Psychology of Advertising: Advertising as a Cultural Agent

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Advertising as a Cultural Agent

This 1966 Ford Fairlane commercial embodies that era's cultural scene in connection with the changing views of and toward women.

The actress Ann B. Davis enacted a romance novel inspired script to take the audience to the edge of innuendo and then "shift" to humor. The selling idea, of course, concerned the virtues of the car's automatic stick shift.

This commercial was written and produced the same year as the founding of the National Organization for Women. In this exemplary commercial, the archetype has turned the tables.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Important Readings For You

Eighmey's journal articles on Internet advertising place him among the 10 most widely cited on the subject. His path-making article "Profiling User Responses to Commercial Websites" (see Journal of Advertising Research, March 1997) has been cited in more than 783 scholarly articles and books.

For a conceptual and data-driven analysis of youth values and the propensity to act on values, read Eighmey's article "Why Do Youth Enlist? Identification of Underlying Themes" in Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 32, No. 2, (January, 2006).

Read "Harlow Gale and the Origins of the Psychology of Advertising" in the Journal of Advertising, December 2007 for historical perspective.

For the big picture read "The Psychology of Persuasion: Perspectives for Theory, Research and Application in a Diverse World." A book co-authored with Osei Appiah and published by Cognella, 2011.

For 450 print ads that bring to life Advertising and American History, scroll down to the link featuring the original ad for Oreo cookies. Why not check out all the other links, too.