Commercials as Discursive Assemblages
Chapter Two demonstrates how commercials employ genre-specific codes and conventions to operate as discursive assemblages. The author adopts Grossberg’s concept of cultural formations as a model for analyzing dance in advertising. Through close readings of several commercials created for US companies produced between 1948 and 2012, the chapter offers an historicized reading of the strategic intersections between dance, television, film, and advertising within commercials to produce a form of marketing that simultaneously reinforces and destabilizes disciplinary boundaries. Several concepts central to the larger project are introduced here, including liveness, advertising positioning strategies, direct address and hailing, montage, and film musical conventions. While the study focuses on an analysis of the history and conventions of dance-in-advertising in the United States during the mid-to-late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it also includes examples of commercials created to advertise US products in foreign markets.