Dr Marta Rabikowska
University of Glasgow
Department of Slavonic Studies
Hetherington Building, Bute Gardens
Glasgow G12, 8RS

Tel: 330 5598

The history of advertising in Poland is as old as the age of trade in Polish lands. Originating in the same spring of world advertising which began in pre-historic times, it consisted of oral or pictorial methods for announcing the exchange of goods, and resulted in the Phoenician invention of financial commerce. The first professional, advertising items come from the fifteenth century, largely as the result of the introduction of the printing press. The Christian church played an important role in the process of advertising, particularly in its successful attempt to popularise the Bible. However, the actual commercial dimension of advertising had its origin in the belle époque of the nineteenth century, caused by the industrial revolution in Western Europe. Despite the political non-existence of Poland at that time, the level of trade in the annexed parts of the country was well underway, although was determined by foreign stocks. Crucial to the development of advertising were that popular and literary press, both blooming, especially in Warsaw, Cracow and Lvov, where the annual press circulation was greater than that of today. Magazines and daily newspapers of that time were full of commercial announcements from merchants and traders who wanted to inform their customers about virtues, prices of, and access to, their products. While advertising in the press as well as outdoor displays promoting goods for sale became a part of social life, it was not yet thought of a discipline to be studied or investigated; it had not yet developed into a separate branch of inellectual thought. With the regaining of Poland’s independence after World War I, this situation changed. Advertising began to be treated as a theory of trade, and distinctly separate from the theory of propaganda, due to the very special, traditional practice of honesty in finance. A milestone for advertising was its introduction as a University subject. In 1925 Professor Olgierd Langer, a graduate of Harvard, began a series of lectures on the science of advertising at the University of Lvov, this was soon followed by similar courses of study at the Universities in Cracow and Warsaw. Advertising theory developed rapidly; increasing amounts of academic publications appeared in the areas of economics, and commercial linguistics, sparking wide interest among researchers and practitioners. At that time The Association of Polish Advertising was also established. Until World War II advertising was perceived as the main indicator of capitalistic industry and a serious scientific field of research. The situation changed dramatically under communism. Advertising disappeared from both the open market and from universities curricula for almost forty four years. Socialistic ideology excluded commercial ads due to its "poisonous" Western capitalistic origins. Ads were considered hostile and dangerous for the health of proletariat. However, in the middle of the seventies a campaign of Coca-Cola was arranged in the national media as the proof of friendly relationship between East and West. Under the authority of the First Secretary of the Communist Part Edward Gierek there appeared some works of scholars and national publishers which explored the methods of advertising and abroad. Nevertheless, they were, of course, checked by the Department of Censorship. Even the works of Western sociologists (Georges Elgozy, Marshall McLuhan, Gillo Dorfles) were supplied with ideological introductions emphasizing the great jeopardy advertisements could provoke in society. Dorfles’ work’s translation from 1973 contains this explanation:

As we can see, this definition is not far from the opinions of other sociologists who fear the destructive influence of advertising. During communism, such a warning was directed not only against advertising but the influence of the West in general, and the complete rejection its capitalistic politics. While some works on advertisement written by Polish researchers between 1964 and 1980 dealt with a theory of press language, semiotics and aesthetics, as well as the mechanisms of trade, all of them submitted to socialist demands. Adverts now sold the political image of communist authority; thus it had to be censored and was designed according to communist propaganda. Poster art and all outdoor exhibitions promoted the image of a happy life in socialist society. Press and TV advertisements focused on popularising national industry, again selling the political ideology not product. Television adverts during this time did not exist in the separate medium of broadcasting. TV production was property of the nation, and as such, was ruled by the government. This control enabled the Party to manipulate TV (1,2) into serving the aims of the system. During late-seventies communist prosperity there were many TV shows about industry, trade, entertainment, even tourism, which could have been called advertising programmes, but they used dogmatic rhetoric for propaganda purposes, not for promoting real products. Thus, TV advertisements for Coca-Cola were laden with images of kinder, gentler communism concerned with the needs of people.

