billboards-popular culture and society

8/22/2019 Billboards-Popular Culture and Society

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The earlier stigma associated with popular culture has given way to exhaustive analysis of its role

and influence in modern society. In this age of global capitalism, intense competition between

product manufacturing units has led to a boom in the advertising industry. Billboards are crucial

to the advertising campaign of any product that aims to create a niche in the market. As a visual

medium of communication, billboards are able to establish a strong link with the masses. Thisdetermines their potential customers.

Billboards are all about ubiquity, powerful visibility and establishing a relation of identity with

people. There is, in fact, no novelty about this concept. Literature has, through the ages, thrived

on the same principle. As an art, it mediates life from different perspectives but attempts to make

its readers see their reflection in the characters portrayed. Popular literature goes a step ahead by

transporting us into alternate realms of reality that we all aspire to be a part of. A classic example

of such aspirational advertising is the creation of the myth of James Bond. Sexy, spunky and

macho, Bond has leaped out of the pages of Ian Flemings narratives and has entered our lives in

a phenomenal way. So we have Pierce Brosnan endorsing a Reid and Taylor suit and a Rado

watch, convincing men that unless they own these commodities, they could be left behind in the

race of life. One need not be a spy for your country and outwit KGB, but if one has the dough,

one can at least live the way Bond does-in style. The things he uses and the way he uses them are

described in the minute detail. This suggests that Bond is not casual about anything in life. Eachpart of his life, however small it may be, is important. The care and precision Bond invests in

choosing his products proves him to be a person of sharp intellect and fine aesthetic sense-

something we all aspire to be. He is aware of his uniqueness and individuality and is coy about

flaunting the same with attitude. The same Bond staring down seductively into our eyes,advertising a product is an invitation to enter his world of virtual reality, an invitation that is very

hard to resist. Similarly, the cult of the Marlboro man and the Johnnie Walker man are examples

of how myths often overwrite reality.

The reader/viewer response works parallel similar lines whether one is reading a book or looking

at a billboard. The magnified images on billboards, some of them digital, along with the logos

and catch lines of the brand, offer to us myriad possibilities of remolding our identities. They

dictate or define our desires by telling us what we need. Confident, blas phrases such as Timeto Express Yourself (Globus Wears), All you Desire (Toyota Innova), Be in Fashion.

Anywhere. (Giordano Travel Accessories) blur the distinctions between the essentials and

luxuries. The pen manufacturing company Parker beats all others when it makes a categorical

statement telling us that the kind of pen we use determines the kind of mark we leave on the

world. So advertisements even offer us a set of ambitions that can easily be fulfilled, their

subtextual triviality not withstanding. The purchaser seeking to rise above the mundane realitiesof his humdrum existence accepts these new desires and ambitions as a shortcut means of

achieving a digitally enhanced, perfected image of him.

The mediation of meaning by advertisements and its role in the communication of identities iscompounded when the advertisements are in the form of enlarged visuals as in the case of

billboards. In most cases billboards are placed at a considerable height that compels its audienceto look up at it with a certain degree of awe and amazement. The combined effect of the large

image, catch line and brand name is dramatic; it creates a void of desire in the viewer-a desire to

attain, a desire to possess. The use of celebrities on billboards adds a high degree of credibility.

The spectator feels he personally knows the person endorsing any given commodity. This

heightens his confidence in the brand. He is also prompted to make connections of identity with

the celebrity.


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So we have Aishwarya Rai sporting an attitude of elegance that seems to come naturally by

wearing a Longines watch. On another billboard, the blown up picture of Aamir Khan announces

his desire to stay ahead by driving a Toyota Innova. This is enough to attract a large segment of

potential customers even though the actual product has been relegated to the margins of the

visual.

More often than not, stereotypes are created by the visual medium of advertising, much in thesame way as they are perpetuated through the literary medium. James Bond becomes the

quintessential ultimate ideal of masculinity and Scarlet OHara becomes the model of a free

spirited girl with gumption. All the protagonists of Mills and Boons deploy and calcify

stereotypes of the romantic hero and heroine. For example, there is the false, almost fashionable

notion that all smart, educated, successful women feel incomplete until their Prince Charming

sweeps them off their feet and introduce them to the world of red roses and champagne like in the

Indigo Marina ad. Darko Kerim in Ian Flemings From Russia With Love says All women

secretly wish to be slung over a mans shoulder, carried off to a dark cave and raped. Here,

Fleming creates the myth about womens repressed sexuality.

