Keywords

1 Initial Theoretical Aspects

Advertising language (it would be more correct to speak of “languages” so as to touch on its discourse richness), which some time ago “escaped” structural and linguistic limitations, is now also embracing creative and socio-cultural aspects. It is from that point that we now consider the cross-disciplinary perspective as the most appropriate for this study.

In the current scenario, advertising discourse seeks a symbiotic inter-dependence with the media domain (a hybridization of media languages). In this way, advertising gives ideal distinction to the consumer-driven product by interposing an enormous amount of semiotic meaning between the object itself and its manufacture.

The result is that the product is considered as a part of social culture and its consumption patterns; and not just within the context of its processing.

Fundamental perspectives about the Concept of Culture, for the study of Brands.

Cognitive Dimension: CULTURE as an INDIVIDUAL STATE of MIND

Collective Dimension: CULTURE as a SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

Social Dimension: CULTURE as a MODE of INTERACTION

Anthropological-Sociological Vision: CULTURE as a WAY of LIFE

Specific and Descriptive Dimension: CULTURE as a CREATIVE and ARTISTIC WORK

Classic-Humanistic Vision: CULTURE as a PRODUCT of ARTISTIC ACTIVITIES

1.1 Definition of Culture

There only exists a consensus in that, culture is not: “It is not obtained studying Shakespeare, listening to classical music nor attending History of Art classes”.

Marvin Harris [10]: “a culture is a way of life learnt socially, which is found in human societies and which touches on every aspect of social life, including thinking and behaviour”.

Terry Eagleton [6]: Culture can be roughly understood as the grouping of values, customs, beliefs and practices which constitute the way of life of a specific group of people.

Subirat’s concept of spectacular culture, “Its marvellous power resides not only in the reproduction and ontological organisation of the world, in the reduplication of reality, but also in its capability of supplanting as much the individual experience of reality as the relatively immediate interactive forms of liberal society; ranging from the democratic parliament to public forums, and to one’s own private or family conversation” [16].

Communication Media achieve the artificial, aesthetic or artistic construction of the world’s reality in a pre-fabricated unity of reality.

The Cultural production is the effect of a permanent tension

  • between originality and standardisation,

  • between industrial logic and dialectic-standardising anti-logic,

  • between industrial logic and creative anti-logic,

  • between the originator’s preferred vision, be it individual or collective, and the necessity of system’s profitability. González Martín [9]

Mass Culture

Culture has converted itself into an industry, on an equal footing with the food, textile, pharmaceutical or automobile industries. It detects standard needs, and supplies the market with products that satisfy it. These products are superficially different (and here, marketing and publicity play their differentiating role).

But, in the final analysis it is the laboratory combinations which tend to exhaust the generous, albeit limited, number of variables. Cultural products are not only manufactured en masse –in so many technologically reproduced products further multiplied by copies and distributed globally– but also they are organised into series, standards and ranges. “Specifically, they confine themselves to types, formats, styles, levels, profiles, and wrappings; even if we want, into compartments which rank our preferences and our differences and emerge in search of their public” [15].

Popular Art has surged from the roots of modern society of the industrialised masses, and has been conceived expressly by that society for its own use, employing its productive forces, that is to say, mass technology, with the purpose of distributing this art to enormous consumer populations.

“Popular Art is the art of a Mass Society and attempts to serve the purposes of such a society” [2].

From these foundations I am working the idea of cyber-culture, highlighting the visible paradigm-shift of the contemporary intersection between art and technology. New concepts of Media Art are put forward, beginning with media properties taken from the works themselves: technical reproduction, innovation, aesthetic information, artificial reality or new-media-reality.

So, the study goes deeply into a machine-related aesthetic from philosophic reflections. These range from the incursion of optical technologies (photography, cinematography) to electronic technologies (videograph, computer graphics, networks). The media have opened up to artists the possibilities of the laboratory of aesthetic experimentation between art, science, and technological innovation.

At the same time, thinking about the relationship between art, technology and advertising leads us to think about the context of that interaction, the city, and which are the obvious relationships, outdoors advertising shows its diversity by occupying privileged sites throughout urban space and confined to corners of the marginal areas, like a visual overview of the city.

