From Naturalisation to Sacralisation: Changing Paradigms for Analysing Visual Advertising.

Advertising has been understood in the structuralist tradition of cultural studies as naturalising social relations by making brands appear natural. This raticle traces a series of approaches to the analysis of advertising that have developed in Britain and the US within the context of media studies over the last 30 years.. It questions how this model has developed from a particularly English understanding of French structuralism which has become a type of orthodoxy in Britain Other theoretical analyses of advertising from of linguistics from pragmatics and speech act theory are considered.. Overall the article argues that the structuralist position that advertising naturalises products is no longer relevant but rather that we should consider how advertising sacralises brands, giving them a supernatural quality by allowing them to cross the border of the media world to the ordinary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]