't be controlled. Yes, firewalls and databases can be iPOLJTICS I 19/ l breached, but for the most part, the flow of information is not as anarchic as the high-profile press coverage of file-sharing networks might suggest. 2 ~ Large amounts of information can be gathered, stored, and transmitted cheaply and efficiently along well-controlled channels. One of the goals of market research within the context of the digital enclosure is to tame the anarchy of available information: to gather data about Web-surfing behavior, MP3 listening patterns, and self-disclosure sites like MySpace and impose order on it by aggregating it, sorting it, and extracting usable patterns. To capture this kind of information, political marketing research firms, such as marketers, rely on automated information gathering: "Their spider programs crawl through the Web, automatically collecting website content, such as a person's email or physical address, or an organization's press releases." 30 One of the reasons for the increasing value of information captured within the embrace of the digital enclosure is that it does treble- and quadrupleduty: for marketing, policing, campaigning-and, as I will argue in the following chapter, for interpersonal or peer monitoring. However, the shift in information-gathering capacity facilitated by the enclosure is both quantitative and qualitative. By embracing sites of domesticity, leisure, and labor and permitting always-on connectivity, the enclosure provides information not just in discrete packets-a survey here, a focus group there-but a continuous flow of data. Consider, for example, the latest version of Apple's iTunes, which can relay a continuous flow of information back to "headquarters" about what music you're listening to while you're listening to it. Similarly, the Web TV devices installed by the researchers at Knowledge Networks do more than capture the information from spot polls (although they do this also); the devices capture a continuous flow of information about viewing habits, Web surfing, and so-called clickstreams (information about which hypertext links viewers click on). What emerges is a detailed, personalized image of consumer behavior: the twenty-first-century version of the forms of personalized monitoring pioneered in the workplace by Frederick Taylor and his associates. The cost problem has been solved, thanks to automated forms of information gathering and sorting. Politicians and marketers alike can incorporate detailed and automated forms of listening-or feedback monitoring-into their attempts to sell consumers on products and voters on candidates. [ 198 ) CHAPTER SEVEN Some Consequences Democracy, understood as a political system in which rulers are held accountable to the citizenry, relies on the interplay between two mechanisms of publicity: one that allows for public scrutiny of government decisions, policies, and actions; and one that makes public opinion manifest to policy makers. Critics of mass society have made much of the so-called refeudalization of the public sphere, understood as the default of government mechanisms of publicity to public relations, in conjunction with the relegation of the role of citizens to that of passive observers saturated by the mediated spectacle of power. In its most popular form, this critique manifests itself in the denigration of infotainment-the triumph of news that entertains without providing citizens with the information they need to hold their rulers accountable. Spectacular entertainment keeps the masses occupied and politically isolated, while real politics takes place behind their backs. According to critical theorist Jurgen Habermas in his discussion of the fate of public debate and deliberation in mass society, the result is "a staged and manipulative publicity displayed by organizations over the heads of a mediatized public." 31 The tendency Habermas critiques is exemplified by the usurpation of public debate by talking heads, spin doctors, and political spokespeople on cable news. Debate has defaulted from participatory public endeavor to spectator sport for the masses. Instead of cultivating public participation in the process of democratic deliberation, such shows display viewpoints as a range of "givens" among which viewers are left to choose. Habermas laments, "Publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one can not respond by arguing but only by identifying with them." 32 A related result is the decline of a countervailing force of publicity-that which comes in the form of public opinion, or the public expression of the will and judgment of the populace to which political rulers are to be held accountable. Just as the public needs to be informed about the actions of its \eaders, so too do the leaders need to be informed about both the public's reaction to policy decisions and its policy priorities. As Habermas, among others, has argued, when media-managed spectacles replace deliberation, the formation of public opinion is itself impaired. Without accurate knowledge about government actions and policies, the formation of public opinion iPOLITICS I 199 I takes place in a vacuum-or, little better, amid the predetermined viewpoints and policy options promulgated by political and media elites. Furthermore, without mechanisms to facilitate engaged political debate (rather than mere spectatorship ), public opinion remains underdeveloped and incoherent, and therefore increasingly subject to manipulation. Political theorist Benjamin Ginsberg has argued that public opinion polling-a "science" that emerged out of the late nineteenth-developments discussed in Chapter 3-changes the terms for the expression of public opinion. This latter might be described as citizen publicity: the right of citizens to have their opinions heard by their rulers. Specifically, public opinion polling shifts the expression of public opinion away from its manifestation in the form of action (such as public