The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture

The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture provides an essential guide to the key issues, methodologies, concepts, debates, and policies that shape our everyday relationship with advertising.

The book contains eight sections:

• Historical Perspectives considers the historical roots and their relationship to recent changes of contemporary advertising and promotional practice.
• Political Economy examines how market forces, corporate ownership, and government policies shape the advertising and media promotion environment.
• Globalization presents work on advertising and marketing as a global, intercultural, and transnational practice.
• Audiences as Labor, Consumers, Interpreters, Fans introduces how people construct promotional meaning and are constructed as consumers, markets, and labor by advertising forces.
• Identities analyzes the ways that advertising constructs images and definitions of groups -- such as gender, race and the child -- through industry labor practices, marketing, as well as through representation in advertising texts.
• Social Institutions looks at the pervasiveness of advertising strategies in different social domains, including politics, music, housing, and education.
• Everyday Life highlights how a promotional ethos and advertising initiatives pervade self image, values, and relationships.
• The Environment interrogates advertising’s relationship to environmental issues, the promotional efforts of corporations to construct green images, and mass consumption’s relationship to material waste.

With chapters written by leading international scholars working at the intersections of media studies and advertising studies, this book is a go-to source for those looking to understand the ways advertising has shaped consumer culture, in the past and present.

Matthew P. McAllister is Professor of Communications in the Department of Film/Video & Media Studies at Penn State. He is the author of The Commercialization of American Culture (1996, Sage), and the co-editor of Comics and Ideology (with Ian Gordon and Edward H. Sewell, Jr., 2001, Peter Lang), Film and Comic Books (with Ian Gordon and Mark Jancovich, 2007, University Press of Mississippi), and The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader (with Joseph Turow, 2009, Routledge).

Emily West is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, whose work focuses on consumer culture, gender and performance, and media audiences. Her research on the commodification of sentiment and nation branding has appeared in journals including Media, Culture & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Consumer Culture, Feminist Media Studies, and Popular Communication. Her newest work is on discourses of consumerism in US healthcare policy.