Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures

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debates among intellectuals, pedagogues, and artists on both sides of the Atlantic revolved around concepts of propaganda and education to promote democracy.At a politically critical moment, they shared a belief in moving images as powerful tools for shaping the human mind.In Zimmermann's second chapter, 'Advertising and the Apparatus: Cinema, Television, and Out-of-Home Screens', the notion of the dispositif serves as a conceptual framework to both theorize and analyse the programming of moving image advertising on three types of screens: cinema, network-era television, and digital out-of-home displays.The chapter shows how screen ads stitch together different forms of intermittent movements -of bodies, images, and objects -and thus help to create flows.Zimmermann's final chapter, 'Advertising's Self-Reference: From Early Cinema to the Super Bowl', takes up the notion of self-reference and redefines it as a particular mode of address.When looked at from the perspective of screen advertising and screen ads, self-reference exhibits the assumed media knowledge of the viewers as much as it displays the medium itself.It thus works as acknowledgement and celebration of the audience's media expertise.The second section in the book, written by Bo Florin, is dedicated to 'Cases and Materials'.In 'Moving Objects: The Case of Volvo', Florin investigates the concept of mobility on several levels -the movement of cars, the movement of people, and the movement of the camera -and how this concept is launched within the ads along with 'Scandinavian' values.The commercials also point to the basic definition of cinema qua moving images, aiming in turn to move the audience.In 'Cinematic Intertexts: h&m Goes YouTube', Florin studies the designer collaborations of h&m, with a focus on these campaigns at the point of breakthrough for social media.The campaigns as such combine high culture and popular culture, and spans from exclusive consumerism to equal opportunities for all, with the Lanvin collaboration as an early example of 'friendvertising' -and using You Tube as an archive.The third and f inal chapter in the section, entitled 'Beyond Promotion: The un Global Goals Campaign', deals with the latter as a particularly interesting example, given the way this campaign did not advertise a product, but rather a policy.Does this change the way of relating to history?Advertising sustainability requires both economic development, environmental protection, and social responsibility.The chapter shows that the launch of this campaign, not least by using Aardman Animations, relies heavily on both film history and the history of commercials.