DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.11| HAGEMANN, WAGNER: LUNCHABLES_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 75 the ads almost universally use clear indicators sig­nalling that what is shown is staged and ironical. 11 We 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 ads from the 1990s(the decade of our childhood), which have been our main focus so far, than of present-day examples. At the same time, representing class structures in this context is apparently governed by special rules. This may be due to the fact that many products are actually aimed for a low-income target group and meant to be promoted to them, although advertising language does not have the means to represent 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 unattractive even to those affected by it, and generally is in conflict with advertising’s imperative of making the unbro­ken promise of a‘good life’. Moreover, most of those involved in the production of advertising still come from the middle rather than the so-called lower class and therefore simply do not have authentic experien­tial knowledge of life under conditions of permanent economic anxiety. Finally, the formation of‘Western’ consumer culture is strongly linked to notions of so­cial advancement, so that pictures of‘poor’ people consuming certain products because of their social situation are simply not logical in terms of advertis­ing strategy. Product advertising for people with low or no income is therefore, most certainly throughout the 1990s and 2000s and the German-speaking countries, almost always set in milieus without any visible experience of financial deprivation. Of course, the commercials in question nevertheless are implicit statements about social class relations, but for our considerations they are even more interesting as a discursive field in which possibilities of veiling while subtly introducing‘class’ as a marker of difference in actually middle-class, financially secure diegeses are negotiated. Our observation is that complete sup­pression of any reference to precarious conditions is not achieved in the spots, nor can it be if the precar­ity is in fact inscribed as a consumer truth in the very products 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 toward her, routinely and without having to say a word to his mother reaches for a flat object wrapped in sand­wich paper on the counter between us and him, and turns to leave with a look of disappointment on his face. The setting of the scene, a single-family house with an open-plan kitchen from which a French door leads into the garden, as well as the mother’s relaxed activity of decorating the home with cut flowers while the lunch packet for the son is already ready on the counter, indicate that there is no shortage of either money or time here. Maternal care work, the com­mercial shows, is not a problem of stress or financial hardship, but above all a question of recognition, and its success above all depends on the judgement of those cared for. It is hence a private matter that can be optimised with knowledge(conveyed by ad­11 For 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 windmill with sausage-shaped sails. The situation with the blond hunk who, with a few seductive half-sentences and a penetrating look, makes the 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 the ad on YouTube see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwYQMpd_eZA(accessed 28 July 2023).