Stumbled upon a research paper I didn’t know before on the social uses of advertising taglines among young men from 2007:
Most of the social uses or tagline recitals stemmed from television advertising campaigns. Respondents said that they would not normally use any copy from print ads, poster ads, radio or internet ads because ‘it’s just not done, everyone our age knows what you’re talking about with TV’. (Mitchell et. al., 2007: 209)
One of the quotes from the research:
Was on the phone in the evening when a new Nike ‘Freestyle’ ad came on TV so I couldn’t really concentrate on the advert. When I was finished on the phone I asked my housemate what the advert was like and he said it was really cool and my other housemate said it was the best one yet and I felt a bit left out and my housemate seemed to think they were better than me cos they had seen it and I hadn’t, like they had something over me, some sort of power and they said I would have to watch TV all week to see it and wouldn’t tell me what happens in the advert. I then watched TV all night and secretly hoped it would actually come on but it never did. (Mitchell et. al., 2007: 212)
Advertising was always ‘social’ media. It’s just that business theory didn’t get it:
Thus the audience that current theories of advertising describe is not an audience at all but rather an “aggregate of individual consumers” (Sheth 1979), p. 415) who respond to advertising stimuli while remaining “islands of cognitive and affective responses, unconnected to a social world, detached from culture” ((Buttle 1991), p. 97). At the center of the great majority of theories in advertising research stands a lonely individual, cut off from the social contexts in which he or she, you and I, actually reside. (Ritson & Elliott 1999, S. 1)
Taken from:
Mitchell, V., Macklin, J.E. & Paxman, J., 2007. Social uses of advertising: an example of young male adults. International Journal of Advertising, 26(2), S. 199.
Related research:
Lannon, J. & Cooper, P., 1983. Humanistic advertising: a holistic cultural perspective.
Buttle, F., 1991. What do people do with advertising. International Journal of Advertising, 10(2), S. 95–110.
O’Donohoe, S., 1994. Advertising uses and gratifications. European Journal of Marketing, 28(8/9), S. 52–75.
Ritson, M. & Elliott, R., 1999. The social uses of advertising: an ethnographic study of adolescent advertising audiences. Journal of Consumer Research, 26(3), S. 260–277.
Heath, R. & Feldwick, P., 2008. Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising. International journal of market research, 50(1), S. 29.