demonstrations and protests) and toward the measurement of attitude. The shift is a crucial one because it allows for the management of public opinion before it is expressed in action. The measurement of attitude, combined with the expansion and proliferation of massmediated forms of communication in the early twentieth century, anticipates the goal of the scientific management of public opinion. The development of the marketing and public relations industries coalesces around this goal of feedback-based opinion management. These industries do not spring full grown from the heads of public relations and marketing pioneers like Ivy Lee and Alfred P. Sloan. Rather, as Chapter 3 suggests, they harken back to nineteenth-century ideals of information-based management-and in particular to the notion that observation and measurement provide the information necessary to "rationalize," or make more efficient and effective, a variety of human endeavors. Thus, the crucial element of the structural transformation of what might be described as "citizen publicity," understood as the public expression of public opinion, is the shift from publicity as public action to publicity as the preemptive measurement of attitude. That is to say, what takes place in the early twentieth century is not the silencing of the masses, but the probing, observation, and measurement of the citizenry. Citizen publicity is redoubled: it occurs not just in the form of the actions taken by the citizenry in response to or anticipation of government action, but also in the monitored expression of opinions about what the public is likely to do and why. As in the case of the scientific management of production, the gathering of this information by public relations practitioners (whether public or private, [ 200 j CHAPTER SEVEN corporate or political) is prompted by the attempt to more effectively manage the populace: to influence action not by directly, physically impinging on it, but by helping to shape attitudes before they result in action. The advent of the digital enclosure and its deployment for political purposes (in the form of increasingly detailed databases and continuous monitoring, as in the case of Knowledge Networks) doesn't challenge the logic of previous forms of marketing and campaigning so much as it promises to perfect them. If strategies for public opinion management rely on the gathering of detailed information about attitudes, behavior, and their interrelationships as well as on information asymmetry (marketers know the details of consumer behavior, but consumers don't know the details about how this information is being used to target or manipulate them), the digital enclosure facilitates market-based campaigning techniques on both counts. In other words, the obverse of the world described by political consultant Joe Trippi-one in which "the Internet is the most democratizing innovation we've ever seen"-is one in which interactive technology can be used to perfect strategies for target marketing and the centralized management of public opinion by political elites. 33 It is the world imagined by a privacy consultant with government experience: "The nightmare scenario is that the databases create puppet masters." 34 In this nightmare vision, the one whose monitoring apparatus is currently being assembled by political consultants and database experts in anticipation of upcoming elections, "every voter will get a tailored message based on detailed information about the voter. The candidate would know what schools the voter went to, any public records that showed they supported some cause, any court case they've been involved in. There might even be several different messages sent by a candidate to the same home-one for the wife, one for the husband and one for the 2}-yearold kid." 35 Far from public empowerment and democratic rebellion, such a scenario envisions what one commentator describes as "a nearly perfect perversion of the political process": "The candidate knows everything about the voter, but the media and the public know nothing about what the candidate really believes." 36 At stake in these alternative versions of the future-one of empowerment, the other of centralized control-is the very meaning of the term democratic participation. By participation, do we simply mean the ability to provide increasingly detailed information about ourselves? If so, then the offer of iPOLITJCS I 201 I participation can double as an alibi for the perfection of marketing strategies-both political and commercial. If, however, by participation we mean a conscious, considered, informed, and meaningful contribution to the governing process, it is important not to distinguish this at every turn from a version of participation that equates submission to detailed monitoring with participation. Defining Participation What is the difference between meaningful partiCipation and consumer or citizen feedback? What, in other words, might one mean by a notion of "meaningful participation"? One way to think about the difference between these two versions of participation is by revisiting the distinction between feedback and shared control in Chapter 1's discussion of cybernetics. A heatseeking missile may be cybernetic insofar as it adjusts to signals from its target, but to call it "interactive" or "participatory" would be to suggest a misleading commonality of interests between projectile and target. As the target shifts and changes direction, it inadvertently relays information about its new trajectory back to the guided missile. The relation between target and missile-or targeted and targeter-might, in this respect, be described as an interactive one. It is this version of interactivity that is invoked by marketers who, perhaps not coincidentally, make use of the vocabulary of"aiming" and "targeting" to describe their advertising campaigns and strategies. This is not to overlook an obvious and important difference between