Call for papers: The affirmation of Advertising as a Cultural Industry

Coordinated by:  Eduardo Cintra Torres (CEIS20) and Pedro Almeida Leitão (CITCEM) 

The academic research on the history of advertising has focused mainly on such aspects as the study of social representations in advertising or the presence of economic or cultural activities in advertisements, studies that have been the basis of quite a few monographic articles. As far as advertising media is concerned, the main research topics have focused, in several countries, on the poster and the press, in particular on its origins. Concerning the elaboration of general histories, countries where advertising reached maturity earlier took the lead, such as the United States and Great Britain, and, later, where academic studies in this field also had an earlier development, like Belgium, Spain, Italy, or France. In Portugal, only recently the first general history of advertising was published. Other topics of study also had significant developments in recent years, such as design or rhetoric. However, a lot remains to be done. 
Considered holistically, during the twentieth century advertising became one of the cultural industries, or part of the culture industry, if we adopt the expression as created by Adorno and Horkheimer.
Through history, advertising has combined in itself two perspectives regarding production and sales processes: the products promoted at the request of advertisers and those resulting from advertising’s own activity, that is, the advertisements in various formats and media. Regarded as cultural products, these are also commodities included in economic value chains that link advertisers, agencies, media, and finally reaching the receivers of the advertisements. Increasingly treated as ‘customers’, that is, as consumers of advertising, they were, therefore, potential customers of the products and services promoted by advertising. By its nature as a cultural industry, advertising intervenes strongly in the transformation of the value in use of a product into exchange value. Understood in this way, it is possible to find integrating views of these specific aspects into a holistic conception. 
It may be useful to assess advertising historically using frameworks of analysis from wider areas of research, applicable in a synchronous perspective to any of the cultural industries, namely the media: the institutionality; the content or text; the reception; and, where relevant, the technique.
In the case of institutionality, we highlight aspects such as agencies, professions, from the common crier to the copy and the model (the human 'objects' in ads), professionals and their biographies, associativism, advertisers and business practices, the media, regulation and self-regulation, the mass media (press, radio, cinema, etc.), the teaching of advertising, market studies, taxes and legislation, etc.
In the case of content or text, the possibilities of research are immense: design, rhetoric and their conjunction, slogans and other verbal, audible or visual manifestations, themes of ads and campaigns, the creative processes, means and materials used, advertising locations, brands and their power as a mean of communicating and selling commodities. 
In a diachronic perspective, the technique acquires importance in the transition from paper to other materials and formats of all kinds, in the apparent dematerialization of the content in the cry and in the reception by radio, television and cinema, in different uses of materials (painting, watercolor, photography, etc.). We expect to address such topics as the relationship with the media, the development of roads and railways, the text sent by the telegraph to the newspaper or the intermediary to 'live' advertising on the radio and early television, etc. 
Finally, we propose the reception of advertising, which remains to be studied systematically, hindered either by lack of sources or by the secrecy applied to studies commissioned to specialized companies, which demand from researchers strategies to scrutinize opinions about advertising (which, for old times, we may find in periodicals or technical publications) and the search for studies of reception, publics and audiences in corporate or state archives.
Thus, this call for papers aims at contributing to provide a solid basis of Advertising Studies in the context of History, as a way to create a structured sub-area within media and cultural studies. Contributions from economics, sociology, management, marketing, design, art history, rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, etc., are equally expected and welcomed. We, therefore, intend to foster an eclectic but not dispersed vision of advertising, unified by history, encouraging not only case studies but also theoretical and methodological reflections. We have concentrated our focus on the period from the massive development of the popular press to the profound change brought about by the media and economic hegemony of television advertising. In Portugal, this period may be situated between 1860 and 1960, but it will vary from country to country. National, international, and compared case studies are welcome.

We accept national and international contributions on several topics, including: 
1. Theory and methodology 
2. Advertising professionals, agencies, associativism 
3. Advertisers 
4. Art and Design in advertising 
5. Artists and writers in and about advertising 
6. Evolution of celebrity endorsement 
7. Social and political representations in advertisements
8. Advertising language and rhetoric 
9. Advertising reception and audience
10. Advertising in cinema, theatre, and radio 
11. Advertising business and commercial practices 
12. The role of advertising in the success of trademarks 
13. International relations and globalization of advertising in agencies and content 
14. Audience and reception of advertising 
15. Archives and sources for the study of advertising 

Papers must be submitted by 15 July 2024 to be published in this issue of Mediapolis in the first semester of 2025.