Thomas Frank. The conquest of cool

The text is taken from the bestseller "The conquest of cool" by Thomas Frank.
Text should give you a starting point for your further thinking and creations.



ADVERTISING AS CULTURAL CRITICISM:
BILL BERNBACH VERSUS THE MASS SOCIETY

     Looking back across forty years, the hyper-rational, science-dazzled Madison Avenue of the 1950s, with its ponderous bureaucracy and its armies of suburban commuters, seems to have been more a bizarre aberration than the advanced and enlightened place of wise consensus its apologists believed it to be. Admen today, although historical judgment is hardly their forte, look back at the rule-bound preachments of Reeves and Ogilvy with a kind of horror: if they study those pronouncements at all, it is to remind them of what they must never do. In other eras, the values and symbols of the industry have usually been the reverse of what they were during the 1940s and 1950s; the business's heroes a series of brazen rule-breakers in touch with the anarchic power of the carnivalesque, its villains the dead-weight yes-men. Tales of workplace madness have been particularly prominent in industry lore in recent years: a full-page newspaper ad placed in 1995 by the employees of the ultracreative Chiat/Day agency remembers Jay Chiat as a man who would "cut off a client's tie if he thinks it's ugly" and who "taught us to squash conventionality like ripe fruit"; Randall Rothenberg's 1995 account of ultracreative Wieden & Kennedy, makers of Nike advertising, details their office basketball playing, their officially sanctioned eccentricity, and at one point has agency principle Dan Wieden instructing his employees that the agency works like "a slime mold.... we don't do things with what appears to be order." Raymond Rubicam, founder of Young & Rubicam, obtained his first job in advertising by exploding angrily at a rude, pompous boss. The manic 1930s adman J. Sterling Getchell was notorious for his accelerated pace of living, his reckless personal behavior, and his defiance of clients. He mistrusted "science" and, according to one employee, "composure was against the rule" at his agency.' Admen have long served symbolically as über-entrepreneurs, eulogists of capitalism's endless cycles of change, its celebration of success, its scorn for failure. Their industry, as nearly every account of it not written during the 1950s agrees, tends to celebrate difference and encourage discontent, not to squelch them.' After all, the slogan of Young & Rubicam has always been "Resist the Usual."

     But during the 1950s, advertising was marked by what Jackson Lears calls "containment of carnival," a powerful effort to suppress the industry's impulse toward difference under a stifling vision of managerial order. In the 1960s, this vision was turned on its head. Advertising narratives suddenly idealized not the repressed account man in gray flannel, but the manic, unrestrained creative person in offbeat clothing. The world of advertising was no longer bureaucratic and placid with scientism; but artistic and dysfunctional, a place of wild passions, broken careers, fear, drunkenness, and occasional violence.

     The ads produced by the anarchic figures who led what came to be called the "creative revolution" broke decisively with the stilted, idealized, cliche-ridden style of the 1950s. A clean minimalism replaced complex layouts cluttered with different product claims. Humor, wit, and stylistic elegance returned from the advertising oblivion to which they had been exiled by deadly-serious USP scientism. But the ads of the creative revolution not only differed from those of the gray flannel past: they were openly at war with their predecessors. What distinguished the advertising of the 1960s was its acknowledgment of and even sympathy with the mass society critique. It mocked the empty phrases and meaningless neologisms that characterized the style of the 1950s. It deftly punctured advertising's too-rosy picture of American life and openly admitted that consuming was not the wonder-world it was cracked up to be. It sympathized with people's fears about conformity and their revulsion from artificiality and packaged pleasure. It pandered to public distrust of advertising and dislike of admen. Comparing one brand to another and finding it lacking was and is a routine advertising technique; in the sixties, advertising actively compared a new, hip consumerism to an older capitalist ideology and left the latter permanently discredited.

