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Shoes?

?

Cars?

? ? ?

Houses?

Clothes?

What do Companies Make?

ONLY IF THEY HAVE TO!

A Firm's most important product is...

DESIRE

What they really make is...

You

The customer must be remade in the image and likeness of the product

"There Is Nothing Outside the Text"

Not "textual idealism"

The Four Frenchmen of the Apocalypse

All knowledge is mediated thru language,

and language is a social construct

"Politics Precedes Being"

The ready-made society of the family

Your being is preceded by politics

No philosophy not already embedded in politics

Desire is socially created

Rooted in desire

Reality not static, but dynamic

Desire is socially created

2. "Power is knowledge" (Michel Foucault)

3. "Politics precedes being" (Gilles Deleuze)

Is this just crazy?

But he has a degree from the Sorbonne

Is the Devil From Paris?

No!

Advertising and Philosophy

4. Suspicion of "Metanarratives" (Jean-Francois Lyotard)

Four Propositions:

1. "There is nothing outside the text" (Jacques Derrida)

psychology, sociology, politics, mathematics, art, music, engineering, etc

it seeks to integrate all branches of human knowledge:

Advertising is the most "philosophic" of all modern disciplines

Post-Modernism

Each company can saturate the market

Failure of Demand

Overproduction leads to bankruptcy

Saturated markets

Competition

Competition becomes war-like

Two kinds:

War-like

"Everybody has one"

Consolidation

  • "All is fair"
  • Terminates...

Economic Oligarchy

Game-like

Cannot survive on replacement or population growth

  • Rule-bound
  • Real losers
  • Unending
  • Enmity
  • No losers

SOLUTION:

  • Cooperation

Planned Obsolescence

Let things wear-out faster

Very high capital costs

Very low unit costs

or release improvements slowly

Must produce in high volumes

so that customers must re-buy the product

Markets quickly become saturated

Two problems:

Competition

Shortage of demand

"Instilling in the buyer

the desire

to own something a little newer,

a little better,

a little sooner than is necessary."

-Brook Stevens, 1954

Capital-intensive, specialized machinery

High re-tooling costs

Not easily be switched to new product lines

The Primacy of Advertising

Marketing, not production or design, becomes the strategic function

Necessary to "instill" the desire for ever-new things

IN the last 100 years...

The possibility of overproduction leads to the BUYOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE

hence, the primacy of advertising over production

Which leads to the need to create desire

SUMMARY:

This really is new...

And it really is an imperative!

"Power is Knowledge"

What counts as "knowledge" is shaped within networks of political, social, and economic power

Academic journals

News media

Individuals do not create society...

society creates the individual, and does so for its own purposes

Suspicion of Metanarratives

Design for the shortest length of time that consumers can be conditioned to accept.

"Explanation of Everything" (Myth)

Jesus gives us not a summa, but biography (mythos & logos)

Nor was it necessary to design products to last.

Science is no less a narrative than religion

ALL knowledge grounded in faith (myth)

blesses all that it touches

and this swooshitka

has no factories.

Makes no products

Nike makes

NIKE

permanently discontented individuals."

Vance Packard

"The Waste Makers," 1960

debt-ridden,

to make us wasteful,

"The systematic attempt of business

Actual production is outsourced

BRANDS

they make...

Companies no longer make useful things,

Markets would quickly be saturated and demand would dry up

Since Desire is the product

The Buyological Imperative

Constant poverty

our industrial production system could not survive

becomes the lynchpin of the whole system

Forget who we are

Without such compulsive consumption

Cultural Alzheimers

but as the creation of desire,

Forget what we own

Must re-buy what you already own

Advertising, understood not as persuasion

From...

One who takes responsibility for himself, his family, his community and his country

A Citizen:

"Coke is the real thing"

The object is to convert us...

with a salable commodity

Identify an intangible desire...

Hyper-reality

The Creation of "Reality"

If there is no "objective" reality,

then there is only the hyper-reality we create

to..

--or even subverting--

You are what you buy

but it does so for the purpose of manipulating

Advertising has supplanted philosophy as the chief integrator of the arts and sciences

one whose identity is derived from what he/she purchases

Advertising as Social Engineering

the human person and society

Edward Bernays (1891-1995)

A consumer:

Propaganda -> "Public Relations"

Nephew of Sigmund Freud

Applied Freudian psychology to advertising

From W. Wilson to R. Reagan

Engineering of consent

Engineering of desire

We are all "philosophers" whether we wish to be or not

We must rationalize our actions

We do so in terms of some (implicit) philosophy

The Goal

"We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture

People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed.

We must shape a new mentality...Man's desires must overshadow his needs."

Paul Mazer - Lehman Brothers

Why Do Women Smoke?

The Philosophical Imperative

1. Turn the ads off...

The "Light Side"

Allows for a critique of modernism

Establish "religious truth" on an equal basis with "modern scientific truth"

Radical Orthodoxy

These propositions undermine the liberal world order

... or WATCH them

Social reality not "objective," but created

Free choice is an illusion

People socially created to serve needs of those in power

Our "narratives" pre-judge all information

Philosophy is a reflection on the narrative

But prior to philosophy there is narrative ("myth")

We justify things in terms of the narrative

And then we use philosophy to rationalize the narrative

The "Dark Side"

2. Try to construct the "logical" argument

PM rejects modern notions of truth

But seems to regard this as the only notion of truth

Nihilism

De-Programing Ourselves

5. Identify the non-marketable "product"

4. Try to reconstruct the emotional argument

But advertisers, like everybody else, need some way to rationalize their actions

3. Note images, colors, ages of the actors, type of music, etc.

It has found this justification within an interpretation of

post-modernism

(not the best strategy)

with you full mind!

The ads lose their power over us

Competes with religion

This is the job of advertising

except that which the consumer has been trained to assign to them

Modernism

"Tolerance"

Scientism

The Cult of the "Experts"

We live in a material world which a purely objective science can explain, given enough time and funding

Science therefore is a "meta-narrative" capable of rendering judgment on every other account of the world

Self-interest as the prime political and economic principle

Rejection of all authorities in favor of pure rationalism

Radical individualism

Modernism

and

Post-Modernism

Materialism, rationalism, individualism

Create a "hyper-reality"

Things have no inherent meaning,

Provide the necessary rationalization for advertising to serve the buyological imperative

Advertising & The Dark Side

The Buy-ological Imperative

The Postmodern Response

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