Thursday, February 17th, 2011 "Advertising That Spreads Humanism": Contemporary South Korean Advertising as Popular Culture

Description

In my paper, I explore appropriations of advertising into popular culture in contemporary South Korea. I emphasize that South Korean advertising publics, rather than relating ads to personally relevant problems of everyday life and consuming them privately, often read ads as a social commentary and a public intervention, expecting advertisers to engage with social issues and contribute to broadly understood improvements of society. To capture this complex dynamic, my paper considers critical engagements with advertising in diaries, blogs, and mass media. I demonstrate how, on some occasions, advertisers were pressured to accommodate the publics’ sensibilities and demands, whereas, on others, the publics readily interpreted ads in a way that compromised their needs and interests as potential consumers. Further, my paper questions the popularity of the so-called “humanistic” advertising, heavily praised by South Korean advertising consumers and producers alike. Its heart-warming messages employ melodramatic conventions to generate pathos by asserting the primacy of humanistic values, which results in a paradoxical situation, where commercial advertising offers a refuge for sentiments that are often critical of the dominant neoliberal ideologies, which prize competition and economic rationality. Overall, I reflect on how advertising, as any popular culture product, combines impulses of containment and resistance in contradictory ways and problematize the commonsensical notion that advertising as a social institution performs an identical role in different societies.

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Olga Fedorenko is a PhD candidate at the East Asian Studies Department of the University of Toronto. Her research deals with discourses and practices of advertising in contemporary South Korea, and her dissertation draws on a 14-month fieldwork in Seoul, which included an internship at a major advertising agency and observation at an advertising review board. Olga also holds MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, MBA from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, and BA in Korean Studies from Moscow State University in Russia.