In the post-modern metropolis there exists a socio-political geography of images in which the language of industry is a primary element in the urban landscape; places where such advertising has replaced monuments. Art is not advertising and advertising is not Art, but they are heterogeneous discourses that interweave. These properties are ideal for cross-fertilisation.

This intersection of common discourse factors is made even sharper when we link:

  • the phenomenon of outdoors advertising

  • the function of the monument, and

  • the theory of public art (that of an urban art and of graffiti)

Three different discourses which in post-modern society give rise to one only interwoven discourse in the eyes of the spectator trained in the media-mixing. Moreover, it is an interweaving.

  • with which art generates an innovative and alternative form, and

  • with which industry feels comfortable infiltrating itself into the individual awareness of its consumers.

1.2 Mass Culture and Mass Communication

Mass Culture possesses a phenomenon framework in post-industrial development which grew under conditions of the Capitalist Economic Model. Capitalism was perfect for advancing the innovating objectives which these societies pursued, and in which, the importance of the study of human communication as applied to international markets, was exalted. The notion of Mass Communication refers to an organisational paradigm which affects not only political, economic entrepreneurial, cultural and social models. Mass Communication is present in the very structure of knowledge. Since knowledge, now more than ever, is nourished with a collective awareness in which the responsibility for truth is homogeneous and universal.

The market feeds itself from a network of communication nodes - points of confluence from various directions – which, by their geopolitical and strategic situations, encompassed greater responsibility and power. In this way, Mass Communication is more than a strategy of conquest of space by means of the growth of social interactions. So as to apply this strategy, space is won with time.

The Communication Media accelerate the time phenomenon of human experiences. At the same time, there are media which abandon the presentation of objects in favour of their representation. They flourish on projects and illusions which consume themselves even before materialising. The decisive factor is the speed of the changes; the acceleration of life or the vertigo of continually-changing consumption replete with novelties. Time is not now human. History disappears when industrial production exhausts periods of time with its production of objects which scarcely subsist. Mass Media enters into the cycle of creation and destruction of information which annuls every historical possibility of indicating stages in Post-Modern Societies.

In spite of that, it is fair to affirm that Mass Communication possesses, by reason of its idiosyncrasy, an autonomous identity. Mass Communication is a new phenomenon which arises from the media which brought together the multitudes; such as the cinema industry, music-disk production and its association with juvenile urban hordes (rockers, mods, punks, technos) or the international formulation of TV programmes. Their principal value, which surrealist artists already appreciated in cinematographic show rooms, was their capacity of bringing masses together, which gathered more people for whatever exposition or artistic event.

Mass Communication utilises Technology to achieve interaction between compatible individuals which provokes the alienation of the general public. The loss of individual personality is a consequence of Mass Culture which does not contribute to the definition of specific features of individuals. On the contrary, it indicates those preferences which, up to a point, make them similar, the fiercest critic has always insisted on that as a consequence. An example is the modern culture of product brands.

Mass Communication directly causes life alteration in individuals, through symbolic connections of objects. The replacement of a vision of a world of living things with an object-driven world is simply a consequence of substituting the authentic with the symbolic. Mass Culture transforms the natural world into a symbolic world which is consumed, firstly in the interior realities of individuals. A consequence of the communicative activity of the Mass Media is the appearance of two very differentiated worlds: the natural world and the artificial world.

The Artificial world is created beginning from a high degree of technification of communication, and for that matter, of human activities. In parallel, the artificial world is constructed by displacing public places; at first natural spaces by other spaces directly designed for collective communication. The artificial world consists basically in the construction of a social reality.

2 The Digitalisation of Mass Communication

The appearance of Digital technologies amplified the technical possibilities of Mass Communication. Digitalisation managed to create a more ordered and controlled reality. Cyber-reality produces a particular from of sensorial perception, of information coding, of communication interpretation; and of acting on that. Virtual Reality is a simulated space in which the intuitive faculties, so as to intervene, will not have the same process as in analogical reality. Digital technology manages to present the world in another, distinctive, mode.

In the Digital World there is a condition; the contra-intuitive performance, for evaluating the repercussions of that technology. We prioritise the brain as distinct from the physical body in this metaphor of artificial life. The constitution of an informational sphere which involves the simulation of the natural, requires a natural structure as a support for constructing its own ontological structure –if we consider that it has such–. Digital Technologies generate things without which the real world, the natural world, re-creates.

