Consumer sign

I think "consumer sign" in the following contexts somehow means "consumer advertising". Am I right?

Contexts:

#1. I have already noted that appropriation from documentary or reportage photography was the driving force behind the 1991–1992 Shock of Reality campaign in which, almost as if to deliberately up the ante, Toscani restored the consumer sign to some sort of historical specificity by deploying recordings of real events as a way of ‘using advertising budgets to do something a little more useful’. Moreover, in addressing social issues in a direct and contentious way through images that circulated in the public arena, the Shock of Reality campaign – and the advertisement depicting David Kirby in particular – came to function as activist art.

#2. In effect, Koons’s choice of advertising images for Luxury and Degradation was both obvious and astute and, together with the decanters, seemed to deliver a critique of traditional advertising that supports Baudrillard’s censorious view of the obscene promiscuity and proliferation of consumer signs. In reconfiguring the advertisements in paint and recontextualising them as works of art, Koons rescued them from their everyday circulation and held them up at a critical distance for new scrutiny – as Marcus Harvey and Sarah Lucas were to do with their appropriations from tabloid journalism.