Sport, advertising and promotional culture

This chapter provides an overview of the critical, contextual study of sport, advertising and society. The chapter begins by reflecting on the author’s research journey, including his initial and ongoing motivations for studying advertising’s role in the increasing integration of sport and global consumer culture. This discussion is grounded in a discussion about how the critical analysis of sport, advertising and promotional culture provides important insights into the production and circulation of culture and cultural meaning and the production and reproduction of ideology. After providing a case for studying sport advertising, the chapter discusses theory and methodology in relation to the author’s identification with the project of cultural studies generally, and physical cultural studies (PCS) specifically. Advocating the critical sensibilities of cultural studies rather than its wholesale adoption as a discipline, the author highlights the notion of ‘radical contextualism,’ a theoretical and methodological approach to analysis which is at the heart of both cultural studies and the PCS project. Moving to consideration of the current state of knowledge in the study of sport, advertising, and society, and the study of advertising in, through, and in relation to, sport more specifically, the author summarises research according to three broad, overlapping categories which are informed by the circuit of culture model first proposed by du Gay et al. (1997): production, representation and textual analysis and audience studies. The chapter concludes with a brief summary and some suggestions for the future.