| It was the"Blue-sky Toothpaste''advertisement published on Tianjin News Daily that embarked on China's commercial ads in media in 1979. As one of the four traditional media in China, the newspaper has been playing an essential role in keeping people informed of what has been going on in China in the past 30 years. While media have been developing in diversified ways today, the newspaper is still one of the most important carriers on which advertisers and manufacturers would like to get their advertisements published because of the factors characterized by high frequency of issuing, large coverage of readers and rapid circulation of information. Since the late 1970s when the economic reform and opening up programs started, China's print advertisements have developed dramatically fast with revenue growing more than 1000 times today. Advertising is regarded by some scholars as a mirror reflecting what is happening in society, and therefore it has the commercial value and the cultural value as well. With China getting more and more involved in global interactions in various areas, cultural values reflected in advertising undertake changes accordingly.This thesis attempts to explore the transformation of cultural values and find out the dominant cultural values in today's society by focusing on the analysis of newspaper advertisements in the past 30 years. It selects 33 east and west cultural values well categorized by some world-known scholars. And then one hundred and fifty advertisements are analyzed in terms of 33 indicators and cultural value theories to find out one or more cultural value(s) manifested in each advertisement collected from Yangcheng Evening News, five advertisements for each year from 1981 to 2010. After the cultural values have been determined, content analysis is employed to compare the cultural values in advertisements between the period of 1981-1995 and 1996-2010. A conclusion is then drawn after analysis of the results: during 1981-1995, the dominant values were"effectiveness","quality","technology","modernity"and"competition". The values like"enjoyment","economy","effectiveness","modernity"and"nature"have occupied the predominant position in the period of 1996-2010. Utilitarian values have gained upper hand on symbolic values in the period of 1981-1995. Between 1996 and 2010, utilitarian values have been on the decline and symbolic values on the rise, and there is a tendency that symbolic values would be in the dominant position, because people have placed great importance on the quality of life. Therefore, it is inevitable for advertisers to apply symbolic values more and more often, but utilitarian values have still been the essential part of advertisements, especially these utilitarian values such as"economy","uniqueness","convenience", and"effectiveness", which are still consumers'concern. In both period of 1981-1995 and 1996-2010, western values gained upper hand over traditional values, but the growth rate of traditional values was much higher than that of western values, which demonstrated traditional values more or less have been affected since China's economic reform and opening up to the outside world, but the core traditional values have been playing an important part in people's daily life. This thesis concludes that Chinese advertising is a hybrid of Western and Chinese traditional cultural values with the tendency to be adapted to globalization. |
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