The Rise of Advertising-Driven Consumerism

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The Rise of Advertising-Driven Consumerism

• Primary source is Stuart Ewens Captains of
  Consciousness, 1976.
• Social Roots of Consumer Culture
• Mass reproduction is aided especially by the
  reproduction of the masses Walter Benjamin
• The rise of industrial capitalism is the primary
  historical backdrop for the study of popular
  culture.

2
Pre-industrial Industrial

• Small town
• Small scale production
• Local control over our lives

• Urban, mass society
• Mass production/consump.
• Big Business, Big Govt

3
Progress, as promoted by industrial capitalists

• Faith in technology/machines to improve the
  quality of life life gets better and better with
  the application of technology.
• Faith that consuming the products that machines
  produce is a means to happiness or fulfillment.
• Advertisements inundate the masses with the idea
  that consumption is the means to salvation.
• Less technological societies are portrayed as
  culturally backward or deficient.

4
The downside of modernity was largely ignored by
industrial capitalists

• Harsh conditions on the job
• Over-rationalization and dehumanization
• Pollution and environmental degradation
• Stress and alienation
• the rat race
• Concentration of power

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Theoretical criticisms

• Karl Marx industrial capitalism produces
  oppression of the have-nots (the proletariat) by
  the haves (the bourgeoisie).
• Max Weber industrial capitalism may contribute
  to over-rationalization, with its heavy emphasis
  on bureaucracy, formality, efficiency,
  conformity, and predictability.
• Both criticisms see alienation and loss of
  humanity as modern problems linked somewhat to
  progress (not that they would go back to some
  good ole days)

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Early 20th Century Industrialists

• Sought new ways to maintain control over workers
  in the factory
• Workers needed discipline.
• Frederick Taylor scientific human engineer who
  rationalized factory workers to maximize profits.
• Workers were treated as machines to be made more
  efficient very dehumanizing.
• Industrys time is money approach reflected a
  self-interested private-profit focus but it
  came at workers expense.

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Shift in Management Attitudes

• Workers were potential citizens, providing they
  learned how to be disciplined and obedient.
• A new interest in workers leisure time are they
  spending it properly?
• An interest in the wider society perhaps the
  industrialist could help bring about a new world
  order.
• To them, capitalism was seen as more than an
  economic system, it was a social system promising
  a new way of life.

8
Shift in Management Attitudes

• Could the existing class society be transformed
  into a new mass society, where goods are mass
  produced and mass marketed to an undifferentiated
  mass of people?
• Can mass media and mass production help create a
  standardized mass consumer?

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Transformation to mass society

• Industrialist capitalists sought to rationalize
  and massify the whole society by altering
  peoples consumption habits.
• Their goal break down individual habits and
  replace them with standardized mass habits.
• Above all, they needed to promote the ideology of
  consumption.
• Utilize the emerging capitalist mass media for
  advertising the virtues of consumerism.

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Henry Fords America

• In 1910 Henry Ford perfected the assembly line,
  increasing output by 600.
• Now products could be marketed beyond the
  relatively small middle class to the vast working
  class, but there were several hurdles.
• 1. The working class subscribed to old values,
  like thrift and moderation.
• 2. Low wages.
• 3. Long hours on the job.

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Henry Fords America

• 1920s-era solutions
• 1. Promote a new set of values extolling the
  virtues of the consumer way of life
• Youth and the value of remaining young at all
  cost
• Progress, as linked to consumer behavior
• Affluent materialism and the good life
• Upper-middle class lifestyle as normalcy
• conspicuous consumption
• status consciousness
• fear of failure or being labeled old or obsolete
  for failing to keep up with the Jones
• 2. Higher wages and credit-purchases.
• 3. Shorter hours, providing they spent their time
  consuming mass-made products.

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The Doctrine of Separate Spheres

• Family life and work life were promoted by
  industry as separate spheres of life.
• Work was harsh and competitive a jungle.
• Family was a haven, warm, fun, cooperative.
• Expect fulfillment from your family, NOT your
  job.
• These new expectations served the private
  interests of industry (low job/wage
  expectations), but led to unrealistically high
  expectations about family life.
• Industrial capitalists promoted new gender roles
  for these separate spheres.
• White males as breadwinner, focused on job.
• White females as housewife/shopper she is the
  primary household or family consumer.

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The Rise of Modern Advertising

• The job of the line manager at a factory is to
  ensure the efficient production of goods the job
  of the advertiser is to ensure the efficient
  consumption of goods. Stuart Ewen

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Modern ads emerged by the 1920s

• Ads before the 1920s
• Emphasis on rational appeals.
• Directed mainly toward the middle class because
  the working class lacked spending money.
• Not very effective in producing mass profits.
• Ads after 1920
• Emphasis on emotional, non-rational appeals.
• Directed toward the masses, including the working
  class.
• Relatively effective in producing mass profits.