It should be emphasised here, that notwithstanding differences between politics and advertisement, both use methods of persuasion for the successful sale of their product. Whether this product is a material good or an ideology it is still sold by means of rhetoric well known to the distributors of official language since the ancient times. I do not wish to develop the theme of rhetorical usage in Polish advertisement here, as I am researching this field in another work Therefore I will describe the mechanisms of persuasion employed in Polish TV advertisement in terms of the sociological changes pervading Polish society since 1989.

The overthrow of communism in Poland brought about the fundamental changes within economics and politics needed in order to give birth to the process of privatization which began on 13 July 1990. As a result of the Reprivatisation Bill in 1994, advertising ceased belonging to the nation and, like all other subjects of trade, was deregulated and opened to the private sector. When we consider this as the birth of the free market in Poland, we can estimate that Polish advertising as eleven years. The first Polish TV adverts actually look like toddlers in comparison to their Western adult forerunners. At first, there were no advertising agencies in Poland. Such notions as advertising campaigns, sales strategies, and marketing research had not yet not appeared in the vocabulary of advertisers. It was only the client who mattered as he paid for the production of the advert, nevertheless, the client could not influence the advert’s final shape due to lack of advanced technology. The client - an ex-worker, miner, metallurgist, or teacher - could now be the owner of a small firm or company which provided them with a living. They could only order the advert in one of two advertising "societies" - the Polonic film studio ITI (established since 1984) and later, the private studio Odeon. With the dawn of the nineties, crowds of clients eager to risk their money on cheap adverts caused a great boom in the advertising industry. On average, advertising production took an average two or three days. Screenplays were very simple and avoided complicated plot arrangements and outside shooting. Private flats were adapted as film sets; the production team provided the basic artistic effects. Advertisers utilised home videos methods with family members as actors. Prices of spots were extremely law at that time; every shopkeeper or retail producer could afford to buy the advertising film. The basic commercial advantage of these films lay in the table of producers’addresses and phone numbers shown at the end of each spot. The same people dealt with production, direction and creation. Their only aim was rather to show, not to sell, the product. Thus, early-nineties advertisement can be called the "packshots" as they were concentrated only on the shown object, not on the contact with a receiver/viewer. Iwona Zabielska, a journalist contributing to the book Pioneers and Titans of Polish Advertisement (the first book on the history of Polish commercials), commented those attempts: "it was the best school of how not to produce adverts".

This observation is remarkably accurate, considering almost all early Polish TV adverts, particularly a 1990 advertisement for cockroach poison. It was ordered by a small firm that attempted to answer an urgent need of a young democratic society – hygiene. The advert shows different places where insects germinated, making the picture quite scary. While the technology of this film was very primitive, the message was completely clear to a public living with the problem of dirt for decades.

Having investigated these early productions, I would like to put forward the thesis that the images in advertisements reflect stages in the process of sociological and economic transition taking place in Poland. I would like to paraphrase for use in my research what George Bernard Shaw said about accent and a person’s origin: show me your advertising and I will tell you who you are. When I found myself plowing through the plethora of early Polish TV adverts, I realised that they showed the whole range of sociological phenomena Poland has been undergoing for the last ten years.

