Metafilter linked to this interview with Andrea Natella, director of Guerrigliamarketing.it, which (I think) pursues culture jamming under the auspices of being an advertising agency. The translation isn't great, but as far as I can tell, the idea behind this is either that ads have become their opposite, or that resistance to ads has become a latter-day form of advertising in itself. (I prefer the far more cynical second interpretation.) In Natella's own words: "Guerrigliamarketing.it was born out of a bet. Is it possible to imagine modalities of radical participation on the universe of brands and at the same time present oneself as an advertising agency? Is it possible for the professionals of communication not to give up their own political ideas in carrying out their job?"
What happens when you make "resistance to marketing" your brand? Is that some sort of parallax approach to advertising? Can you converse in the discourse of brands without tacitly endorsing it? Doing Wacky Package-style art seems to vindicate the power of brands rather than subvert it. I guess I am skeptical of the whole "culture jamming" concept, which seems less like Situationist detournement than borderline-cruel pranksterism (sort of like Improv Everywhere). I know it is supposed to "make us think", but culture jamming often ends up mocking the consumers it purportedly wants to win over.
It strikes me that a strategy of less clever nuisances might be more effective in slowing the juggernaut of thoughtless consumption. When an effort is made to mitigate the inconvenience that inevitably arises from monkeying with the retail market with what can be taken as hipster humor, it alienates the discomfited even further. That makes the subversion of culture jamming into advertising a weird sort of dialectic that ends up vindicating consumers, if you believe Natella, anyway: "What we try to do is to increase the awareness that true value is produced by the consumers." This is a familiar theme in cultural studies, that consuming culture is an underappreciated form of production -- users innovate new techniques to use things, and produce signs and cultural capital with regard to what cultural goods mean. But that doesn't mean marketing is ultimately benign; it just suggests that its modality is depressingly easy for laypeople to adopt. The value we produce is often something that marketers most appreciate; it is our doing their job for them. So while Natella touts the more obvious capacity of guerrilla marketing to be confrontational -- "We made people think that in order to sell a company [the agency] is ready to do anything, also on the border of illegality. We tried to confuse these borders" -- the more radical implication is that we are all being drafted as guerrilla-marketing recruits without especially realizing it. Marketing has so saturated culture -- with people adopting the discourse of branding, with online activity being tracked and parsed by companies to serve ads, with people embracing hype as a conversational strategy, and so on -- that we produce ads simply by virtue of living our lives.
(Incidentally, do not follow the link to thisman.org. It will haunt your nightmares.)
Showing posts with label guerrilla marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guerrilla marketing. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Thursday, July 7, 2011
"The exceptionalist fallacy" (6 August 2008)
Drawing on Rob Walker's Buying In, philosophy professor Mark Kingwell, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, postulates the existence of the "exceptionality fallacy":
Kingwell notes the futility of trying to stay ahead of marketing in pursuit of authenticity: "You can do the dance of sideways dodges, trying to stay cooler than the cool-hunters, savvier than the savvy-trappers. But however you dodge, you are done, because they're already inside your head." I relate this to the problem of a good's actual functionality serving as the ultimate self-deceiving ruse -- it's what permits the exceptionality fallacy. As Baudrillard argues in several different places, the "use value" of a good is just an alibi; it anchors our ploys for status through goods in a kind of objective-seeming authenticity. To use Kingwell's example, I have to find ways of justifying my love for Starbucks in the product's alleged superiority, so I don't come across as a phony, mindlessly consuming a brand that has come to signify membership to the haute bourgeoisie that I want to belong to. My defense of its quality, even to myself, becomes a ploy in a larger game of trying to seem as though I'm not playing the identity game. Of course, I'm playing the identity game at a more self-deceptive level.
This becomes a spiraling process which makes it harder and harder for us to actually access the use value of something; we have to instead consume the idea of ourselves being the kind of person who would find this sort of good useful. It becomes impossible to taste the coffee qua coffee.
Most people believe they themselves are immune from marketing tactics even as they note the sad susceptibility of other people. I tested the EF on myself and it held: I drink Starbucks coffee because it tastes good; you drink Tim Hortons because you have bought into nostalgia and sham nationalism. Now you try.A corollary to this is the idea that advertisers are shrewdly trying to persuade us that we are smarter than they are and we can fully resist them -- they advertise their own futility as a way to actually enhance their subtle power. (Thomas Frank explores this in The Conquest of Cool.) So it takes ads to persuade us that we are smarter than ads, and everyone else. Then we are in that vulnerable hubristic state when we are most open to being persuaded.
