Advertising in France

Advertising’s massive expansion since 1945 can be linked initially to the emergence of the consumer society and the economic confidence of the 1950s and 1960s and, later, to increased commercial competition alongside massive media expansion. Total advertising expenditure represents 1.25 per cent of the French gross domestic product and the sector employs on a regular basis an estimated 50,000 people. Although this is small compared with countries such as the United States, the French advertising sector has continued to grow even during periods of recession. However, the late twentieth century is seeing a period of turmoil. The long-established tradition of agencies such as Havas and Publicis has enabled the sector successfully to resist infiltration by foreign competitors, so that the largest French advertising groups-EURO-RSCG (the result of a 1991 merger between Havas-EUROCOM, and RSCG: Roux-Séguéla-Cayzac-Goudard), Publicis and BDDP: Boulet-Dru-Dupuy-Petit-still command the largest share of the national market, but their position on the international market remains modest.

Following a succession of changes in the regulation and funding of the broadcasting media, advertising (which had started to appear from 1968 on state-owned radio stations and television channels) became a major source of funding for both television and radio in the 1980s (particularly affecting the fast expanding private stations and channels), thereby vastly extending its influence as a means of mass communication. Even in the case of state-owned television channels, advertising revenue has grown faster than licence revenue, taking the maximum advertising time per hour to twelve minutes in 1995. As a social practice, advertising has itself started to attract media attention (the M6 television channel offers a popular weekly programme Culture pub), and publicitaires (admen) have gained in social recognition via such figures as Jacques Séguéla of RSCG (who masterminded the 1988 Mitterrand presidential campaign) and Bernard Cathelat of the Centre de Communication Avancée (Centre for Advanced Communication), linked to the group Havas, who has published many books on socio-styles or styles de vie (lifestyles), outlining a sociological method for analysing consumer motivations.

Advertising is a communication process which involves a number of social actors: advertisers (manufacturing or service industries, state or other public agencies, etc.), advertising agencies which create the advertising messages, the media (the five traditionally recognized grands médias: cinema, press, radio, television and “outdoors” which includes bill boards, to which one must add the new electronic technologies, particularly relevant to France since the launching of Minitel) and the consumers as target audience. The growing importance of a category of intermediate companies, the centrales d’achat, such as Carat France, who purchase the crucial advertising space and time and negotiate between advertisers, agencies and media companies, is one of the more striking organizational changes which have affected this sector in France since the 1960s. The reliance of advertising on the media to deliver commercial messages, and, conversely, the increasing financial dependence of the media on advertising revenue, raise the issue of whose voices are heard and compete for influence in society. The new practice of advertisers sponsoring programmes is likely to extend their influence. The idea of public space and public service (which has been an important concept in the cultural history of France and which is echoed in the French term for advertising, publicité) is often seen by critics as losing out to commercial forces.

Advertising as a discourse is one of the most pervasive means of mass communication and lies at the heart of popular culture; its omnipresence ensures that all members of society receive advertising messages in the course of their most mundane activities and, as such, these messages are a powerful indicator of a society’s values and practices. Whether advertising is seen as a mirror of society or as capable of shaping attitudes and inhibiting or initiating social change has always been a fiercely debated ideological question. A number of laws regulate advertising-for instance when it involves children or where it concerns particular types of products or services. Advertising of tobacco was banned in 1991 (Evin law) and alcohol advertising subjected to restrictions. The Sapin law of 1993, aimed at preventing political and economic corruption, introduced strict financial rules affecting advertising groups. The BVP (Bureau de Vérification de la Publicité) and the CSA (Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel) are the main bodies concerned with the regulation and fairness of advertising. Comparative advertising was made legal in 1992 but is strictly regulated.

