Sign Wars: the Cluttered Landscape of Advertising

Arthur Asa Berger

Journal of Communication Review

Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising.

By Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson. New York: The Guilford Press. 1996. 322 pages. $28.95 (soft).

According to Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, sign wars refers to the continually and endlessly escalating battles waged by advertising agencies for the attention of radio listeners, readers of newspapers and magazines, and especially television viewers--that is, those who advertisers hope will purchase the products and services being advertised. These wars, we are told, represent “a mature stage of brand competition” (p. 25) and are a manifestation of the desire of advertisers to position their signs (that is, advertisements and commercials) as superior to those of their competitors. The authors use the term “ads” generically-- to stand for both print advertisements and radio and television commercials. (Traditionally the term advertisement is reserved for print media and the term commercial is used for electronic media.)

Sign Wars argues that advertisers are always in need of new ways to differentiate themselves from their rivals, always involved in “one-upping” them--even if this leads to everyone cannibalizing signs and images wherever they can find them, ultimately creating a stage the authors describe (taking a cue from Baudrillard) as “hypersignification.” In this stage, every advertising agency has to create new and more daring commercials and print advertisements at an increasingly rapid pace, just to maintain their position, so to speak. As Goldman and Papson explain, (260) “The pace and aggression of sign war competitions has continued to increase in intensity, force and speed....” So advertising agencies have to “run faster and faster” just to stay where they are.

In order to assuage their voracious hunger for new images that will capture the attention of their increasingly jaded and alienated audiences, many advertisers employ what the authors call “style hunters” (analogous in many respects to “bounty hunters”) to discover arresting and exciting new styles that can be used to create fresh commercials and, especially, to avoid being “zapped” by viewers. “Advertisers,” we are told, “can never rest in their search for culturally resonant meanings that can be used as resources for constructing new sign values.” (p. 257) It sounds as if they are in the sixth or seventh level of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.

Ultimately this process is self defeating. This is because advertising agencies, condemned to continually change the signs they use and battling with one another for the attention of viewers, inevitably generate clutter. The pace of this process--signs wars among advertising agencies--leads ineluctably to a breakdown in the communication process caused by information overload, as viewers--especially in the case of television--become overtaxed by being exposed to so many commercials competing with one another.

The ultimate outcome of being exposed to a glut of signs is a kind of sign pollution that, the authors suggest, “has taken a deep toll on our culture--it has cost us our faith.” The authors also wonder whether the ever-accelerating and all pervasive decontextualization of signs is leading to a “generalized crisis of meaning in our culture.” (p. 247)

Sign Wars deals with advertising in America (primarily television commercials) from the mid 1980s through the early 1990s--a period when advertisers started attacking each other with increasing intensity. It examines common themes in advertising campaigns and approaches that can be used to deal with them, such as hypersignification. It also pays particular attention to the way ads “hail” alienated spectators, the way ads and commercials use memory and notions of authenticity for their purposes, and the way they have co-opted the green revolution.

The approach the authors take is essentially a critical one, that also uses semiotic analysis and psychoanalytic theory in its analyses. The authors thesis is that advertising has replaced imperialism as a means of sustaining capitalist societies. As they write: (p.273)

...when capital annexes culture as a semiotic universe and directs the meanings of images to obey the logic of commodity relations, it also introduces into culture the contradictions of the commodity form. By turning to culture to expand the range of exchange values, capital has exported its crisis tendencies into the cultural sphere.

Thus, advertising not only keeps bourgeois societies going but also is the prime factor in motivating people to work. Alienation is, it turns out, functional--since directed by advertising , alienation leads to increased consumption.

The authors continually use the term “hailing,” suggesting their intellectual ties with Althusser (who, curiously, is not listed in the index or bibliography), and the subtitle of their introduction, “Advertising in the Age of Accelerated Meaning” obviously recalls Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” And their concern with hypersignification suggests, as I mentioned earlier, their links with Jean Baudrillard’s work.

The book has numerous small and generally grainy illustrations in it--frames from television commercials--and has a large number of wonderfully perceptive analyses of particular advertisements and commercials and case studies of various campaigns, such as the Nike-Reebok sneaker wars, the cola wars and a number of other sign wars.

There is a strong sense of irony that permeates Signs Wars. The authors continually mention dilemmas and problems advertising agencies face as they battle one another for the attention of the American public. Interestingly enough, the pace with which corporations are abandoning their advertising agencies has increased markedly in recent years and many agencies find themselves casualties of the sign wars that are raging.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all, I would suggest, is that Sign Wars is a book that can be used, with great profit, by advertising agencies. It is a major contribution to our understanding of probably the most important and influential genre in television, and certainly the most annoying one--the commercial. Sign Wars carries forward the argument and methodological sophistication of books such as Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects and a work one seldom sees mentioned these days, Marshall McLuhan’s 1951 classic, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. There are numerous other books on advertising that could be mentioned here, as well.

The American public seems to have bought the argument that it is worth being plagued by endless numbers of commercials if it is to have “free” television. What Sign Wars points out is that this is a devil’s bargain and that Americans are all actually paying, in more ways than they are aware of, for their so-called “free” television.

Tough Girls: Women, Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture by

Sherrie A. Inness. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1999. viii + 228 pages.$47.50 (hard), $19.95 (soft). Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad and Sexy by John A. Lent (ed.). Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green Popular Press. 1999.212 pages. 49.95 (hard), $21.95 (soft).

"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" That question, asked by Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, is, in a curious way, the subtext of Sherrie Inness's fascinating book, Tough Girls. She points out that toughness has conventionally been perceived as antithetical to being feminine--"femininity and masculinity are defined as opposites in our culture." (p.15). One might argue, drawing upon Saussure, that they would be seen as opposites in any culture, due to the way language makes sense of concepts--by differentiation. Thus, being feminine means being not masculine and not having traits associated with masculinity.

