Recorded Spring 2016.
Published in 2014 in Advertising and Society Review, this paper traces a long and rich history of human billboarding, examining past and recent advertising efforts that involve the human body as a site for promotion, or as a living component of persuasion. Resisting the temptation of apocalyptic judgment, the paper suggests these phenomena are expressive of new notions of human agency and free-willed choices, strategically leveraged to achieve relevancy in an increasingly saturated media landscape. “Human Billboarding: Peopled Publicity and a New Space of “Agency” in Advertising” seeks productive ways to understand this new form of corporate messaging as a strategy for addressing social realities through carnivalesque performance.
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