In the 1950s, Roland Barthes pioneered academic interest in popular discourses by his bold semiological analyses published in Mythologies; meanwhile, the forms of advertising discourse have evolved and become increasingly sophisticated as both creators and receivers of messages have become conversant with the codes of this communication process. Since advertising messages are ephemeral and dependent on media space and time, the optimum conditions of reception necessitate a frequent renewal of forms and techniques. Initially a discourse that spoke directly to passive consumers and attempted to persuade them with arguments for the superiority of a product or a service, it has gradually resorted to more subtle forms of seduction: an attractive lifestyle or highly desirable but often unreachable qualities such as glamour, beauty or a return to an ideal state of nature are presented, by means of visual juxtaposition and semantic transfer, as irresistibly within the consumer’s grasp. A new form of seduction which seeks to entertain the receiver signals a shift in the positions of the participants in the process of mass communication: potential consumers are invited to partake in a narrative (a brief soap opera) or a humorous scenario, or to solve a puzzle, the product or service sometimes only performing an accessory function. The need to provide instant viewer’s interest, given the cost of advertising space, is thus generating new forms of exchange and interactive behaviour. The multiplicity of art forms contributing to the increasingly sophisticated production of messages (video clips, computer-produced images and graphics, special visual effects, electronically mixed jingles), while providing an experimental ground for musicians and artists, is also pointing at a redistribution of boundaries between discourses. Advertising is increasingly intertextual. It has been described as an unstable and parasitic discourse which feeds on the whole range of cultural forms of expression of a society. The culture of advertising, meanwhile, is becoming internationalized; the cost of producing advertising films for television is so high that agencies seek to produce messages which can be recognized and decoded everywhere in the world for products (such as cars or training shoes) which are equally available everywhere. The now frequent use of internationally acclaimed film stars, athletes or supermodels adds to this process of globalization. Analysing the specificity of French advertising discourse is thus becoming less relevant. Although French agencies are proud of some of their creative achievements, the sophistication of some of the British advertisements from the 1960s onwards has been rarely matched, it seems, by their French (or North American) counterparts. However, there are a number of ways in which the national environment is relevant.

Borrowings from other cultural discourses, including high culture, demonstrate the ability of French advertisements to rely readily on a shared cultural heritage transmitted through the education system. The French as a nation have always enjoyed games involving language: advertising slogans constitute an immensely rich field where language-specific creativity is deployed and where the receiver’s attention is engaged with riddles and puns or highly organized rhythms and sound patterns. It is also a good experimental ground for new modish words: advertisements promptly pick up on shared but elusive linguistic innovations, even if regulators will occasionally attempt to intervene in the process (the case of the 1994 Toubon law banning the use of foreign words in advertising is a good example).

National stereotypes frequently used to promote certain foreign products will clearly depend on a specifically French perception of, for instance, Italian, English or American behaviour patterns.

More importantly, gender stereotyping needs to be considered in the light of French cultural practices. Nudity, particularly female (and increasingly, since the 1970s, male), is used considerably more in French advertising than it is in Britain or the United States (but probably less than in some Scandinavian countries). This is often seen as reflecting French people’s less puritanical outlook and their easy relationship with the body; none the less, the casual and constant representation of people as sex objects cannot be ignored as irrelevant. More controversial is the subservient, not to say degrading, role often assigned to women in French advertising discourse. The objective situation of women in French society has changed considerably since 1945. French advertising seemed for several decades impervious to this new situation, but since the 1970s a number of changes have become visible. Society’s changed perception of gender roles and sexuality has found many echoes; particularly in the 1980s, when Yvette Roudy, the Ministre de la Condition Féminine, started a campaign protesting against the humiliating representation of women in advertising and a deliberate attempt was made to convey both men and women in a new light: images of caring or domesticated fathers, and assertive businesswomen displaying their new social confidence in traditionally male environments and occupations, began to appear. However, given the capacity for advertising discourse to function intertextually and its increasing use of humour, which is one of the hallmarks of the new styles of advertisements, many of these examples can arguably be interpreted as more of a playful acknowlegement that gender relations have become high-profile than a genuine attempt to reflect women’s changed reality and aspirations to social equality. Reversals of (or allusions to) old stereotypes, allowing the receiver to engage humorously with a scene from which he or she can feel detached, do little to change deeply ingrained perceptions.

Judging by the dominant messages conveyed by advertisements in women’s magazines, there is little evidence that the late twentieth century is offering new perspectives on gender (and indeed race and class) representation. French feminist organizations seem reluctant to intervene.

Advertising as a prime vehicle of mass communication and mass culture has been at the heart of the cultural debate in France since 1945. More than in many Western countries, it has been held in utter contempt for its vulgarity or accused of being manipulative and degrading by successive generations of intellectuals scornful of mass culture generally. Its link with capitalism has been one of the reasons for its low esteem among left-wing intellectuals, but official cultural policy under the Gaullist regime also denied it any value, favouring all forms of high culture which it tried to disseminate among the masses. The first signs of a change came in the 1980s, when some high-profile intellectuals started to embrace the new Americanized way of life. The younger generations are particularly open in their enjoyment of the newly shared media and advertising culture, as is demonstrated by the success of ‘la nuit des publivores’ (an all-night event where advertisements from all over the world are shown to a jingle-chanting audience). However, advertising and its easily attainable pleasures is still regarded with deep suspicion by sections of the more educated French population.