Transcript 340mc advertising in consumer culture

M98
ADVERTISING
Week 1: Captains of
Consciousness
John Keenan
[email protected]
The blog
http://m98mc.wordpress.com
Assignment
• Design a campaign for a made-up brand
• Analyse the campaign with theory.
Deadline
• M98MC: 2 May 2014
Hello. Who are you and what do
you know?
Things you need to know this
week
• Advertising’s ability to give objects and
services meaning in order to sustain
capitalism.
• What consumer culture is.
‘Find some common desire, some widespread
unconscious fear or anxiety think out some way to
relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell,
then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over
which your customer can pass from fact to
compensatory dream, and from the dream to the
illusion that your product, when purchased, will make
the dream come true’
Aldous Huxley
5 stages of advertising Leiss and Jhally
•Utility
•Branding
•Symbol
•Personalisation
•Lifestyle
Stage 2: Branding
1890s-1920s
Branding
•Guarantee of quality
•USP - Unique Selling Proposition
1890s
•Mechanisation/Economy of scale
= overproduction
•Global competition
Reading 1: Kathy Myers Understains
Mechanisation
Pre-capitalist societies
• Production and
consumption are
linked
• Production is directly
for use-value
Karl Marx 1818-1883
Capital
Commodity Production
Exploitation: paying people less than the products they produce
Estrangement/Alienation: divorced from the goods they produce
Forced to become consumers – produce goods others make
doodle
CapitalismZygmunt Bauman
Freedom
Means-ends calculus
Zygmunt Bauman
Reading 2 Freedom Zygmunt Bauman Quotes 3-5
Henry Ford
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Means-ends calculus
3 mins
93 mins
15 million
Any colour you like as long as it’s black
John Berger Ways of Seeing
1. Make the consumer dissatisfied
‘The purpose of publicity is to make the
spectator marginally dissatisfied with his
present way of life..It suggests that if he
buys what it is offering, his life will
become better’
‘Publicity begins by working on a natural
appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the
real object of pleasure …The more
convincingly publicity conveys the
pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea,
the more the spectator-buyer will become
aware that he is hundreds of miles away
from that sea and the more remote the
chance of bathing in it will seem to him’
2. Make the consumer envious
‘The spectator-buyer is meant to envy
herself as she will become if she buys the
product. She is meant to imagine herself
transformed by the product into and object
of envy for others, an envy which will
then justify her loving herself. One could
put this another way: the publicity image
steals her love of herself as she is and
offers it back to her for the price of the
product’
3. Make the consumer anxious
‘All publicity works on anxiety’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q0JvXiZw7o&feature=related
4.56
Watching 1: Ways of Seeing
Reading 3: Word in Ads by Greg Myers
Stage 3: Product Symbol
1920s-1960s
Product given connotations through associations with other signs.
‘A key shift has taken place, from
emphasising production and use of the
commodity, to emphasising meanings
associated with consumption’
Myers p.22
Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure
Sign: ‘basic element of meaning’
a sign occurs the moment something makes sense to us
Sign
signifier (DENOTATION)
signified (CONNOTATION)
c ot
Signs are polysemic.
temptation
Teacher’s
pet
Clean teeth
healthy
food
Connotations are arbitrary
DEATH
STRONG
EVIL
SOLVENCY
A product can mean anything
Any product can have any connotations
Advertising gives products connotations
Connecting an object with an object
Connecting an object with a world
Connecting the object with a person
Reading: Decoding Advertisements Judith Williamson
Stage 4: Personalisation
1960s-1980s
Adverts were targeted at types of people and the product was
included in activity.
Focus groups were more crucial to the creative process.
Demographics, psychographics, life-stage targeting.
Stage 5: Lifestyle
1980s - present
From the 1980s products were sold much more as accessories to
a ready-made lifestyles.
The whole way of life was shown, sometimes through ‘slice of
life’ adverts and the product was a small part of this, subtly
included into the narrative.
Utility - health drink
Branding
Branding - cure headaches (USP);
bottle differentiated; logo
Product Symbol
sex
America
Christmas
sex
America
world harmony
Christmas
The first time, the first kiss
Oh! what feeling is this?
Electricity flows
like the very first kiss
The first time, the first Coke
Oh! what feeling is this?
Electricity flows
like the very first kiss
sex
America
Christmas
World harmony
First kiss
Personalisation
People connected to
product, audience
targeted more
specifically, product
given human qualities
Lifestyle
Product
made to
seem
like an
essential
part of a
way of
life
Consumerism
To consume – to take in
‘the active ideology that the meaning of life
is to be found in buying things and prepackaged experiences’
Bocock, 1995: 50
Culture
• Raymond Williams
High
Popular
Way of life
Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as
without publicity capitalism could not survive
John Berger 3.39
Watch: John Berger Ways of Seeing
The Jerk
Sigmund Freud
Edward Bernays
‘constantly moving happiness machines’
Herbert Hoover29/4/2002 The Century of the Self
Century of the Self
None are more
hopelessly enslaved
than those who
falsely believe they
are free
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Captains of
Consciousness
mindcasting
pp. Posting a series of messages that
reflect one's current thoughts, ideas,
passions, observations, readings, and
other intellectual interests.
.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/
09/facebook-users-union-demandspayment?INTCMP=SRCH
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/
* http://www.wordspy.com/words/mindcasting.asp
Be Like No Other
Pseudo-individuality Adorno
Who isis your
our captain?
Who
captain?
I consume, therefore I am
Me
places
other cultures
TV characters
What else do I consume?
Food
(object/meaning)
education
books
musicians
films
“False needs”
• Raymond Williams
• Advertising: The
Magic System (1962)
• Because of
advertising we live in
fantasy
We are what and how we produce and consume
Fighting the captain
No Logo
Is there a way out?
Watch: Noam Chomsky Manufacturing
Consent