It can be easily noticed that at this early stage of Polish advertisement a response to public was juxtaposed with the possibility for business opportunities. Hence, the advert warning against the danger of virulent cockroach invasion could be followed by advertisement for exclusive products sold in Western currencies by the national corporations Baltona and Pevex. Between 1988 and 1990 a popular series of Baltona TV and press adverts appeared, directed at the richest people in Poland. TV spots, recorded still on VHS tapes, showed elegant women and men in amid chic scenery, convincing customers to buy very expensive products attainable only by a narrow group of Polish people, or by foreigners who could pay for these products in dollars. After the privatization bill was introduced in 1990, national adverts vanished from the market, replaced by adverts of private clients who offered extra products for zloties, imported chiefly from China, Korea, Vietnam and Turkey. One of the most famous was the spot Blaupunkt which showed expensive TV sets and video players floating against a relatively high-tech background. We observe for the first time the usage of the symbolic motif: a moving ball, not connected directly with the image of the object, but whose function was to foster the particular atmosphere. These visual elements, together with a special soundtrack, seemed to direct the viewer’s imagination. It can be said that Blaupunkt represented a turning point in the development of advertising. This positive change was the result of foreign participation in the production, the supplying of Polish studios with sophisticated equipment, money and advice from professional designers.

After fifty years of broadcasting silence, the Polish advertising market became a very tempting financial target for Western corporations who decided to invest their money, and flood that undeveloped area. Till 1992 it was seized by Western agencies. They controlled 85% of the market, yet, by the end of the nineties this rate fell to about 25%. This great initial impact can be easily recognised in the pictures of adverts. Most of adverts were simply adapted to Polish conditions without any care for linguistic or sociological suitability. Many embarrassing examples of various blunders which disorientated the public can be found in these adverts. This was the result of a very general view foreigners had of Polish society, considering them as an unprepared and undiscerning group of customers. Polish receivers, as all others around the world, interpret the message of adverts according to their own situation and particular cultural background. When an advert misses the characteristic context in which a customer was brought up, the message has little chance of being understood. Unfortunately, as many Polish copywriters complain, the psychology of Polish society is still not appreciated by Western expatriates working in Poland on behalf of their agencies. Leszek Stafiej, a president of one of advertising agencies advises Polish producers:

A positive example of such an attitude was realised in the advertising campaign of 1990-1996 in the strategic use of quotations from a very famous canon trilogy by the nineteenth-century writer Henryk Sienkiewicz. A verse “ociec prać?” (“father shall we go to wash them up?”), taken from Potop the text known to every Pole over fifteen, was used in the advert of Pollena washing powder. The homonymic verb “prać”, which means “wash” and “beat” in Polish, was employed as the symbol for the product, identifying it with the story in the novel. It enabled this stage of the public’s acceptance which in classical rhetoric is called captatio benevolentiae (common satisfaction). The high level of satisfaction was gained by virtue of reference to the common archive of quotations. The linguistic pun and the historical scenery imitating the novel’s reality took the audience by storm. It was a great commercial success which some agencies tried to repeat after the latest airing of a film based on another novel of the same author: Ogniem i mieczem (By Fire and Sword). The clever slogan "neither with fire nor with sword" accompanying the image of indestructible jeans could have positively influenced the sale of this product if the author had not forgot to… name the brand in the spot.

Returning to the demands of the Polish audience, I would like to say that it in the first decade of reform, Polish people were ready to accept any kind of advertising message, providing it was colourful, noisy and vague, which is how they viewed the forbidden West. The Polish audience were quite unprepared for the world of advertisement. They matured very quickly however, with the influence of rapid economic and social changes (although many producers still have not noticed it). Over time, people became more critical of adverts. At present, public attitude toward advertising has reached a level of statistic normality comparable to results of Western surveys. People become largely indifferent to advertisement (see figure 1) and they mostly try to skip adverts whilst watching TV (see figure 2). It should be pointed out that at the beginning of the nineties, the Polish TV audience took into account not a message of an advert but rather they watched advertisement itself. Commercials were perceived as a new attractive programme on Polish TV, and were watched like a film or cartoon. We still do not have data on the influence of advertising on sales at that time. The relationship between advertising expenditures and subsequent sales could not even be measured, as there were no sociological devices or scientific background needed to conduct such research. On the other hand, the market was destabilised and it happened frequently that products advertised on TV were absent on store shelves. Moreover, Polish customers were accustomed to buying everything what they could meet in shops without basing their purchase decisions to the advertisement message. The most popular saying of the time was "a good product does not need to be advertised". This opinion determined the perception of advertising in Poland for many years. Many people did not believe that adverts had honest intentions and did not consider them as the source of reliable information. The increase of general expenditure on advertisement (see figure 3) has not heavily influenced people’s buying (see figure 4). The group of older audience still suspects that the whole mechanism of advertising is working to undermine their finances, and even morality. The idea that the more advertising the product needs, the poorer it must be, is still very popular. Such historical prejudice certainly influence the overall level of consumption, as Richard Schmalensee explains:

