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Jayasinghe, Laknath and Ritson, Mark (2013). Everyday Advertising Context: An Ethnography of Advertising Response in the Family Living Room. Journal of Consumer Research. 40(1) pp. 104-121

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Copyright 2013 by University of Chicago Press. Originally published in Journal of Consumer Research.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/668889

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Everyday Advertising Context: An Ethnographyof Advertising Response in theFamily Living Room

LAKNATH JAYASINGHEMARK RITSON

Consumer research largely examines television advertisingeffects usingconventionalpsychological accounts of message processing. Consequently, there is an emphasison the influence of textual content at the expense of the everyday interpersonalviewing contexts surrounding advertising audiences. To help restore this theoreticalimbalance an ethnographic study was conducted in eight Australian homes to explorethe influence of everyday viewing contexts on advertising audiences. This articleexamines how the everyday advertising contexts of social interaction, viewing space,media technology use, and time impact consumer responses to television advertisingtexts. Advertising viewing behavior in the family living room is framed within broaderhousehold activity and around cultural ideas regarding family life, and can enhanceconsumer and family identity value. Our theoretical framework details how televisionadvertisements, everyday viewing contexts, household discourse, and viewer prac-tices intersect to produce processes of advertising response and engagement notexplicated in previous studies of consumer behavior.

Jacqui Vickers, her sister Sally, and mum Sarah watch theteen soap opera Home and Away. The dinner rush is over,and all three watch the program’s dramatic storyline inshocked silence. When the television program breaks, dif-ferent kinds of everyday activity in the living room organizehow television advertising is experienced by the viewers.Sally attends to her homework with her back to the screen.Jacqui turns to chat with her mum seated next to her andlargely ignores an ad for Retravision. Sarah ignores herdaughter, however, and instead watches the television ad-vertisement. Unsuccessful at grabbing her mum’s attention,Jacqui engages with a spot for Dettol hand wash. Her visualattention to the ad shifts according to the chat now establishedbetween her mum and younger sister. As the Dettol ad ends,Jacqui inquires: “Did you see that? Ha ha! Did you see thatad, Mum?” She attempts to insert herself into the chat byresourcing the ad’s quirky ending. But she is ignored, again.

Laknath Jayasinghe ([email protected]) is a PhD graduate fromMelbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, Carlton 3053, Aus-tralia. Mark Ritson ([email protected]) is associate professor of marketingat Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, Carlton 3053,Australia. This article is written by the first author based on his dissertationat Melbourne Business School, and the second author served as dissertationadvisor. The authors wish to thank the participant families for sharing

Home and Away returns. Sally stops chatting and returns toher homework book. Sarah then faces Jacqui and chats withher for 10 seconds before both reengage with the program.Advertising responses at home are influenced by wider do-mestic situations, physical viewing positions, and the use ofother objects in the family living room, and shape the mean-ing of ads. (Observational note, Vickers household, 7:20 p.m.,Thursday, June 26, 2008)

The contexts through which we respond to televisionadvertisements, engage with them, and read and decode

their messages have been studied in consumer research.Much research examines the effects and outcomes of var-iables such as broadcast and program context and socialcontext on audience reception and engagement (Murry andDacin 1996; Raghunathan and Corfman 2006), using pre-dictive measures such as brand attitude or ad recall (Murry,

their lives with us as part of this research. The authors also acknowledgethe constructive comments from the three reviewers on previous versionsof this article and appreciate the advice and commitment from the associateeditor and the two editors.

Ann McGill served as editor and Russ Belk served as associate editor forthis article.

Electronically published November 29, 2012

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

JAYASINGHE AND RITSON 105

Lastovicka, and Singh 1992). Other research also addressescontextualized ad engagement but focuses on understandingthe processes of engagement in social settings and the in-terpersonal meanings constructed through it (Kates 2004).Ritson and Elliott’s (1999) account of advertising contextoutlines part of this process, highlighting how televisionadvertising texts are sometimes watched and engaged athome due to social influences operating beyond domesticsettings. We build on Ritson and Elliott’s research by con-centrating not on the external social influences that increasead engagement but on the everyday (i.e., commonplace ormundane) domestic situations, interpersonal interactions,and object use that acutely shape viewing, response, andengagement during actual advertising broadcasts at home.Consumer researchers have traditionally assumed that ad-vertising information and socially engaging advertisementshold their power over viewers during the viewing event.Yet, as highlighted in our seemingly banal opening obser-vation note, shifts in interpersonal and situational contextssuch as Jacqui’s seating position and Sally’s chat with hermum largely influence Jacqui’s experiences with the quirkyDettol advertisement. In light of our data, Ritson and El-liott’s outline of the social contexts of advertising seemsinadequate to more roundly address a central question inconsumer research: what motivates viewers at home to re-spond to, watch, and engage with certain television adver-tisements while they ignore others?

To help fill this conceptual gap, our study analyzes theways that television advertising broadcasts interact with andinfluence viewer behavior in the family living room. Twokey research questions are proposed. First, what are thecentral elements that activate the process of television ad-vertising response, from initial exposure to engagement andconsumption? Our article examines the culturally framedviewing contexts and practices organizing advertising ex-periences in the living room and provides a theoreticalframework outlining advertising engagement and consump-tion in domestic settings. Advertising consumption is ho-listic and includes how the lived experience of both thetelevision program break and advertising textual interpre-tation are embedded within consumers’ “everyday practicesand the structure of [their] cultural communities” (Jansson2002, 24). In home viewing situations, it accounts for thehousehold discourses and wider viewer contexts and prac-tices that lead to the viewing and personalizing of adver-tising messages, including how moments during the tele-vision program break are reclaimed by consumers forhomemaking purposes. From this perspective, consumer re-search has not accounted for the variety of everyday house-hold discourses that compel ad viewing behavior or displaceadvertisements from attention. Second, how do contextual-ized viewing practices produce domestic advertising mean-ings? Here, we are influenced by Epp and Price’s ideasconcerning “network transformations” (2010, 833). We ar-gue that exposure to a television advertisement in a domesticviewing space may set in motion particular contextual shifts,linked to shared household ideas around family identity, that

impact the ways viewers at home subsequently watch tele-vision ads scheduled within a particular program break.These are significant questions for consumer researchers in-terested in television advertising engagement and consump-tion, as they invite us to consider advertising response froma viewer-centred perspective and caution against concep-tions of advertising engagement and interpretation organizedsolely through broadcast media contexts. They also helpuncover the situations and contexts that motivate advertisingexperiences, responses, and engagement at home; and locatethe presence of family interaction during the television pro-gram break. Next, we further develop some of these theo-retical perspectives and assumptions to ground our analysis.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Advertising Context

Studies of advertising context within consumer researchare largely derived from cognitive and social psychologyand apply experimental methods to determine measures ofadvertising engagement and effectiveness. It is normal inad experiments to both implicitly and explicitly delimit thenotion of reception and engagement context. For example,participants are often asked to evaluate an ad in isolationfrom the programming that generally contextualizes theviewing experience (Batra and Ray 1986), while other stud-ies try to “maximize external validity within experimentalconstraints,” for instance, by testing commercials surroundedby stimulus television programming (Brasel and Gips 2008,34), by accounting for advertising frequency (Campbell andKeller 2003), or by introducing into the viewing event con-federates with limited “audience member familiarity” (Pun-toni and Tavassoli 2007, 294). As well, in many interpretivestudies, television advertising texts are read and interpretedby culturally informed viewers through the ad’s textual,intertextual, and allusory media features (O’Donohoe 1997;Scott 1994). These traditions and techniques have eachserved the discipline well: they link ad interpretation to atext- and message-based notion of engagement, enablingresearchers to better understand how we as consumers pro-cess advertising and brand information, as well as how werespond to the formal features of the broadcast advertisingtext, the commercial pod, and the surrounding programming.Yet a principle limitation has been a reduced understandingof how the situational and temporal context elements sur-rounding audience members—such as Jacqui Vickers’s at-tempts to connect with her mum in our opening empiricalvignette—strongly govern and influence the very act of adreading, engagement, and interpretation during televisionprogram breaks (Hornik 1988; Kates 2004; Ritson and El-liott 1999).

This lack of contextual sensitivity within extant consumerbehavior stands in contrast to the study of television audi-ence behavior in other disciplines. Media studies research-ers, for example, have also examined television audiencebehavior, albeit from a marketer-controlled rather than con-sumer-centric perspective. David Morley (2000) provides a

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conceptual framework for examining how actual consumersin everyday domestic settings experience and respond tocommercial television programming at the moment ofbroadcast. He theorizes that contemporary viewers at homeread and interpret television material through three inter-related everyday consumer contexts (2000, 16–30): the ideaof home as a place of rules and comfort (Ang 1996), livingroom symbolism (Money 2007), and through the identityconflicts and obligations of the individual viewer embeddedwithin a family collective (Kim 2006; Mankekar 1999).Couldry (2000) additionally highlights how the contexts ofintertextuality and the time effects of viewing intersect tocreate personalized social meaning from television pro-grams. Others have observed how transitions in actual pro-gram audience composition and behavior influence exposureto and personalization of television material at home (Brodyand Stoneman 1983). Despite these productive perspectiveson household program viewing, media studies researchershave generally been reluctant to empirically study householdadvertising audiences due to their discipline’s Marxian ap-proach to examining consumer culture (Scott 2006). Mediaresearch therefore fails to account for the ways that—amongother things—television advertising’s “peculiar media goals”(Ritson and Elliott 1999, 266) of reach and frequency ensurethat the television program break and the ads scheduledwithin it produce more widely shared social experiences thanprogramming.

