One method of limiting liability used in every type, although not in every instance of civic advertising is interpellation, or hailing. Overtly used as an attention getter, through direct eye contact, and use of the word you, to pull the viewer into the scene as if the spokesperson were speaking directly to and about them. Hailing serves a dual use through such personalization, because if the advertisement spoke directly to the individual about a problem, the individual spoken to must be somehow responsible for the solution. The result of this tactic was that individual misperception made people complicit in their own subordination, and thus agreeable participants. As Rutherford explained, hegemony is not just about power, but about power that is routine, institutionalized, organized, and generally accepted in short legitimate power or authority.
One of Rutherfords examples of hailing concerned re-education campaigns designed to boost productivity and efficiency by targeting the whole of the workforce individually through the 1973-1976 Sign Your Work advertisements that scolded labor in general by urging individual workers to keep jobs in America by taking pride in their efforts, and asking them if they would be happy to autograph their daily labors. President Fords [
] WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign was also popular with business interests. Both of these advertisements removed any accountability for unemployment or the state of the economy from government or the business sector by making the individual directly responsible for the condition of both.
Other examples of advertising campaigns that made use of hailing to affix responsibility to individuals rather than larger actors involved in a problem include the Chief Iron Eyes Cody anti litter campaign that was highly successful in its bid to attach pollution on individual litterbugs rather than industrial waste, and the Smokey the Bear campaign that cautioned campers and smokers to be aware of their actions, but without similar cautions to the logging industry.
Hailing works to privatize via a double maneuver: the conversion of the collective crisis into a personal problem and of the social issue into a moral ill. This transformation works to remove culpability from moneyed powers that would object to their identification as agents of the given crisis in expensive ways and to place responsibility on individuals who cannot as ably censor the advertisers or punish the news media for objectionable content. The advocacy ad endeavored to make problems personal and moral, ensuring that any blame stuck to the individual so that any solution depended upon individual action. It follows that those individual solutions requiring collective action should be financed individually, through specific taxes, or, optimally, through legislation that requires the individual purchase of corrective measures.