This statement was cleverly commented on by Richard P.Adler (in the Aspen Institute Communication and Society Program Report): "Schmalnsee is saying, rather than advertising causing the sale of goods, it appears more probable that the sale of goods causes advertising." This revelation seems to describe the situation in Poland in the first half of the nineties. However, it must be said that the habits of consumption in Polish society have significantly changed since the advent of advertisement.

A meaningful example is the sociological revolution which took place following the sales campaign for Always sanitary towels. Mention of hygienic products had been a social taboo in Poland for many years. This resulted firstly from the traditional way of rearing children which prevented people, particularly men, from speaking about physicality, and secondly, from the social naiveté about the product. TV adverts shown for almost the entire year of 1992 broke the situation (and the social taboo) and changed the customers’ way of thinking about such products. With constant parroting of the slogan: "with some kind of shyness", which became a national joke, people became familiar with the product and its real context.

An analogical, sociological "reform" occurred after sales campaigns for different brands of beer began at the beginning of the 90s, before the bill to ban alcohol advertising [ustawa o zakazie reklamowania alkoholu]. In Poland, beer had been considered as the worst kind of alcohol and had been consumed in relatively small amounts compared with the consumption of vodka and other spirits. Due to advertising strategies, beer was not only introduced to TV screens, a new lifestyle was also created. Advertising methods focused on presenting different social groups: students at the parties, young women chatting in restaurant or on picnics, men in pubs and clubs. The accent was put on the outdoor activity not on the product. This shift helped to accustom people to considering beer a sociable, even elegant drink in contrast to its image prior to 1990. In the communist époque, beer had been a symbol of degradation, deterioration and poverty, as it was drunk in humble pubs by male workers who could not afford to buy other spirits. What seems to have been the most crucial obstacle for Agencies to overcome was that Polish adults did not approve of drinking alcohol outside of the house, bearing in mind such a habit immoral and destructive to the family. The advertisement persuaded people that drinking beer can be a special activity which fosters new contacts and leads to friendships. Most beer adverts from the first half of the nineties (as well as most of the latest ones), tempted the audience with attractive leisure situations, relaxed atmospheres and energising elements of scenography. Such adverts could be perceived as a means of escape from the coercion and drudgery of everyday Polish life after 1989. It is interesting that analogical adverts broadcast in the West were understood as a rest from work, as observed by Torban Vestergaard and Kim Schroder - the authors of The Language of Advertising. This discrepancy was the effect of differing job markets in the East and in the West. Polish society at the end of the nineties had not yet reached a state of exhaustion and

What was characteristic for Western societies could not possibly apply to the economic situation in Poland ten years ago. Polish consumers still retained the memory of the meaninglessness of work under the communist system which, as Adam Michnik once said, kept everybody unemployed by depriving the work of any financial logic or productive sense. For Polish people beer adverts during that period showed people how to spend their free time and they somehow legalised outdoor drinking. In 1998 the advert for Varka Strong beer appeared. For the first time, men were shown drinking beer after hard manual work This made the advert accessible to male receivers with only a basic education who spend most of their time at work. This thoughtful advert was adjusted to the actual social context and also to the current job market which lacked openings to manual workers (a current advert of Frugo juice shows garbage drivers with a warm irony). Young uneducated men between twenty five and forty comprise a significant part of society, and a large group of beer drinkers. Although they are limited to looking for a job on the black market where they are poorly paid, in the advert of Varka beer they gained a respect (for being part of TV working society), and consolation (being awarded with beer). The aim of such a sales strategy was of course to promote the product in the market, which was successfully carried out by the advertising agency.

