In 1988 Arthur Bell & Sons initiated an advertising campaign on hoardings and in the colour supplements of the broadsheet press, which was of the greatest interest to students of how signs operate in society. The contents of each individual advertisement altered but the form remained constant – a kind of trompe l’oeil realism best exemplified by a certain tradition in American painting which reached its popular apotheosis in the work of Norman Rockwell (1894–1978). Each advert depicted a shelf-cum-bookcase (and, in one case, a pinboard) carrying objects with Scottish associations: a Balmoral bonnet; antique copies of the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832); historic golf balls of the period 1850– 1905; an old Scots postcard; an antique microscope beside a copy of Sir Alexander Fleming (1881–1955)'s book on penicillin; part of the manuscript for Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47)'s The Hebrides overture (1830– 32); tickets for a Scotland versus France rugby match; the hilt of a claymore; and so on. The single recurrent item in each advert was a bottle of Bell's Extra Special Scotch Whisky.

The strategy of the campaign was clear. Bell's whisky was consistently located among objects which signified, most obviously, ‘Scotland’, but which also signified non-nationally specific ideas such as venerable old age, tradition and a certain kind of comfortable living, thereby transferring those qualities, by association, to the whisky itself. This cluster of meanings was enhanced by the advertisements being painted rather than photographed. While rendered in a highly realistic style, the advertisements, by bearing all the signs of the process of easel painting, were located in yet another discourse (that of High Art) and thus further reinforced the campaign's central appeal to discourses of age and tradition.

What interested students of signification about the Bell's campaign was what could be called its semiotic overkill, its piling, one on top of another, of every conceivable emblem which might signify the conjunction of ‘venerable’ and ‘Scottish’. Redundancy, the process of offering more channels of meaning than are strictly required for any given message to be understood by its intended recipient, is a feature of most sign systems, but seldom can redundancy have been carried further than in the Bell's campaign, which corrals emblems from virtually every discourse within which Scotland and the Scots have been signified, historically speaking.