Kingwell notes the futility of trying to stay ahead of marketing in pursuit of authenticity: "You can do the dance of sideways dodges, trying to stay cooler than the cool-hunters, savvier than the savvy-trappers. But however you dodge, you are done, because they're already inside your head." I relate this to the problem of a good's actual functionality serving as the ultimate self-deceiving ruse -- it's what permits the exceptionality fallacy. As Baudrillard argues in several different places, the "use value" of a good is just an alibi; it anchors our ploys for status through goods in a kind of objective-seeming authenticity. To use Kingwell's example, I have to find ways of justifying my love for Starbucks in the product's alleged superiority, so I don't come across as a phony, mindlessly consuming a brand that has come to signify membership to the haute bourgeoisie that I want to belong to. My defense of its quality, even to myself, becomes a ploy in a larger game of trying to seem as though I'm not playing the identity game. Of course, I'm playing the identity game at a more self-deceptive level.
This becomes a spiraling process which makes it harder and harder for us to actually access the use value of something; we have to instead consume the idea of ourselves being the kind of person who would find this sort of good useful. It becomes impossible to taste the coffee qua coffee.
Friday, July 1, 2011
More on the promotional culture (10 June 2008)
Little did I know that when I referred to the emerging "promotional culture" in my post the other day that there was already a book called The Promotional Culture, which was mention in this recent Toronto Star piece by Ryan Bigge about the "mass underground" (via Rob Walker). The premise is that the internet has eroded the former foundations of subcultures -- the obscure information and insider cultural goods that are now immediately accessible for those who are search savvy. I still forget sometimes that nothing in the realm of pop culture is really rare anymore, and that anything I might have wondered about before but never thought I would find is now probably out there: weird albums I'd read about, SCTV sketches I remembered dimly, Situationist experiments in redubbing movies with Marxist dialogue. This stuff was once currency in subcultural circles; I'm not sure if merely knowing about such things and linking to them has any real value for one's underground credibility at this point. Is that a good thing? Or will subcultures disappear without their basis in a certain kind of material scarcity?
Bigge cites Dick Hebdige, author of Subculture: The Meaning of Style, who argues that subcultures allow people to acquire social recognition without securing it at the expense of conformity and subordination. According to Hebdige, "it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. It is a hiding in the light." Of course, nonconformity itself has been a mainstream value since the 1960s, so that muddles things some; since aggressive individuality is a pervasive value, we are all encouraged to become subcultures of one, to play a double game with ourselves in which we forget the mass-market origins of the things we acquire to project our "unique" identities while relishing in the comfort of partaking of brands and trends that are much, much larger than ourselves.
This same logic plays through things that were formerly underground and exempt. They once supplied a refuge from the pressure of popularity. But if the underground is mass, then subcultures will no longer be content to be sub-anything, and they are subject to same impetus to achieve recognition on a much broader scale and permit participation in something much bigger.
The internet obviates barriers imposed by natural limits in the world, by where we can be in time and space. Without those barriers, we are likely to overwhelm ourselves and fail to recognize the aggregate harm of something that seems positive in incremental doses. Our ability to pay attention suffers as the amount of attention we have to pay fails to meet even a fraction of the things demanding it. We fail to engage with any one thing because the awareness of all the other things crying out for attention is always so palpable. Inevitably, people will begin to impose on themselves arbitrary limits for how many friends they'll have on Facebook or how many gigs of music they'll have, or they will choose services that impose limits for them: a social network that lets you have only 10 friends. The craving for artificial limits is probably what gives Twitter its devotees.
Could there be an arbitrary limiting system that could restore the potency of formerly underground cultural goods? Could a samizdat system of cultural exchange emerge in the absence of necessity? Bigge argues that "the next subculture or underground movement will not be discovered behind the door of a secret handshake speakeasy somewhere in East Berlin, but in the center of Alexanderplatz; hiding in plain sight, everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously." Perhaps. It's optimistic to think anonymity can trump anomie. But I find myself reminded of the empty promise of the silent rave. I'm afraid that all activities in the public sphere will tend toward technologically enabled narcissism and people will be too preoccupied with their own potential fame to want to sustain close-knit connections of a subculture, weaving together with a select few others so tightly as to block out the isolating glare of the spotlight. Subcultures were a line of defense against a corrosive mainstream culture and ideology that seemed to trivialize things we wanted to care about; now it seems as though few people find the mainstream culture sufficiently dangerous, because it presents itself as fragmented and user-driven. Or perhaps we've succeeded in convincing ourselves that there is nothing at stake in resisting the mainstream except one's own ego, which can be gratified much more comfortably through collaboration.
Bigge cites Dick Hebdige, author of Subculture: The Meaning of Style, who argues that subcultures allow people to acquire social recognition without securing it at the expense of conformity and subordination. According to Hebdige, "it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. It is a hiding in the light." Of course, nonconformity itself has been a mainstream value since the 1960s, so that muddles things some; since aggressive individuality is a pervasive value, we are all encouraged to become subcultures of one, to play a double game with ourselves in which we forget the mass-market origins of the things we acquire to project our "unique" identities while relishing in the comfort of partaking of brands and trends that are much, much larger than ourselves.
