With her book, 'Decoding advertisements', she explores and analyses what can be 'seen' in advertisements. Believing it's an "inevitable part of everyones lives..." stating that you don't even have to be 'directly involved in the media, it's all around us". That images within our urban surroundings are 'inescapable'.
Williamson states that advertisements have their own independent reality, becoming separate from the material medium which carries it. She agree's that the main function is to sell thing, but that it has another, to create structures of meaning. In order to sell us something advertisers make the properties of a product 'mean' and connote something to us.
She suggests that advertisements provide a structure, transforming the language of objects to that of people.
"Advertising sets up connections between certain types of consumers and certain products."
Using signifiers and what is signified to create the connection."Taking the sign for what it signifies, the thing for the feeling."
Williamson believes people and objects become interchangeable, advertising is selling more than just good, but by providing a structure, in which people and goods are interchangeable, are selling people, themselves.
"People are identified by what they consume rather than what they produce."
We are no longer an image of our skills but by our materials and commodities. She states we are made to believe we can rise or fall within society by what we can afford, and can't, obscuring actual class basis. Class difference has lost meaning. Apparently we can now purchase our place in society. As we feel a need to belong, the mass media provide this 'Place to belong' to an extent.
Overall Williamson sums up advertising as giving good a social meaning.
Reference - Williamson, J, 'Decoding Advertisements', 1978
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