BU Research Blog

We are constantly told how enabling and empowering new interactive digital technologies are. How they free us to talk back to and build relationships with brands, allow us to organise ourselves as consumers, and stimulate marketers to find more relevant and less manipulative ways of communicating with us. Yet, how true is this really?

A chapter written by Dr. Chris Miles and published in a new Routledge collection, Explorations in Critical Studies in Advertising, investigates the optimistic claims for interactive advertising as a liberating platform for dialogue and co-creation and concludes that they are largely rhetorical strategies designed to persuade decision-makers of the terrifying prospects of losing brand control to consumers. As Dr. Miles concludes, “powerful keywords such as ’empowerment’, ‘interactivity’, and ‘dialogue’ act as discursive grounds for a fearful rededication to the goal of control”. Carefully analysing the ways in which both academic researchers in advertising and practitioner pundits talk about interactive strategies, Dr. Miles found a curious mixture of ostensibly celebratory language alongside terms and comparisons designed to unnerve and threaten marketers and management. The result, argues Dr. Miles, is both an understanding and practice of interactivity which largely serve to consolidate advertising’s traditional control orientation.

Dr. Miles’ chapter is part of the collection Exploration in Critical Studies of Advertising, edited by James Hamilton, Robert Bodle and Ezequiel Korin, and published by Routledge. A full chapter list and outline can be found at the publishers’ site here (link: https://www.routledge.com/Explorations-in-Critical-Studies-of-Advertising/Hamilton-Bodle-Korin/p/book/9781138649521).

Dr. Chris Miles is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing & Communication in the Department of Corporate and Marketing Communication. He is a member of the PCCC Research Centre and Head of the BU Advertising Research Group. His research focuses on the discursive construction of marketing theory and practice, particularly as it relates to communication and control. His book, Interactive Marketing: Revolution or Rhetoric?, was published by Routledge in 2010. He is currently working on another monograph for Routledge exploring the relationship between marketing, rhetoric and magic.