target marketing and missile attack: in the case of the former, the impact on the target isn't fatal (at least in most cases, cigarettes excluded)-but it may well run counter to the self-expressed interests of the targeted. Despite what they may say, marketers have a bottom-line goal that remains inaccessible to the needs and desires of consumers, even if information about those needs and desires is crucial to attaining this goal. We can thus differentiate between two layers of feedback in its broadest sense: the first allows for the adjustment of strategies to achieve a given end (boosting record sales, destroying a rocket); the second influences the goal-setting decisions themselves (whether profits are more important than, say, diversity of music or quality). The marketbased model of interactivity promises shared control at the second level, but it delivers only on the first. [ 202 ] CHAPTER SEVEN Democratic politics, by contrast, promise public participation all the way up, as it were, to the goal-setting process itself. Indeed, this level of participation might be considered one element of the definition of meaningful participation, elaborated in more depth in Chapter 9. A second elementone emphasized by constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein-is the creation of optimal conditions for public deliberation about shared goals. As Sunstein suggests, the adoption of marketing and advertising techniques by political campaigns ignores an important difference between consumer decisions and political decisions: the former relate to individual preferences and only indirectly influence society as a whole, whereas the latter are explicitly about collective decisions that (directly) influence society as a whole. 37 My decision to buy a particular laundry detergent does not have broader social consequences in quite the same way as does my vote for a new school tax proposal or a congressional candidate. Moreover, as Sunstein argues, political participation envisions a decision-making process that "does not take individual tastes as fixed or given. It prizes democratic self-government, understood as a requirement of'government by discussion,' accompanied by reason-giving in the public domain."-'~ The database-informed customized campaign model of political marketing transposes the perfection of what Sunstein might describe as a consumerist model onto the political process. Far from contributing to democratic participation and deliberation, the version of interactivity envisioned by the database consultants and target marketers offers to perfect a cybernetic form of public relations: the customization of marketing appeals that are based on detailed profiles of individual voters. The consequences of this model of interactivity are threefold: the further disaggregation of the citizenry, the facilitation of sorting and exclusion when it comes to information access, and the further normalization of surveillance as a legitimate political tool. In the following pages, I explore each of these consequences in a bit more detail. Customization and Disaggregation The French social critic and activist Guy Debord described consumer capitalism as a society characterized by the triumph of the spectacle-one in which consumers and viewers were "linked only by a one-way relationship iPOLITICS I 203 l to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another." 39 The mediated spectacle, as Debord notes, "unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness." 411 Consider, for example, a description of Manhattan's Upper West Side on the evening of September n, 2001, by one New Yorker who, looking out the window of his ninth-floor apartment at nightfall, noticed something unusual about the view. Usually the buildings visible across the way presented a patchwork of lit and unlit windows. On that evening, however, almost every window was lit, in part by the bluish glow of a TV screenY With the city for all practical purposes closed down, everyone had returned to the privacy of their apartments to watch the news coverage, each to view the same horrific images repeated over and over on their separate screens. They were united by their relation to the images that each received separately in the privacy of their honeycombed apartments. This is perhaps an extreme example occurring in response to an exceptional situation, but the process of separation and unification it illustrates arguably characterizes everyday consumer and political conditions. Our media-saturated society provides us with (at least for the moment) shared images, information, and culture, which we experience, for the most part in conditions of relative isolation, from the privacy of home via the television or, more recently, the Internet. From the perspective of democratic participation, the process of separation identified by Debord undermines the conditions for debate and deliberation. It disavows and suppresses the collective character of democratic politics, reinforcing a consumerist model in which citizens are treated not as part of a deliberative body, but as isolated shoppers in the marketplace of ideas. As critical theorist John Brenkman observes, the tendency of consumer society is to "destroy the space"-of deliberation and collective action in which critical public opinion can be formed. 42 Countervailing publicity-the citizenry making known its wishes to public officials and representatives-is reduced to the privatized polling of spectators. The promise of interactive media is predicated in part on a critique of this process: thanks to the Internet, the public no longer need depend on centralized, top-down, mass media; nor are citizens all sharing the same images. Moreover, the interactive capability of the network allows media consumers to become media producers. New media guru Howard Rheingold, for example, envisions a world in which citizens equipped with souped-up [ 204 ] CHAPTER SEVEN versions of cell phone video cameras could engage in distributed peer-topeer journalism: "Imagine the power of the Rodney King video multiplied by the power of Napster. ... Would it be possible to turn the table on the surveillance society and counter the media monopolies?" 