Depending at which social group the advert was targeted, differing communication codes are discernible. In the Zagłoba advert beer we can see average men fishing, playing billiards, arm-wrestling and, of course, drinking beer. The advert was aimed at working class male class low-income males who were offered a series of images which told them how they should be spending their leisure time. It is significant that the advert suggests popular leisure activities for men between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, as if their only desire is to leave home to meet other males. According to this advert, men who cannot afford more expensive entertainment should relax in pubs or outdoors with friends from the same socio-economic group. This is a stereotype perpetuated for ages in Polish society: what is best for a mature (married) man is drinking together without women (wives) and drinking together. What is novel about this stereotype is that firstly it includes a more "civilisied" drink (bear, not vodka), and secondly, new sports activities (billiards, arm-wrestling). We can observe, that on one hand advertisement attempts to challenge Polish society to take up new habits, but on the other hand, it implements out-dated stereotypes to push a message.

It is symptomatic that in advertising for spirits, female characters are avoided perpetuating the obsolete image of alcohol-hating women. Women can play the part of maids or hostesses serving alcohol, but they rarely drink it themselves. The press advert for Zywiec of 1995-1996 was rather exceptional; it showed students together, men and women having a party and drinking beer. This is explainable in terms of another stereotype: juvenile student behaviour, which was always equated with courage and rebellion that seems makes impossible situations possible, so such scenes look fairly reliable and did not evoke distrust in the audience. Another exceptional press advert of that time presented women on a picnic, chatting and drinking Okocim dark beer. Yet dark beer is usually perceived in Poland as the feminine kind of beer. Consequently, to make the advert acceptable, women had to play their parts in this over-sweetened bucolic. Having said this, there are many males who like dark beer, but for them the advert was certainly more discouraging than tempting, and as a result they became excluded from the group of potential costumers. In this case, thwarting one stereotype (by showing women drinking) was followed by stereotypical reactions of the other group of (male) costumers who did not want to be identified with a "feminine" product.

While the advert for Carlsberg beer was accepted by the whole spectrum of male viewers despite age and origin, it was mainly directed at a new social group: young businessmen who could afford spending time with beautiful women in luxurious surroundings: yachts, restaurants, and, what was most significant, who could pay for this relatively expensive beer. The principal male character in this advert was a type of hero figure who wore a white shirt with red suspenders (symbols of growing Polish Stock Exchange), figure who embodied the images of affluence, prosperity and luck. Female actors played secondary parts of decorative hostesses moving in the background to the erotic rhythms. This type of screenplay was repeated several times in different adverts, entirely embraced and accepted by the (male) public. One of the latest one was an Okocim beer advert with Jean Rehno playing a VIP. His character was a type of Mafia boss from gangster films. The advert was directed at young, perhaps teenage males who could recognise ironically treated allusion to this films. What attracts this audience is the image of masculinity created by the producers who know how to operate with subconscious needs of male costumers in order to sell their product. It is obvious that such adverts cater to the desires and urges of certain social groups who are considered unsatisfied children dreaming of the forbidden fruit. Naturally this fruit can be reached only by buying the product that is offered. It is a very-well known mechanism of advertising to walk a tightrope between reality and dream in the process of creating a need for the product. Most adverts produced for the Polish audience induce people to take up the "challenge" of a new and easy lifestyle which is certainly desirable but also very untypical for a society brought up on Romantic ideas of self-denial and sacrifice. What is overthrowing is that beer adverts anticipated or even created new possibilities for life under capitalistic conditions, in terms of concentration on the self and people’s hedonistic needs.

