The Advertised Crisis: How Advertising Is Facing the Issue of Social and Economic Crisis

This period is collecting different types of storytelling concerning social and economic crisis the world is facing with, depending on which media and which particular gaze they reflect. We can quote, of course, not only what the media, and especially the news sphere, is telling us about crisis, but also movies, tv fiction, contemporary literature, and so on are depicting a shared frame on it.

But it could be of particular interest analysing how advertising deals with this issue, particularly because it has to talk and engage consumers differently from the past and from its usual patterns. A traditional way to conceive advertising’s main scope it’s based on the assumption that it has to create and develop a reality totally positive, where everything is at its best in every shade. This led J. Baudrillard to call this totally different reality “hyperreality”. But nowadays consumers aren’t so well disposed towards this kind of advertising that has to rethink itself in a different way, being more respectful and loyal with consumers, their lives and their feelings.

So I’ll mention in this paper different cases and different manners with which economic, social and political crisis enters also the advertising stories and became part of its narrations. We can call it synchronization between social system and advertising (Luhmann; Antonioni) and maybe it could be the right key to the effectiveness of the latter. So I can say that the semantic of crisis affects also advertising, its storytelling and its working routines at different levels that this paper will try to enlight.