Advertising Communication

This course is about advertisements and their producers: what happens behind the scenes to create them, how they are deployed, and what they tell us about the social groups constructing and consuming them. By drawing on a wide range of studies and disciplines, the course surveys the history of advertising, focusing primarily though not exclusively on the United States, and investigates the changing strategies that have been used by advertisers from the 19th to the 21st centuries. It does so by approaching advertisements as texts that can be understood through semiotic analysis and the advertising industry as a relatively autonomous social field whose structure and dynamics can be looked at through a sociological lens. The course will provide a cultural approach to the study of advertising and its history as a means to understand advertising and branding as central components in capitalist economies and indicators of cultural attitudes and ideologies. It will also examine how advertising texts and producers represent various social identities: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion and more. The latter section of the course investigates what kind of impact advertising has in shaping social trends, style and changing consumer practices.

After completing this course, students will learn to:
- Describe how an advertising agency works.
- Evaluate and critically interpret advertisements both in terms of their construction and their societal impact.
- Analyze and discuss the advertising process through a sociological lens.
- Formulate research questions about how advertisements are made.
- Develop a method to collect, import into a data set and statistically manipulate primary data for testing hypotheses about the relationship between advertising and society.