Werbung – Konsum – Geschichte
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Edited by:
The volumes in the series Werbung – Konsum – Geschichte investigate advertising, marketing, consumerism, and material culture both past and present by taking perspectives from the humanities, the social sciences, cultural studies, communication studies, and integrative scholarship. The series’ editorial team aims to promote productive discursive and interdisciplinary exchange, and to provide fresh impetus for further research into these areas. All works published in the series have been subjected to an double blind peer review process.
Editorial board: Reinhild Kreis, Holger Schramm und Guido Zurstiege.
Topics
Filmed commercials are part of the culture of remembrance and of corporate and film history. When did this form of advertising begin? Who were the first sponsors and were advertising films made differently at that time than now? The monograph addresses these questions using the example of Austria. Starting from the early period of cinematography, it researches the development and establishment of the genre of the commercial in Austria until 1938.
In western societies today, it goes almost without saying that sex and consumption are closely related. On the one hand, there is a plethora of commercial goods and services that shape sexual desires, and practices. On the other, there are scarcely any products or services that do not lend themselves to sexually charged advertising and mass media communication. This volume focuses on forms of hybridization of these equally suggestive notions.
Buy national propaganda has been booming again recently. But it also has a long history that clearly gained momentum in the 20th century as the moralisation of shopping seemed urgent in mass consumer societies. Not only did it serve the sale of 'national' goods, but its aims extended beyond that.
Buy national propaganda and the discourses linked to it constituted a hegemonic project. They inscribed shopping in a 'national economy', in a triangle of state, nation and economy dominated by the propertied classes. The study analyses these relations on the basis of Switzerland and Austria from the 1910s to around 1980.
The most important addressees of this propaganda were women, children and young people. Depending on gender, age and class, they were supposed to contribute to the national economy in different ways. Nationalising discourses and practices encompassed purchase and renunciation, consumption and production. The demands appeared in conservative or social democratic, austerity-oriented or Keynesian guise.
Where does advertising begin and end? How has its boundaryless dissemination been structured in the past and present? Have consumer cultures changed? What strategies generate emotional and behavioral patterns? What considerations critical of consumption exist in advertising films, recordings, TV programming and digital platforms? Twelve experts address these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective.
