Description
The purpose of this paper is to call for critical engagements between frame theory and advertisement research. Thus far, consumer psychology constitutes the dominant scholarship on advertisement frames, which are by and large classified as either marketing tactics arranging ad content, or as a priori schemas and experiences influencing consumer responsiveness. However, the consumer-advertisement-product triad not only involves individual cognition of stimuli but involves cultural narratives and practices surrounding consumer goods and social identities. The current paper thus encourages the adoption of insights from the critical and cultural studies tradition which would address issues that the current frame model in advertising research overlooks, mainly those concerning power, ideology, and subjectivation. To redress this epistemological shortfall in advertisement research, the current paper adopts Judith Butler's post-structuralist conceptualization of frames. It uses her account to study the social construction of erectile dysfunction (ED) in direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical advertisements on drugs for ED (DEDs). Following a textual analysis of visual and discursive rhetorical figures in print DTC ads of FDA-approved DEDs Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, this study determined that the ads' figures are framed by pathology and assimilation, with the former frame medicalizing male sexuality by way of the penile function/dysfunction binary, and the latter frame subsuming sexual differences under a rubric of (heterosexual) masculinity as virile, active, in-control, and able to perform. Results of this study suggest that advertisements lend themselves to critical frame analysis, which can enrich and complicate frame theory as it is currently understood and deployed in advertising research.
