Lisi Davis: Creative Advertising: OUCA401: Lecture 12: Representation

Culture can be used to describe the values of a group and Stuart Hall was particularly interested in how things are communicated in different cultures.

I found it really interesting how perspectives depend on culture, meaning that the way we perceive things is learned, not inherited, and therefore depends on what social group you belong to. For example, these two drawings of an elephant was perceived differently by particular cultural groups. The split elephant drawing was generally preferred by African children and adults.

International representation means there is a different underlying message. For example, this image shows someone drinking coke but the intention is to get people to buy coke. International representation is used a lot in advertising as the main function of advertising is to increase profits and get customers to buy the product/service.

Documental photography is a representational medium as it records the reconstruction of the everyday, e.g. Henri Cartier who was a 20^th Century street photographer. His work helped bring meaning back to France after the war, which shows photography isn’t just a mirror of life.

It is interesting to discuss how much truth black and white photography actually embodies. Whatever we photograph was lived in colour, not black and white. Black and white can often be seen as false/story/not as real, e.g. Holocaust pictures were not allowed to be produced in colour due to complaints that they were too ‘real’ (Yad Vashem museum). According to Readex Research, when this advert for Airgas was run in colour, 33% of readers claimed to remember it, suggesting that colour has a positive impact in advertising. However, some may argue that black and white advertising, especially on television, makes it more serious, dramatic and memorable.