     It is a curious quirk of sixties historiography that, when running through the list of seismic shifts (in music, literature, movies, youth culture) that gave the decade its character, annalists never include advertising. And yet, given advertising's immense presence in American public space, the big change in the attitude and language of advertising must be counted as one of the primary features distinguishing the cultural climate of the sixties from that of the fifties. Read as a whole, the best advertising of the sixties constitutes a kind of mass-culture critique in its own right, a statement of alienation and disgust, of longing for authenticity and for selfhood that ranks with books like Growing Up Absurd and movies like The Graduate. The difference between the advertising critique and the others, though, is the crucial point: for the new Madison Avenue, the solution to the problems of consumer society was-more consuming.

COUNTERCULTURE / CONSUMER CULTURE

      The use of youth culture and youth imagery in advertising was not, of course, an entirely new thing in the 1960s. It had appeared extensively, if sporadically, since the 1920s. But "youth" marketing has always been a little confusing. Much of it has indeed been designed to speak to young people. But even more frequently, "youth" has served as a marketing symbol, an abstraction of commercial speech, a consuming vision for Americans of all ages. Obviously, the actual "youth market," the vast number of consumers under thirty, or twenty-five, or twenty-one, or nineteen (depending on the definition at hand) was important to admen in the sixties, and the demographic significance of the baby boom has been amply recognized by cultural historians. What is less frequently recognized is the basic marketing fact that "youth" had a meaning and an appeal that extended far beyond the youth market proper. This point is driven home again and again in the trade press of the era: The imagery and language of youth can be applied effectively to all sorts of products marketed to all varieties of people, because youth is an attractive consuming attitude, not an age-an attitude that was preeminently defined by the values of the counterculture. By "youth," Madison Avenue meant hip, often expressed with psychedelic references, talk of rebellion, and intimations of free love.

      Youth markets come and youth markets go; so do youth styles and youth movements, and sometimes without ever drawing the attention of a single adman. But this one was different-and not merely in terms of its size. When creative admen looked at the counterculture, they saw what they chose to see. The industry's privileging of the antimaterialist youth over their conformist brethren-of the hip over the square-marked a crucial step in the development of a new ideology of consumption that arose with the Creative Revolution. With simple black-and-white photographs, gentle humor, and straightforward-sounding copy, DDB had sold Volkswagens as a solution to the ills of mass society; now admen were discovering a ready-made symbol for the cultural operation Bill Bernbach had taught them to perform. In the eyes of the American ad industry, the counterculture was special-it appeared to be a broad social affirmation of the very values that had launched the admen themselves into the new era. The counterculture seemed to have it all: the unconnectedness which would allow consumers to indulge transitory whims; the irreverence that would allow them to defy moral puritanism; and the contempt for established social rules that would free them from the slow-moving, buttoned-down conformity of their abstemious ancestors. In the counterculture, admen believed they had found both a perfect model for consumer subjectivity, intelligent and at war with the conformist past, and a cultural machine for turning disgust with consumerism into the very fuel by which consumerism might be accelerated.

     "Youth" was a posture available to all in the sixties. Admen clearly believed that the marketing potential of youth culture far transcended the handful of people who were actively involved in the counterculture: as Mary Wells Lawrence recalls, "It didn't matter what age you were-you had to think young." Youth was the paramount symbol of the age, whether in movies, literature, fashion, or television. For admen "youth" was a sort of consumer fantasy they would make available to older Americans. Jerry Fields noted in a Madison Avenue article entitled "Think Young" that appeared in February, 1965, that "the maintenance of a young, fresh appearance has become a primary concern of our population which looks back wistfully at their thirty-fifth birthday."

     In 1967, the magazine quoted an adman who noted that "the youth market has become the American market. It now includes not only everyone under 35, but most people over 35." Edward Gorman, sales and merchandise manager of J. C. Penney was reported in Advertising Age in 1966 to have said that the youth market not only encompasses teens, but everyone up to 35 and "most of the people older than that." He explained that the appeal to the young is heard by many who are in their 30s and 40s. They even buy the cars that were designed for the young. "Like the Pontiac GTO," Mr. Gorman said.