The World Vision supplied as Information encapsulated in Digital Archives is subject to the logic of a mathematical model for communication, and to a cybernetic model for organisation. For Shannon, information remains reduced to a structure which acquires sense in a space of probabilities. Hence, information passes through simpler or more complex states. The information quantity is defined specifically by such a state within its field of definition. By this means we come to appreciate that the natural world can be reduced to information. Since this has a structure which allows for the remaking of what we can know, and understand, of the natural world [8]:

  • The differences between states is a condition of the existence of Information.

  • Transmission and Participation are qualities of Information.

  • Structural changes which information experiences in a system can be seen by means of their causal relationships.

  • The natural world possesses its field structure.

  • The physical field is completely specified by the relationships which define it.

  • Finally, all that which remains outside of the Information, which the fields specify, does not exist and does not require our attention.

The technological domain of the natural world (control of reality) is a question of reduction. For this technology, to digitalise consists, simply, in reducing reality to information. The consequence of this action is that now the reality is the product of technologies by way of their reduction to information. On that matter [8] makes a very interesting observation. “In this way, they began to be made plausible at the same time as the analogies between the three levels of reality which distinguish classic epistemology; the three levels of Popper.; reality itself, the concepts that describe it and the subject thought about”.

Digitalisation is the basis of the Information Society and also of a Knowledge Society. Technologies are required in this world for the control of the immense quantities of information. In spite of the evident progress in information management, societies appear condemned to an unconscious ignorance in renouncing the subjective value of communication.

Digitalisation imposes, moreover, a social, political, and economic organisation which encourages the alienation of specialities. Mankind specialises itself in its functions within its community and associates itself with those of the same desire for specialisation. For Habermas, Post-Modern communities characterise themselves by identifying the thought with the deed, making the latter as valid as the former and therefore reaffirming the irrational, the relative and the arbitrary. For this thinker, there exists a critical point in the rupture of tradition by means of post–metaphysical thinking, the linguistic twist and the surmounting of logo-centrism.

The digitalisation of life is a metaphor which illuminates sensibly the creative possibilities of technology on life’s experience. It is evident that communication, stimulated by technological implements, generates new sensorial experiences which will lead to other meanings about reality. Since we are not able to forget that life’s experience begins in the first place from the interior of mankind. It is necessary that the process of living passes through a stage of interiorisation and, beginning from there, the interpretation will arise which will be no more than the exteriorisation of understanding.

3 Mass Culture, General Context of Advertising

To study a General Advertising Context implies questions of a cultural, technological and communication nature from the perspectives of each of those fields of knowledge. For the purposes of approaching knowledge of contemporary Mass Culture, there appears to be no better idea than to avail oneself of the opportunity of multi-disciplinary study. We cannot avoid the fact that we are confronted with a new configuration of the social, political, institutional, democratic, human, migratory, biological and post-biological, ethical and aesthetical, provoked by radical technological changes since the beginning of the current century. In our opinion this immense task is important for the comprehension of the influences on production processes in the context of Global Discussion of Advertising.

Communication has experienced a radical transformation with network technologies as the main consequence of new advertising formats. Nevertheless, this is not the only factor, since new advertising discourse production has also seen itself altered by a trans-national market model which those very same merchandise and passenger transport systems, and national commercial policies, have developed within their territories.

From empirical investigation in fields, such as the economy, to work in computing applications for direct information for users, the Global Culture presents itself to us as a highly complex system and the observation of Advertising acquires a highly significant value for communication, since it is presented to us as a multi-faceted prism with numerous faces.

Globalisation has made Advertising a frontier between different disciplines. It is not a defined or confined space, but rather a place of interacting wisdom and knowledge. About studies of this type; Aronowitz explains to us:

Cultural studies do not linger in a new frontier because of blocked channels; but rather in a place in which each action produces an incision (however small that may be) and outflow. Cultural studies trim spaces in existing disciplines not so as to cordon them off; but rather to connect, so as to bring together small groupings of students and lecturers; a heterogeneous, and therefore imperfect, patchwork which facilitates a space into which those who choose can come and go and dispense with the pseudo-sanctity of the disciplinary preserves. [8]

The paradigmatic context of Advertising is closed off with the philosophic values of Technological Societies. Advertising discourse also sees itself as being affected by Post-Modern phenomenology based on dialects of the appearance, and disappearance, by means of Communications Media speed [18], or the evolution of tele-objective vision which causes in people an atrophied experience of one’s perception of the world. The real world is replaced by symbols which share a likeness. The symbolic relationship with images is appropriated from the truly authentic. Moreover, Post-Modern mutations have achieved narrative forms which now fragment, and then organise themselves, by means of hypertext syntax.

