Advertising and the Consumer Culture

1. Advertising and the Consumer Culture Twenty-First-Century Promotional and Consumer Culture, Culture Jamming and Resistance Erik Chevrier November 22nd, 2018

2. Culture Jamming • AdBusters • Buy Nothing Day (November 23rd) • Optative Theatrical Laboratories • Buy Nothing Day Culture Jam • Dov Charney • Coppertone Jam • Global Invisible Theatre • (b)Ad Trucks • Golden Billboard Award • News Piece • Chartwells Jam • New Scheduled Meal Plan

3. Empowering Consumers (Holm) • James Vicary – Subliminal Advertising ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ – Sham experiment • Active Advertising Audience • Agency • Encoding (production) – Decoding (consumption) Model • Producers of meaning within their cultural context • Affected by technological, social, and economic contexts • There is no correct meaning • Audience can: • Accept it as a producer intended • Reject it • Negotiate with it to accept certain elements while contesting, questioning or refusing others • Audiences resist advertising by: • Ideological resistance – an audience’s rejection of an ad because of the assumed worldview it embodies. • Lifestyle resistance – an audience’s rejection of the world presented in the ad, particularly in terms of the desirability of the values presented (ethics & pragmatic values) • Modes of address resistance – an audience’s rejection of the tone of the ad.

4. Uses and Gratifications (Holm) • Elihu Katz – Pioneering work about that people do with media (not what media does to people) • Satisfy needs and wants • Pleasures and benefits • Conscious choice to engage • Rational self-interest in their pursuit of satisfaction (except in understanding how acts of consumption lead to satisfaction) • Empowerment • Autonomous choice • Cultural desires

5. What An Audience Gets Out of Advertising (Holm) • Information about products and/or services • Learn about fashion, trends, etc. • Advertising is an informative medium that provides the means for its audiences to successfully navigate the complicated world of contemporary capitalism • Although most ads do not provide any real information about products/services • Information vs meaning based model • Meaning Transfer • Symbolic equivalence • Requires active participation in unlocking meaning • Uses and gratifications (people get cultural information by negotiating meaning from ads) • Constructing Consumer Identities • Product of intersectional social forces and dynamic theory of construction and re-construction • When consumption services as a means to build identity, advertising becomes central to this process • Audiences use advertisements to determine and access social meanings of commodities and obtain gratification by bringing those social meaning into their construction of identity through purchase and display • Constructing Consumer Communities • Members are conscious of their connection with each other and differences with others • Members engage in shared activities based on the celebration of the brand • Members experienced sense of social obligation and assist one another in use of branded product

6. Active Audiences Online (Holm) • Cult of Mac • Apple.wikia.com • Immaterial Labour Time • Can backfire

7. Twenty-First Century Promotional and Consumer Culture (Jhally, et al.) • What power does advertising have to influence us? • Compare advertising now to advertising of the past, does advertising have more, less (or the same), influence as before?

8. Twenty-First Century Promotional and Consumer Culture (Jhally, et al.) • 2006 – The year of the consumer (Ad Age), You are the magazine person of the year (Time) • Mara Einstein – It’s a myth that people are being empowered by ‘new media’ • The best minds of my generation are thinking about new ways to make people click ads. • The focus should not be on addressing whether advertising still has power, instead we should focus on how its (advertising) is uniquely manifested in culture and society – as the privileged discourse through and about objects.

9. The Millennia Marketplace (Jhally, et al.) • Millennial • Refers to an age cohort born on the 1980s and 1990s – those who came of age around or shortly after the turn of the new millennium. • A.K.A – Generation Y • Brought together by commercial forces and media • Not just a descriptive term but is inseparable from the marketplace. It was socially constructed by advertisers. • It does not describe a ‘real person’ but a generalization of a market demographic • Digital natives (grew up with internet) • Do not typically use traditional media forms as much as previous generations (difficult to reach) • Talk with not at – pull rather than push advertising • Media and advertising savvy – ‘knowing wink’ techniques • Influencer, guerrilla, user-generated content, and word of mouth work best on Millennials rather than traditional ads • Important parallels of ‘Millennials’ and ‘Generation X’ • They were both invented to describe people who are at an important juncture in life where their spending power increases and brand loyalty is forged – Late adolescence and early adulthood. • No agreement of exact definition of these categories • Attributes overlap