Then there is the ultimate stereotype of a workingwoman whose primary role and raison detre is

that of a mother. She juggles between feeding and bathing the baby, cooking dinner, shoppingand managing office jobs. This myth has been used in this billboard advertising jewelry. Its visual

epistemology operates at two levels-it presupposes the existence of such multitasking women and

makes this exclusive group its target customers. As an offshoot of this theory of exclusivity, it

creates a desire among those women who have been occluded and who then long to achieve thestatus of the superwoman. The obvious upper-class markers of women in these ads make the

upper-class lifestyle normative and the natural thing to desire. For instance, the billboard of Estee

Lauder shows a shopping bag that says Destination Estee Lauder.

Often the image of women as cultural signs appropriates all womankind in a tradition of

femininity. These stock images gloss over differences in nationality, ethnic community and class.

The loss of identity as anything other than that which exists within the projected rubric, is just

one of the troubling aspects of the indiscriminate, irresponsible use of the images of women. Theother significant question that arises is the effect of these images on the mass-perception and

opinion.

Homogenization of identities has led to the concentration of just a few stereotypical images of

women being projected worldwide. A supposed uniformity in the desires of consumers has led

advertising pundits to restrict themselves to a few tried and tested formulae which have worked tocreate markets in the past few years. Even where they seem to break away from tradition, they are

actually rehashing the same stereotypes. Examples of women, scantily dressed and anorexic,

which objectify women as decorative and ornamental props abound in India. Photographs of

women are used to advertise everything from mens razors, coaching institutes and evenhardware shops. In extreme cases of desultory advertising, often white-skinned (non-Indian)

women are used on billboards to attract a male audience and create a male theatre of desire. Thenaturalizing of the canonized point-of-view of white, European, male blinds consumers to the

dangers of universality and stasis of common perceptions. In fact, most billboards use the images

of women as icons that diffuse national, cultural, social and class identities.

An example of powerful advertising, which creates a wide customer base by employing several

techniques of eye-catching visuals, is the Levis ad for their new line of Slim Jeans. This ad uses

the color yellow as its background: yellow being in the middle of the spectrum of colors catches

the attention of viewers immediately. The use of a woman celebrity in a seductive posture


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heightens the glamour. The tagline Be slimmer in just 7.8 seconds virtually fulfills the desire of

women to look attractive. We can see how advertisers work as sign manipulators. It follows that

meaning results when signs are shared by both advertisers and consumers.

In the name of creativity some most dissimilar images are yoked together to serve as anadvertisement for a product. These images or objects might not have anything in common except

the fact that each image, in itself, is an undisputed hotcake. If the same advertisement is seen sansthe selling-value of the visuals used, there incongruity becomes glaring. If we forget that the use

of women in advertising is a favorite marketing strategy, could we ever conceive why a woman

would wear a miniature washbasin around her neck? Or even if she does, why should that make

us buy a certain brand of sanitary fittings. On the other hand, what is the correlation between

watches and sex?

Robert Goldmann, in his book Reading Ads Socially, calls such advertisements ads that wink

at the spectator. There is no interpretative openness here, no infinite intertextual play of

signifiers. Ambiguity, argues Goldmann, is no more than a masquerade-it is a deliberate part of

the conspiracy, a function of market imperatives to seek commodity difference. Of course there

is always an attempt to pass off oddities in the name of experimentation but concrete, visual

presentations of the nature of billboards should be a serious cause of concern.

Whereas on the one hand, in this post-modern era that believes in the individuality and

uniqueness of every person, consumers are being offered and exhorted to make their own choices,

the dominance of global capitalism and the resulting consumerism ensures that desires aredefined by market economics. The famous billboard, which had a large mirror at eye-level,

proclaimed Man of the Year 2000- thats you. The consumer is made to believe that he is being

spoken to individually but his freedom of choice is illusory and there is a subsequent effective

erasure of identity. The American Association of Advertising Agencies put it succinctly when it

said that shopping isnt merely the buying of products but the buying of identities.

While it is hard to resist the lure of powerful and fetishized images that surround us and threaten

to subsume our reality, we could become more astute and discerning consumers. The onus lies onus to resist the seductive but false visual epistemology of billboards.

In this world where everyone is a consumer in one way or the other, there has been a distortion of

Descartes I think therefore I am which now reads I buy therefore I am. Shouldnt we revert

to the original?

billboards-popular culture and society

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