     The name given by admen to the market thus targeted was the "young thinking," a rubric under which advertising people could classify almost everybody. "To be young is to be with it," ruminated Martin R. Miller in a 1968 editorial in Merchandising Week, the journal of the electronic appliance industry. "Everywhere, our mass media push psychedelia with all its clothing fads, so-called `way-out' ideas, etc. Youth is getting the hard sell." And the benefits from this were clear to his readers: "the fountain of youth has spilled over into new areas and is revitalizing the buying habits of some older, more affluent customers." A 1970 Business Week article reached similar conclusions. Noting the across-the-board effectiveness of the young-thinking theme, the magazine predicted that "The 1970s promise to become the decade when youth becomes a state of mind and overflows all traditional age boundaries." And "whether they are marketing to youth or to youthfulness, businessmen find the prospect exhilarating."

      Madison Avenue's vision of the counterculture was notoriously unconvincing to many who actually took part in the movement-and for a very simple reason: they were not necessarily the primary target of such campaigns. If youth was an attitude rather than an actual age, it would have to be expressed in a manner understandable to much older people. Thus, through the proliferation of psychedelia, Milton Glaser imitations, and "yellow submarine art"; all the photographs of self-assured young iconoclasts and body-painted women, advertisers were careful to speak a language that sounded hip but got a message across to young and old alike. The size of the "young-in-spirit" market, art director and Advertising Age columnist Stephen Baker counseled, made it "important that youth language is made to be understood not only by the under-aged chaps and chicks but also those who want to stop the clock and can afford to do so." A 1966 study conducted by BBDO (the "establishment" agency responsible for the Pepsi Generation) stated the facts even more directly. Images of youth were simply not appropriate for the youth market, it found: these consumers already knew they were young. Youthfulness was best used as an appeal to older consumers:

     Since the need of a "younger" image appears quite suddenly (at about 25), it should probably be kept in mind that in selling to people under 25, the "youthful" appeal may not be effective. A proper appeal to [the] youth [market] might actually emphasize a topical appeal.

      Again, the slogan "Think Young" is illustrative: consumers could not all be young, but they could all be encouraged to think as though they were, to assume the attitudes of the young revolutionaries. The function of "youth" in advertising was symbolic, an easy metaphor for a complex new consumer value-system. The really remarkable fact about co-optation isn't that Columbia records ran pseudo-hip ads in "underground" publications; it's that a vast multitude of corporations ran pseudo-hip ads in Life, Look, and Ladies Home Journal. Madison Avenue was more interested in speaking like the rebel young than in speaking to them.

     There were, of course, other symbols for the new antinomian consumerism available during the 1960s-both spies and jaded jet-setters were common before 1967. Admen settled on the counterculture as the signifier of choice for hip consumerism at least partially because they believed, contrary to the assertions of countercultural theorists like Roszak and Reich, that the hip young were good potential consumers. Despite their suspicion of advertising and material accumulation, and despite the standard claims that the movement's privileging of nonconformity and heterogeneity opposed it automatically to consumer capitalism, admen used the external markings of their culture to represent new consuming values because, admen believed, it had already internalized those consuming values. Like Christopher Lasch and Irving Howe, Madison Avenue found in the ideas of people like Jerry Rubin a continuing-even a heightened-commitment to the values and mores of the consumer society. Caught up in the frenzies of the Creative Revolution, admen looked at the counterculture and saw ... themselves.