This same logic plays through things that were formerly underground and exempt. They once supplied a refuge from the pressure of popularity. But if the underground is mass, then subcultures will no longer be content to be sub-anything, and they are subject to same impetus to achieve recognition on a much broader scale and permit participation in something much bigger.
The mass underground distorts the equilibrium suggested by Hebdige's hiding in the light. Because built into the technology and logic of the mass underground is the possibility of blowing up huge. As the title of an October 2006 New Yorker article about YouTube fame suggests, "It Should Happen to You."The same would seem to apply to social networks, which implicitly pressure users to expand their base and sacrifice quality to quantity. This is the essence of the promotional culture -- the possibility of a large audience (and of measuring one's own success in reaching it through site meters and such) becomes a requirement to pursue it.
For Andrew Wernick, a professor at Trent University, the problem is that our desire for attention and fame is leeching into the creative groundwater. As he writes in his 1991 book Promotional Culture: "When a piece of music, or a newspaper article, or even an academically written book about promotional culture, is fashioned with an eye to how it will promote itself – and, indeed, how it will promote its author and distributor, together with all the other producers these named agencies may be identified with – such goods are affected by this circumstance in every detail of their production."
The internet obviates barriers imposed by natural limits in the world, by where we can be in time and space. Without those barriers, we are likely to overwhelm ourselves and fail to recognize the aggregate harm of something that seems positive in incremental doses. Our ability to pay attention suffers as the amount of attention we have to pay fails to meet even a fraction of the things demanding it. We fail to engage with any one thing because the awareness of all the other things crying out for attention is always so palpable. Inevitably, people will begin to impose on themselves arbitrary limits for how many friends they'll have on Facebook or how many gigs of music they'll have, or they will choose services that impose limits for them: a social network that lets you have only 10 friends. The craving for artificial limits is probably what gives Twitter its devotees.
Could there be an arbitrary limiting system that could restore the potency of formerly underground cultural goods? Could a samizdat system of cultural exchange emerge in the absence of necessity? Bigge argues that "the next subculture or underground movement will not be discovered behind the door of a secret handshake speakeasy somewhere in East Berlin, but in the center of Alexanderplatz; hiding in plain sight, everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously." Perhaps. It's optimistic to think anonymity can trump anomie. But I find myself reminded of the empty promise of the silent rave. I'm afraid that all activities in the public sphere will tend toward technologically enabled narcissism and people will be too preoccupied with their own potential fame to want to sustain close-knit connections of a subculture, weaving together with a select few others so tightly as to block out the isolating glare of the spotlight. Subcultures were a line of defense against a corrosive mainstream culture and ideology that seemed to trivialize things we wanted to care about; now it seems as though few people find the mainstream culture sufficiently dangerous, because it presents itself as fragmented and user-driven. Or perhaps we've succeeded in convincing ourselves that there is nothing at stake in resisting the mainstream except one's own ego, which can be gratified much more comfortably through collaboration.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Rob Walker's Buying In (4 June 2008)
Each week, Rob Walker writes the Consumed column in the New York Times Magazine, which is sort of a thinking person's trendspotting report. Unlike most writers who cover consumerism, he's not interested in clarifying a marketing strategy worth mimicking (or browbeating readers into feeling ashamed about shopping) so much as tracing the ways consumer needs are identified, assuaged, manufactured, and dignified -- exploring the different ways commercial and personal values influence each other. The basic premise behind the column is essentially the same as the one behind this blog, that how and why we consume is closely bound up with how we view ourselves and want to present ourselves, and that brands and goods permit us (or force us) to speak a social language about identity. He is extremely adept at finding subjects to cover that reveal some subtle wrinkle of consumerism, and he lets the reader draw conclusions from his reporting. Sometimes the reticence frustrates me -- I want the implicit idea expanded into a more general theory about consumer behavior. Thankfully, his excellent new book Buying In, which frequently draws on material originally deployed in his columns and occasional NYT Magazine features, does just that.
The book's subtitle -- "the secret dialogue between what we buy and who we are" -- is a bit misleading, because this dialogue is not entirely secret. Often, it's rather explicit that we are consuming something to evoke a lifestyle and not for the product's inherent utility (which, if you believe Baudrillard, doesn't even exist anyway). We occasionally attempt to disavow this, and marketers certainly want us to overconfidently assume we are immune to advertising, as this makes us all the more vulnerable to it. And marketers generally search for ways to insinuate their messages so that we pre-endorse them before contemplating the ulterior motives behind such communication. If we find the marketing messages useful enough to our identity-construction project, the goods involved that mediate these messages won't be examined too carefully for their own actual usefulness. We buy into the socially constructed concepts, and the goods themselves are artifacts, souvenirs of this. We consume marketing, but console ourselves with the fiction that we are consuming some specific product. This helps us feel that we are still steering our own ship, that we haven't sold out, that we aren't rubes, that we are somehow generating our identity from the depths of our soul and not within the narrow confines of what the zeitgeist and the available tools permit.
The interplay between consumers, marketers and goods is less secret than it is contradictory -- as Walker explains in the introduction, consumerism is a means to resolve what he calls the fundamental tension of modern life: "the eternal dilemma of wanting to feel like individuals and to feel as though we are part of something bigger than ourselves." Another way to regard this is as the problem of securing social recognition in a competitive consumer culture, where one can easily be drawn into quests to be the first to own some desirable product or to be the first to devise some crafty use of a standard commodity, and so on. We want to be recognized for our individuality, which is itself a socially constructed ideal, the terms of which are not defined by individuals. The ideal is disseminated through brands and products (which are, as Walker points out, engineered to have maximum "projectability" -- meaning that they can represent different things for different consumers without dissolving into meaninglessness), which encapsulate the meanings we rely on to flesh out what we want our own lives to mean to others and, via that route, ourselves. Walker argues convincingly that we use goods to tell stories about ourselves to ourselves (and not merely to communicate status, as it can often seem), but they are only capable of convincing ourselves because we know they have social currency. Goods must become a language, with a common grammar and vocabulary, and marketing (for better of worse) is the means by which the language is fabricated and supported. As Walker recognizes, this is a matter of allowing brands to be flexible in their signification.
Saussure's distinction between the langue, the language system, and the parole, a specific instance of signification, is relevant here: Ads are generally incoherent at the parole level, but that helps establish the hegemony of the langue -- reinforcing the rules by which we can make and convey meaning out of brands and branded goods. A good example is how nonsensical TV commercials dissolve logic in the particular instance so that an illogical form of persuasion can reign in all of them. An individual ad that makes no sense is dismissable, but the climate of irrationality serves all of them well, leading us not to question the absence of causality in the ads and to use the free associational techniques promulgated therein in our own efforts to persuade others and ultimately ourselves. Only within the system is the idea that brands connote lifestyles not utterly absurd, and because the shorthand is so useful, we all become complicit in supporting it. We need the tools for making social meaning. "We are thirsty for meaning, for connection, for individuality, for ways to tell stories about ourselves that make sense," Walker writes. "Meanwhile, what brand makers generally have to sell is a pretty good product that is hardly equipped to fulfill those needs." So commercial persuasion is deployed to bridge that gap and conceal the inadequacies of consumerism as a means to quench that thirst.
"Secret dialogue" is a slightly-off way of getting at Walker's main preoccupation: what he calls "murketing" -- murky marketing. (It must be noted that Walker has a slight overfondness for coining phrases and capitalizing them; perhaps this is symptomatic of aiming to attract readership in the business community -- you are forced to manufacture buzzwords. It's especially weird to read a book that's in part about such techniques also employing them itself. I guess you can't spend as much time around marketers as Walker has without being infected with their disease.) And the book chronicles the many different ways marketers have come up with to create new means for getting their messages across, incorporating branding and advertisements into various unlikely corners of everyday life and making it the driving force behind all sorts of spectacles. Walker argues that our growing ability to click off ads and such (through TiVo, etc.) forces marketing to become murketing, but ads and entertainment were already in the process of merging, especially if you accept Frankfurt school arguments about the culture industry. Consumerism is a totalizing system, entertainment products reinforce the needs they purport to sate. They are ads for entertainment while being entertainment, just as ads are entertainment in their own right that people enjoy consuming as a means for being able to launch into vicarious fantasizing. Walker's point (I think) is that the more we are able to shut out advertising foisted on us involuntarily ("the power of the click" in his terminology), the more we invite advertising into our lives voluntarily on what we believe are our own terms. The power of the click doesn't decrease the amount of ads we consume; it just makes us believe we direct and control the flow. brands and marketing have no less force in shaping the public discourse. Paradoxically the technology for blocking ads only makes ads have a more powerful hold over us, as we take it upon ourselves to seek out the ads we want and grant them more currency in shaping our identities. We remain dependent on marketing discourse to make shopping meaningful in the way we have come to expect, in the way a consumer society (by suppressing or commercializing all other public discourses) forces us to respect. We are shifting from a consumer society to a promotional society.
Given that dependency, it's no surprise that consumers cooperate with marketers, as it affords us an opportunity to participate more directly in what is self-evidently one of the most pervasive public discourses in our society. When we collaborate with advertisers, helping spread their messages, we capture that elusive sense of being a part of something bigger, and we get to feel like we are behind the curtain, with our hands on the controls, rather than being the target. (It's like being on reality TV rather than watching it.) People want to participate in branding and marketing because the viable alternatives for shared sociality, social participation, have been disappearing, in no small part because of the marketing culture itself -- anywhere an alternative arises (say, aspects of the lost culture of clubs and organizations chronicled by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, or an authentic grassroots lifestyle or organically developed subculture -- Walker highlights the skateboarding culture of Southern California detailed in Dogtown and Z Boys) marketing agents swoop in to co-opt it.
This is what murketing is all about, finding these alternatives, or any attempts to subvert the mainstream meaning of objects, and reassimilating them to consumerism. It is the ongoing way in which marketing preserves itself as the culture, as the space in which popular culture exists. As Walker notes, "the idea that shared consumer tastes add up to something like a community is a pervasive one." And the end of marketing, as it has evolved, seems to be to assure that shared consumer tastes is the only community possible, particular as old ties within communities dissolve under the pressure of globalization and virtualization and the delocalization of culture. In this atmosphere, the cooptation and the collaboration are mutually reinforcing, as both seem to enhance the significance of the original activity (because marketing is like a megaphone -- it seems to operate on the same scale as the mass culture we consume) even as they are cannibalizing its significance as an alternative.
His most provocative chapter, about the ad firm BzzAgent and its army of volunteer shills who spend their social lives spreading word-of-mouth advertising for companies, explores this in depth. That people are eager to volunteer to spread product gossip suggests the nature of the promotional society, in which the most respected public discourse (the sort that we spend money on and consume the most of) is marketing. To speak in that voice is to be speaking with the dominant voice of the culture. Its pervasiveness has detached it from its function; the climate of commerciality (which has become a proxy for a kind of popularity) overwhelms the specific promotion of any product, so the BzzAgents don't care what they are promoting as long as they are promoting, which gives them something to say that will be socially recognized as significant, relevant to everyone's lives as consumers in consumer society. Walker details a few BzzAgents overcoming their shyness through having some marketing pitch to dispense and a means to keep score of how social they are being (making social life into a competitive game). So ordinary conversation between individuals gets assimilated to marketing. "Even in the small orbit of your own social circle," Walker writes, "knowing about something first -- telling a friend about a new CD or discovering a restaurant before anyone else in the office -- is satisfying. Maybe it's altruism, maybe it's a power trip, but influencing other people feels good." So we get involved with trends for their own sake, for the sake of influencing itself, not because we have faith in the substance of what we are convincing people of. Marketing becomes the medium for social life, becomes the substance of public space. Promotion as an activity has supplanted promotion as a means. We have become a society of sophists.
Perhaps in the future, all people will learn to socialize primarily through having something to promote, since it supplies a reason for social interaction when technology is otherwise working to eliminate it in the name of convenience.
Even as our social activities get co-opted, we get to co-opt the methods of marketing to market ourselves. Hence in effective murketing, we become the subject of ads rather than the target. We invest ourselves in nebulously defined brands, which seem to be unlocking our creative self-fashioning potential, while at the same time we are basically enhancing a company's brand equity. It's not clear whether this is a fair exchange. It's hard not to see the shallowness and potential for corporate manipulation in commercial-made selfhood. The problem with all this identity-and-social-recognition consumption is that it negates the space for public action -- or rather it reduces all public action to a number of shopping choices. We don't build a public self through what we do so much as through what we buy and display.
With that point in mind, Walker explores the idea of people starting their own brands or conceiving of themselves as brands -- thoroughly depressing. But he avoids celebrating them, and doesn't make the reactionary mistake of regarding consumerism as a form of liberating production for consumers simply because people can derive their own meanings from the goods and marketing practices supplied. In that way, his book is a step beyond the futile debate over whether hyperconsumerism is good or bad and whether consumers are victims or not. (It's reminiscent of anthropologists Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood's The World of Goods, another book about consumption as a meaning-making practice, that way.) It eschews such evaluations and concentrates on elucidating what consumer society is becoming, the various ways it is adapting, how it twists technology to suit its values. He insists repeatedly that we collaborate in making brands powerful, but he is equally insistent in arguing that consumers aren't "in control" as a consequence, striking an important balance.
Walker tries to end on an optimistic note, evoking the ultimate privacy of the meanings we make of our belongings and how we "pull the wool over our own eyes" with regard to consumer goods to satisfy ourselves that way. And though he posits some alternatives to the dominant consumer culture in the craft movement and unconsumption, the overriding conclusion is that we have no choice but to fashion our sense of self "out there in the marketplace, acting in our own self-interest" -- constrained by the tenets of capitalism made universal.
The book's subtitle -- "the secret dialogue between what we buy and who we are" -- is a bit misleading, because this dialogue is not entirely secret. Often, it's rather explicit that we are consuming something to evoke a lifestyle and not for the product's inherent utility (which, if you believe Baudrillard, doesn't even exist anyway). We occasionally attempt to disavow this, and marketers certainly want us to overconfidently assume we are immune to advertising, as this makes us all the more vulnerable to it. And marketers generally search for ways to insinuate their messages so that we pre-endorse them before contemplating the ulterior motives behind such communication. If we find the marketing messages useful enough to our identity-construction project, the goods involved that mediate these messages won't be examined too carefully for their own actual usefulness. We buy into the socially constructed concepts, and the goods themselves are artifacts, souvenirs of this. We consume marketing, but console ourselves with the fiction that we are consuming some specific product. This helps us feel that we are still steering our own ship, that we haven't sold out, that we aren't rubes, that we are somehow generating our identity from the depths of our soul and not within the narrow confines of what the zeitgeist and the available tools permit.
The interplay between consumers, marketers and goods is less secret than it is contradictory -- as Walker explains in the introduction, consumerism is a means to resolve what he calls the fundamental tension of modern life: "the eternal dilemma of wanting to feel like individuals and to feel as though we are part of something bigger than ourselves." Another way to regard this is as the problem of securing social recognition in a competitive consumer culture, where one can easily be drawn into quests to be the first to own some desirable product or to be the first to devise some crafty use of a standard commodity, and so on. We want to be recognized for our individuality, which is itself a socially constructed ideal, the terms of which are not defined by individuals. The ideal is disseminated through brands and products (which are, as Walker points out, engineered to have maximum "projectability" -- meaning that they can represent different things for different consumers without dissolving into meaninglessness), which encapsulate the meanings we rely on to flesh out what we want our own lives to mean to others and, via that route, ourselves. Walker argues convincingly that we use goods to tell stories about ourselves to ourselves (and not merely to communicate status, as it can often seem), but they are only capable of convincing ourselves because we know they have social currency. Goods must become a language, with a common grammar and vocabulary, and marketing (for better of worse) is the means by which the language is fabricated and supported. As Walker recognizes, this is a matter of allowing brands to be flexible in their signification.
Saussure's distinction between the langue, the language system, and the parole, a specific instance of signification, is relevant here: Ads are generally incoherent at the parole level, but that helps establish the hegemony of the langue -- reinforcing the rules by which we can make and convey meaning out of brands and branded goods. A good example is how nonsensical TV commercials dissolve logic in the particular instance so that an illogical form of persuasion can reign in all of them. An individual ad that makes no sense is dismissable, but the climate of irrationality serves all of them well, leading us not to question the absence of causality in the ads and to use the free associational techniques promulgated therein in our own efforts to persuade others and ultimately ourselves. Only within the system is the idea that brands connote lifestyles not utterly absurd, and because the shorthand is so useful, we all become complicit in supporting it. We need the tools for making social meaning. "We are thirsty for meaning, for connection, for individuality, for ways to tell stories about ourselves that make sense," Walker writes. "Meanwhile, what brand makers generally have to sell is a pretty good product that is hardly equipped to fulfill those needs." So commercial persuasion is deployed to bridge that gap and conceal the inadequacies of consumerism as a means to quench that thirst.
"Secret dialogue" is a slightly-off way of getting at Walker's main preoccupation: what he calls "murketing" -- murky marketing. (It must be noted that Walker has a slight overfondness for coining phrases and capitalizing them; perhaps this is symptomatic of aiming to attract readership in the business community -- you are forced to manufacture buzzwords. It's especially weird to read a book that's in part about such techniques also employing them itself. I guess you can't spend as much time around marketers as Walker has without being infected with their disease.) And the book chronicles the many different ways marketers have come up with to create new means for getting their messages across, incorporating branding and advertisements into various unlikely corners of everyday life and making it the driving force behind all sorts of spectacles. Walker argues that our growing ability to click off ads and such (through TiVo, etc.) forces marketing to become murketing, but ads and entertainment were already in the process of merging, especially if you accept Frankfurt school arguments about the culture industry. Consumerism is a totalizing system, entertainment products reinforce the needs they purport to sate. They are ads for entertainment while being entertainment, just as ads are entertainment in their own right that people enjoy consuming as a means for being able to launch into vicarious fantasizing. Walker's point (I think) is that the more we are able to shut out advertising foisted on us involuntarily ("the power of the click" in his terminology), the more we invite advertising into our lives voluntarily on what we believe are our own terms. The power of the click doesn't decrease the amount of ads we consume; it just makes us believe we direct and control the flow. brands and marketing have no less force in shaping the public discourse. Paradoxically the technology for blocking ads only makes ads have a more powerful hold over us, as we take it upon ourselves to seek out the ads we want and grant them more currency in shaping our identities. We remain dependent on marketing discourse to make shopping meaningful in the way we have come to expect, in the way a consumer society (by suppressing or commercializing all other public discourses) forces us to respect. We are shifting from a consumer society to a promotional society.
