Advertising, Consumer Culture, Desire

Cultural Capital and Taste

Ads assume that we occupy certain subject positions:

Pierre Bourdieu identified different forms of capital in addition to economic capital (material wealth), including social capital (whom you know, your social networks), symbolic capital (prestige, celebrity) and cultural capital which refers to the forms of cultural knowledge that give you a social advantage. Cultural capital can come in the form of rare taste, connoisseurship and a competence in deciphering cultural artifacts.

It is accumulated according to Bourdieu, through education, privileged family contexts and long process of inculcation.

Window Shopping and Browsing

Window shopping is, in many ways, a modern activity one that is ntegral to the modern city that is designed for pedestrians, strolling and crowds.

Flâneur : a man who stroll the streets of cities such as Paris, observing the urban landscape in a detached way.

mobility of vision

MALL CULTURE - ARCADES

Brands/Brand Relationships

Transformation of shopping: Shopping was transformed from a mundane task into an activity of leisure and entertainment. In 19th century for instance shopping arcades began to emerge in European cities such as Paris, Milan and Berlin

Walter Benjamin/Arcades Project

Like a theme park of endless consumption, the arcades became a place to go to, to stroll through, as well as to buy things. Walter Benjamin wrote about the Arcades culture in Paris: The arcades maximized the potential for looking. Benjamin wrote: "both sides of these passageways, which are lighted from above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world, in miniature." The Arcades Project saw the shopping arcade as the essence of modernity, in which the street is turned into a kind of interior space and the unruliness of the city is made manageable.

Advertising asks us not to consume products but to consume signs in the semiotic meaning of the term.

Ads set up particular relationships between the signifier (the product) and the signified (its meaning) to create signs in order to sell not simply products but the connotations we attach to those products. When we consume commodities we consume them as commodity signs- we aim to acquire through purchasing a product, the meaning with which it is encoded.

Making fantasy a part of narrative.

Lack and advertising

Consumer Societies

Creation of Consumer culture

(1) Creation of self-image through goods - emergence of the mall culture

(2) Therapeutic ethos - ideas of individual fulfillment - path to betterment was through the increased acquisition of goods.

Consumer products = self fulfillment

Consumer cultures have developed out of the rise of modernity and the historical emergence of capitalism as economic force throughout the world. Capitalism relies on production and consumption of large amounts of goods, well beyond those that are necessary for daily living.

Consumer choice: Individual choice is offered as something crucial for individual's experience.

Commodity Culture and Commodity Fethism

The concept of commodity culture is intricately allied with the idea that we construct our identities, at least in part, though the consumer produts that inhabit our lives. This is what media theorist Stuart Ewen has called the "commodity self".

Consumer Societies

Commodity Fetishism

Consumer socities emerged in the context of modernity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the rise of mass production. In a consumer society, the individual is confronted with vast amounts of goods. The characteristics of those goods change or appear to change constantly.

This refers to the process by which mass-produced goods are emptied of the meaning of their production (the context in which they were produced and the labor that created them) and then filled with new meanings in ways both mystify the product and turn it into a fetish object.

Examples?

Advertising Consumer Culture

Desire

In a consumer society, there is a constant demand for new products . A capitalist economy is dependent on the overproduction of goosds, which requires the production of desire for those goods amongst the society.

Rise of Global Consumerism: same stores and brands around the world.

(1)Rise of the commercial/advertising culture/Creating a consumer culture (therapeutic ethos, creation of urban life)

(2) Commodity Fethism / Coolness

(3) Anti-Ads : Critique of Consumer Culture (Guy Debord/ Ad-Jamming)

Merchants of Cool (2001)

Advertising Cultures

AD PAPER DUE FEBRUARY 24

Brands and Their Meanings

We are confronted with advertising images constantly through the course of our daily lives, in a lot of different spaces ---- Let's make a list.

In today's media environment advertisers and marketers are compelled to constantly reinvent the ways in which they address and hold the attention of increasingly jaded consumers.

February 10 Monday: Rise of Consumer Societies /Reading Advertising Practice

February 12th Monday: Brands, Brand Attachments/ Critical Approaches to Consumer Cultures

February 19th Wednesday: Rise of postmodernism- advertising in everyday life- pastiche/parody/remake- selling ideas through space/architecture

The Marketing of Coolness

19th century idea- When brands started seeing the advantages of packaging (for oats and soap)

Company or product

Oats- Quaker oats

Role of logos and visual style: Absolut campaigns

Creating deep and emotional connection with the products

How to Critique Advertising and Consumer Culture

Commodity Fetishism is also a process of mystification that not only empties commodities of the meaning of their production but also fills them with new, appealing meanings, such as empowerment, beauty and sexiness.

Example of: Nike

1960s - advertisers and marketers began to see themselves creative professionals rather than craftsmen

They started using parody and new innovative styles as the rigid hard sell.

Attaching coolness- to an array of products.

Blurring mainstream and marginal cultures - "cool hunters"

Today what comes to mind when we say cool? What products and for what reason?

(1) Political Commentary

(2) Ad-Jamming

Culture-Jamming

Artists have long used the form of advertisements not only to affirm popular culture and advertising, as the pop artists did, but also to critique it.

The practice of culture jamming barrows from the legacy of the Situationist group of artists and writers in France in the 1960s, the most famous of whom was Guy Debord, who advocated political intervention at the level of daily life to counter the passivity and alienation of moden life and spectacle.

Society of the Spectacle/Guy Debord (1966)

Advertising, Consumer Culture, Desire

The term culture jam was coined by the band Negativland in reference to the citizens' band radio term for jamming someone's broadcast. Lasn writes "culture jamming is, at root, just a metaphor for stopping the flow of spectacle long enough to adjust your set." On eof the primary strategies of the Situationists, whose work inspire culture jammers, was called detournement, or the rerouting of messages to create new meanings.