     Madison Avenue's favorite term for the counterculture was "the Now Generation," a phrase that implied absolute up-to-dateness in every sense. It also intimated what admen felt was the young's most important characteristic as consumers: their desire for immediate gratification, their craving for the new, their intolerance for the slow-moving, the penurious, the thrifty. Admen believed they had found an entire generation given over to self-fulfillment by whatever means necessary-which would, of course, ultimately mean by shopping. Grey's John Adams made what is perhaps the bluntest statement of this perception, having been reported by Advertising Age in 1971 to have said

     There is nothing to support the contention that the youth are anti-materialistic. "They are in the peak acquisitive years," he said, "and their relative affluence enables them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level"

     In 1968, creative partisan Bob Fearon penned an impressionistic appreciation of the young for Madison Avenue. Written in a curious colloquial style that was probably meant to demonstrate his familiarity with the intricacies of youth culture, the article aims to enlighten advertising men about the tastes and anti-advertising predilections of the inscrutable young ("They talk to him. They tell him things like that. And he listens. He doesn't condemn.... And he ends up knowing.") Perhaps the most important feature of the young people Fearon discusses, despite their hotly professed antimaterialism and their suspicion of consumerism, is their heightened appetite for the new. Unlike their parents, the hip new youth are far more receptive to obsolescence; buying goods for the moment, discarding them quickly, and moving on to the next:
" When the new generation buys they want it for now. They're not interested in how long it will last."
These young people have a different idea about thrift. They have a new definition of value. They accept obsolescence. They want the new, improved version tomorrow. Very important words. New, improved. More than ever before. Everything is instant. Now. Everything is faster."

     Not surprisingly, the same texts that praised the counterculture for its questioning of conventional ways usually came around to the counterculture's single worthiest point: its revolutionizing of America's consuming ways. Older Americans had been reluctant to spend, had guarded their money jealously, would only spend on the basis of a hard, demonstrable product superiority-and sometimes not even then. It was for overturning this antiquated, depression-induced, even puritanical attitude that youth culture received its greatest plaudits. Merle Steir wrote:

     The Then Generation didn't know where its next dollar was coming from, so it paid attention to getting lots of dollars stashed away. But if you realize you are always able to make a living you begin to wonder what else you might want to do. . This is particularly true if you noticed that for all the money around older people don't appear very satisfied.... So the Now Generation says: "If I have choices, I want to be satisfied as well as housed and fed."

      This was consumerism for a new age, consumerism that began where the old variety left off-the anomie, conformity, and meaningless of plastic mass society. It was to escape these qualities, to be fully "satisfied," that the "Now Generation" would do its consuming.

      The craving for deeper satisfaction, wrote E. B. Weiss, would lead inevitably to accelerated lifestyle experimentation, something admen and businessmen generally-were anxious to encourage rather than to suppress.

      In 1971 these youngsters spent more on travel than the entire older generation spent on travel ten years ago. They spend more on stereo than their parents spent on phonographs. They may furnish their first home more simply than was true decades ago, but they will replace their initial home furnishings much sooner and much more often. Disposables-not "forevers" are their thing.... True-their lifestyles will differ on a larger scale, but isn't changing lifestyles what marketing is all about?

      American advertising took the side it did during the cultural revolution of the 1960s not simply because it wanted to sell a particular demographic, but because it found great promise in the new values of the counterculture. Conformity, other-direction, contempt for audiences, and Reevesian repetition were good neither as management styles nor as consuming models, the creative revolutionaries had proclaimed; now, it seemed, here was a broad cultural upheaval validating their vision of hip consumerism. Thus did the consumer revolt against mass society, which had begun with the selling of a sturdy car that defied obsolescence, come into its own as a movement of accelerated obsolescence.

THE USES OF HIP

      The changes in the worlds of advertising, fashion, and business in general during the sixties were a greater part of the cultural upheaval of the period than is customarily acknowledged. From the management theory of Douglas McGregor to the advertising-criticism of Bill Bernbach, leading businessmen made a deliberate attempt to smash the idealized but stagnant consensus of the postwar years, and one can trace the cultural trajectory that sixties historians describe with terms like "unraveling" and "coming apart." But from the perspective of almost forty years, the efforts of American businessmen to break the brittle conventions of the fifties seems more like a first step in the creation of a new ideology of consuming, one we live with still. Not only does hip consumerism recognize the alienation, boredom, and disgust engendered by the demands of modern consumer society, but it makes of those sentiments powerful imperatives of brand loyalty and accelerated consumption."