Given that dependency, it's no surprise that consumers cooperate with marketers, as it affords us an opportunity to participate more directly in what is self-evidently one of the most pervasive public discourses in our society. When we collaborate with advertisers, helping spread their messages, we capture that elusive sense of being a part of something bigger, and we get to feel like we are behind the curtain, with our hands on the controls, rather than being the target. (It's like being on reality TV rather than watching it.) People want to participate in branding and marketing because the viable alternatives for shared sociality, social participation, have been disappearing, in no small part because of the marketing culture itself -- anywhere an alternative arises (say, aspects of the lost culture of clubs and organizations chronicled by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, or an authentic grassroots lifestyle or organically developed subculture -- Walker highlights the skateboarding culture of Southern California detailed in Dogtown and Z Boys) marketing agents swoop in to co-opt it.
This is what murketing is all about, finding these alternatives, or any attempts to subvert the mainstream meaning of objects, and reassimilating them to consumerism. It is the ongoing way in which marketing preserves itself as the culture, as the space in which popular culture exists. As Walker notes, "the idea that shared consumer tastes add up to something like a community is a pervasive one." And the end of marketing, as it has evolved, seems to be to assure that shared consumer tastes is the only community possible, particular as old ties within communities dissolve under the pressure of globalization and virtualization and the delocalization of culture. In this atmosphere, the cooptation and the collaboration are mutually reinforcing, as both seem to enhance the significance of the original activity (because marketing is like a megaphone -- it seems to operate on the same scale as the mass culture we consume) even as they are cannibalizing its significance as an alternative.
His most provocative chapter, about the ad firm BzzAgent and its army of volunteer shills who spend their social lives spreading word-of-mouth advertising for companies, explores this in depth. That people are eager to volunteer to spread product gossip suggests the nature of the promotional society, in which the most respected public discourse (the sort that we spend money on and consume the most of) is marketing. To speak in that voice is to be speaking with the dominant voice of the culture. Its pervasiveness has detached it from its function; the climate of commerciality (which has become a proxy for a kind of popularity) overwhelms the specific promotion of any product, so the BzzAgents don't care what they are promoting as long as they are promoting, which gives them something to say that will be socially recognized as significant, relevant to everyone's lives as consumers in consumer society. Walker details a few BzzAgents overcoming their shyness through having some marketing pitch to dispense and a means to keep score of how social they are being (making social life into a competitive game). So ordinary conversation between individuals gets assimilated to marketing. "Even in the small orbit of your own social circle," Walker writes, "knowing about something first -- telling a friend about a new CD or discovering a restaurant before anyone else in the office -- is satisfying. Maybe it's altruism, maybe it's a power trip, but influencing other people feels good." So we get involved with trends for their own sake, for the sake of influencing itself, not because we have faith in the substance of what we are convincing people of. Marketing becomes the medium for social life, becomes the substance of public space. Promotion as an activity has supplanted promotion as a means. We have become a society of sophists.
Perhaps in the future, all people will learn to socialize primarily through having something to promote, since it supplies a reason for social interaction when technology is otherwise working to eliminate it in the name of convenience.
Even as our social activities get co-opted, we get to co-opt the methods of marketing to market ourselves. Hence in effective murketing, we become the subject of ads rather than the target. We invest ourselves in nebulously defined brands, which seem to be unlocking our creative self-fashioning potential, while at the same time we are basically enhancing a company's brand equity. It's not clear whether this is a fair exchange. It's hard not to see the shallowness and potential for corporate manipulation in commercial-made selfhood. The problem with all this identity-and-social-recognition consumption is that it negates the space for public action -- or rather it reduces all public action to a number of shopping choices. We don't build a public self through what we do so much as through what we buy and display.
With that point in mind, Walker explores the idea of people starting their own brands or conceiving of themselves as brands -- thoroughly depressing. But he avoids celebrating them, and doesn't make the reactionary mistake of regarding consumerism as a form of liberating production for consumers simply because people can derive their own meanings from the goods and marketing practices supplied. In that way, his book is a step beyond the futile debate over whether hyperconsumerism is good or bad and whether consumers are victims or not. (It's reminiscent of anthropologists Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood's The World of Goods, another book about consumption as a meaning-making practice, that way.) It eschews such evaluations and concentrates on elucidating what consumer society is becoming, the various ways it is adapting, how it twists technology to suit its values. He insists repeatedly that we collaborate in making brands powerful, but he is equally insistent in arguing that consumers aren't "in control" as a consequence, striking an important balance.