43 The promise, in short, is to rearrange the relationship between spectators so they are no longer linked only by a "one-way relationship to the very center." Instead, they could be linked in a myriad ways to dispersed centers, participating in the shared production of a proliferating series of spectacles. Instead of tuning into the network news, viewers could surf the Internet for all kinds of publicly generated "news" about the world covering a range of interests and perspectives. If you're tired of watching Americans interview other Americans about the war in Iraq, you might be able to tune in to video narratives about life in Baghdad that were shot, edited, and posted to the Internet by Iraqi residents-or defense contractors, for that matter. Wired magazine has dubbed the prospect of distributed information production a form of "crowdsourcing"-turning over the duties of production to the populace, which, thanks to the development of interactive technology, can "solve problems [and] even do corporate R & D" in addition to providing "content" in the form of more images for shared consumption. 44 Two questions need to be addressed regarding the promise of distributed media production-the crowdsourcing of the spectacle. The first has to do with whether a distributed spectacle overcomes the atomism that undermines conditions for collective deliberation. The second has to do with the impact of customized information on the populace. If the citizenry, relegated to the role of spectators, has surrendered the task of critical deliberation and accepted the model of politics as one more form of individualized consumption, could the promise of participation revitalize interest and participation in the deliberative process? Does peer-to-peer journalism undo the default of publicity to public relations, and does it furnish improved conditions for public deliberation? The hope of distributed reporting is that it might provide citizen-journalists with a more complete and accurate understanding of the world around them and the political issues affecting their lives. One possible danger, anticipated by legal theorist Cass Sunstein, is the loss of shared resources for collective deliberation. People need an overlapping knowledge base of some kind to be able to engage in meaningful political discussion. In a world of information glut, it becomes possible, Sunstein argues, iPOLITICS I 2.0) I for people to become so specialized in their information consumption that they lack the resources to engage in debate on topics of general interest in a democratic society. 45 Thanks to the proliferation of information resources online and on television, it is conceivable, for example, to devote one's news consumption entirely to NASCAR racing, fantasy baseball, or online gaming. Nevertheless, the danger that more information could lead to less shared knowledge doesn't provide a convincing argument against the importance of providing the populace with a variety of perspectives and information. It was even easier to have nonoverlapping knowledge sets before the proliferation of always-on, customized news and information outlets, because lack of information is equally a hindrance to collective deliberation. The real danger posed by the proliferation of information resources lies in the tendency to reinforce a savvy postmodern skepticism that threatens to default to an incoherent relativism. Sun stein worries that, for example, political polarization might result from conservatives only getting their news from Fox, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, and conservative Web sites, and liberals limiting themselves to Democracy Now and The Nation, with the result that neither group would face challenges to its political predispositions. The real threat to deliberation lies a bit deeper: in the mind-set that allows individuals to feel comfortable deliberately seeking out only a select group of news sources with predictable slants. The standard explanation of this phenomenon-sometimes called "selective exposure"-is that people, loathe to having their opinions unsettled or challenged, seek out information sources that confirm their values, attitudes, and prejudices. But this explanation doesn't do justice to the deeper pathology of the savvy postmodern attitude, which provides a specific justification for choosing those outlets that fail to challenge one's worldview: because all portrayals are biased in one way or another, there is nothing to prevent viewers from selecting those that present the views with which they identify and screening out the rest. Political commentator Josh Marshall describes this popularized version of postmodernism as one characterized by the belief that "ideology isn't just the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is." 46 This savvy reductionism equates the recognition that all viewpoints are biased with the assertion that bias is all there is. That this formulation is incoherent in its absolute dismissal of absolutes does not detract from its popularity among [ 206 ] CHAPTER SEVEN not just the tragically hip, but also, as philosopher Bruno Latour suggests, an increasingly savvy and skeptical populaceY The result is what might be described as a preemptive defense against the charge (recklessly popularized by critical theory) of being a dupe. It is a fate that can ostensibly be avoided by asserting in advance the claim that all truth claims and statements of fact are simply ruses of power. Latour, referring to the proliferation of conspiracy theories after the 9/11 attacks, asks, "Remember the good old days when revisionism arrived very late, after the facts had been thoroughly established, decades after ...