      It's a circular cultural operation that works through a variety of media. Mark Crispin Miller finds it in television programming, functioning to prevent the very sort of viewer elusiveness so beloved of certain cultural theorists. According to Miller, the moments of carnivalesque and patriarchy-mocking that are so typical of contemporary television are less the concessions to popular resistance that some believe them to be and more an integral part of broadcast strategy. "TV preempts derision by itself evincing endless irony," he writes.

      Thus TV co-opts that smirking disbelief which so annoyed the business titans of the Thirties.... TV protects its ads from mockery by doing all the mocking, thereby posing as an ally to the incredulous spectator. For Miller, television's pseudo-subversiveness is an essential element of the way it works. Unlike the telescreens in 1984, which demand that people revere authority (and which made up the central symbol for one of the all-time greatest installments of commodified hip, the famous commercial that introduced the Macintosh as an implement of counterhegemonic empowerment in 1984), television gains their assent by mocking authority, leaving only itself. "TV would seem to be an essentially iconoclastic medium," Miller notes; "and yet it is this inherent subversiveness toward any visible authority that has enabled TV to establish its own total rule-for it is all individuality that TV annihilates, either by not conveying it or by making it look ludicrous." One can detect the first glimmerings of this strategy of preemptive irony, of advertising that works by mocking advertising convention, in the early Volkswagen advertisements that launched the creative revolution. And, as Miller observes, this strategy has proven particularly lucrative as countercultural participants became prime middle-aged consumers in their own right:

      Through such easy irony the generation that upset the Sixties now distracts itself with an illusion of exceptionalism; for it is that generation, or its wealthiest subgroup, that maintains the spectacle today, both as its authors and as its most esteemed consumers.

      But there is another, even more fundamental cultural rationale for business's ongoing hunger for rebellion. In the battle between Warren Susman's two "moral orders," the ideology of hedonistic consumerism may have prevailed in certain public spaces, but its victory cannot alter the fact that portions of the earlier, more repressive system of values remain necessary to economic production. Daniel Bell finds in this a terrible "contradiction": the workplace still demands the earlier values of diligence and sublimation, while as consumers we are taught the opposite virtues.

      What this abandonment of Puritanism and the Protestant ethic does, of course, is to leave capitalism with no moral or transcendental ethic. It also emphasizes not only the disjunction between the norms of the culture and the norms of the social structure, but also an extraordinary contradiction within the social structure itself. On the one hand, the business corporation wants an individual to work hard, pursue a career, accept delayed gratification-to be, in the crude sense, an organization man. And yet, in its products and its advertisements, the corporation promotes pleasure, instant joy, relaxing and letting go.

     But hip consumerism resolves the "contradiction," at least symbolically. However we may rankle under the bureaucratized monotony of our productive lives, in our consuming lives we are no longer merely affluent, we are rebels. Efficiency may remain the values of daytime, but by night we rejoin the nonstop carnival of our consuming lives. As it turned out, the mass society critique was one with which American capitalism was singularly well prepared to deal-which is why it sometimes seems we will never be rid of it. Hip and square are now permanently locked together, like the images of Coke and Pepsi, in a self-perpetuating pageant of workplace deference and advertising outrage. Our celebrities are not just glamorous, they are insurrectionaries; our police and soldiers are not just good guys, they break the rules for a higher purpose. And through them and our imagined participation in whatever is the latest permutation of the rebel Pepsi Generation, we have not solved, but we have defused the problems of mass society. Impervious to criticism of any kind, and virtually without historical memory, hip has become what Norman Mailer predicted: the public philosophy of the age of flexible accumulation.