Page 134 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport in Advertising • 123

translating between systems of meaning, and therefore constitute a vast meta-system
where values from different areas of our lives are made interchangeable.’ Samsung
does not invent a meaning for the camera, but translates meaning for it by an already

existing sign system that consumers understand (the significance of Joe Cole).

What a Feeling: the Currency of Sport Goods

Advertisements enable the transfer of emotions to products. Williamson (1978)
suggested that the product is constructed as an intermediary currency to buy a posi-
tive feeling: love, happiness, success, popularity. While money cannot buy love, it
can buy a commodity, which appears to get you what you want. By purchasing the
Tag Heuer watch, the advertisements suggest that you are buying the status and suc-
cess of Tiger Woods. An advertisement for a Ford Focus sports car presents fast-
moving scenes of empty roads by day and night, suggesting that the purchase of the
car will get you the thrill and sense of freedom of driving for sport along roads laid
out like a racetrack. As Williamson (1978: 38) observed, ‘the product not only repre-
sents an emotional experience, but becomes the experience and produces it.’
The connections that advertisements make are often visual, without linguistic
explanation or justification. The Tag Heuer watch is simply placed next to Tiger

Woods. The logic of the advertisement relies on the connection being made by the
consumer. Knowledge about what sport stars like Tiger Woods or Joe Cole mean is
necessarily supplied by the consumer. It is not Joe Cole’s body that is important, but

what his body signifies in the sign system of celebrity football. But the consumer is
not necessarily aware that he or she knows what Joe Cole or Tiger Woods means until
they encounter the advertisement and recognise the meaning. Our involvement in the
advertisement brings those meanings into being.

Sport, Advertising and Distinction

Advertisements’ lack of explicit narrative links between objects is part of their effec-
tiveness as ideology. If they do not make explicit their claims, they cannot be ques-
tioned. If they present connections by juxtaposition, leaving us as consumers to fi ll
in the gaps, we become implicated in the advertisements ourselves. We construct the
meaning for the product on the basis of what we already know. The perceived truth of
the advertisement is thereby unassailable. Yet this is not all—we are also created as
particular kinds of subjects by the meanings we make of the products in the advertise-
ments. To achieve this, the marking of difference is a vital part of advertising.
Advertisers must market their goods as distinctive with particular, desirable fea-
tures. There may be very little real difference between brands of products within
any one category: washing powder, sneakers, cars, drinks. Very often, two or more
brands that appear to be in competition with each other are manufactured by the