The increasing sale of beer proved that people appreciated a change; finally they began to substitute beer for other alcoholic drinks. This success alarmed the Ministry of Health who banned beer adverts in 1992 and introduced an official bill in the Parliament. From that time until March 2001, beer advertising could appear only along with a mendacious note saying beer was a non-alcoholic drink. This of course mobilised agencies into using clever means to promote sales, such as: covert-advertising of travel agencies (Vodka Bols and Soplica), literally winking at the audience (Bosman Beer), and playing visual and linguistic tricks (Zagłoba Beer) to push the product. In March 2001, Parliament discussed the project of International Advertising Association in Poland, heard the proposals of advertisers and producers, and finally decided that beer could be advertised on TV, but only after 8 p.m.

These examples seem to confirm the effect of advertisement on Polish social life; they also prove that advertisements are slowly becoming, as in any other capitalist country, a distorting lens which blurs public perception of tradition and cultural mores. Advertising promotes its own values such as shopping, demand, consumption and credit, which are the basic tenets of the contemporary Western lifestyle. It cannot be denied that advertisement creates a sham world of fraudulence and superficiality; yet it must also be acknowledged that advertising participates positively in societal life by instigating sociological reforms. Even if this reaction was only the side-effect of advertising campaigns, they hastened the process of progressive transition in the Polish life style.

Today, Polish consumers are becoming more and more conscious of how advertisement works. However, this consciousness can be attributed predominately to isolated groups of educated people. Here we meet another difficulty advertising agencies must cope with in Poland: since only 8 % of people in Poland have a higher education, advertising agencies, seeking the widest possible audience comprehension, are forced to favour those parts of society who have either basic education or none. Most uneducated people trust adverts, yet at the same time they are the most vulnerable group to the advertising persuasion. While educated people, who are able to appreciate the artistic and technological dimension of advertising, tend to be less prone to its persuasive meaning, and more demanding.

Another crucial indicator of advertising perception is the age rate. Older people are still used to the former lifestyle of life and way of thinking under communism, which actually means having no lifestyle and the surrender of independent thinking. Since they were brought up with the totalitarian system making decisions on their behalf, they find it difficult to accept abstract messages which require interpretation. Productions targeted at these groups of people have to be realistic, simple, and clear. Multivalent or symbolic adverts might be directed only to a younger audience, as older generations do not want to cope with the uneasy challenge of ambiguous jokes, horror scenes or any kind of obscurity. The audience between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five treats advertisement as the integral element of TV broadcasting and is more open to its innovations (the best example can be the sales campaign of Frugo juice). These group had contact with commercial mass-media culture since their youth.

Marketing research looking for historical and sociological background of a society has a chance to affect positively the success of sales campaigns. However. in Poland, marketing agencies still have problems understanding differences between targeting groups. They mostly ground their knowledge on stereotypical image of a Polish receiver. It means that again the majority of receivers are fit into a stereotype based on statistical data and the results of polling surveys. As it can be perceived through the examination of adverts, the most typical Polish consumer is: anti-feminists, materialistic, traditional, romantic, family-oriented, and lacking an abstract sense of humour. There are plenty of examples of advertisements which overuse these statistically derived features; they take for granted the acceptance of the typical audience and what is (unfortunately) not surprising, they rarely fail. One of these is the latest advert for Okocim beer, targeted at young men between the ages of twenty five and forty who have an average family life, average income and simple needs, in other words, polling stereotypes. The advert shows a husband who cannot stand his wife’s nagging and decides to escape from the flat for a glass of beer and discovers kindred spirits with similar complaints in the pub. The image of a woman presented in this advert continues the viscous stereotype of "the little woman" – a silly, boring nag from whom a "real man" should escape from time to time. The producer simply used the deeply-rooted topos of "male rationality vs. female stupidity", and through denigrating women, gained the approbation of most of the male audience.