Advertising scholars, however, have developed a body ofwork that empirically examines how television advertisingmaterial is personalized in specific post-broadcast situations(Griffiths and Machin 2003). In the family living room,viewers may enjoy television advertising material, often us-ing it as a transformative identity resource, for example,when children appropriate it to display literacy and com-petence to parents (Bartholomew and O’Donohoe 2003).Yet many viewers also feel ambivalent about television ad-vertising entering the private, domestic contexts of the fam-ily home, often enduring advertisements as an intrusive,commercialized entity (O’Donohoe 2001). Research alsooutlines how shifts in practice such as media multitaskingand time shifted program viewing impact how televisionprogram breaks are experienced in the living room (Bardhi,Rohm, and Sultan 2010; Pearson and Barwise 2008). De-spite these advances of viewing in post-broadcast situations,advertising theory rarely investigates how the actual tele-vision program break and the advertisements broadcastwithin it are experienced at the precise moment of broadcastat home and the role of interpersonal advertising contextsin these experiences.

So, heeding Ritson and Elliott’s (1999, 275) request forconsumer researchers to study the “actual act” of advertisingviewing, we borrow ideas from media studies and elsewhereto advance an empirical account of how television advertisingis experienced and engaged by audiences in the everydayviewing contexts found in a family living room. Our researchsuggests that everyday social interactions, viewing space andtime, and concurrently used media technology all influence

the ways that advertising is viewed, engaged, and personalizedduring actual broadcast events. Importantly, we understandany precise moment of advertising response as less moderatedthrough any one particular contextual element but morethrough specific orchestrations of the entire network of ad-vertising contexts, orchestrations that themselves influence thesubsequent flow of everyday household and family life (Lind-lof, Shatzer, and Wilkinson 1988). We aim to elevate theconcept of advertising context to a more important theoreticalposition within consumer behavior and to arrive at a moreformal treatment of advertising response and consumption.

(Re-)Negotiating Family Identity inthe Living Room

Family identity within the living room appears precariousconsidering the opposing and differing interests, demands,and electives of individual family members in various partsof the contemporary home. Livingstone (2007) writes howmedia-led developments in late modernity have shifted themodel of Western family life once based on collectivism inthe living room to one based more on a “bedroom culture.”Holloway and Green (2008) note that changing parentingstyles have meant many parents now manage householddisputes among children by encouraging media use practicesin separate household rooms. Such household tensions arethemselves said to be aggravated by wider cultural trendsinvolving increased levels of materialism and individualmodes of product consumption (Bauman 2007; Buijzen andValkenburg 2003). With increasing crisis and physical sep-aration within the home, the notion that advertising viewingcontexts can motivate relational and pro-family behaviorsin the living room may appear little more than theoreticalspeculation.

Yet, simultaneously, researchers find that living room ex-changes are perhaps at their most varied and closest: giventhe hurried pace of contemporary family life, including thefelt experience of time depletion (Cotte, Ratneshwar, andMick 2004), intergenerational and cross-sibling exchangeshave never been tighter (Broege et al. 2007). “Quality” house-hold interactions enhance or challenge elements of affection,trust, and bonding between family members (Kremer-Sadlikand Paugh 2007). In many living rooms, “cold spots” arecreated, as moments are recovered and reclaimed by familymembers to more firmly control the “temporal rhythms ofdaily life” for homemaking purposes (Southerton 2003, 20).Our research examines the role of the temporal and situa-tional contexts of advertising response in the living roomthrough these lenses of family socialization.

The popularity of domestic media leisure forms, such astelevision sets, mobile phones, and video games, has led torises in intrafamily media consumption practices in the liv-ing room (Atkins 2001). These situated and social exchangesdemonstrate media-contingent practices of family identity.Family identity, as understood here, follows Epp and Price’s(2008, 56) formula as an interplay between the “comple-mentary and competing” commitments within families.


Family members use particles of media and television cul-ture to tell stories and share gossip at particular times, inparticular places, to the family collective or subsets of it inthe living room (Morley 1986, 2007). Our research suggeststhat viewer responses during the television program breakorient around these perspectives of family identity practice.

From the above reviewed literatures we further summarizeseveral important theoretical gaps. First, prior research hasnot shown why viewers momentarily engage with certainadvertisements and then apparently ignore them, particularlyadvertisements that contain relevant product information, orthat may stimulate product consumption or develop brandloyalty. That is, it has not addressed the contexts and sit-uations under which targeted television advertisements areapparently avoided during the television program break, norhas it been explained how everyday behaviors in the familyliving room may disturb key advertising engagement prac-tices. Second, previous studies have not outlined the cir-cumstances under which television advertisements thatseemingly have low relevance to viewers are watched andengaged in family viewing situations. Finally, this corpushas not studied the influence of changes in everyday situ-ations and contexts during the television program break onadvertising engagement or consumption, or on family view-ing behavior. Advertising consumption involves a wide arrayof potential changes in the living room arising from theinteractions of viewer practices, household discourse, andadvertising texts. Advertising theory has not explained whyparticular viewing practices are performed during a specificviewing event nor traced the implications for advertisingconsumption or household behavior.

METHODOur study is a videography of viewer behavior in the

family living room (Kozinets and Belk 2006; Tutt 2008)and sits within a growing body of video-recorded ethno-graphic studies of advertising response in advertising andconsumer research (Brodin 2007; Pearson and Barwise2008). It was conducted in eight family homes in Glenvale,a pseudonym for a middle class suburb 13 miles southeastof Melbourne, Australia. Using video recordings with mem-ber check interviews, we studied the everyday behaviors ofconsumers in the family living room and noted what theydo during television program breaks and how they experi-ence, respond to, and engage with real-life advertisingbroadcasts.

Prior videographies of household advertising viewing andengagement have sampled a series of homes selected acrossa range of age groups, socioeconomic factors, cohabitationarrangements, and household sizes (Brodin 2007). The eighthomes in this study, however, were purposively selectedusing an explicitly homogeneous sampling strategy (Patton2002). With Glenvale, we aimed to select a field site typicalof the Australian suburban heartland, as suburban living inAustralia is often regarded as a national ethos (Dowling andMee 2007). Within Glenvale, eight suburban family house-holds were recruited in line with normative Australian mar-

keting industry and television audience ratings metrics, spe-cifically, the most valuable commercial audience category oftwo-parent families with children aged 5–17 years (OzTAM2008; see table 1).

The video recording of viewer behavior was achieved byplacing a small video camera, a microphone, and a harddrive recorder unobtrusively in the main television viewingarea in the living room in each of the eight suburban familyhomes. The equipment was installed in each home for twocontinuous weeks and a week of viewer acclimatization tothe presence of the equipment was allowed before the actualrecording of viewer behavior began. Each camera recordedactivity in the entire living room including audio and,through an input connection from each family’s televisionset, a small picture-in-picture insert showed what was beingwatched at each precise moment. All recordings took placebetween February and August 2008.

Primary video data for each of the eight households con-sisted of footage recorded from the final seven days of tele-vision viewing behavior. This was then edited to produce3,800 minutes of video clips of viewer behavior, filmed overthe 1,250 television program breaks that occurred duringthe recording period across the eight homes. These clipswere watched many times over, and behaviors of familymembers during the program break were detailed and an-alyzed using ethnographic coding for verbal and nonverbalbehavior (Norris 2004; Patton 2002).

Once emergent themes of advertising response had beendeveloped, the first author returned to Glenvale in May 2009to triangulate the etic analysis with participant accounts ofviewing behavior. Member check and video auto-drivinginterviews (Heisley and Levy 1991) were conducted witheach of the eight families and were professionally tran-scribed to produce in excess of 285 single-spaced A4 pages.Theory and data were toggled in iterative fashion (Spiggle1994) to develop four themes explaining everyday adver-tising response and engagement during the program breakin the family living room, focusing on the processes andmeanings of advertising experience and viewing to house-holders.

Everyday advertising experiences are explained throughconsumers’ cultural immersion within Australian suburbanfamily life. In the following section, we outline suburbanfamily life in the Glenvale homes by describing its generalideological form, recently observed challenges, and its cur-rent character. These aspects contextualize the Glenvale fam-ilies within our sampling strategy and underpin our discus-sion about advertising response and engagement in thefamily home.

SUBURBAN FAMILY LIFE IN GLENVALESuburban family life is an aspiration and reality for many

Australians. From the ideology’s first planting in the newBritish colony in 1790, suburbanism has subsequently growninto an Australian national creed, routinely politicized andculturally celebrated for its putative social egalitarianism andequitability (Gilbert 1988). The architects and planners of


TABLE 1

PROFILES OF THE PARTICIPATING FAMILIES

Household pseudonym Informant, age, and occupation Living room environment Additional sets

Adams Peter, 46, postal worker; Claire, 32,postal worker; Zere, 8, student;Justin, 6, student

DVD and PlayStation, remotecontrol set, Foxtel pay TV,digital

One in master bedroom

Dangerfield Nick, 35, church minister; Susan,33, social worker; Rick, 6, student;Daniel, 4, preschool; Steve, 4,preschool

DVD and PlayStation, remotecontrol set, Free-to-Air TV

One in family room with Fox-tel and DVD/VCR

Davies Ian, 50, secondary school teacher;Maureen, 43, kindergarten assis-tant; Sarah, 18, university student;Amanda, 16, student; Linda, 14,student; Tina, 6, student

VCR and DVD, remote controlset, Free-to-Air TV, digital

One in lounge room

Richards Craig, 36, personal trainer; Bec, 34,personal trainer; Joanne, 10, stu-dent; Hector, 8, student; Victor, 8,student; Olivine, 8, student

VCR and DVD, remote controlset, Free-to-Air and Foxtel payTV

One upstairs (PlayStation),one in master bedroom(rarely used)

Smith Greg, 36, hospital lab technician;Simone, 35, social worker; An-drew, 13, student; Nigel, 12, stu-dent; Nicole, 11, student; Damien,9, student; Anthony, 16 months

VCR and DVD, remote controlset, Free-to-Air TV, digital

None

Vickers John, 46, business developmentmanager; Sarah, 45, teaching as-sistant; Jodie, 16, student; Jacqui,15, student; Sally, 11, student

DVD, remote control set One in family room

Whitney Steve, 44, CIO; Renae, 43, postalworker; Seb, 15, student; Isabella,12, student; Emma, 10, student

DVD and Xbox, remote controlset, Foxtel pay TV, digital

One in master bedroom

Williams Andrew, 40, car dealer; Simone, 40,supermarket manager; Siobhan,15, student; Tim, 11, student;Dane, 9, student

DVD and Wii, remote control set,Free-to-Air TV, digital

One in lounge, one in masterbedroom (rarely used)

Australian urban family living produced a uniquely Austra-lian form of urbanized, middle-class settlement by infusingan Arcadian sentiment inherited from the English colonistswith the cultural nationalist mythologies inspired by local“bush poets” such as Henry Lawson. This Arcadian form,as Johnson (2006, 261) astutely observes, locates the mid-to outer-level Australian suburb as an idealized authenticplace of “semi-rural escape” from the “dirt, dangers, andimmorality” of the seemingly commercialized city.

Paradoxically, the cultural success of Australian suburbandiscourse has helped stoke recent moral panics about com-peting discourses undermining this form of middle-classfamily lifestyle (Hamilton 2003). As noted by Pusey (2003),these are suburban anxieties focused on the “dark side” ofrationalist economic philosophy that gained political cur-rency in Australia from the 1980s onward. At root is atension between the “real and imagined hardship” (Hamilton2003) felt by many Australian families, particularly the livedexperience of many middle-class “working families” in themid- to outer-level Australian suburbs whose family time isconstrained by longer working hours and the spillover ofwork into home life (Pocock and Clarke 2005). Accordingly,Australia’s Arcadian family lifestyle is increasing experi-enced as under threat and fragmenting and is framed againstglobal capital interests and other related agents—including

both the broadcast of commercial advertising into the homeand an untrammelled view of consumer culture—that areassumed to challenge and weaken it (Buchanan et al. 2006).

The overall character and lived experience in our sampleof Glenvale homes appears to reflect some of these recentshifts in Australian suburban ideology: middle-class familyaspiration (Dovey 1994; Latham 2003) tempered by a cau-tious view of overwork, and concerns about the increasingencroachment of materialist and consumerist aspects intothe domestic sphere (Allon and Sofoulis 2006; Pusey 2003).The participant Susan Dangerfield best expresses a commonconcern held by the Glenvale householders, calling tele-vision advertisements broadcast into the living room “a bitof an invasion,” as they often rub against family time andchallenge pro-family discourse. Importantly, in half of oursampled homes, a strong commitment to religious and moraldevelopment was evident. For example, Greg Smith runsBible study sessions with his children every Wednesdaynight, and Nick Dangerfield is a local church minister.Equally, all participating households displayed a commit-ment to children’s well-being, with participation in teamsport emerging as a unifying discourse across most of thehomes.

In the Glenvale living rooms, advertising response duringthe program breaks is patterned into wider domestic activity


such as mundane family dramas, intergenerational play, andmoral discussion. The family living room in Glenvale there-fore evinces a suitable ethnographic field site from whichwe can gain insights about advertising context and its in-fluence on viewer behavior during the television programbreak, and about how family members are exposed to (andexperience, engage with, and make sense of) television ad-vertising in suburban, everyday viewing settings, beyondtraditional research perspectives of advertising reception.The next section focuses on everyday advertising contextas experienced in the Glenvale living rooms. These inter-personal advertising contexts orchestrated numerous text-based, situated, and social viewing behaviors, and also in-fluenced several identity-sculpting and relationship-buildingendeavours. We present them in our four cultural themesbelow. From our wider empirical data set, we selected forour themes only the most “archetypal” (Ritson and Elliott1999, 265) viewing episodes to highlight the importance ofeach of the viewing contexts to the process of everydayadvertising response, engagement, and personalization. Ourdiscussion then presents our framework for analysis andaddresses the implications from this videography to under-stand the links between advertising context, viewer prac-tices, and household discourse.

FINDINGS: FOUR CONTEXTS OFADVERTISING RESPONSE

The Social Context: The Role of MultimodalInteraction

One of the first insights from Glenvale is that after therelatively isolated viewing styles that absorbing programcontent created within the households—where we observevery little chat and discussion between viewers—the arrivalof advertising often provided the cue for much more engagedsocial interaction. The intergenerational experience of fatherand son, in the case of Greg and Damien Smith, illustrateshow everyday physical interactions can represent the dom-inant behavioral activity during the broadcast of televisionadvertisements:

Damien and Greg watch Sea Patrol on channel 9. As thefirst program break commences, Damien attempts to ticklehis dad. His father tickles Damien back. The play continuesthrough the break, replacing attention toward the advertise-ments. When Sea Patrol resumes, both return their gaze tothe program. At the start of the next break, Greg immediatelygrabs Damien’s hand and kisses it, while both of them in-termittently watch the advertisements. Greg pretends tosmack Damien on his bottom, displacing their looks at theadvertising. Damien laughs, turns to Greg, and asks him toplay a childhood game. Greg, who has now returned his gazeto the program that has just resumed, suggests another time.Both watch Sea Patrol. When the next program break com-mences, both watch a recruitment advertisement for the Aus-tralian Defence Force, filmed in the style of the Sea Patrolprogram. It prompts Damien to turn to Greg and ask: “Dad,

what did you actually want to be when you grow older [sic]?”Greg faces Damien and mentions as a young boy he dreamedof being a veterinarian. Both gaze back at the ads as Damienremarks on his dad’s current job and comments that his owndreams of being a soccer player may not materialize. As theads roll on, Greg talks about his experiences regarding careeraspirations, personal ideas of success, and moral attitudes tomoney. Sea Patrol returns and they both focus on the programin silence. (Observational note, Smith household, 9:00–9:30p.m., Monday, March 31, 2008)

During the breaks, intimate yet resolutely mundane physicalmoments strengthen the identity commitment of one indi-vidual toward another. We note that the compounding ofeach physical encounter between Greg and Damien acrossthe three breaks heightens the bond between father and sonand enriches the communication between them as they waitfor Sea Patrol to resume. This intergenerational dyad usesthe moments offered by the program breaks to nonverballyexpress their filial relationship. It is a complex expressiveprocess in which attention to the advertisement is continuallydisplaced by multimodal interaction involving gestures andsmall chat (Norris 2004); at best, advertising is only inter-mittently engaged. Through the Defence Force ad’s allusionto job recruitment, however, it culminates in Greg’s briefthough deep discussion about careers, tempered materialism,and moral affairs with his 8-year-old son. Equally important,during the periods where the Sea Patrol program resumes,their filial interactions immediately fade, and both fatherand son return to a more stereotyped audience position.

In this initial example from the Smith household, socialinteractions between father and son are achieved at the ex-pense of a more engaged and attentive viewer of advertising.But family interactions in the living room can also have theopposite impact, reincorporating television advertising backinto the viewer’s focus. Like Greg Smith, Andrew Williamsis occasionally observed playing with his children duringthe television program break. The morning of August 1,2008, however, was not one of these occasions. Andrewdoes not perform some of the more caring behaviors ap-propriate for a loving father because of the strain he is under;his car dealership business is in serious financial difficulty,and his moodiness this week has already caused much ten-sion and anxiety within the family. In fact, throughout therecording week, the Williams’s living room was the settingfor a series of strained discussions as the entire family de-bated the merits of a fresh start by moving interstate, down-shifting, and simplifying their current suburban lifestyle.Here, we note the ramification of the behavior of one an-tisocial viewer in the living room on the verbal and non-verbal viewing strategies performed by other family mem-bers during the break:

The Williams siblings watch Sunrise on channel 7 with theirdad Andrew. When the program breaks, Andrew readies him-self to take Siobhan to school. Suddenly, Dane announcesthat his reading book is missing. He needs his dad to signthe school book to certify he completed last night’s home-


work. Andrew is grumpy and, while staring at a Telstra ad-vertisement, he gruffly tells Dane he should take more careof his belongings. The atmosphere in the Williams’s livingroom instantly becomes tenser, prompting Siobhan to re-spond: “Don’t yell at him about it . . . it’s not his fault!”Andrew retorts in exasperation: “Back off the parents!” Fa-ther and three children all focus on the Telstra ad in stonysilence. Dane’s voice quivers as he focuses his eyes on amascara advertisement and suggests that one of his classmates“must now have two” reading books. Siobhan chats withDane in an overtly upbeat and reassuring tone with her eyesentirely focused on the screen. As an advertisement for theClothing Warehouse sale begins, all eyes and attention moveoff the television and focus elsewhere: the book is finallyfound. Dane smiles at Andrew, who signs the book. Everyoneis relieved. (Observational note, Williams household, 8 a.m.,Friday, August 1, 2008)

Once again, a particular intergenerational interaction im-pacts on the process of advertising viewing. Significantly,the book activates a particular network of viewer practices(Epp and Price 2010), including the short drama, that hasat its core the Arcadian-inspired tension generated by thefamily’s uncertain future. The combined strain promptsSiobhan’s cheery and skittish conversation. It also causesthe three children to avoid eye contact with their father andwith each other. Instead, all eyes settle on the televisionscreen with deliberate intensity, paradoxically driving moreapparently engaged advertising attention. This is not by anymeans, however, the image of the focused viewer of ad-vertising understood by many researchers, in which height-ened engagement with the advertisement is caused by textualfeatures or by the product being promoted. As Siobhan ex-plains in the member check interview when reviewing theincident:

I pretend that I’m watching [the advertisement] so I can ac-tually [stand up for my younger brothers] without looking atthem, because Dad gets all mad at me when I try to standup for them. I don’t want to look at Dad when he’s angry,so every time I’m talking to Dad [when defending her broth-ers], I look at the TV. (Interview excerpt, Williams household,Monday, May 18, 2009)

Siobhan’s interview comments suggest her “pretend” looksat the advertisements during this short intergenerationalstandoff are nonverbal viewing behaviors that reduce the“conversational discomfort” (Lull 1980, 203) experiencedin the living room. Apart from reducing tension, her view-ing practices also attempt to foster a stronger sense ofsibling unity—particularly by encouraging Dane to speakup—while diplomatically appeasing her already burdenedfather too.

Television program breaks often provide crucial oppor-tunities for family members to socialize through multimodalinteraction. A viewing episode during a single programbreak in the Whitney living room outlines in greater detailhow this particular system of social interaction works to

achieve greater family well-being, with implications for ad-vertising engagement:

Seb and his parents watch Top Gear on SBS. Seb sits on thecouch and rests his arm on his mother Renae’s hip. Theprogram breaks, and an Olympic Games promotional ad airs.He watches it for a moment before attempting to get up.Renae places her hand on his shoulder and inquires: “You’renot going?” “Yes,” he replies. Renae quickly asks her sonhow his leg is, after he shaved it following an accident at asoccer match on the weekend. Mother and son intensely lookat and discuss the shaved area, and this behavior draws hisdad, Steve, seated nearby, into the conversation. Concern overthe leg injury displaces Renae’s attention to the ads and Seb’surgency to go to his bedroom. When a spot for Crown fork-lifts airs, there is a short pause that disrupts the chat, and theads once more come into focus, and it seems that visuallyattending to a Shannon’s motor insurance ad allows the view-ing triad to gather their thoughts. Renae initiates a quietconversation about Seb’s soccer match, which all three chatabout while gazing at the ads on the screen. When Top Gearresumes, Seb remains on the couch, and the three of themwatch the program in silence. (Observational note, Whitneyhousehold, 8:30 p.m., Monday, July 14, 2008)

In this episode we note that even though viewers often tryto personalize the program break for family interaction,they are not entirely successful: the advertisements are notentirely displaced from attention, and viewing is usuallyincomplete and partial. Multimodal advertising interactionswork through the ordering of three elements that convergein any viewing event: explicitly visually attending to atelevision advertisement, verbal communication, and bod-ily gesture. In this instance, we observe the elements ofphatic conversation and physical interaction between Seband his mother are multimodal behaviors that are prioritizedover the explicit visual engagement of advertisements; eventhough each of the three converging elements is reorganizedin different hierarchical arrangements to choreograph sub-sequent advertising responses observed later during thissame break. Additionally, Renae’s initial request to Seb toshow her his injured knee is delivered with a sublimatedperlocutionary intent (Gaines 1979) to manage the socialinteraction during the break to prevent Seb from leaving theroom. Crucially, during the interview, Renae mentions thatSeb will turn 16 later during the year and so may only liveat home for two more years until he completes his secondaryschooling. It is mainly this bittersweet realization that hereldest child is growing up quickly, she says, that promptsher to personalize the program break and reclaim from it afew more moments to interact with Seb. Paradoxically, thethree-way discussion following her request to Seb not onlyorganizes the partial viewing of advertisements on thescreen, but the chat’s subsequent intensity also stymies op-portunities for the three viewers to more fully engage withany of the advertisements subsequently broadcast during thebreak.

Advertising broadcasts are by definition social events, not


just in the sense of how they are experienced but also inthe sense that responding to and interacting with them athome can enhance narratives about family life. The rangeof multimodal practices observed during the program breaksin the Smith, Williams, and Whitney households helps buildan impression of real-time television advertising viewers aspartially attentive, as talkative and socially embodied, andembedded in the stresses, strains, and humor of everydayhousehold discourse. The particular hierarchical ordering ofmultimodal behaviors enacted by particular viewers—priv-ileging the gentle smacks and tickles between father andson in the Smith living room, Siobhan Williams’s exces-sively cheery chats and stares at the screen, or Renae Whit-ney’s perlocutionary acts—add texture and nuance to ourunderstanding of both how consumers marshal family iden-tity and domestic discourse during the program break, howthey arrange advertising viewing, and how these socializingbehaviors intermittently dislodge advertising from viewerattention.

The Spatial Context: The Deterritorialization ofAdvertising in the Living Room

The process of deterritorialization structures advertising en-gagement and consumption in the Glenvale living rooms.Deterritorialization describes the loosening of ties betweencertain consumer practices and their performance from withinparticular physical locations (Appadurai 1996; Ustuner andHolt 2010). Our observations challenge consumer researchperspectives that reduce the effect of viewing space on tele-vision advertising experience and interpretation (Campbelland Keller 2003; Fisher and Dube 2005). Advertising deter-ritorialization implies viewers immersed in the physical set-tings of the living room do not experience television adver-tising the same way they experience it in traditional researchsettings, for example, by understanding it through receptionmeasures of brand attitude. Instead, many advertising re-sponses in Glenvale are observed through interpersonal pro-cesses of consumer agency and domestic power linked tothe physical character of each family living room. In theAdams family, for instance, Peter, Claire, and daughter Zereall sit in the living room. Yet in fact they sit in two deter-ritorialized zones, where different modes of viewing be-havior are sanctioned from within two physically separateplaces in the room. Peter effectively harnesses this under-standing during a program break:

Claire and Zere sit directly in front of the television and watchA Current Affair on channel 9. Peter sits at a small diningtable at the back of the living room. He faces the televisionbut reads a newspaper laid out on the table. The programbreaks. Claire and Zere relax their gaze at the screen andchat. An ad promotes the Spirit of Tasmania cruise liner, andZere asks Claire about it. Later, an ad for the Classic WarMovies DVD collection is broadcast. Its jingle is a militarytune. With eyes focused on the newspaper, Peter briefly whis-tles along to the jingle while reading the newspaper. Whenthe ad voiceover mentions the film The Great Escape, Peter

looks up at the ad for less than a second. His partial attentiontoward it is displaced by the newspaper immediately in frontof him. Later during the same commercial, he whistles thetune to the iconic war film, while still gazing down at thepaper. Claire is humorously surprised. Zere walks over to hughim, and he briefly whistles the tune again, still looking atthe newspaper. Peter ignores a Jenny Craig ad, and he beginsto chat to Claire, even though his eyes do not lift from thepaper. (Observational note, Adams household, 7:45 p.m.,Wednesday, April 23, 2008)

In the Adams’s living room, the two main couches are ar-ranged in an L-formation. The small dining table sits at thetip of the long arm of the “L,” and the gap created betweenthe couches and the dining table functions as a walkway forthe family. More importantly, the gap contextualizes an in-visible social separator, a buffer between the two leisurezones, symbolizing where family mealtimes occur (the din-ing table) and where relaxation and television viewing gen-erally take place (the couches). During the member checkinterview, Peter indicated he felt excluded from the chat onthe family couch and that his whistle of The Great Escapefilm score was deliberately enacted to remind both Claireand Zere that, in his own words, “I’m here too!” The jinglefrom the Classic War Movies DVD advertisement displaceshis attention from the newspaper and heightens his sensi-tivity to the deterritorialized “emotional geography” (Da-vidson and Milligan 2004) in this zoned living room. Peteris a postal shift worker who sleeps at 9 p.m., much earlierthan Claire, as he leaves home at 4:30 a.m. each weekdayto go to work. So during the week, as he explains in theinterview, his “family time” is limited to only the few earlyevening hours once Claire arrives home after work at 5:30p.m. During this program break he concludes that the fur-niture arrangements in the living room actually separatehim—both spatially and emotionally—from other familymembers. Rather than engage with the ad’s visuals or spon-soring message, he creatively engages with the advertisingjingle, consuming it as a social resource to cross the imag-inary boundary and symbolically reconnect with his wifeand daughter.

We can also apply Allon’s (2004, 261) notion of “newspatialities” to elaborate these processes, highlighting howviewers in Glenvale create advertising viewing spaces athome that are impacted with deeper, more personalizedmeaning. In the homes observed, for instance, the notion of“the living room” is phenomenologically experienced byfamily members as more expansive than merely configuringit solely through the architectural boundaries of the actualroom where much of the television is viewed. Open planarchitecture, found across all the sampled Glenvale homes,is fundamental to this process. In the following observationfrom the Davies household we note a large portion of thewall is cut out between the kitchen and the family livingroom, implying that—for family members in the kitchen—living room experiences enter and blur the felt “kitchenexperience” during the break:


Maureen Davies is in the kitchen and has just prepared abreakfast pancake for Tina. Tina sits on the main couch inthe living room, just underneath the wall cutout, and eats herpancake while watching Saturday Disney. When Maureenstands directly in front of the stove preparing a second pan-cake, she can’t see the television screen, though she can hearthe television audio track through the cutout. During thebreak, an advertisement for Colour-by-Number Doodle Ponyairs. Tina yells: “I want to get that, Mum!” Maureen’s at-tention to the pancake is displaced; she turns and faces thecutout, and her gaze shifts from the stove to the television.She twice attends visually to the ad through the cutout, buton each occasion the cooking pancake pulls back her focus:“What is it?” she asks. Tina replies, pointing at the screen:“That! . . . It’s a Doodle Pony!” Maureen, responding toTina’s gesture, walks closer to the cutout and refocuses onthe screen: “I haven’t seen that one before.” Maureen reen-gages with the ad, chatting to Tina about it through the cutout.Saturday Disney recommences, and Tina attends to it. Thepancake on the stove ensures Maureen returns her attentionto breakfast preparation. (Observational note, Davies house-hold, 8:10 a.m., Saturday, May 10, 2008)

The space-bridging function of the wall cutout aids the pro-cess of advertising deterritorialization for Maureen becauseit opens up to her in the kitchen the typically mundane familyactivities, interactions, and events that occur in the livingroom. Challenging normative approaches in consumer be-havior, which reduce or ignore the impact of spatial meaningon advertising engagement, we observe that the viewing ofthe advertisements through the cutout allows viewers suchas Maureen to aurally and visually experience a “doublingof place” (Moores 2004, 30). That is, the lived experienceof viewers such as Maureen, positioned in other areas ofthe home, is one of domestic “co-presence” (Urry 2002,267) when they attend to advertising discourse originatingfrom within the living room. Unlike her husband and mostof her friends, Maureen was raised without a television inher childhood home, and Christian morality and family in-teraction were explicit domestic discourses into which shewas socialized. In fact, she only began to develop the ap-propriate television viewing behaviors (and associated in-terpretive skills and literacy practices) after she married andleft home. As she remarks in the interview, her relativelylate socialization into television viewing practice now meansthe television is used in her own home as a tool to explicitlyenhance family interaction. The cutout, as a part of the do-mestic viewing architecture, aids this goal, and it is initiallyactivated by a network of viewing practices involving Mau-reen preparing breakfast in the kitchen, and Tina watchingtelevision in the living room, as well as ideas of familyinteraction, and the Doodle Pony TVC itself. Simply, thephysical presence of the cutout allows Maureen to engagewith and recontextualize advertising material broadcast intothe living room. More importantly, as a deterritorializing adcontext, the cutout allows Maureen to remain active in fam-ily relationships by engaging with advertising discourse—-

in her own words, “to be part of it, still”—while attendingto domestic matters in other areas of the home.

Advertising deterritorialization suggests that for ad view-ing experienced in the family living room, the domesticarchitectures, spaces, and furnishings surrounding viewersare inscribed with various social meaning, contextualizinghow advertising is subsequently experienced and interpretedduring the program break. Just as the contexts of open-plandesign in contemporary Australian homes encourage a par-tial but continual opt-in of householders to everyday familyevents (Dowling 2008), so the meanings attached to boththe program break and television advertising are often de-territorialized, enabling family members to interact with andcreate personalized domestic meanings from them whenphysically located in other areas of the family home.

The Media Multitasking Context: ConcurrentMedia Technology Use in the Living Room

In their discussion of “simultaneous media use,” mediaengagement researchers Pilotta and Schultz (2005) detect ashift in how viewers experience television in the contem-porary living room. They correctly reveal that in manyhomes in the developed world, the contemporary televisionviewing episode is experienced while also tasking with anynumber of competing media technologies, for example, mo-bile phone, gaming console, and laptop-tablet screens. Ourdirect observations of viewing in the Glenvale households,however, unpack the actual event of what is widely called“simultaneous” or “concurrent” media use or media multi-tasking at home to reveal it as a series of shortened sequentialviewing practices within a single—putatively concurrent—viewing event. Our findings also challenge perspectives ofaudience behavior described as either dedicated advertisingavoidance or visual attention (Brasel and Gips 2011; Rojas-Mendez, Davies, and Madran 2009); we reveal that domesticmultimedia tasking behaviors and associated visual engage-ment practices during the program break are motivated moreby broader household events and everyday family interac-tion than by a pressing want to avoid or attend to televisionadvertising.

Individual identity commitments of family members arecentral to many of the concurrent media technology use(CMU) experiences observed during the program breaks inGlenvale. As a solo viewer, Steve Whitney is occasionallyobserved watching the advertisements during the break. Yetas a member of a double-income “working family,” he isalso very aware of the spillover of his professional activitieson the quality of wider family life:

Steve sits directly in front of the television and taps on hisBlackBerry. All afternoon he has worked on a draft articlefor a computer professionals’ bulletin board, while watchingsnatches of the V8 Supercar Championships on channel 7.He has already promised to take his family on an outing andis now running late. The break commences, and there is anoticeable change in audio quality, prompting his brief ori-entation to the news promotion on the television screen. Sud-


denly, his wife Renae peers over from the kitchen to checkon Steve’s progress, forcing Steve to reengage with theBlackBerry and focus on the writing task, thus displacingany potential engagement with the ads. His daughter Emmastands over him later during the break and complains abouthis tardiness: “When? . . . Dad? . . . When? You said 5minutes ago [sic]!” Steve’s concentration on his draft is in-terrupted. His eyes shift off the BlackBerry; he faces Emma,and chides her: “Don’t stand here, it slows me down!” Emmaleaves in frustration. Steve refocuses on the BlackBerry andtakes no notice of both the advertisements that continue toair and the return of the car race. (Observational note, Whit-ney household, 3:30 p.m., Saturday, July 19, 2008)

Steve’s advertising viewing practices comprise foregroundedfocused looks at his BlackBerry screen as the break is initiallypersonalized for the purpose of writing. Even though this isa Saturday afternoon, competing elements of Steve’s pro-fessional and family life intertwine as he attends to theBlackBerry. His disengagement from visually attending tothe ads is a direct consequence of the professional obliga-tions that loom large in what should be a moment for afamily outing. He therefore takes a multisensory approachusing mainly aural means to monitor the advertising broad-cast while he types on the BlackBerry. He is largely unawareof the advertising visuals on the television screen and notdue to any particular motivation to avoid them. Steve revealsin the interview that when he actually glimpses the adver-tising, his brief visual monitors were not performed to watchthe advertisements on the screen but rather to relieve hisconcentration on the small BlackBerry screen, as well as topause and gather together his thoughts and opinions for hisarticle as he rushes to complete his draft. The overridingsentiment of potentially letting down his family this week-end afternoon means the BlackBerry becomes the locus ofvisual attention, rather than the television screen, and ad-vertising engagement remains latent. This blending of mul-tisensory modes of media engagement with domestic dis-course features widely in advertising experiences in theeveryday CMU observations in Glenvale. It is a blend ofperceptions that shifts according to a network of practicesinvolving the particular domestic viewing situation, timeallocation skills, and media forms engaged in the livingroom. This combination of visual and aural advertising ex-perience is also seen elsewhere in the Whitney living room,for example, in leisure viewing situations:

Renae relaxes after dinner and watches Doctor Who onUKTV with her daughter Emma. Doctor Who is one of Re-nae’s favorite childhood shows, and Emma has been social-ized into it too. As the break commences, Renae chats withher eldest daughter Isabella, who stands next to her, beforereading a Women’s Day magazine buried in her lap. Duringthe break, a Pine-O-Cleen ad is broadcast. Renae very brieflyattends to it, but any deeper ad engagement is deferred byher interaction with Emma over the magazine, which the twonow browse in unison. The two discuss the magazine’s sto-ries, a practice that not only enriches their mother-daughter

bond but also further prevents any of the other ads on thetelevision screen from fully entering Renae’s field of atten-tion. When Doctor Who resumes, Renae keeps reading themagazine for a minute and then returns her eyes to the tele-vision screen to watch the show again with undivided atten-tion. (Observation note, Whitney household, 8:10 p.m., Tues-day, July 15, 2008)

Both Steve and Renae Whitney’s CMU practices attempt tocreate “cold spots” during the “hot spot” (Southerton 2003)of the advertising broadcasts, by reconfiguring, personal-izing, and reclaiming moments offered by the programbreak. Renae’s behavior is an already busy allocation ofconsumption practices during the program break, includingreading a magazine. During the interview, Renae mentionsshe often combines visual and aural monitors of the broad-cast flow of advertisements on the television, which in thisviewing episode allows her to concentrate on the magazineand monitor when Doctor Who resumes while keeping visualadvertising engagement to a minimum. Similar to Steve’sCMU practices, we observe how Renae’s foregrounding ofthe Women’s Day magazine largely backgrounds the tele-vision screen and displaces the advertisements. But in Re-nae’s case this is performed by explicitly allocating time formother-daughter interaction during the latter half of thebreak (Southerton 2006).

The riotous activities in the Smith living room, recordedin an episode at the end of the school holidays, more vividlydemonstrates how these aspects of CMU behavior duringthe break have implications for advertising response. Duringthis particular break in a football broadcast, we note the timeallocation skill of the close sibling triad of Andrew, Nicole,and Damien and its relationship to media multitasking, ad-vertising response, and family interaction:

Andrew and Nicole sit on the couch, each with an Etch-a-Sketch on their lap. Damien sits on the ground. All watchthe football game on channel 7. A goal is scored and theprogram breaks. Nicole draws a crude picture of a bottomon her board, stands on the couch, and giggles excitedly:“What part of your body is this?” She shows the board toAndrew. The children look at the drawing and laugh. Andrewresponds by drawing a hairy bottom on his board. Again, alllook at the drawing and laugh. Nicole gurgles with laughter:“That’s disgusting, Adam!” No one watches a station pro-motion for So You Think You Can Dance. The siblings nowgather around the Etch-a-Sketches. Damien, who idolizes hiseldest brother, turns his head away from the Etch-a-Sketchin Andrew’s hands and visually monitors a Sony Bravia spotairing on the television, then returns his attention to the actionat the couch, quipping: “I’ve got the best one for Andrew!”Damien grabs the Etch-a-Sketch from Nicole and sits downto draw. None of the three siblings watch the ads that arebroadcast. Rough-and-tumble play unfolds between Nicoleand Andrew, prompting their dad, Greg, to warn Andrew tocalm down; he obliges, and sits and watches an ad for PeddersSuspension. Suddenly, Damien calls out to Andrew, whoseattention to the ad is immediately displaced. Andrew turns


and looks at Damien’s drawing on the board. He recoils:“Aw, man, that’s disgusting! You don’t draw pictures of that!Dad! He’s drawn a picture of a, err . . .” Andrew turns toGreg and points to his crotch. He looks back at Damien andskittishly laughs: “That is overboard, man!” The siblings lookat the Etch-a-Sketch, giggle again, and chat hysterically, ig-noring the ads. Sponsorship billboards air, signalling the foot-ball’s return, but the living room is still a scene of chaos,and it takes a minute for the children to return to the football.(Observational note, Smith household, 8:15 p.m., Saturday,March 29, 2008)

We note many situations and contexts in the Glenvale livingrooms that determine which media screen is foregroundedand engaged with during CMU events. In the exampleabove, we apply Southerton’s (2006) theory of practice toexplain the Smith siblings’ CMU behavior and note thevarious everyday advertising contexts that converge to dis-place any message-oriented advertising engagement: thehigh degree of “audience member familiarity” (Puntoni andTavassoli 2007, 294) developed between the sibling trio; therelatively calm and focused viewing of the actual footballmatch itself and the high frequency with which breaks arescheduled in the football broadcast; the tight coordinationof the siblings’ time orientations during the break and, morewidely, during the holidays (more spontaneous and social)compared to their dad’s (more planned and disciplined); and,finally, the ability of the Etch-a-Sketch screen to participateas a shared resource in the siblings’ social interactions. Aswith the Smith’s living room, in coviewing situations inGlenvale more generally, CMU or media multitasking ad-vertising contexts are observed through these intersectingelements of social familiarity, rush and calm, through thesynchronization of viewers’ time orientation, and most im-portantly through an accessible media screen that providesa common focus for social interaction.

Our cases demonstrate how television advertising is dy-namically engaged or displaced in CMU situations. We alsonote how viewer engagement across different media screensis cycled into individual or family identity commitmentsand outline how television screens interact with other mediascreens, viewers’ time allocation practices, and householdand family discourse in the living room, to reveal the preciseways that advertising responses occur in CMU situations.

The Temporal Context: Time and AdvertisingViewing

It’s 7:10 a.m. on a school day. Joanne and her younger broth-ers Hector and Victor watch King of the Hill. Their mum,Bec, is in the adjacent open plan kitchen busily preparingbreakfast. The program breaks. The children watch a stationpromotion for Unan1mous. Bec calls out “Weet-Bix, guys?”(an inquiry about cereal preferences), over the top of an adfor the DVD release of Iron Man. The Iron Man ad is partiallydisplaced from attention, as Joanne and Hector answer “Yesplease!” while Victor asks for toast. “Yeah, after Weet-Bix!”

Bec replies. The children reengage with the ad. When a Won-der Performance Sandwich Bread TVC airs, Hector asks Becabout the meaning of the ad. She looks up, very briefly en-gages with it, answers Hector’s query, then resumes attentionto the breakfast preparation. King of the Hill returns. Thechildren resume their viewing and await their breakfast. (Ob-servational note, Richards household, 7:10 a.m., Wednesday,May 28, 2008)

Bec Richards’s query to her children during the adver-tising broadcast might appear a mundane and unimportantmoment. Yet it illustrates the centrality of temporal contextto viewers’ perceptions and experiences of the programbreak and the advertisements broadcast within it. Televisionadvertising in the morning is often only partially experiencedby Bec and, as noted by the discussion about the WonderPerformance commercial, is briefly engaged as a way tointeract with her children. She is a busy mother with fourchildren, has a partner, and is studying for professional ex-ams while working both as a swimming instructor and per-sonal trainer. Instead of watching and engaging with ad-vertisements, quotidian domestic tasks such as breakfastpreparation displace advertising attention and assume pri-ority at this time of day.

Domestic behavior such as meal preparation performedduring the program breaks are common time-reclamationstrategies played out by the parents in the Richards house-hold, in ways similar to Renae and Steve Whitney’s CMUbehaviors examined earlier. In the above observational note,Bec talks and tasks and barely engages with the advertisingon the television screen. In the interview she confirms shehad already planned and mentally scheduled time, some-where into one of the 3-minute breaks in King of the Hill,to personalize and reclaim the break for her query aboutbreakfast preferences (Ebert, Gilbert, and Wilson 2009;Southerton 2003). Her strategy ensures that in this workingfamily, the morning’s household activities flow moresmoothly. These behaviors contrast with traditional represen-tations of advertising response in consumer research that re-duce or ignore the effect of time; they mainly assume viewersexperience advertisements as if temporal considerations—in-cluding diurnal effects (variations in the time of day of view-ing) and social orientation elements (Cotte et al. 2004; Hor-nik 1988)—have no bearing on the way they respond to andengage with advertisements.

Bec’s advertising viewing behaviors are also observedlater during the same day as this early morning episode. Inan observation involving Craig, her partner, they detail morerichly the diurnal and social orientation elements of coupleviewing during the program break. The children are atschool; the couple are at home alone. Against the backdropof wider family life, they participate in a lunchtime ritualwhile watching Dr. Phil together:

Bec moves closer to Craig on the couch during this break inDr. Phil. They quietly chat about a friend’s problem, whileoccasionally looking at each other. As a Reflex copy paperadvertisement airs, the couple quieten even more, and they


both focus their eyes on the screen. Their behaviors are awk-ward and stiff. Craig turns to Bec, and they face each other.They kiss for 10 seconds. Any potential to engage with theReflex ad is displaced. The couple complete the kiss, sit back,and smile midway through a Lite ’n’ Easy advertisement.They focus their eyes on the Lite ’n’ Easy ad and chat quietlyagain. When Dr. Phil returns, the couple quieten and refocustheir attention on the program. (Observational note, Richardshousehold, 12:10 p.m., Wednesday, May 28, 2008)

Bec and Craig take advantage of their together-alone lunch-time viewing to strengthen their relationship during thisbreak. Their shared interpretive strategy acknowledges thetemporal segmentation that guides the family’s daily house-hold cycle. It also highlights a common though awkwardpractice: rather than dedicated advertising viewing, viewershave to create their own standards of advertising responseduring the liminal moments of the program break (Couldry2003). The personalization of this portion of the break—Bec’s change of seating position, the backgrounding anddisplacement of the advertisements, and the brief chat andkiss between them—is performed at this precise momentbecause of a specific felt experience of everyday householdtime: a mutual recognition of an imminent end to their timetogether this afternoon. Interestingly, both Bec and Craigvisually monitor the Lite ’n’ Easy ad, so motivating itspotential reincorporation as a focal object (Epp and Price2010), but their mutual chat ensures that the ad also remainsdisplaced from full attention.

Bec and Craig’s kiss and intimate chat during this breakare advertising responses enacted specifically to maintainand enhance their relationship. With four young children tolook after and other household commitments to attend to atother moments during the household’s daily cycle, Bec im-plies that there is a performative aspect to their responseswithin these program breaks:

We have lunch together every [week] day and that’s our time.. . . That’s [during the break] when we usually cuddle upand talk. If we miss that, it’s hard. Oh yeah! We know thatthat’s our time. (Interview excerpt, Richards household, Fri-day, May 15, 2009)

The diverse ways that Bec and Craig experience advertisingat home provide excellent insights into how program breaksand television advertisements are actually personalized andintegrated into a couple’s respite from their family and pro-fessional commitments, in different ways, at different timesof the day. Interestingly, in many observations when Becand Craig are together alone at night, after the children havegone to bed, we note the couple occasionally “cuddle up”in similar ways as outlined above. Yet often the effort re-quired to sustain any meaningful chat is too much for thecouple at the end of a long day. In these instances, extendedglazes at the screen mean that advertisements are more fre-quently brought back into their viewing practices, and ad-vertising meanings are often personalized and shared throughhumored phatic comment.

In addition to specific diurnal influences, we can examine

more deeply how temporal influences structure moments ofadvertising response and engagement in the Glenvale homes.Focusing on a viewer’s phenomenological orientation tohousehold time helps understand why Hector Richards dif-ferently experiences two broadcasts of the same advertise-ment involving one of his favorite action films, Iron Man:

It is 8:10 p.m. on Thursday night and Hector attentivelywatches The Simpsons with his siblings. During a programbreak, a commercial airs announcing the DVD release of themovie Iron Man, and it catches Hector’s eye. At the sametime, their dad Craig enters the room. Hector’s twin brother,Victor, turns to Craig and worriedly inquires about their mum:“How come she was sad before?” Craig hesitates to explain,but Victor demands an answer: “No, you’ve got to tell us!”Hector very briefly monitors the dimly lit Iron Man ad. ButVictor’s raised voice displaces Hector’s ad response, and healso turns to Craig and pensively listens to him discuss thehealth of a sick relative and how this news has saddenedtheir mum. Hector, still looking at Craig, wears a concernedlook and asks if his grandaunt is going to die. Craig, sensinghis son’s unease, reassures him that she is “alright.” Thecontrasting brightness of a L’Oreal mascara ad forces Hec-tor’s eyes back to the television. The anxious family atmo-sphere combined with the ad’s low relevance to Hector, how-ever, prevents any meaningful attention to it and, while gazingat the spot, he quietly murmurs: “I don’t want Mum to besad.” The Simpsons returns, and Hector redirects his attentionto it. (Observational note, Richards household, 8:10 p.m.,Thursday, May 22, 2008)

The next morning there is an entirely different response toexactly the same Iron Man advertisement:

At 7 a.m. Hector and Victor watch King of the Hill. Theprogram breaks and Hector comments on the program seg-ment’s storyline. An ad for the Iron Man DVD movie releaseairs, and the two brothers watch it attentively. While he isstill watching the ad, Hector rehearses one of the humorouslines of dialogue featured in it: “Where’s the fun in that?”After a few seconds, just as a Daewoo Whitegoods TVC airs,he clarifies to Victor his thoughts about Iron Man, whilegazing at the television screen: “I think he just likes to beboss!” The ad rolls on, and the boys silently gaze at thetelevision screen. When King of the Hill resumes, the brotherswatch the program in silence. (Observational note, Richardshousehold, 7 a.m., Friday, May 23, 2008)

Even when viewed from within the same place, and by thesame two people, the same advertisement is received verydifferently across the two different time periods. In each,different viewing times construct vastly different viewingevents in the family living room, leading to very differentlevels of exposure to, engagement with, and interpretationof the same ad. In the first evening exposure the brief pres-ence of his dad combined with bad family news almost fullydisplaces the Iron Man ad from Hector’s awareness. Yet thevery next morning, in a viewing situation devoid of anypressing family news, we observe how the same ad is thor-


FIGURE 1

ADVERTISING RESPONSE IN THE FAMILY LIVING ROOM

oughly engaged with. Crucially, this change in advertisinginvolvement takes place not because of any textual feature,but rather because of a change in Hector’s social orientationacross the two broadcast events, enabling him in the secondevent to use the Iron Man advertising text to connect withhis twin brother, who is also a big fan of the movie.

What we witness in these vignettes with Hector Richards,as well as in many other observations in the Glenvale livingrooms, is that the combination of actual advertising viewingtime with the way it is experienced through everyday home-making events, discussions, and social dramas determinesthe level to which an ad is either engaged or displaced fromattention. Everyday viewers experience ads, attend to them,disengage from them, and reattend to them in different waysat different times of the day depending on the flow of house-hold discourse. The importance of temporal context in thehome, especially the intertwining of its diurnal and socialorientation elements that sharpen its expressions of familyand relational identity, makes it a powerful context shapingthe ad response process.

DISCUSSION

Implications for Understanding Contexts andAdvertising Response

In our article we analyzed the social settings and situ-ations that help organize the lived experience of the tele-vision program break and the types of everyday advertisingresponses performed through these interpersonal contexts.We produce a conceptual framework so researchers canbetter understand important features of our analysis of ad-vertising context and its impact on advertising response,engagement, and consumption. Figure 1 highlights the prac-tices and processes that occur when four key culturally

framed contexts—social interaction, spatial, media multi-tasking, and temporal—intertwine within any single adver-tising response event.

Our figure outlines what happens when a television pro-gram breaks and an advertising text is broadcast in a nat-uralistic viewing setting. Commonly, the viewing of adsscheduled within a program break is personalized througheveryday consumer discourse and is embedded within a net-work composed of the interpersonal contexts of the partic-ular viewing setting, the media context surrounding the ad-vertisement, the advertising text, and viewers’ interpretivepractices. Advertisements are activated and foregroundedwhen consumers incorporate them into their social practices,wider behaviors, and ordinary routines during the break.Contextual shifts during the program break such as the onsetof a social drama, the “doubling” of viewing space, or thebroadcast of a new advertisement are common viewing sit-uations that can displace advertising attention. In these in-stances, advertising is backgrounded and considered dis-engaged when it is not directly employed by viewers. Ourresearch analyzes how specific features of the viewingnetwork—linked to broader consumer discourse and patternsof behavior—can background personalized ads and how ad-vertising attention is heightened or lowered during actualbroadcasts in naturalistic viewing settings. Prior research hasfound that when engaging advertising is displaced by at-tention to complementary and competing activities in theliving room, it can also be reengaged by viewers later duringthe program break (Krugman, Cameron, and White 1995).We provide a deeper understanding of this activity by de-tailing the influence of household advertising context ele-ments in orchestrating this dynamic engagement, displace-ment, and reengagement process.

As outlined in figure 1, our analysis includes a numberof intersecting elements that guide advertising response and


produce different consumer identity engagements in the liv-ing room, including the impact of the actual advertisingmessage and its intertextual/allusive traces, broadcast influ-ences such as programming or other advertisements sched-uled within the commercial pod, viewers’ domestic prac-tices, and changes in interpersonal viewing contexts suchas household discourse, viewing time, and everyday inter-action. Our findings outline how the contribution and va-lence of each contextual element to the consumption processvaries during each advertising response episode. Critically,however, when consumers at home are exposed to ads broad-cast during the television program break, they invoke so-ciohistorically developed household discourse that reducesthe felt experience of the program break as an intrusivecommercial broadcast segment. By enmeshing their adver-tising responses and behavior with meanings pulled fromAustralian suburban and family discourse, many Glenvaleviewers place themselves as householders working to en-hance family identity value and foster a smoother flow ofeveryday domestic life. For these viewers, viewing practicesduring the program break work toward greater family unityand household functioning through their control, reclama-tion, and personalization of a broadcast particle often ini-tially felt as invasive and family-weakening.

Advertising Contexts and Practices in the Living Room. Akey finding in consumer research is that advertising contextsare significant to living room and interpersonal communi-cation (John 1999; Ritson and Elliott 1999). Deeper ex-amination is required of the bridging and bonding functionof commercial advertisements in the living room, particu-larly in light of the widespread criticism television adver-tising receives for its more pernicious influence on house-holds (Buijzen and Valkenburg 2003; Rindfleisch, Burroughs,and Denton 1997). We propose, more contentiously, that con-textualized advertising experiences and responses can arouseand sustain issues of interest to living room practices andto householders, who effectively link their advertising re-sponses during the program break to pro-family initiativesand quite readily personalize commercial advertising.Broadly, advertising engagement and consumption in thefamily living rooms we studied is performed through ideasof household functioning and emotional well-being held byparticipants. Advertising consumption is therefore a practicein which social and commoditized meanings are separatedout and interpersonal meaning is routinely affirmed. Ad-vertisements are often contextually framed. Consumers mayactively attend to television advertising’s commercial spon-soring messages (Luedicke, Thompson, and Giesler 2010)or may wholly avoid them (Holt 2002), but most of the timeadvertisements are experienced partially and incompletely,and responses are negotiated through everyday interpersonalcontexts. The television program break and television ad-vertisements broadcast within it are understood as activesocial agents that allow consumers in the living room todeal with everyday domestic tensions (Epp and Price 2008;Ritson and Elliott 1999). A vital component of this consumeragency process is outlined in our research: the role of ev-

eryday advertising contexts to help marshal well-being inthe living room.

The issue of audience member agency has been high-lighted by Ritson and Elliott (1999), who observe that prod-uct information readings of advertising can be displaced byinterpretive strategies that help build social group identity.When framed within this perspective, our research spotlightshow consumers build their advertising engagement and con-sumption practices around the everyday dramas, narratives,and discourse within the suburban family living room. Weprovide an important extension to Ritson and Elliott’s theoryby detailing the sociocultural processes that organize ad-vertising engagement in the consumer context of the livingroom (via multimodal, deterritorialization, time allocation,and temporally influenced practices). All but the youngestof our household consumers both explicitly and implicitlyunderstand commercial television advertising’s link to thebroadcast economics of commercial television (Lawlor andProthero 2008). In making this link, householders are en-gaged in an Arcadian project that evaluates advertising’spotential utility as an authentic social agent, not as a com-moditizing particle of consumer culture. Ritson and Elliott,however, argue that consumers watch and engage with tele-vision advertising at home based on an advertisement’s linkto out-of-home social group identity. We find, conversely,that advertising engagement—as expressed through con-sumers’ responses and contextualized experiences during theactual broadcast event—is based on shared living roommeanings. In this sense, Ritson and Elliott’s assessment ofadvertising consumption at one level productively connectsto the wider social world of consumers. Yet paradoxically,they also explicitly call for a deeper analysis of advertisingresponse and viewing behavior within actual broadcast set-tings. Simply, in the absence of any meaningful discussionabout actual viewing contexts, television advertisements aremerely understood as resources for identity signaling throughproduct consumption (Kates 2004; Luedicke et al. 2010).We outline processes in which television advertising oftenenhances family identity value by activating a network ofconsumer practices involving the living room’s viewing con-texts, suburban and household discourse, consumer identitycommitments, and personalization strategies.

Advertising Viewing Context and Family Identity Prac-tice. Examining everyday advertising context enables con-sumer researchers to more deeply understand advertisingexperiences and their link to family identity value. Familyidentity, according to Epp and Price (2008, 52; 2010) is “co-constructed in action,” and when applied to our research, itinvolves solo or coviewing units at home, consumer practiceslinked to everyday household discourse, and broadcasts oftelevision advertisements. Varman and Belk (2009) describehow the Gandhian notion of satyagraha is linked to peacefulconsumer boycotts and active avoidance of well-knownbrands to preserve and emphasize an idealized notion of thefamily and the family home. Family identity value, as such,is located in marketplace objects and sites through which aseparation of the domestic from the public, commercialized


sphere is experienced. Our observations suggest, however,that family identity value may be effectively negotiatedthrough commercial sites at home and experienced by con-sumers through particular advertising responses. Throughtheir performance during the television program break, rec-lamation, deterritorialization, and time allocation strategies,for example, can be configured as valued family identitypractices because they are performed through contextualizedelements coconstructed by family members in the livingroom and advertisers. In these instances, experiencing tele-vision advertising material activates a cluster of domesticallycharged meanings, enabling family members to negotiatepro-family scripts and narratives through an advertisement’s(and the program break’s) potentially materialist-commo-ditizing orientation. By contextualizing processes that linktelevision advertising to living room discourse, and person-alizing ads by reworking their product sponsoring meaning,this perspective builds for researchers another socioculturalpathway that may enhance family identity value (Epp andPrice 2008).

Advertising contexts have significance for engagementpractices in the family living room. In both scholarly andapplied research, engaged viewing practices are assumed toreflect the product consumption, focused attention, andforced “eyes on screen” measures that organize represen-tations of advertising audience behavior in survey and ex-perimental studies (Campbell and Keller 2003; Krugman1977). Our research suggests, conversely, that the successof advertising engagement at home can be linked to a moremundane though potent contextualized viewing practice:reclamation. Our findings describe the way that particularadvertising responses represent localized domestic meaningand associated family practices. Household discourse, forexample, enables advertising engagement to articulate todomestic routines, family interaction, and sociohistoricallydeveloped perspectives linked to suburban family lifestylesand notions of good homemaking. Reclamation, for instance,captures quite succinctly the motivations behind quotidianfamily interaction during the television program break. Withits own cultural history embedded in turn of the centurydebates around “work/family balance” and “quality familytime” (Daly 1996; Kremer-Sadlik and Paugh 2007; Pocockand Clarke 2005; Southerton 2003), it finds its everydayexpression in suburban opposition to the harsher elementsof global capitalism. Despite Australian cultural nationalistrhetoric about egalitarian values and idealized family life,the lived experience of many suburban families is one con-strained by depleted family time. Reclamation is adopted inthe family living room and, as a practice long adopted inthe Davies family to enhance family interaction, it is per-formed in opposition to consumer culture agents deemeddestabilizing. This viewing practice is widely adopted byhouseholders and is embedded within a compelling mix ofadvertising responses linked to ideas about family construc-tion, suburban lifestyle, moral development, and householdwell-being. Reclamation practices performed during the pro-gram break are especially relevant for living room viewers

as they articulate a strong cultural contradiction experiencedby family members—experiencing depleted time and strug-gling to produce quality family moments within a societythat supposedly celebrates and upholds suburban family ide-ology.

Reclamation, however, is not embedded within frame-works of engaged advertising response as Krugman (1977)and Campbell and Keller (2003) would have it. The partic-ipants in our research do not locate advertisements as centralto their everyday life, consumption patterns, or domesticexperiences. Yet they interacted through reclamation strat-egies and incorporated advertising elements into their mul-timodal viewing practices. Engaged ad responses such asfocused attention to advertising messages may therefore bethought of as extreme instances of contextualized recla-mation in everyday viewing situations. We note that veryfew household ad viewing practices explicitly linked to tra-ditional theoretical perspectives of advertising response andattention; nor did many advertising responses implicitly orexplicitly connect to managerial notions of attitude or recall.Many advertising responses, nonetheless, may develop lessinformation-specific yet still contextualized notions of en-gagement by articulating to householders’ notions of ap-propriate domestic behavior.

From a practical standpoint, our analyses can aid scholarlyand applied advertising researchers, particularly those in thefields of media planning and pretesting, where ad responseand engagement is usually considered in terms of effec-tiveness measurements concerning brand attitude and ad re-call, media context, viewing demographics, and multimediaviewing platforms. Media planners may benefit from payingcloser attention to how interpersonal context elements areintegrated into consumers’ particular patterns of advertisingresponse and viewing behavior in naturalistic viewing set-tings and situations. Similar to how different viewing timesinfluenced Hector Richards’s experience of the broadcastIron Man TVC, media planning models may heighten orlower the valence of a particular context element within anad viewing event. Our findings have additional relevancefor media planners targeting both out-of-home and house-hold-based viewers, where familiarity with both the socialaudience and physical viewing setting can largely influenceadvertising audience behavior. We also feel that recent ad-vances in television advertising pretesting, such as the useof biometric and eye-tracking technology to gauge emo-tional engagement, can be strengthened to account for var-iances in consumer and household discourse. Just as SiobhanWilliams’s “pretend stares” are routinely conducted withminimal advertising engagement linked to message pro-cessing, we recommend that scholarly and applied ad pre-testers calibrate their studies to account for the impact ofeveryday household discourse and interpersonal commu-nication on consumers’ emotional engagements with broad-cast advertising, in ways not predicted by current pretestingtechniques and assumptions. We echo recent comments thatjust as applied and academic advertising researchers havefailed to account for the influence of social context in re-


search situations, the broader interpersonal elements hithertoreduced and discounted from consideration in advertisingmodelling and experimental research may nonetheless im-pact reception measures without researchers even beingaware of these contextual influences (Puntoni and Tavassoli2007).

Limitations and Future Research

We limited our sampling frame to homes that fit normativetelevision target audiences and suburban family lifestyle cat-egories in Australia, and so selected two-parent familyhouseholds with children aged 5–17 years. While we believemany of our findings are robust enough to travel acrossnumerous household audience categories, more conclusivework about the ways advertising is actually received in ev-eryday viewing contexts is required in homes that varyacross demographic and lifestyle profiles. For example, howwould television advertising responses differ in one-person,shared, and same-sex coupled households, which are be-coming more commonplace in Australia and elsewhere, andwhich are structured by different ideologies, discourses, andpatterns of household behavior than those found in moretraditional family arrangements? Different lifestyle catego-ries also imply different domestic viewing spaces, viewingplatforms, and media multitasking environments, which wefeel would impact the advertising response and engagementprocess. For example, if the household behavior of youngprofessional singles living in shared house arrangements isless framed by family identity discourse than the Glenvaleviewers in our study, then how do viewers in these sharedhouses respond to television advertising in media multi-tasking situations during the program break?

Our observations of advertising response were gatheredin only one area of the family home, albeit a physical view-ing space that is commonly occupied by all family members,either collectively, relationally, or alone: the living room.Within many family households, additional television setsare also placed in other spaces of the home, such as inkitchens and bedrooms. In Australia, however, the trend toplace television sets in children’s (as opposed to adults’)bedrooms seems to have limited traction (Holloway andGreen 2008). We call for future research to consider otherphysical viewing settings and observe and compare adver-tising responses and other associated interpersonal experi-ences from within multiple rooms within the same home.

Our study was also limited by our analysis of everydaymedia multitasking practices performed during the actualprogram break. It is increasingly common for many familyhouseholds to own media technologies such as personalvideo recorders (PVRs), which enable viewers to erase orfast-forward through the program break during real-timeadvertising broadcasts. We encourage researchers to ex-amine the impact of everyday interpersonal contexts on theincreasing practice of fast-forwarding through the programbreak using PVRs. How does the strength of familiaritybetween members in the viewing audience influence theextent to which fast-forwarding occurs? What are the im-

plications for the process of advertising engagement? Weencourage consumer researchers to examine some of theseissues involving everyday interpersonal viewing contextsand their influence on advertising response.

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