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Running head: POLITICAL ADVERTISING AND THE DIGITAL AGE

Political Advertising and the Digital Age
Student’s Name
Institution
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POLITICAL ADVERTISING AND THE DIGITAL AGE

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Political Advertising
Political advertising is a kind of advertising that attempts comment or influence a certain
matter which is of political debate. In the United States, political advertising is an important part
of contemporary political campaigns. Political advertising is used to strategically influence the
citizens and to get them to vote for a certain candidate. One of the well-known political ads is the
Hillary Clinton’s ad against Donald Trump named Role Models. The political ad involves
children listening to Donald Trump address some controversial issues through offensive words.
The ad portrays Donald Trump as inappropriate and irrational. The emotional appeal created in
this ad is to choose a leader who will set the right principles for children. In the advertisement, it
says, ‘Our children are watching. What example will we set for them?’ (Clinton, 2016). In the
advertisement, several genre conventions that are connected to political advertising are used. The
candidate image is used, documentary formats, and ordinary folks (Children). In the ad, images
of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are used as the major competitors. Both images are used as
a comparison between the irrational and the rational. The clip attempts to show the citizens why
they need a rational leader. Documentary formats are used to show Trump’s different instances
where he portrayed himself as dangerous and irrational. The format is used to show how one of
the candidates lacks principles and how he will be a disgrace to the country. The other genre
convention used is ordinary folks. In this ad, normal children, different gender, race, and age, are
used. They are used to show why the country needs a principled leader. They are represented as
the victims of lack of principles in the country.
In the advert, Hillary Clinton seems to target a wide segment of voters. First, she seems
to target Donald Trump’s supporters, who are the Republicans. The ad portrays Donald Trump as
dangerous, inappropriate and irrational and it portrays Hilary Clinton as the hopeful protector

POLITICAL ADVERTISING AND THE DIGITAL AGE

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and rational. From the clips and sound bites, Trump is using offensive words leading to
questioning of his principles. For instance, at one point he says, “I could stand in the middle of
Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s like incredible.”
(Clinton, 2016). The advertisement poses a question about the United States guiding principles.
It suggests that Donald Trump will be a disgrace to the country’s principles if he becomes the
president of the United States. The claim assumes that the country needs to have principles and
morals and the president should symbolize these morals. On contrary, Trump symbolizes
ableism, sexism, violence, profanity, and xenophobia. The advertisement hence seems to target
the supporters of Trump to show them how Trump is not the best choice. She also seems to be
targeting everyone in the country no matter their race, gender, and age. In the ad, there are
children watching Trump’s controversial clips and sound bites. The children are diverse in race,
age, and gender. In the clip, Trump demeans other races. He says ‘When Mexico sends its
people. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.’ (Clinton, 2016). This is
an indication that the ad targets people from different races. The ad also targets parents. Towards
the end of the ad, Hillary Clinton urges parents that they are responsible for setting principles for
them. She says “Our children and grandchildren will look back at this time and the choices we
are about to make, the goals we will strive for, the principles we will live by, and we need to
make sure that they can be proud of us.” (Clinton, 2016).
Contemporary political campaigns and commercial campaigns have much in common.
The aim of commercial campaigns is to influence the purchasing behavior while political
campaigns aim to influence voter beh...


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