Media Promotion and Power Dynamics

Introduction:

Gurevitch (2010) notes that contemporary media promotional culture has metamorphosed from its traditional roles of informing, reminding and persuading potential and existing customers to purchase goods and services into a degrading, decaying and flawed system under control from a few societal elites. Davis (2013) states, “Ultimately, promotional culture has contributed to the development and sustenance of a flawed and contradictory system of mediated, capitalist democracy. Such a system, in its current state, reproduces growing inequality, exploitation and the erosion of precious environmental resources. In so doing, it also corrupts individuals, cultural and social norms, and values.” Davis (2007) clearly shows how people in positions of power influence and use media to propagate bigoted messages against the principles of promotion. This essay agrees with Davis’ statement and seeks to expand the assertion by drawing from existing research on the issue. This essay presents an evidence-based and in-depth analysis of the contemporary media promotional culture and illustrates how modern promotional culture has contributed to the growth and sustenance of a contradictory and unsound system of mediated and capitalist democracy which is the foundation for inequality, environmental destruction, moral erosion and corruption.

Roles of Promotional Culture

According to Davis (2013), unlike advertising, promotional culture entails applicable activities of public relations, marketing, lobbying and branding with the main objective being promoting ideas, people and organisations. On the contrary, advertising is the activity of promoting goods and services. Further, Davis (2013) notes that promotional culture is highly influential in indirect ways. Nowadays, promotional practices are inform and shape individuals, organisations, society, cultural exchange and social relations. Aroncyzyk (2015) reports that promotional culture shapes values and ideals, extends brand awareness, functions as social communication and shapes ideals and values. Everin and Tankard (2011) observe that in the twenty-first century, everything has become promotable, apart from the traditional goods and services. As such modern promotional culture incorporates people, cultures, ideas, values, organisations and nations among a host of others. This has led different means of constructing, representing and performing identities in promotional cultures while targeting different markets using different media. Additionally, the expansion in roles of promotional culture has generated interest among researchers particularly in how they serve varied interests and align with political and social national agendas. Before delineating Davis’ statement, it is important to revisit Wernick’s primary theoretical framework for promotional culture.

Wernick’s Promotional Culture Thesis

Wernick (1991) suggests that promotional culture is a critical reflection – sociological and cultural – on the effects of advertising in informing and shaping modern culture. According to Wernick (1991), the impact of promotion has become increasingly fundamental given that market has spread to every facet of contemporary life. For this reason, the resultant promotional culture has changed the traits of all forms of communication. In the first place, cultural products are comprised of complex signifiers which communicate promotional messages that are co-extensive with the larger symbolic world (Wernick, 1991). Therefore, all manner of communications under modern cultural conditions possess, to an extent, a “self-advantaging” exchange. Wernick’s thesis provides a foundation for exploring promotional culture holistically. According to Iyorza (2014), Wernick’s work assists in understanding the cultural power possessed by the media by proving that advertising not only sells commercial products in a favourable light but also promotes specific notions indirectly. As such, advertised goods and services are emblems of their promoters and their ideologies. By extension, the idea can be associated with the celebrity and self-commodification phenomena that currently characterises the commercial world. Besides, the theory elaborates how all aspects of contemporary life have gradually come to assume a quasi-commodity or commodity form. Davis (2007) borrows from Wernick’s work and asserts that the society has gradually become more promotionally-oriented and people, cultures, organisations and nations have come to accommodate promotional discourse as a characteristic of modern life and have allowed it greater priority. In summary, Wernick’s theory clearly demonstrates the supreme power possessed by the media since objects signify and communicate to audiences more than themselves. In the following paragraphs, the transformation of promotional culture is elaborated. Two case studies that illustrate how promotional culture contributes to moral degradation are also included.

