In this lecture we first looked at Lupton's post-modern interest in hermeneutics (interpretations) and structures of social control, which would lead us to believe her to be receptive to the idea of subliminal advertising, however her argument is largely critical - but still thinks it locates an important truth.
***
The critical phase of Lupton's argument:
- The idea of subliminal advertising involves reading an image in a certain way
- Lupton notes connection between reading ambiguous images and the wordplay of advertising (puns, compressions, double meanings) post-modernists are interested in the idea of double coding
- Early cinematic 'blipverts'(intermittently flashing imagery on a single frame of a film) were said to increase concession sales- but that this could not be repeated under experimental conditions.
Stuart Ewen's All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture
The positive phase of Lupton's argument:
- There are subliminal effects of advertising -> in truth this is an issue of representation -> representations of ethnicity/class/femininity/ etc
|
|
representations of cultural normality are transmitted in a quasi-subliminal fashion
- the myth of subliminal advertising ultimately cheapens the valuable critical and semiotic deconstruction of the representation of societal norms and power interests as they are encoded in images of media
- 'Mintel' report
-'Seducing the subconscious: The psychology of ...' - Robert Heath
- Compare the Market vs Go Compare
- the curious case of O2
- Affect vs representation
