Page 167 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

146 Critical investigations in political economy

Advertiser influence is so built in to the market context that not only is it
often difficult to prove, but advertiser influence frequently occurs without
the advertiser’s inducing it by any specific act, sometimes even without the
advertiser’s wanting it.

Oscar Gandy (2000: 48; 1982, 2004) examines the implications of the uneven
distribution of commercial subsidy for media serving poorer, ethnic minority
audiences in the US, concluding: ‘[t]o the extent that advertisers place a lower
value on gaining access to particular minority audiences, those who would produce
content for that segment will be punished by the market …’.
The structuralist analysis is helpful in highlighting theoretical deficiencies in
instrumentalist explanations but historical analyses show that the forms of influ-
ence change under different conditions and that advertising influence can take a
complex combination of forms. We may continue to ask: under what conditions
can marketers or agencies successfully intervene to influence editorial decisions?
Yet as marketing decouples from traditional media vehicles we need to frame
this more broadly to examine how marketing finance and decisions affect the
range and nature of communication services. How do the various influences
operate and interact, from more ‘impersonal’ market signals to the interactions
between media, agencies and marketers themselves?
Leiss et al. (1990: 121), drawing on Murdock’s (1982) distinction between allocative
and operational control, argue that the influence of advertising tends to be of the
allocative type, namely shaping the goals and scope of media firms and determining
the general ways in which firms deploy resources, rather than directly influencing
operational decisions. Other studies have suggested that advertising influence is
largely internalised by media management, influencing editorial strategies designed to
maximise revenue (Curran 1978, 1986). As Fenton (2007: 13) writes: ‘[Advertiser]
influence commonly functions pre-emptively: the sensibilities of the advertiser are
taken into consideration by the media company prior to the screening of contentious
material’. TV programming is required to provide a suitably positive selling envir-
onment by ‘privileging genres that employ the same capitalist realist aesthetic as the
advertising that surrounds them’ (Murdock 2011: 29; Herman and Chomsky 2008).
Baker (1994: 44) summarises how ad dependence encourages the media to
shape and adapt media content:

1 to treat advertisers’ products and their broader interests charitably in both
news reports and editorials
2 to create a buying mood that will induce readers or viewers to react favourably
to advertisements
3 to reduce partisanship and often reduce controversial elements in order to
avoid offending advertisers’ potential customers and to increase the media’s
potential reach
4 to favour the middle- to higher-income audiences whose greater purchasing
power advertisers value most.