The Transformation of Promotional Culture

Davis (2013) observes that modern critiquing of promotional culture is championed by conservative traditionalist, centre-left journalists and post-Marxists pundits. In the recent past, other parties have joined the fray with issues emanating from consumer rights, racial equality, environmental concerns and gender issues (Gurevitch, 2010). Davis (2013) notes in daily life, regardless of prevailing socioeconomic conditions, promotional experts work through deception, manipulation and propaganda. In fact, the main contributor to the decay in media promotional culture is the practitioners who have managed to act contrary to professional images promoted by their respective industries with relative liberty (Hesmondhalgh & Toynbee, 2007). Also, majority of global countries have nondescript rules regarding conduct of promotional culture. In some countries, promotional professions have no strict rules of entry and professionals need not to have specific qualifications nor belong to professional associations (Kellner, 2008). Therefore, to expect such individuals to exercise utmost professionalism in an unregulated environment is unrewarding (Iyorza, 2014). Additionally, public censure or fines to such individuals are rare since contemporary promotional culture has become deeply ingrained in modern life. While promotional professions have played a huge role in evolution of market-based democracies, they have failed to facilitate neutral emergence of such institutions and social relations. Davis (2013) notes that on the contrary, promotional professionals have disoriented neutral emergence into specific problematic directions as witnessed over the last five decades in most Western Countries. As a result, the transformed promotional culture has encouraged mediatised capitalist democracies that are cultural, morally and socially flawed. Modern promotional practices have tainted and blinded people, corrupted social relations and institutions and encouraged prejudice and inequality. In fact, individuals in their use of media inadvertently alter their discursive practices, relations and behaviours and in so doing shape people and institutions. A good case study of mediated power is the profound coverage of 9/11 attacks in the United States and the subsequent public beliefs. Regarding Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), extensive assessments by the United States and United Nations found such claims false. However, mediatised coverage particularly in the West downplayed the report from the United States and the UN. A poll conducted in 2006 revealed that over 63 percent of people in the US believed that Iraq had WMD. Additionally most people in the Western countries believed that Iraq had supported the al Qaeda in carrying out the attacks. In the UK, the situation was not different since the media framed Iraqi invasion and public debates with regard to existential threats instead of international legality of invading a sovereign country with fully-fledged leadership on unsubstantiated claims.

In the above case study, the media used its profound power to inform public opinion and directed public debates and beliefs in a problematic direction. As a result, since 9/11, Western media has led to emergence of mediatised capitalist democracies characterised by Islamophobia, hatred towards refugees and scepticism towards Islamic countries. This points out to a deeply flawed and morally decayed societal systems that do not tolerate religious and cultural differences. As a matter of fact, the situation is highly pronounced in the UK. The recent spats in the Arab world have sent millions of people seeking refuge in Europe. For refugees who arrived in the UK, the media used dehumanising words to describe them notwithstanding their conspicuous need for assistance. It spread hatred by using words such as “vermin” and “invaders” to describe Syrian refuges in the UK. Such attitudes serve to corrupt the minds of UK people who then begin to perceive asylum seekers as leeches and thereby cut off all help and human compassion towards other suffering human beings. Davis (2013) also highlights how promotional industries have facilitated the development of complex markets that equally benefit the public and producers equally. Such advanced marketization have gradually subdued people and societies at large. Advanced marketization coupled with capitalism have contributed to “commodity fetishism” across the world. Capitalism, which is widely practised in most countries is contradictory, deeply defective and unsustainable whose end result is exploitation of many people by a few as well as enormous inequalities in the society. Curran and Morley (2006) point out to the fact that promotional culture usually benefits larger and established producers rather than consumers going by the fact that promotional intermediaries are employees of producers. Therefore, a few producers generate biased content that informs and shapes the attitudes and knowledge of societies. More often than not, producers use promotional culture to corrupt public information channels to benefit from the economic and political impacts of their promotional messages. A good case study stems from several instances reported widely where the elite few pressure and abuse journalists using all means for the latter to alter information content. According to Kellner (2006) pressuring journalists and media houses by major producers pursuing commercial interests has led to commodification of public information at the expense of information acquisition by citizens. As such, contemporary promotional culture has led to public exclusion, unequal access and reduced coverage on issues that are of public interest (Kaplan & Vigna, 2007; Davis, 2013; Pavelka, 2014). As a result, there has been greater state management of promotional culture to the disadvantage of ordinary citizens. Curran and Morley (2006) further report that in the commercial context, promotional culture inadvertently leads to emergence of a “magic system” which leads to a vicious and endless dissatisfaction cycle among consumers. For example, unethical promotional practices have been used to create “false needs” which then imbue “false symbolism” which encourages consumption as the ultimate solution for satiating needs. As a result, misinformed individuals are compelled by ongoing and empty “commodity fetishism” to purchase goods. In this way, market systems led by producers are sustained but customer dissatisfaction is never addressed (Davis, 2007). Davis (2013) reports that there is the tendency of modern promotional cultures to replace or substitute social values with market values which lead to cultural, social and moral erosion. As such, socially generated virtues, values and codes of good conduct are substituted with market generated principles. In the long run, there is elevation of individual good/welfare over societal welfare which leads to enormous gaps where a few people are getting richer by mischievously nibbling the dwindling resources of the majority. All in all, the advancement and support for producer-oriented ideologies in modern promotional cultures has kept ordinary consumers/citizens subjugated.