So why should women want to be tough? Because toughness, Inness explains, is connected with strength, success and power. She writes, "the connection we make between maleness and toughness works effectively to ensure male privilege and authority." (p.17) Feminine toughness, then, is connected to the desire women have to escape from a socially constructed definition of the feminine as weak and inferior, and her study examines heroines in popular culture who challenge, with varying degrees of success, the dominance of tough male heroes.

In the first part of the book she deals with "semi-tough" characters such as Emma Peel, the three wiggle-and-jiggle leads in Charlie's Angels, and the Bionic woman on television. Then Inness turns her attention to women's magazines, with a focus on advertisements and fashion. One complicating factor, raised in her discussion of leather, involves the association between lesbianism and toughness, a commonly held stereotype. Her last chapter in this section deals with killer women in films such as Prizzi's Honor and La Femme Nikita.

Nikita is described as "the ultimate male threat--a seductive, attractive woman who lures men to their deaths with her feminine wiles." Inness provides a photo of Anne Parillaud, who plays Nikita, with a lot of leg showing, in spiked heels, holding a great big pistol. (The Freudian in me asks whether these beautiful and tough women, with big pistols and submachine guns, generate unconscious castration anxiety in men.)

The characters Inness has dealt with, to this point, are only pseudo-tough; ultimately, when they are in danger, they rely on men, who are really tough, to save them; there is also a tendency for these semi-tough women to function as sexual objects.

In the second part of the book, Inness analyzes the personas of Jody Foster in The Silence of the Lambs and Gillian Anderson from The X-Files. These characters, and others like them, cross boundaries that have traditionally existed between male and female representations. But even some of these tougher women, such as Ellen Ripley in Alien (who Inness suggests has changed the way women are depicted in films) ends up in bikini underwear and a tank top at the end of the film.

Inness is particularly interested in science fiction, a genre that she suggests enables us to reexamine contemporary problems involving race, gender and class; she devotes the remainder of her book to this genre. She deals with post-apocalyptic heroines such as Sarah Connor, from the Terminator films, heroines like Storm and Elektra from the comics, and concludes with a heroine who, she believes, marks a major change from previous representations of women, Xena: Warrior Princess.

But Xena is a problem, because her sexual orientation is decidedly ambiguous (it is considered a queer show by its queer viewers, Inness tells us) and because Lucy Lawless, who plays her, is a gorgeous woman who often wears little clothing. Xena may not need a man's help, but that may be, because she's not a woman, as we commonly understand what it means to be a woman. "Xena's appeal is particularly interesting," Inness writes, "because her show--and television in general--possess the power to change how we construct and understand gender in real life." (p.162).

This notion that gender is a social construct that can be affected by television and the other mass media is reasonable, and Inness's book is persuasive on that matter. How big a role society and the media play relative to biology is the question. Maybe gender (and we can add race and other matters) are socially constructed, but only up to a point? Women, according to Gloria Steinem, have a long history of being female impersonators. Do all these tough women suggest that now women will start impersonating men? We are led, then, to an answer to Henry Higgins' question. A woman can be more like a man, but she can never be a man (that is, a tough guy) and the more she's like a man, the less she's like a woman.

This leads us to the second book, an important collection of essays on Asian cartooning and comic art edited by John Lent. This first section of the book is on Asian cartooning and has articles on Malay humor magazines, the Korean animation industry, animation and Islam (with reference to Disney's Aladdin) and comics in Singapore. The second section deals with gender and Asian comics in some detail.

One article, by Kanako Shikawa, "Cut but Deadly: Women and Violence in Japanese Comics," deals with the kawaii phenomenon, namely "cuteness" in Japanese comics of the sixties. Women who are "cute" are generally shown with large, round (that is, non-Asian) eyes and little in the way of breast development. The nemesis of these cute girls are utsukushii, beautiful women who also look rather western. By the nineties, these "cute" girls had kept their facial features (the large, Keane-like eyes) but now had fully developed bodies and were "placed in increasingly explicit and usually very violent sexual scenarios, including rape and bondage." (p.114)

This theme of violent sex is carried forward in a second article, Setsu Shigematsu's "Dimensions of Desire: Sex, Fantasy, and Fetish in Japanese Comics." This essay deals with rape fantasies and all kinds of other sexual material and concludes with a statement that brings us back to the concepts behind Tough Girls. Shigematsu writes, "my concern is not to villainize the heteronormative, but to show that how we think about sexuality functions within a larger socio-political framework…"(p.151)

There is also an essay on representations of women in Indian comics (goddess, demon, avenging warrior, martyred wife" and finally one by Mary Grigsby, "The Social Production of Gender as Reflected in Two Japanese Culture Industry Products: Sailormoon and Crayon Shin-Chan." This essay ties these characters to consumer culture. To be feminine in Japan, Grigsby writes, is to consume market goods and be consumed by men. We are far removed from the tough girlsthat Inness wrote about.

Both of these books argue that our popular culture--comics, television shows, films, fashion--plays an important role in our lives, especially in the ways we think about gender and sexuality. They contribute in important ways to our concern about gender and sexuality in the arts and popular culture. Popular culture provides images of heroines, of all kinds--tough in America and Europe and "cute" in Japan-- that are used by women to construct their identities. These images may not be the dominant element in the way women learn to define themselves--anatomy, it would seem, is also part of destiny. But these books offer convincing arguments that mass mediated representations of women play a larger part in the construction of a feminine identity than we had previously believed.