Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture - Softcover

McLaren, Carrie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865479879 ISBN 13: 9780865479876

Verlag: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

With the style and irreverence of Vice magazine and the critique of the corporatocracy that made Naomi Klein's No Logo a global hit, the cult magazine Stay Free!-long considered the Adbusters of the United States-is finally offering a compendium of new and previously published material on the impact of consumer culture on our lives. The book questions, in the broadest sense, what happens to human beings when their brains are constantly assaulted by advertising and corporate messages. Most people assert that advertising is easily ignored and doesn't have any effect on them or their decision making, but Ad Nauseam shows that consumer pop culture does take its toll.

In an engaging, accessible, and graphically appealing style, Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky (as well as contributors such as David Cross, The Onion's Joe Garden, The New York Times's Julie Scelfo, and others) discuss everything from why the TV program CSI affects jury selection, to the methods by which market researchers stalk shoppers, to how advertising strategy is like dog training. The result is an entertaining and eye-opening account of the many ways consumer culture continues to pervade and transform American life.

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Edited by Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky

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Ad Nauseam

A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture

By Carrie McLaren, Jason Torchinsky

Faber and Faber, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-86547-987-6

Contents

Ad Nauseam, 
Copyright, 
Foreword, 
Preface, 
1.: How Advertising Works, 
2.: How Consumer Culture Shapes People, 
3.: Consumer Culture and Society, 
4.: Behind the Scenes, 
5.: Down the Memory Hole, 
6.: Adventures in Medialand, 
Postscript, 
Notes, 
Acknowledgments, 

CHAPTER 1

How Advertising Works

The Evolution of Advertising

Ads are predatory. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as some of my favorite cats are predatory. But ads are not only predatory, they're mercenary: hired guns paid to hunt down our desires and bag them for dollars. Like any good predator, advertising evolves along with its prey. Ads in their primeval form merely needed to alert a potential buyer of what was being vended — a shoe or a dismembered pig, for instance. Just enough to get the idea across. As competition grew, so did the need to create demand; hence modern advertising was born. If we start the modern era of advertising around the late 1800s, an evolutionary path can be plotted and expressed as a series of broad caricatures.

The Polite Pedant (Late 1800s to 1900s)

Print ads from this early era have the tone of a helpful, avuncular acquaintance, someone who is humble about taking up your precious time but feels compelled to describe in great, tedious detail the relative benefits of a particular product. You can almost imagine him, dressed soberly but very dapper, hat in hand, earnestly and a touch apologetically enumerating every possible item of worth about face soap or bolts of cloth. You'd likely smile and nod, not offended, with every fiber of your soul fighting off the warm blanket of sleep.

The Expert (1920s to 1940s)

It didn't take advertisers long to realize that a well-reasoned argument was still just that: an argument. And arguments can be lost, which begs the question: Why do something unless you know you can win? Why bother presenting facts to make a case when you can neatly circumvent all that messy reason and appeal directly to emotion? With the popularization of Pavlov, Freud, and the nascent field of psychoanalysis, advertisers realized that you can give people reasons to do things that don't really make sense, as long as they play to a person's deep-seated drives and insecurities. It's kind of like being able to hack into brains: say the right thing, from a position of authority (perhaps wearing a white lab coat), and you can create an army of self-conscious zombies, ready to buy anything they can to get rid of their horrible breath or coarse hands.

Pretty as a Picture (1940s to 1950s)

People aren't that crazy about reading long blocks of text about products. Better to show them! Advertising, while never afraid of images, starts to realize their true power. Make them big and colorful. And don't focus on the product; focus on the consumer, who is by now enjoying the wild, unrestrained happiness that can come only with choosing a quality drain unclogger or a pair of insoles.

The Double Agent (1960s to 2000s)

Blatant advertising styles were becoming a joke, but where there's a joke, there's laughter; and where there's laughter, there's either a recording of laughter or, better yet, people — people who can be made to buy things! So why be laughed at when you can laugh with.

And so was born a new persona for ads: an intelligent friend, a pal who's a bit smarter, hipper, and more attractive than you but likes you anyway. He tells you, in a witty way, why you might want to buy a Volkswagen as both of you laugh at those ridiculous Chevy ads with their smitten bimbos and tailfins. The fools, you and your pal laugh, right before he suggests what kind of vodka a young, urbane sophisticate such as yourself may enjoy. The Double Agent is cunning. He's genuinely funny and engaging, but deep down he only wants you for one thing.

The Mystic (1990s to 2000s)

Recent changes have made ads the most effective consumer-consuming creations ever known. Building on over a century of experimentation, ads now work from deep within your mind. Ads no longer need to engage in such mundane activities as showing the product, telling what it does, or making any claims of value. Sellers catch more prey by blurring the boundaries between advertising and not-advertising. Product placement, viral marketing, and friend-to-friend shilling is all part of the new form — a being that has reduced itself down to a single cell that permeates the air you breathe, the sounds around you, the classrooms you endure, and the movies you watch. It's a fully ingrained part of the fabric of life.

The Psychology of Advertising WE'RE ALL APES

In order to understand how advertising works, we need to first realize how it doesn't work. Many people assume that commercials succeed or fail based on whether viewers rush out to buy the particular product. They assume that if they don't like an ad, can't remember the brand, or consider the whole affair inane, they're not affected by it. All of these assumptions are based on an outdated model of advertising as a form of persuasion. But advertisers discovered long ago that persuasion is terribly limited in its ability to push product. Persuasion engages rational thought. When your potential consumers start thinking, they're as likely to consider the bills they need to pay, the crap they can't fit in the closet, the calories they need to count, or the appointment they're going to miss. In other words, thinking consumers buy less. Persuasion is also a relatively slow process. In a sped-up world with zillions of ads competing for attention, there's no time for it.

The vast majority of consumer advertising today, then, isn't designed to convince anyone of anything. Rather, advertising relies primarily on the power of suggestion (or association) to create a psychological link between some favorable image and one's product. Nike = inspiring athletics; Lexus = luxury; Marlboro = manly. Unlike persuasion, suggestion doesn't require our active attention. If some guy in a suit said to you, "Wear these Nike shoes and you'll be like an athlete," you'd never take him seriously. Such a claim is verifiably true or false, and the question of whether something is true or false prompts that troublesome habit of thinking ("Is it true?" "What does that mean?").

Suggestion, however, inspires belief by not asking for it, by averting the questioning process. Nike's ad agency produces jawdroppingly beautiful images and emotionally rich, provocative commercials punctuated by contained moments of rebellion. Repeated often enough, the linking of Nike with inspiration and triumphant athleticism gets drilled into your brain, becoming more accessible than your father's birthday.

The basis for association is Pavlovian. We consumers are like dogs who dance excitedly when someone pulls the leash out. Advertisers take greatest advantage of us by capitalizing on our animal behaviors — and by "animal" I mean rooted in our biology, behaviors that are innate. Much of what we consider to be advertising clichés are strategies based in these biological drives: the human appetites for food and sex (not necessarily in that order). I'm talking...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0865479879
• ISBN 13: 9780865479876
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 366
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Henry Holt; https://henryholt.com/; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien