Video Ethnography, Researcher Reflexivity, and Constructions of Advertising Response in the Australian Family Living Room

Abstract

This article adopts perspectives of family identity practice as an analytic lens to understand advertising response and attention in the family living room. By using an emerging approach that examines ethnographic data through the reflexive role of the researcher, the article brings a novel conceptualisation of advertising response as a set of domestically constructed consumption practices. Through this approach, it is shown how advertising response is performed by viewers in the family living room embedded within a network involving cultural ideologies, domestic discourses, advertising literacies, and viewing practices, but argues that the very configuration of these performances is itself developed by the researcher through broader scholarly debates about the politics of advertising response, viewing, and attention in the marketing and advertising research literature. The article argues that advertising response is not value neutral, it takes on different meanings for viewers beyond an advertising text's informational orientation, and response is understood to be a product of the research method that uncovers it. To better conceptualise advertising response and attention, the findings suggest that a deeper exploration of advertising response is required in terms of the researcher's reflexive role in constituting it.