This essay is adapted from my Turkish-language CultPost podcast episode, first released in December 2024. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument and examples. The advertisements discussed were broadcast in Türkiye; the cultural references are explained where necessary.

Advertising has faced sustained criticism for its representations of gender, race, age, disability, and other forms of social difference. In response, many brands now attempt to present more inclusive images. Class inequality and poverty, however, remain far less visible.

Working-class people sometimes appear in advertisements as domestic cleaners, agricultural workers, factory employees, or cheerful service providers. Yet the conditions that define their class positions—their wages, insecurity, dependence, exhaustion, and unequal relationship to ownership—are usually removed from the story. Workers may be visible while class itself disappears.

To understand this representational process, I draw on Carol J. Adams’s concept of the absent referent. Adams developed the concept in The Sexual Politics of Meat to explain how the living animal is made absent from the meat consumed by humans. The animal must disappear as a living subject before its fragmented body can be renamed and presented as food. The final product is separated from the violence that produced it.

I use the concept analogically to consider class in advertising. Poverty and labor exploitation are not equivalent to the killing of animals. The connection lies in the representational operation: the person whose experience should matter is removed from the meaning of the final image. Advertising can show workers while making the social reality of their work absent.

The Domestic Cleaner as a Comic Figure

One Turkish commercial for a household-cleaning product takes place in the carefully organized home of an affluent woman. She introduces new products to the woman employed to clean the kitchen and bathroom. The domestic worker is skeptical and prefers traditional methods. Her resistance is presented not as practical knowledge or disagreement but as a comic sign that she is old-fashioned and unable to keep pace with modern life.

For Turkish audiences, this performance recalls a familiar figure from 1990s popular television: the working-class woman whose accent, manners, lack of education, and repeated difficulties become sources of humor. International viewers may not know the specific television reference, but the hierarchy remains recognizable. The homeowner represents modernity, knowledge, purchasing power, and control. The cleaner represents an outdated world that the product will overcome.

The commercial therefore stages a class relationship between two women. One owns or controls the home and purchases the product; the other performs the physical labor. Yet the advertisement invites the audience to identify with the employer’s amused perspective. The cleaner’s expertise, exhaustion, economic dependence, and rights within the workplace remain outside the narrative.

The worker is present, but her class experience becomes the absent referent. She survives in the image mainly through comic signs. The employer’s modern and comfortable lifestyle is sustained by another woman’s labor, but advertising celebrates the first woman’s consumer choice while treating the second as part of the household scenery.

This example also demonstrates why gender cannot be examined independently of class. An advertisement may place women at the center and still reproduce an unequal relationship between them.

Tea Without Labor

A second Turkish commercial follows an urban woman who visits a tea-producing village in the eastern Black Sea region. She joins local women harvesting tea on steep green hillsides. The visitor initially struggles with the work, producing humorous scenes, while the agricultural workers appear energetic, cheerful, and perfectly adapted to their environment.

Tea occupies an important place in everyday life in Türkiye. It is consumed throughout the day and strongly associated with hospitality, sociability, and national culture. This makes the labor of tea production especially suitable for advertising stories about authenticity, nature, tradition, and community.

The problem is not that agricultural workers are shown enjoying companionship or taking pride in their work. Workers can, of course, experience joy. The problem is that joy becomes the only truth the advertisement permits. Fatigue, bodily strain, uncertain income, ownership of the land, and the workers’ position within the wider economy disappear.

Harvesting is transformed from demanding labor into a picturesque cultural tradition. The urban protagonist briefly enters this world, experiences its charming difficulty, and leaves with a story. The women who remain become guarantees of the product’s authenticity. Their smiles suggest that labor and happiness naturally coincide.

Here again, workers are essential to the commercial but absent as social subjects. Their bodies appear on screen while the economic relations surrounding their work do not. They become extensions of the landscape—signs of nature, sincerity, and contentment that add value to the commodity.

The Father-Boss and the Happy Factory

A third example is a Father’s Day commercial centered on a man who has inherited a factory after his father’s death. He walks among the employees, remembers birthdays, asks about their families, and offers assistance when someone has a problem. The factory appears as a community of affection. At the end, the owner looks at a photograph of his father and expresses gratitude for the values and life he inherited.

The advertisement connects two forms of fatherhood. The deceased father passes the company to his son, and the son becomes a symbolic father to his employees. This reflects a familiar Turkish ideal: the baba patron, or “father-boss,” imagined as protective, generous, and personally concerned with a loyal workforce.

An employer may genuinely treat workers with kindness. The difficulty arises when kindness replaces rights. In the commercial, good working conditions depend on the moral character of the owner rather than workplace democracy, collective bargaining, public regulation, or enforceable protections. Employees do not appear as people capable of making collective demands. They receive benevolence and respond with gratitude.

The family metaphor makes conflict appear unnecessary or even disloyal. A worker may negotiate with an employer, but challenging a symbolic father can look like betrayal. The language of intimacy obscures the unequal relationship between those who own the factory and those whose labor sustains it.

The company’s history is narrated through inheritance from father to son. The workers who make that inheritance economically meaningful remain in the background. Once more, the people are visible while the class relation disappears.

Aspirational Homes and White-Collar Life

Class is also obscured in advertisements featuring white-collar workers. In Türkiye, corporate employees are often described as plaza workers, a reference to the glass office towers of İstanbul’s business districts. They may possess education, professional status, and lifestyles that distinguish them culturally from industrial workers. Yet they also survive by selling their labor and can face long hours, competition, debt, performance pressure, and insecure employment.

Advertising rarely emphasizes this vulnerability. White-collar families usually inhabit enormous kitchens, spacious living rooms, landscaped gardens, and carefully designed children’s bedrooms. These homes represent an affluent ideal even when the characters are presented as ordinary middle-class consumers.

I often watch such advertisements and see almost nothing resembling the middle-class homes around me in İstanbul. The interiors do not reflect the average consumer’s present life. They present the life to which the product promises symbolic access.

Most viewers cannot acquire the house, leisure, or economic security displayed on screen, but they may be able to buy the detergent, appliance, food, banking service, or mobile plan placed inside that world. The commodity becomes a small and affordable part of an otherwise inaccessible lifestyle.

Advertising therefore translates class privilege into taste and consumption. The obstacles separating viewers from the promised life appear to be missing products rather than low wages, insecure employment, high housing costs, or inherited inequality.

Why Class Remains Difficult for Advertising

Advertising can incorporate many demands for recognition. Brands can represent women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people, older people, or people with disabilities as consumers and members of brand communities. Such visibility can matter, even when it remains commercially constrained.

Class creates a different problem because a serious class analysis quickly raises questions about ownership, wages, working conditions, unions, security, and the distribution of economic value. These questions concern the institutions that produce advertising as well as the worlds represented within it.

Commercial narratives therefore tend to individualize economic problems. The hardworking employee succeeds through determination, the poor family receives charity, the generous employer intervenes, or the right purchase provides dignity. Structural inequalities are translated into personal attitudes and moral relationships.

The alternative is not to demand that every advertisement show misery. Turning poor people into spectacles of suffering would be another form of objectification. More realistic class representation would allow workers to appear as complex people with skills, perspectives, rights, and the capacity to speak for themselves.

Critical viewing begins by asking what the advertisement has made absent. Who produced the object? Who cleans or maintains the space? Whose labor allows another character to appear modern, comfortable, and free? Which unequal relationship has been transformed into humor, sentiment, or picturesque tradition?

Advertising will continue to sell dreams. The problem begins when those dreams depend on showing workers only as service, scenery, or gratitude while making the social conditions of their lives disappear.