10. Examples of Campaigns Directed at Millennials (Jhally, et al.) • Jeep Renegade • Tiffany & Co. – Snapchat Geofilter • Ads can cause word-of-mouth – Old Spice

11. Ethical Brands, Cause-Related Marketing and Politically Charged Advertising (Jhally, et al) • How do we know if a company is a socially responsible company? • Are companies actually responsible or is there a major ‘greenwashing’ effort? • How can we measure corporate social responsibility? • Should we fall for the corporate social responsibility trap?

12. Ethical Brands, Cause-Related Marketing and Politically Charged Advertising (Jhally, et al) • Monsanto is recognized as a socially responsible company • Monsanto still uses chemicals that were used to kill people, but in our food • Is Round-Up safe to drink? • Farmer won lawsuit against Monsanto – Glyphosate causes cancer • The World According to Monsanto • Monsanto is now owned by Bayer who used to be part of I.G. Farben, manufacturing poisonous gas for concentration camps during the World War. • What does corporate responsibility really mean? • Environmental Social Governance (ESG) scores

13. Ethical Brands, Cause-Related Marketing and Politically Charged Advertising (Jhally, et al) How do corporations use-cause related marketing to influence consumers? • Red Campaign • Jimmy Kimmel • Red Campaign Shopathon • Bike Ride with Bono • Red Song • Bono & Oprah News • Bono on Oprah • Brand-cause fit? • Bell Let’s Talk • What other cause-related marketing campaigns exist? • What can people do and what are positive and negative, intended and unintended consequences? • Consumer boycotts • Voting with dollars • Supporting ethical brands and activist brands • Backlash – Pepsi Kendall Jenner

14. Ethical Brands, Cause-Related Marketing and Politically Charged Advertising (Jhally, et al) • Criticisms erupt when • Consumers disagree with the cause • When brands and causes do not align • Politically charged promotion seems disingenuous or opportunistic • Einstein – Genuine political empowerment cannot come from commodities and instead requires us to step out of the consumer subject position. • Aronczyk – When corporations act like social movements, forms of collective action are made flexible, weak and contingent. • Corporations give private solutions to public problems • Dean – Illusion of participation and political action may actually relieve those in formal politics of having to respond to citizens.

15. Brand, Community and Publics • Cause-related marketing demonstrates two important trends: • Brands, not commodities are at the center of advertising campaigns • Brands have become abstract entities far removed from their earliest function – identification and differentiation • Brands are symbols – They became objectifications of a particular way of living with commodities, a particular ethos that permeates relations between people and goods, and between people and other people insofar as those relations are mediated by goods. • Reification and commodity fetishism

16. Promotional Culture • Nations and countries are making themselves brands • Incredible India • Public institutions are brands – Universities • Universities are almost always targeted at the individual level • Making my future, invest in yourself, making my mark on the world, etc. • Self-Branding • A form of self-presentation singularly focused on attracting attention and acquiring cultural and monetary value. • Influencers • Micro-celebrities • Promotion(alism) • Broader than advertising • A kind of speech seeking some kind of self-advantaging exchange, and often the thing promoting is the thing promoted. • Must be contextualized into the larger political economy of neoliberalism, a liquid, flexible and precarious state where individuals must ultimately take responsibility for themselves.

17. Group Projects • For those of you who are not doing a ‘paper’ as referenced in the course outline, I need: • a written document outlining your involvement in the project, • your specific outputs and qualitative and/or quantitative measurements for our deliverables, • a timeline for the completion of your part of the project, and • a delineation of your grade expectations in relation to your qualitative/quantitative outputs. • This will serve as a contract for your grade so that our expectations are made clear. • If you prefer to use what was outlined in the syllabus, you can still take that option, others must provide me the information above. • Checking in, how is everything coming along?

18. Have a Great Night • Questions or concerns? • Next class – Chapter 10 of Holm. I will also be discussing John Holloway’s theories in Crack Capitalism and relating this to Marx’s Labour Theory of Value, Commodity Fetishism and Reification. • We will also discuss the documentary, Art and Copy