It can be said that in such a case the audience is given what it deserves, which means that advertising only reflects the nature of the society. The aim of this advertisement is to imitate life in terms of what is known or instinctively felt by people. Producers use images which have a superficial resemblance to reality in order to create a pseudo-world which looks better than the monotone surroundings of the customer, who certainly cannot escape from his wife through the magic hole in the wall. By using stereotypes advertising not only tries to imitate reality, but, what is more dangerous, it also has the power to mould it. Gillian Dyer seems to confirm this saying:

But at the same time, as the critic claims, the ad distorts reality; it uses stereotypes and simplifications which lead to the perpetuation of schematic beliefs and prejudices such as gender discrimination, class differentiation, all too common in Polish advertising.

Advertising dictates needs which are connected to the deepest and primitive desires in people. Having such a strong influence on social life, it could foster positive attitudes and progressive thinking; it could focus more on the art of gracious living than the vulgar trappings of material success, but actually very rarely does. An illustration to this can be an advert of bank services, which won an award in the last advertising competition in Poland (Zlote Orly 2000). This advert attempts to reach customers with the tempting picture of luxury and independence embodied in the image of the a large azure swimming-pool. For many decades the private swimming pool was a symbol of affluence for most Polish people who saw them in Western soap-operas and kitchy realistic dramas. A customer, taking the message mimetically, will buy the offer of the bank under the influence of this vivid symbol of opulence. Even though the client may never own a swimming pool, s/he is duped into feeling enriched by being the member of this bank. Thus a stereotypical, surface understanding of richness, although so old-fashioned, banal and naive, can be still valid for Polish society.

This morbid effect, quite common in advertising all over the world, is caused by the use of inadequate means to obtain an accurate picture of the viewing public. The results of polling surveys establish the stereotyped picture of the society which is then translated into commercial images, and, as follows, reinforce stereotypes already present in the consciousness of the audience. A relationship between reality and advertisement might be considered in terms of the following sylogism: Polish advertisements are simple because the society is simple, but the society is simple because advertisements foster simplification. It is a kind of a vicious circle which cannot be broken without courage on the part of the produces to undertake a risk of novelty. Certainly, such an endeavour should be grounded on a sound and thorough knowledge of society it seeks to represent, not only on the results of polling. In avoiding the linguistic and historical inaccuracies endemic to polling, advertising could become a sensitive indicator of customers’ real needs. Of paramount importance, advertising could inform Poles about themselves, as well as make them open to the growing global tendencies of transcending stereotypical ways of thinking. These shortcomings of marketing research are characteristic not only for Polish advertising but to all countries where the tradition of marketing research is not long. Unfortunately, Polish advertising still appeals to the "common knowledge" of a consumer who is assessed through answers to questions reflecting the traditional opinions of clients and producers. This creates a mechanical picture of the audience, which is very rarely exposed to a metaphorical, ambiguous, or humorous messages within advertising. Although Polish advertising is now at the highest technological level, its creative potential is too often limited, literal, even primitive. Advertisers in Poland say that their productions must be conservative because they cannot afford a risk of financial failure. Clarity of social codes guarantees returns to clients and advertisers.

Neither Polish marketing departments nor polling agencies research Polish culture, history, economics or politics as one area in attempting to gauge audience’s reactions and preferences. It should be remembered that the viewer’s consciousness mirrors his/her collective heritage, and advertising research ought not to divide it into separate disciplines. Even though the audience might experience this linkage subconsciously, they still do so in reference to the entire background that formed their present reality. It is highly likely that the interdisciplinary research could broaden the knowledge not only of advertisers, who would be then able to create more positively influential advertising that serves the real needs of people in a changing society, but could also inform the audience about itself.

Figure 1. Source from: "Aida-Media" 1999, no 8; 36.

Figure 2. Source from: O.Orbaniuk, Struktura czynnikowa postaw wobec reklamy telewizyjnej, "Czasopismo Psychologiczne" 1999, v.5, no 3: 278.

Figure 3. Source from P.Wasilewski, ed., Pionierzy i tytani polskiej reklamy, Kraków,1999:186.

Figure 4. from: "Aida-Media" 1999, no 8: 36.