Techno-science, understood as a Post-Modern scientific mode, also presupposes a rupture relative to the classical culture of times past. Techno-science introduces its procedures so as to operate in fields exclusively reserved for mankind’s questions. Human life-forms are conditioned by this techno-science which alerts us about climate change, atmospheric contamination, disappearance of nature’s heritage, biological modification of nature, or, more simply, the survival limitations of our planet. Advertising feeds itself on these stories, and on others of a political or social character.

The importance of Techno-science, relative to other meta-narratives, is explained when we contemplate the epistemic turnaround provoked by individual behaviour relative to life by way of technologies of communication, and of information and knowledge. The overwhelming influence of technologies has presupposed, from the beginning of this century, an ontological change in discovery and innovative thinking in ethical crossroads into which bio-technologies place us.

All of these elements regulate the formation of a Global Advertising Culture, since already they no longer refer to localised facts or events in concrete localities. On the contrary, they define communication processes in highly technologised societies which interchange the same concerns, challenges and future expectations.

The systematic elimination of old and obsolete communication models in favour of replacement with other models based on the strength of the Virtual, of the absolutely Symbolic, explains sufficiently well that to which Global Advertising is conforming. This highlights the culture of rational practicality, from which trans-national markets profit, so as to organise the production and distribution of their merchandise. Technological innovation has achieved that the new economic order will not end up in the same uncontrolled situation. We can state that technology facilitates, from the panoptic vigilance of Advertising messages, and of consumers, towards the efficacy of brands and, above all, in detecting new tendencies and fluctuations of tastes in the market. Information Technologies also serve the purpose of information vigilance and why not also Infor-Attack also? when Advertising annihilates the factors which hinder the advance of consumption of our products and services.

To deal with Global Advertising, a world guarded by vigilant instruments which register our psychological profiles; inspecting and processing, by means of this presence; one’s changes of personality, of tastes, of needs, retaining in artificial memories the variations in our way of life. Global Advertising already possesses a registration technology of the styles of the persons connected to a world phenomenologically reduced to digital networks.

Contemporary Advertising confronts a consumer world which marches to the rhythm of current lifestyles. The communicative process is more chaotic and, expressed in terms of complexity, is saturated with attractors which augment desires and personal virtual experiences. The fusion of the virtual and real worlds has generated the “cyber-person” whom Whittaker outlines with precision.

….a new space; cyberspace which exists both nowhere and everywhere, and which consists of a kind of tabla rasa in the sense that it is constructed, and constantly re-constructed, is written and re-written, by means of simultaneous Network users and their consequent re-elaboration of the same occurrence. [19]

Since the middle of the 20th Century, Advertising is the discourse of Mass Culture and of the Consumer Society. Nevertheless, it is in the cyberspace of new phenomena where advertising acquires its denomination as a Global Discourse, since it is here that Virtual Communities come together. These human collectives in cyberspace are groups of individuals united by a common interest. Here the interest is the same as an affinity; subjects associate themselves around a consumer tendency, a brand, or a lifestyle which, individually or collectively, links them independently of where they actually live. The similarity of their preferences in life arranges them around a common need for Information (and Advertising) of a pre-determined type which satisfies their leaning towards their desired objectives.

In these places –dematerialised but with the presence of human desires– non-existent space in the ontological sense, but only in a phenomenon sense –there is now, what’s more, an interactive space where individuals link up with others, opening up and communicating, by means of visual elements (texts, images, videos) the image or presentation of their own identity–. The elasticity of cyberspace offers users the possibility of continually reinventing themselves. Advertising thrives on the need for appropriation of social signs and symbols (riches, culture, education, experience, elegance, training, etc.) which individuals use so as to create their own personalities. All of those social signs, which allow them to integrate themselves into a community, whose profile (social, psychological, economic, political) coincides with their individual desires.

