Stereotyped Utopia or Utopian Stereotype; The Imaginary World of Iranian TV Advertisements

Advertisement is one of the most important parts in any media around the world. Most of the ideas presented in peoples’ life are conveyed through advertisements. It plays a pivotal role in shaping the dominant discourse. To have an effective advertisement, producers search the ways to capture the audiences' attention. Therefore the beautification of products always is in the center of producers’ attention: they depict a utopian world through the advertisements. Thomas More who challenged the dominant discourse of his time in Utopia, introduces utopia as a place in which no misery, poverty and hate exist. In present time, advertisement tries to unite utopia and ideology. This paper will study the utopian world according to its primary definition and its changes during the time; the way that advertisement implicitly works through hegemony to implement ideology. Then, emphasizing on Iranian television advertisements in early 1390s (2010s), the research follows the issue up in an empirical and objective way. Our research takes advantage of interdisciplinary studies as an integral part of comparative literature. It also uses the new definition of text that includes any cultural product and blurs the boundary between low and high literature. Among the different scopes of advertisement, the focus of this study is on household appliances. The aim is to find the ideology behind this utopian representation and its affinities with the real life of the target audience.