Perfect moments: British advertising during the 1990s - an assessment of determinants

The aim of this thesis is to consider how advertisers and their clients in the 1990s conceptualised social and technological change. In particular, I address how advertisers deduced and represented new characteristics in their customers. By reflecting on changes in the content of adverts, I take a symptomatic approach in considering how new conceptualisations were incorporated into new and broader ad styles.
To do this, in Chapter 1, the Literature Review, I identify my central approach and key issues against existing literature in the field. Given that this study is essentially an industry-oriented analysis of advertising, which not been attempted this way before, I consider the relevance of existing industrial and academic-centred critical models for this study.
Chapter 2 then maps out the key changes in advertising in the 1990s from previous decades. It considers what prompted the ad industries to change their perspectives and how advertisers restructured their operations in an attempt to re-imagine their consumers.
In Chapter 3 benchmarks of the key changes are examined in more detail. Three campaigns are examined to explore how promotional strategies negotiated (perceived) changes in consumers. The campaigns for Britvic Tango (1992), Daewoo cars (1995) and Tesco Clubcard (1997) were chosen because
they are symptomatic of key moments during the 1990s in which the way advertising targeted consumers was
re-addressed. In the final part of this chapter I consider how shifting methods of advertising during the 1990s registers in the 'bigger picture' of twentieth century communication.
Following the case studies, the next two chapters review two key issues for advertising during the 1990s. Chapter 4 considers how advertisers changed their tone of address. Here issues such as national/personal representation and 'boutiques of history' are considered. Most notably, changes in youth mood is considered against advertising's own strategies for coping with change.
Chapter 5 then considers changes in modes of address, and in particular the impact of digital technology on advertising's means of communication. Unlike the previous chapter, which demonstrates how advertising negotiated change, this section shows how the existing agency system was forced to change.
Before 1990 an attitude perSisted in the ad industry that changes to the way agencies communicated and did business was (to a large extent) determined by advertisers themselves. This was not the case in 1990s. This study maps out how change was negotiated in a climate of cultural fragmentation and digitised communication.