Advertising, Commercial Spaces And The Urban (consumption And Public Life)

Providing a detailed account of contemporary outdoor advertising and its relationship with urban space, this book examines what the outdoor advertising industry tells us about the commercial production of urban space, what industry practices reveal about contemporary capitalism, and how ads and billboard structures interface with spaces of the city. This book provides the first detailed account of contemporary outdoor advertising and its relationship with urban space. Going beyond accounts of urban 'place marketing' or advertising cities to tourists, the book asks: What can the outdoor advertising industry tell us about the commercial production of urban space? What does an analysis of these industry practices reveal about contemporary capitalism? How do ads and billboard structures interface with spaces of the city? What forms of 'urban vernacular' do they provide? The book presents an analysis of industry practices as 'commercial experiments' that engage with capitalism as performative, adaptive and open. Extending debates on non-representational theory, it analyses advertising texts, structures and spatiality through 'fabulation': a form of vernacular that sees animation, or the life of capitalism, in urban spaces. What do ads say about urban space, and what can those spaces reveal about advertising and capitalism? "Challenging the conventional critique of advertising as a process that saturates and commercialises space, Anne Cronin focuses on the ubiquitous hoardings, notice-boards and bus-stop panels that constitute outdoor advertising to produce a stimulating, highly original, sophisticated account that significantly extends understanding. Cronin demonstrates that it is a far from exact science as those in the advertising industry acknowledge, for along with many contemporary capitalist endeavours, it is improvisational, intuitive, processual and performative, continually changing as part of the fluid, lived city. Moreover, rather than being simply a means of producing dominant meanings and signs, and persuading consumers to spend money on things they neither need nor want, outdoor advertising is ingeniously conceived as an urban vernacular, a resource through which the city is known, sensed and practised, continuously reproducing forms of the 'public' and public space."--Tim Edensor, Reader in Cultural Geography, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Front Matter....Pages i-vii Introducing Commercial Spaces....Pages 1-19 The Industry and the City: Knowledge Practices as Commercial Experiments....Pages 20-43 Mobility, Market Research and Commercial Aesthetics....Pages 44-67 The Commodity Rhythms of Urban Space....Pages 68-89 Fabulating Commercial Spaces: Mediation, Texts and Perception....Pages 90-119 Perceiving Urban Change in Detroit and Manchester: Space, Time and the Virtual....Pages 120-160 The Commercial Vernacular of Advertising: Public Space, Commercialisation and Public Address....Pages 161-193 Back Matter....Pages 194-215