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Modern Advertising Tactics

• The old way to sell a product was to make a
  somewhat rational appeal. Logical or critical
  thinking was often encouraged.
• This tactic is only moderately successful.
• A more successful way is to sell the sizzle, not
  the steak. The new ad approach was designed to
  manufacture desire.
• Use non-rational appeals. Discourage critical
  thinking in the general population.
• Use emotionalized appeals.
• Attack the social self and offer your product as
  the solution.

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Modern advertising

• An unhappy consumer is more profitable than a
  citizen who is secure and happy with who they
  are.
• Some ads even invent problems and illnesses (ie
  ring around the collar, teeth not white, etc).
• Many ads imply that unless one consumes the
  proper products, they will never be socially
  accepted.
• Modern consumerism requires constant, regularized
  taken-for-granted consumption habits that are
  rooted in emotional needs. Ads teach us to need
  things. They instill consumerism.

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Effects of modern advertising

• A mass society that takes for granted the virtues
  of consumerism without grasping the real costs.
• Psychological self-esteem issues, especially in
  women, regarding the self and its supposed flaws.
• Discouraged use of critical thinking abilities
  fosters a naive and ignorant public.
• Spill-over into politics. Politicians now
  typically utilize non-rational appeals and rely
  on these ad techniques to manipulate a
  poorly-informed public.

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The Ideal American?

• By the 1920s, ads promoted a monolithic and
  narrow archetype of the pure American
• White
• Anglo
• Middle class
• Civilized as measured by their consumption
  habits
• All other categories of people where somehow less
  American.
• Monolithic stereotypes served the interests of
  private industry.

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Absurdity of ads

• Ironically, ads promoted industrys products as
  solutions to social problems that industry itself
  helped to cause alienation, stress headaches,
  health problems, pollution, obesity, etc.
• The same corporation that sells the fast food
  that causes obesity may sell the diet pill that
  supposedly solves the problem of obesity.
• The diet pill is often portrayed as a miracle
  pill in the typical ad style that uses a
  non-rational, emotionalized appeal.

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As large private corporations gained influence
they altered the social landscape

• 1. Private corporations affected the curriculum,
  funding, and policies of schools to serve their
  own self-interest.
• 2. Art and aesthetics became commercialized, with
  many artists serving the interests of private
  industry. Also, should profits determine worth?
• 3. By 1930, 80 of all U.S. cities had only one
  newspaper as newspaper oligopolies emerged, thus
  increasing corporate hegemonic control over the
  media.
• 4. U.S. politicians now use the same questionable
  ad techniques used by industry.

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Leisure as escapism

• As the American culture became increasingly
  massified (mass media, mass products, assembly
  line working conditions, etc), escapist leisure
  activities rose.
• 1920s ads promoted escapist pleasures like
  shopping, movie theaters, and spectator sports.
• Today, television programming is fundamentally
  escapist.
• Escapist leisure is class-based, with the working
  class more likely to seek it out than the middle
  class.

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The consumer mindset

• Colonized and insecure, because it isnt free to
  do as it pleases. Rather, it is dependent on the
  styles and ideas that corporations want to sell.
• Status conscious
• Keep up with the Jones
• Trivial pursuit (of trivial issues, products)
• Mildly neurotic, obsessed and insecure

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The issue of control

• A key issue in modern society involves how much
  control we have over our own lives.
• Work life?
• Industry has historically resisted workplace
  democracy.
• Mystification of work activities has led to
  meaningless jobs and little worker influence over
  what is being made.
• Family life?
• Industry attacks parental authority and
  substitutes itself as the expert.

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The crisis of mass society

• As assembly-line jobs made work life more bland
  and meaningless, industry promoted the consumer
  way of life as the means to happiness.
• Industry redefined the role of the citizen from
  issues of self-determination to issues of
  obedience to new and improved styles.
• Advertising played a crucial role in shifting
  mainstream ideology toward the interests of
  private industry.

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The historical record of private industry from a
critical perspective

• Exploitation of workers while resisting
  democratic reforms, workplace reforms, pro-family
  policies
• Exploitation of racism, sexism, ageism
• Over-rationalization of the workplace
• Instilling and promoting personal insecurity
• Promotion of monopoly and oligopoly
• All of these behaviors
• 1. Impose control over people
• 2. Serve the private interest
• 3. Violate the public interest

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Epilogue

• Television grew in the 1950s as a powerful new
  tool of industry.
• 1950s TV programming was highly escapist and
  propagandistic, and it remains so today.
• The ultimate triumph of industrial capitalism has
  been in its ability to define the conditions of
  our daily lives without being significantly
  challenged.

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End of this section