DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.11| HAGEMANN, WAGNER: LUNCHABLES_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 75the ads almost universally use clear indicators signalling that what is shown is staged and ironical.11We found that, in terms of class politics, product advertising in Germany almost always takes a‘middle’view, which generally can only represent any variation of‘race’,‘gender’, and‘class’ as a fantasy informed by that view. This is even more true of adsfrom the 1990s(the decade of our childhood), whichhave been our main focus so far, than of present-dayexamples. At the same time, representing classstructures in this context is apparently governed byspecial rules. This may be due to the fact that manyproducts are actually aimed for a low-income targetgroup and meant to be promoted to them, althoughadvertising language does not have the means torepresent this target group in a relatively non-discriminatory and, at the same time, promotionally effective way. Visible poverty is not good for business,carries a risk of being perceived as confrontational,correlates with negativity, is potentially unattractiveeven to those affected by it, and generally is in conflictwith advertising’s imperative of making the unbroken promise of a‘good life’. Moreover, most of thoseinvolved in the production of advertising still comefrom the middle rather than the so-called lower classand therefore simply do not have authentic experiential knowledge of life under conditions of permanenteconomic anxiety. Finally, the formation of‘Western’consumer culture is strongly linked to notions of social advancement, so that pictures of‘poor’ peopleconsuming certain products because of their socialsituation are simply not logical in terms of advertising strategy. Product advertising for people with lowor no income is therefore, most certainly throughoutthe 1990s and 2000s and the German-speakingcountries, almost always set in milieus without anyvisible experience of financial deprivation. Of course,the commercials in question nevertheless are implicitstatements about social class relations, but for ourconsiderations they are even more interesting as adiscursive field in which possibilities of veiling whilesubtly introducing‘class’ as a marker of difference inactually middle-class, financially secure diegeses arenegotiated. Our observation is that complete suppression of any reference to precarious conditions isnot achieved in the spots, nor can it be if the precarity is in fact inscribed as a consumer truth in the veryproducts advertised.One example of this is the mentioned German Lunchables commercial of 1998, which goes as follows:We are looking over the shoulder of a woman arranging a bouquet of flowers in a vase. In the background, the family dog is lying in its basket. A boy,apparently the woman’s son, comes walking towardher, routinely and without having to say a word to hismother reaches for a flat object wrapped in sandwich paper on the counter between us and him, andturns to leave with a look of disappointment on hisface. The setting of the scene, a single-family housewith an open-plan kitchen from which a French doorleads into the garden, as well as the mother’s relaxedactivity of decorating the home with cut flowers whilethe lunch packet for the son is already ready on thecounter, indicate that there is no shortage of eithermoney or time here. Maternal care work, the commercial shows, is not a problem of stress or financialhardship, but above all a question of recognition,and its success above all depends on the judgementof those cared for. It is hence a private matter thatcan be optimised with knowledge(conveyed by ad11For example, in the well-known“medieval” campaign for Rügenwalder Mühle sausages, in which a representative of a kind of a“Reichsbürger” sect, living in the countryside obviously outside the society, barges in on a group of housewives in a butcher’s shop,buys, or perhaps robs, the shop empty, and returns on horseback to his community that awaits him gathered around a red windmillwith sausage-shaped sails. The situation with the blond hunk who, with a few seductive half-sentences and a penetrating look, makesthe timid, whispering female shop assistant hand over all the fat sausages unmistakably echoes scenes from dime novels, Victorianstyle romance movies, and similar fantasies of petty-bourgeois women being overpowered by handsome country lads. To watch thead on YouTube see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwYQMpd_eZA(accessed 28 July 2023).