Walker tries to end on an optimistic note, evoking the ultimate privacy of the meanings we make of our belongings and how we "pull the wool over our own eyes" with regard to consumer goods to satisfy ourselves that way. And though he posits some alternatives to the dominant consumer culture in the craft movement and unconsumption, the overriding conclusion is that we have no choice but to fashion our sense of self "out there in the marketplace, acting in our own self-interest" -- constrained by the tenets of capitalism made universal.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Ad creeps (1 Feb 2007)
As was widely reported, a stealth/guerrilla ad campaign for the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim went "haywire" in Boston. (Boston Globe's Brainiac blog has lots of interesting coverage.) People mistook the ads -- which look like Lite-Brites with a cartoon character giving the finger -- for bombs, as they were placed in semi-surreptitious manner on bridges, overpasses and subway stations. This seems like a pretty bad idea, and you might wonder what the ad agency, the aptly named Interference Inc., was thinking, though arresting ad henchmen over it seems extreme. They may as well throw those clowns who talk loudly about products on the subway in the klink. I guess I might feel differently if I had been sitting in a traffic jam in Boston, but then again when am I ever driving in Boston and not in a traffic jam?
But it seems like this is the inevitable destination of "ad creep" -- ads seeking new places to garner attention as targets learn to filter out their omnipresence elsewhere. What could garner more attention than something that looks like a suspicious package? It's not called guerrilla marketing for nothing. In the video showing how these boxes were installed, it seems like they were taking their revolutionary marketing practices pretty seriously, as though it was something truly subversive. (Fitting, as adults who watch cartoons seem to suspect their is something radical in their praxis.) And their surrealist bantering with the media after being released on bail reinforces that impression: "Outside, they met reporters and television cameras and launched into a nonsensical discussion of hair styles of the 1970s. 'What we really want to talk about today — it’s kind of important to some people — it’s haircuts of the 1970s,' Berdovsky said." Ha, ha ha. Is there anything these irreverent zanies won't do in their quest to liberate us from staid boredom?
These pseudo-subversive practices certainly seem to undermine the political potential of DeBordian detournement strategies and other similar cultural "interventions" -- what's so dastardly about advertising is that it's an industry organized to systematically co-opt any interesting, innovative, or arresting way to communicate, such that now all forms of rhetoric seem diseased with inauthenticity, even the most radical forms of antisocial activity can now seem staged and phony. The very act of getting someone's attention has itself become suspect; it tends always to feel like a hoax.
In my early-morning fugue state I seem to recall hearing on NPR a discussion of whether this hullaballoo over a terror scare constitutes success for the ad campaign. If the goal is to attract attention with no heed for the comfort or willingness of individuals to see it, then it seems to have been pretty successful to me. Perhaps Interference Inc. can come up with ads embedded in buildings' fire alarms or in the sirens of ambulances. Perhaps they can kidnap people from in front of ATM machines and make them listen to speeches about proprietary fruit juices. The act of stealing someone's attention has been decriminalized and to a large extent normalized (this is perhaps why people in cities besides Boston paid no mind to these boxes) and now there's no obvious limit beyond which advertisers should not go.
But it seems like this is the inevitable destination of "ad creep" -- ads seeking new places to garner attention as targets learn to filter out their omnipresence elsewhere. What could garner more attention than something that looks like a suspicious package? It's not called guerrilla marketing for nothing. In the video showing how these boxes were installed, it seems like they were taking their revolutionary marketing practices pretty seriously, as though it was something truly subversive. (Fitting, as adults who watch cartoons seem to suspect their is something radical in their praxis.) And their surrealist bantering with the media after being released on bail reinforces that impression: "Outside, they met reporters and television cameras and launched into a nonsensical discussion of hair styles of the 1970s. 'What we really want to talk about today — it’s kind of important to some people — it’s haircuts of the 1970s,' Berdovsky said." Ha, ha ha. Is there anything these irreverent zanies won't do in their quest to liberate us from staid boredom?
These pseudo-subversive practices certainly seem to undermine the political potential of DeBordian detournement strategies and other similar cultural "interventions" -- what's so dastardly about advertising is that it's an industry organized to systematically co-opt any interesting, innovative, or arresting way to communicate, such that now all forms of rhetoric seem diseased with inauthenticity, even the most radical forms of antisocial activity can now seem staged and phony. The very act of getting someone's attention has itself become suspect; it tends always to feel like a hoax.
In my early-morning fugue state I seem to recall hearing on NPR a discussion of whether this hullaballoo over a terror scare constitutes success for the ad campaign. If the goal is to attract attention with no heed for the comfort or willingness of individuals to see it, then it seems to have been pretty successful to me. Perhaps Interference Inc. can come up with ads embedded in buildings' fire alarms or in the sirens of ambulances. Perhaps they can kidnap people from in front of ATM machines and make them listen to speeches about proprietary fruit juices. The act of stealing someone's attention has been decriminalized and to a large extent normalized (this is perhaps why people in cities besides Boston paid no mind to these boxes) and now there's no obvious limit beyond which advertisers should not go.
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