Moreover, going by major political events in the recent past, it can be construed that promotional culture is thinly reviving feudalisation in politics. According to Hesmondhalgh and Toynbee (2007), promotional practices are largely responsible for redirecting political organisations to work towards propagandas, secrecy and winning power through reshaping political entities into “electoral-professional” enterprises. The results of this orientation are far-reaching. According to Davis (2013), when political parties develop development policies, they are guided by promotional culture mediums such as pollsters, media managers and marketers instead of core memberships and political ideologies. For example, in the United States, campaign efforts are overly directed on a few swing states and voters. Governments and political parties even in the UK have been known to use their advertising budgets to influence content of news normally through “dumbed-down” content, “pseudo-events” and “sound bites” (Davis, 2007). Davis (2013) adds that “information subsidies” characterise modern promotional culture and they are provided by large corporate and political public relations undertakings. For example, in the UK, over two-thirds of public affairs and public relations professionals are employed by huge corporate and political entities. This allegiance to specific businesses and political parties is a recipe for further decay in modern promotional culture. For example, in the UK and the United States, promotional industries have been known to ally themselves with the Conservatives and Republicans respectively. These parties favour business and have expansionist agendas. Therefore, promotional cultures in these contexts tend to undermine the Labour and Democratic parties in the UK and the US correspondingly. Promotional culture has also been cited as an effective propagator of social prejudices across sundry audiences. Kaplan and Vigna (2007) report that promotional texts, videos and pictures unintentionally invokes views of others in terms of ethnicity, race, region and religion. A good example is a recent case in China promoting a detergent. In attempt to capture and relay the effectiveness of the detergent, the promoters entreated racial issues. As such, in the advert, a young Chinese woman has a black boyfriend whom she wished cleaned. Thus, she puts the young man in a washing machine and after a few minutes, a good looking Chinese man emerges. This case was controversial since it directly refers to the black colour as dirt. Davis (2013) observes that promotional culture disadvantages women. Normally, women are likely to be portrayed as supportive wives and mothers at home than in the workplace. In the example given above, the young lady was portrayed as a supportive woman at home doing her family laundry. On the other hand, men are far more likely to be portrayed at the workplace. Also, promotional culture tends to represent women by their body parts in seductive poses where desired body shapes and sexual preferences are the theme (Davis, 2013). Iyorza (2007) in a study in Nigeria found that dominant Western views are promoted and white people are not substituted with black people to match contexts. As such, most multinationals advertising their products in Africa use their views and models to pass their messages instead of recreating such ads to match the African context. However, it is important to note that firms are increasingly getting cognisant of this issue. For example, Coca Cola produces advertisements that match racial contexts. Davis (2013) observes Indian promotional culture emphasises cosmopolitan, globally-oriented and body-conscious profiles of novel men and women instead of sticking to societal norms. On the other hand, fashion magazines in Taiwan and Singapore use Caucasians and white models to promote their messages irrespective of the fact that the ethnic majorities in the two areas are ethnic Chinese.

Kellner (2008) reports that 1990s was characterised by escalating issues resulting from globalisation. Global warming and environmental destruction, overexploitation, pollution, climate change and ecological problems emerged in earnest. With the deregulation of the media and the corporate practices, the media celebrated “economic boom” and the birth of a “new economy” while disregarding the perils of climate change, environmental erosion and loss of biodiversity.

Conclusion

In summary, from the earliest days of capitalism and expansion of commodity production, promotional culture came under the control of the few that control supply. On one end, promotional culture has spurred immeasurable growth in mass media, markets and democracy but has also been used to propagate propaganda which serves the whims of governments and major corporations. As such, it has been illustrated throughout the text that modern promotional culture places emphasis on the concerns of individuals and ignores the greater welfare of the society. From the neo-liberal field of thought, modern promotional culture hampers freedom and choice which are key in facilitating individuals to rise while unhampered by collective issues and concerns.

References

Aronczyk, M., 2015. Understanding the impact of transnational promotional class on political communication. International Journal of Communication, Volume 9, pp. 2007-2026.

Davis, A., 2013. Promotional culture: The rise and spread of advertising, public relation, marketing and Branding. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Everin, W. & Tankard, J., 2011. Communication theories: origins, methods and uses in the mass media. 5th ed. Addison: Wesley Publishers.

Gurevitch, L., 2010. 100% pure imperial ecology: Marketing the environment in Antipodean film and advertising. New Zealand Journal of Media Studies, 12(1), pp. 58-97.

Iyorza, S., 2014. Global television and cultural promotion: Taming the cultural dilemma among Nigerian youths. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, 4(4), pp. 308-310.

Pavelka, J., 2014. The factors affecting the presentation of events and the media coverage of topics in the mass media. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, Volume 140, pp. 623-629.