Social inclusion reflected in the images of modern advertising

Today’s rapid transformation of the social landscape, coupled with expansion of the media space and intensive digitalization in various areas of public life, focuses humanitarian research on overcoming the problem of alienation, rejection, and intolerant attitude towards the Other. Inclusion in a broad sense is a large-scale process that penetrates various spheres of life of modern society, to which advertising can also be attributed. At the same time, the topic of inclusive advertising, as well as the term itself, is a lacuna in Russian-language philosophical and interdisciplinary research. The purpose of the article is to outline the contours of inclusive transformations that are related to advertising mechanisms, and to put forward a typology of advertising based on the use of images of ‘special’ people. The analysis of examples of advertising communication attempts to identify trends of social transformations in this specific segment. Such an analysis might help to apply positive experience of inclusion in Russia, using prerequisites for inclusion both in reality and in the media, where advertising belongs. The article dwells upon the concept of visual normalization which acts at the superindividual level of reality construction, supported and shared by communities through visuality, including advertising. The paper allows for drawing certain conclusions regarding a possible inversion of values in consumer society in connection with proliferation of inclusive advertising; it is resumed that traditional utopianism, idealization of a person and a product inherent in advertising, as well as dystopism, focusing on negative phenomena that is typical of the genre of social advertising, give way to advertising without prejudice, based on the use of representative images that convey the diversity of modern society.