A Research On Advertisement Culture In Light Of Ritual Theory

China's modern advertising has become one of China's most dynamic industries——knowledge-intensive, technology-intensive, personnel-intensive high-tech industries.Advertisement itself is a commodity promoting tool, whose purpose is to promote the production it serves successfully. With the development of mass media technology, advertisement forms are getting more and more varied, and advertisement reaches to nearly every corner of people's life. It gradually grows into a cultural phenomenon. Advertisements transfer certain cultural information to the public, and affect people's money-expense idea. But the faster the advertisement industry develops, the more competitive it becomes. A piece of advertisement which merely publicizes the merit of a product would not do to excel itself from other advertisements. Therefore, various novel expense concepts come up and ceremonious even ritualistic advertisements are produced.This thesis tries to adopt a new way of ceremony analysis to probe into advertisement's ability to construct, guide and effect people's life struclture, from the angle of the reoccurrence of ceremony in advertisements.Through the analysis of ceremonious features in advertisement campaigns, this thesis views advertisement as a kind of social ritual activity, and tries to explore the effect of advertisements on people's ideology, values, life roles, life concept, and their classification of different consumer groups. This thesis also tries to find out advertisement's role of constructing mass culture and its impact on consumers'lifestyle. ased on the studies listed above, this thesis also predicts the future development of advertisement industry, and at the same time discusses how to enhance the capacity of the advertisement to promote the sale and the public image of the product by means of adopting cultural elements.This thesis consists of three parts:First, summarizes the reasons for cultural development, transfer and change, and focuses on the germination and the development of modern advertisement culture that came in being with the shaping of economic society.From commercial drives that have pushed the booming of the advertisement we learned that, to achieve the purpose of advertisement, advertisement designers did everything possible to highlight the effect to attract consumers. Then, ceremonies, because of their ability to attract popularity among most people, were widely applied to the campaign.And secondly starts with the discussion of the development of religious rites, of its relationship with cultural evolution. Then, the serviceability of ceremony theory to explain expense phenomenon in the modern society was discussed and this provided a base for advertisement culture research in light of ceremony theory.The last but not lest mainly deals with the reoccurrence of traditional rituals in advertisements and promoting activities. It also analyzes cultural phenomena and life concepts that take shape in the process of the formation of ritualized advertisement activities with relative ceremony theory respectively. In addition, it makes an analysis on mass culture constituted by these phenomena and concepts. At last, this chapter selects some classic advertisements to explain in detail the process of advertisement ritualization, to highlight the value of ritual theory in culture research, and to analyze how advertisements managed to achieved the goal of social control.