To sum up, there are three fundamental clarifications in the study of the general context of Global Advertising Culture. Firstly, an ontological differentiation; advertising culture is an exclusively human phenomenon which developed itself with the modernity that blossomed with capitalism. Then there is a pragmatic differentiation; advertising language respects cultural diversity, since it is a form of communication which feeds itself on mutual and harmonious understanding of individuals from different cultures; always under the influence of a capitalist socio-economic model. Finally, there is a phenomena distinction which is more interesting, because experience demonstrates that we all share a society which lives under diverse norms. In this sense, the definition of culture consists of a complex and dynamic ecology of people, objects, world views, activities, actions, places and scenarios which, fundamentally, remain stable; yet which also change by virtue of routine communication and social interaction. Culture is a global context [13].

Advertising culture has evolved through socio-economic changes. There exist numerous theories which link Advertising Communication with Modern Economics. [4, 5, 11]. Globalisation processes brought with them an upsurge in the modern economy, which, fundamentally, consists of an aggressive capitalist neo-liberalism carrying a particular and distinct vision of industrial economic models [4] explains that the Information Society rewards those entrepreneurial projects which are capable of creating expectations in the market, without the need for either supporting material or new capital to back it; such as had happened in the Industrial Society. Now market confidence, in future success possibilities, is sufficient for businesses to have progressed. In the Nineties of the last century, the adolescent millionaires, or geeks as they are known, who possessed Information Technology knowledge and had put it at the disposal of their enterprises are an example of these socio-economic transformations.

For Castell [4], this emergent model offers similar opportunities, independant of place, or of initial capital on which new enterprises count. This widely-accepted vision, however, also has its detractors who fear a retrogressive tendency for human liberties with the establishment of such a Virtual Feudalism.

Virtual Feudalism shares political aspects with Classic Feudalism, but its economic base is abstract riches, and the resultant social system can be very fluid. The central institution of (the new) European Feudalism will be Virtual Feudalism, and not the Castle nor the lordly lands of (the previous) European Feudalism. The distribution of assets and privileges will depend on “Virtual Resources” on an international scale; that is to say, the particular basis of abstract riches can vary according to temporary variations of institutional financial needs and market conditions. [19]

The background of the Global Advertising Culture is the Information Society and Post-Modernity [14]. Modernity had abandoned us in a stagnant system, both permanent and subject to tradition, custom and the land. The Information Society and Post-Modernity place us in an unstable society based on a continuous change and re-adaptation of life’s direction in the liquidation and re-construction of ideas, in the disappearance and re-appearance of objects, in change which has as its foundation “change for the sake of change”. Society advanced towards the future; looking exclusively in the rear-vision mirror.

Globalisation, Localisation, Dis-location, Re-location and Glocalization are Socio-Cultural processes which indicate the effects of trans-national markets, of the Toyota production model, and of the neo-liberal economy on the cultural diversity of communities.

In the Information Society, Mass Culture develops itself outside of its original geographic context among new hybrid cultures. Cultural hybridisation has bypassed the problems of the Industrial Cultures which are now confronted with political identity problems. Privatisation is a cultural phenomenon characteristic of limited groups who struggle to preserve their identifying symbols, traditions and way of life.

All these factors incorporate a new phenomenology of merchandise into people’s daily lives. This phenomenology of Global Advertising Culture is translated into what appears; what manifests itself. But previously it was Mass Culture which manifested itself to human awareness. The Phenomenon of the Masses is the aspect by which Industrial Production Objects bring themselves to the awareness of others and demand the intervention of intuition so as to promote the essence of things. In general terms, it could be said that the essence of Mass Culture is economic development, social progress and human wellbeing in Western societies.

The critical revision of the Mass Culture emphasises the importance of intuition and of common sense; thereby excluding awareness, as a resource, of what mankind has available in a contemporary society for gaining knowledge of a day-to-day nature by which to develop the quality of his life. To survive in this civilisation of the Mass Culture, mankind exercises an informed interpretation of objects which are presented to him, and at the same it throws light on an epistemic labour of world knowledge. Mass Culture and its context describes the realities in mankind’s lives, but also the diverse world visions which are derived about this world of material desires produced by industry and which future generations will inherit.

