Living with Ambivalence

Abstract

Although the ambivalence of public attitudes to advertising is often acknowledged, it has been undertheorized. This paper begins with an overview of prior research on the structure of attitudes to advertising, and a case is made for ambivalence as a central characteristic. It is also argued that research on attitudes to advertising has generally focused on the content of attitudes at the expense of contextual factors, yet consumers do not relate to advertising in isolation from their experiences of popular culture, postmodernism and advertising literacy. Ambivalence in consumer attitudes to advertising is revisited by considering three sets of tensions which are related to these contextual factors. The paper concludes by considering the implications for advertising production and consumption in postmodern times.