The Social Uses of Advertising: An Ethnographic Study of Adolescent Advertising Audiences

Abstract

Advertising research has focused exclusively on the solitary subject at the expense of understanding the role that advertising plays within the social contexts of group interaction. We develop a number of explanations for this omission before describing the results of an ethnographic study of advertising's contribution to the everyday interactions of adolescent informants at a number of English high schools. The study reveals a series of new, socially related advertising-audience behaviors. Specifically, advertising meanings are shown to possess social uses relating to textual experience, interpretation, evaluation, ritual use, and metaphor. The theoretical and managerial implications of these social uses are then discussed.