Book and Media Studies

This book demonstrates how fashion brands communicate, why the practice is significant within wider society and how it can be perceived as culturally meaningful. Enabling readers to connect the tools and techniques of communication with their theoretical underpinnings and historical antecedents, the book shows how these methods can be applied in practice. The authors utilise social, consumer and cultural theory, and frameworks rooted in psychology, sociology and economics, as mechanisms to analyse and deconstruct current communication strategies used by fashion brands.

In 1951, a new type of publication appeared on newsstands--the physique magazine produced by and for gay men. For many men growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, these magazines and their images and illustrations of nearly naked men, as well as articles, letters from readers, and advertisements, served as an initiation into gay culture. Such businesses have often been seen as peripheral to the gay political movement. In this book, David K. Johnson shows how gay commerce was not a byproduct but rather an important catalyst for the gay rights movement.

Advertising, Consumer Culture, and Canadian Society is a critical collection of readings that place Canadian advertising and consumer culture in historical, social, and cultural context.

Contemporary consumer society is increasingly saturated by digital technology, and the devices that deliver this are increasingly transforming consumption patterns. Social media, smartphones, mobile apps and digital retailing merge with traditional consumption spheres, supported by digital devices which further encourage consumers to communicate and influence other consumers to consume. This volume explores the digitization of consumption and shows how consumer culture and consumption practices are fundamentally intertwined and mediated by digital devices.

This volume provides a thoughtful and wide-ranging exploration of approaches to the critical study of advertising. Current and impending practices of advertising have in many ways exceeded the grasp of traditional modes of critique, due at least in part to their being formulated in very different historical conditions. To begin to address this lag, this edited collection explores through critical discussion and application a variety of critical approaches to advertising.

This collection of classic and contemporary essays provides a detailed, engaging, and altogether current study of gender that focuses on Canadian themes and scholars.

Coverage includes marketing in a post-demographic world, crafting the story of the brand, building engaged communities, creating experiences that inspire loyalty and evangelism, and the cutting-edge tricks that help businesses large and small harness the enormous power of youth. Businesses today have to embody the ideals of youth culture in order to succeed, by tapping the new and rapidly evolving resources n business and in life. YouthNation is a roadmap to brand relevancy in the new economy, giving businesses turn-by-turn direction to their market destination.

Designed for the critical media studies curriculum, The Media Studies Reader is an entry point into the major theories and debates that have shaped critical media studies from the 1940s to the present. It is comprised of over 40 readings that are organized into seven sections representing key concepts and themes covered in an introductory media studies course: culture, technology, representation, industry, identity, audience and citizenship.

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.

Through case studies in twelve countries and in-depth interviews with nation branding experts and their national clients, Melissa Aronczyk argues that the social, political and cultural discourses constitutive of the nation have been harnessed in new and problematic ways, with far-reaching consequences for both our concept of the nation and our ideals of national citizenship. Branding the Nation challenges the received wisdom about the power of brands to change the world, and offers a critical perspective on these new ways of conceiving value and identity in the globalized twenty-first century.

This text provides an international perspective on the practice of advertising while examining some of the ethical and social ramifications of advertising in global societies. The book illustrates how issues such as the representation of women and minorities in ads, advertising and children, and advertising in the digital era have relevance to a wider global community.

What, exactly, does advertising do? How and why do ads influence us? How does the advertising industry influence our media? These are just a few of the many important questions addressed in The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader--an incisive, provocative collection that assembles twenty-seven of the most important scholarly writings on advertising and consumer culture to date.

Advertising and Promotion takes a novel intellectual approach and draws on concepts from the wider humanities and social sciences to cast fresh light on an over-familiar subject matter. It uniquely combines detailed case information, current research and lively topical issues to offer an authoritative and comprehensive account of advertising′s pre-eminent role in contemporary marketing communications. It is an advanced student text, a reflective practitioner′s handbook and an insightful account for the general reader.

This text traces advertising's influence within three key social domains: the new commodities industry, popular culture, and the mass media that manages the constellation of images that unifies all three.

Understanding Women's Magazines investigates the changing landscape of women's magazines. Anna Gough-Yates focuses on the successes, failures and shifting fortunes of a number of magazines including Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Frank, New Woman and Red and considers the dramatic developments that have taken place in women's magazine publishing in the last two decades.

The Consumer Society Reader features a range of key works on the nature and evolution of consumer society. It includes classics such as the Frankfurt School writers Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse on the Culture Industry; Thorstein Veblen's oft-cited writings on "conspicuous consumption"; Betty Friedan on the housewife's central role in consumer society; and John Kenneth Galbraith's influential analysis of the "affluent society."