In the Information Society, Virtual Communities are those connected by Digital Networks constituted by individuals who basically interpret this world, conceding the same validity to objects from industry. In this sense, Mass Culture succeeded in reuniting the consensus of individuals with similar interests; although, maybe, tightening symbolic links around products of Industrial Cultures. Mass Culture equipped itself with its own ideological planning, applying that to societies by means of heterogeneous forces (such as education, science, art, law, etc.), all of which dragged with it; a unique rhetoric.

Mass Culture organises itself around a super-structure which also understands science, managing to augment its credibility opposed to a growing relativism which introduces a Post-Modernity that is destructive. It was responsible for the lack of credibility in the major global debates -in which science was included-. That inclusion produced a new post-industrial hermeneutic.

The modern world, which surged from the end of the Second World War, was complicated and complex, and its irrational consumption was a senseless spiral. New interpretations impelled new modes of understanding, and of recognition, of what appeared in the everyday environment of mankind, relative to the vague discourses which industry produced through Advertising and the Communication Media.

4 The Role of Advertising in the Mass Culture

To make culture find its way to the masses is expensive and relatively unproductive; but absolutely necessary to maintain a social order.

Cultural Products are industrial output which are difficult to automate and, in a high-salaried economy, they are the dearest products to produce.

The Confrontation between production and creativity.

As a result, Advertising, apart from being an object of cultural consumption, is an important catalyst in society, and is also a financial source of the Mass Culture.

Advertising as a CULTURAL INDUSTRY (C.I.).

Symbolic creations may access society, through communicative supports and materials, in the spheres of the Media and the Market. They impact on a very diverse grouping of products and services, such as production chains and of product distribution, languages, and symbolic representations in the Communication Media.

Advertising is a C.I. to the extent that, the communicative tools may be used in the general promotion of products and services.

C.I.’s contribute directly to the construction of the culture which currently surrounds us by way of its iconic and audiovisual creations. Cultural Industries also construct languages and everything (is) a grouping of representations generated by their very actions.

Advertising, as a C.I., is a vague concept, referring to the grouping of constructive processes and to the dissemination of social knowledge.

4.1 The New Consumer Society

Consumption within the Mass Culture scarcely has anything to do with the necessities for the survival of humanity, but rather with personal desires, frustrations, insecurities and (dis)satisfactions. In the past, consumption evolved as a process of transformations so that something might function. In Mass Culture, consumption implies deterioration, expenditure or extinction of something. The pessimistic viewpoint of Consumerism is wastage. Irrational expenditure of survival resources of civilisations is the nucleus of the criticisms of the Consumer Society. This expenditure brings added importance to the cycle of destruction of natural resources of our planet and is necessary for the maintenance of the economic development of our societies.

5 The Promotional Condition of Contemporary Culture

Culture goes back to the World of Brands and Consumption, and the Commercial World reverts, more or less, to the Cultural. The term Promotion is very broad; it includes advertising, packaging and design, and also the commercial non-communicational activities.

The very nature of Mass Culture carries with it the idea of promotion:

  • Cultural Products are produced for its benefit

  • The Culture Industry promotes its products

  • The market, the ongoing re-novation of products

  • Culture promotes, and self-promotes, itself continuously, so as not to lose its market share.

The expansion of Logos and Brands is visible in advertising, the media, and progressively more so, in public places; be they commercial or not (logofilia).

The Brand is the lynchpin of World Culture. For various reasons:

  • There is a lot of creative work in its conception and diffusion

  • Advertising has changed its tune.

  • Now, there are not objective characteristics of the product, but rather entertainment, involvement, and the spectacular.

  • The aesthetic dimension of the brand goes beyond advertising.

  • The design and packaging, the commercial architecture are points of reference which contribute to the anesthetization of the world.

  • Brands associate themselves with grand causes to promote their image.

The brand is a aesthetic universe, and communication aesthetics result from a great interest in understanding new hegemonic forms of contemporary visual culture. The promotional condition of contemporary culture commences with new possibilities of understanding of the world through vision. Reality can be constructed by the use and manipulation of images.

Advertising appears in urban space occupying privileged places, or cornered in marginal zones as a visual debasement of cities. In the Post-Modern metropolis there exist geopolitical phenomena of images in which Industrial discourse is a primary consideration in the urban countryside.

