Analysing an Advertising Campaign: Towards an Integrated Cultural-Industrial Analysis

This article critically examines an advertising campaign for Smithwick's ale that is known as the ‘locals’ campaign and was televised in Ireland throughout the 1990s. My intention is not to ‘explain’ the campaign but to suggest an analytical approach that captures and preserves its sociological complexity. The article is divided into two parts and the analysis is built primarily around the interview accounts of producers of the campaign. In the first part I suggest that the ‘retelling’ of the Smithwick's ‘locals’ campaign not only animates a variety of sociologically significant themes in Ireland but also reveals some of the cultural assumptions of its producers, especially regarding Irishness. In the second part I switch my analytical focus to foreground the inherent ‘uncertainty’ of advertising expertise and the asymmetrical power relations which characterise the advertising industry. From this perspective, I suggest that Irishness is a malleable ingredient of advertising production that often has little to do with what producers ‘believe’, or even necessarily what consumers want, but is largely shaped by the exogenous pressures put on advertising agencies, such as the demands of the client company (in this case Diageo). However, the article concludes by highlighting the benefits of a ‘synthetic’ approach that incorporates different modes of analysis with a view to building an ‘integrated cultural-industrial analysis’.