Art is not Advertising and Advertising is not Art; but their rhetoric is heterogeneous and inter-textual. These properties are appropriate for their basic structure, and for the display of their communication plan. The inter-textuality of advertising resembles that which art generates in an innovative and alternative work, and with what industry feels itself comfortable for infiltrating into the individual awareness of its consumers.

It is complicated to find town-planners or architects who design cities counting on Advertising as an integral element of its countryside. The streets or squares are not designed for the placement of Advertising, as the Renaissance Monument organises the centre of the Square or the Baroque statue de-centralises the space of the same area. There does not exist an aesthetic urban environment which organises Advertising into the urban ambience, but indeed we know of an urban architecture respectful towards the natural environment and nature which avoids the contamination of the visual countryside. Always, and with an invasive attitude, Advertising opens for itself space in the asphalt and in the concrete; looking for maximum visibility, and with that, the exponential growth of visual impact.

In the Post-Modern era, the intentions of external Advertising are not so deep-rooted. It is not a question of imposition on the space. There exist examples of more intelligent advertising; looking for inter-textuality through places in which, in the past, there was an appropriate monument. This is a new dodge of Post-Modern cultural relativism; together with strategies of Capitalistic Culture.

5.1 The New Advertising

Concepts like Publicização [3], allow categorise new advertising formats which arose as a result of the transformation promoted by the socio-technological intervention of media devices on hyper-modern or post-modern society [7] with their contemporary social values [11].

Such values and interactive processes characterise new or alternative environments for the “movement of trademarks” (planned media and format rotation of brand advertising) in the context of the phenomena referred to as Transmedia or Crossmedia; generators of meaning for the consumer society.

Then, final thoughts are woven about the relevance of the creation and operation of procedures for observing network communication.

From these thoughts, a conclusion is drawn which comments on the implications of these phenomena for communicative thinking in relation to the problematic nomenclature Storytelling TransMedia and Crossmedia, that has been used to explain such so-called phenomena; especially seeking ways to delineate the horizons of this terminology and its uses in advertising communication in the Latin American context.

In this way, the tradition of Latin-American thought can, through qualitative studies, concern itself with supplying theoretical solutions, aimed at the creation of meaning, and linkages between brands and consumers, as is the intent of this document.

In doing so, a different position is assumed to that of the Anglo-Saxon, especially North American, which is more focused on the study of the effects. As a counterpoint to the latter, a closer look has been taken here at the socio-cultural aspects.

The new Hyper-Consumer Society [12], it is characterised by:

  • Loss of traditional “Points-of-reference”.

  • A voluble, disorganised and unregulated consumer.

  • Consumption that is more experiential and emotional than describable.

  • One consumes more for oneself than to obtain the recognition of others.

  • Consumers are possessed by fear of not experiencing new sensations.

  • To buy is to play (Subjectivity)

5.2 The Capitalism of Fiction

The author of this concept is Vicente Verdú [17], who constructs the idea; beginning from the exposure of Jesús Ibáñez:

  • Production-driven Capitalism: since the end of the 18th C. to the end of WWII.

    • MERCHANDISE.

      Consumer-driven Capitalism: Until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Publicity loads produced merchandise with meaning.

    • SIGNAGE.

      Capitalism of Fiction: Arises at the beginning of the 21st C. (written 20th C) places emphasis on

    • THEATRICAL IMPORTANCE in PEOPLE.

      The two first-mentioned Capitalisms are loaded, above all, with material well-being. The third, is that of Fiction of sensations, of Psychological Well-being.

Their main function is to create a reality from fiction, with the appearance of improved and sweetened authenticity, which are characterised by:

  • The importance of appearance.

  • A spectacularised reality.

  • The change from being citizens to being spectators.

  • Global cultural homogenisation.

6 Advertising Global Culture

It´s a concept under construction, which is based on all of the above and which we summarize as follows:

Technology has changed the ways of communication, social relations and consumption; from programmatic advertising, which is global because it uses Communication Networks, through which spreads very quickly using, in addition to the numerical strategies, postmodern aesthetics based on art and visual culture, modes of social behavior socially based on shared cultures and consumption as a social activity with a cultural sense throughout the world. The Global Advertising Culture (complex, changing and evolving) has been raised thanks to programmatic advertising, based on numerical calculations and statistical prediction.