"I picture the reality in which we live in terms of military
occupation. We are occupied the way the French and Norwegians
were occupied by the Nazis during World War II -- but this time
we are occupied by an army of marketers."
"GOD IS CAPITALISM." [Techie bumper-sticker]
"As if to parody Cold War values, Mediaplex, a high-tech
advertising firm, uses its ads to depict a knockoff of the
Eastern Bloc realist worker aesthetic. Dressed in differing hues
of button-down casual, an assembly-line phalanx of grinning,
briefcase-toting businesspeople marches under the slogan: "New
Internet Advertising Technology for a New Tomorrow."
"Communism as camp --unthinkable 10 years ago in America--
is now a rallying cry for consumption. These, we may presume,
are the new laws of history. Capitalists of the world unite!"
CAPITALISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
Advertising the New Economy in San Francisco
by Stephen Bender
San Francisco Bay Guardian, July 19, 2000
There has always been a not-so-lovely reality beneath our
squishy illusions of a beautiful, progressive, exceptional San
Francisco. The most frequent yet subtle affront to this notion is
the swallowing of public space by advertising -- from billboards
and apartment facades to bus stops, kiosks, and cars.
The carpet-bombing approach to marketing is most obvious at
Union Square. Shoppers are pummeled with messages by a multitude
of hulking billboards. The sheer redundancy of ads within eyeshot
of the shops corroborates the view expressed by David Lubars,
president and creative director at leading advertising firm
Fallon: "Consumers are like roaches -- you spray them and spray
them and they get immune after a while."
Union Square also features a column dedicated to Admiral
Dewey, conqueror of the Philippines during the Spanish-American
War. It's fitting that such a monument pricks the fog next to
Niketown and the Disney Store -- monuments to modern-day
marauders currently bringing "progress" to the peoples of
Southeast Asia. "Advertising is not just about manipulating
people anymore," culture jammer Pedro Carvajal says. "It's about
taking over their major environment." The state of Union Square
and many other places in San Francisco attests to the truth of
his statement, particularly in these heady days of the New
Economy.
Ursula Franklin, professor emeritus at the University of
Toronto, says, "I picture the reality in which we live in terms
of military occupation. We are occupied the way the French and
Norwegians were occupied by the Nazis during World War II, but
this time we are occupied by an army of marketers."
Since 1998, select dot-coms have adopted a new approach to
advertising throughout the Bay Area, and the digital class is
lapping up ladles of it. Whether one calls it "ironic capitalism"
or "greed chic" or something else, it has seeped into many
corners of the city.
A key element of this new form is advertisers' use of the
word "capitalism" in a blithe or clever way. Greed is exalted in
various "Wired"-style fonts and garish color schemes, and in such
an over-the-top, crass way that hip consumers are trusted to
react with a snort and a chuckle. The quintessential example of
this is the billboard for AllBusiness.com very recently seen
around the San Francisco Bay Area. The ad depicts an anonymous
person getting a tattoo of Alan Greenspan, the chair of the
Federal Reserve. In many financial circles, Greenspan (a disciple
of Ayn Rand) is considered a key architect of the current
"prosperity," due to his free market-friendly manipulation of
interest rates and the money supply. In this role he dwarfs the
president's influence over the economy. AllBusiness.com's
hipster-capitalist billboard image of the partially completed
Greenspan tattoo sports the tag line "We're very, very dedicated
to business."
Where does this strange new brand of capitalist humor come
from? It all goes back to the 1960s, when the idea of the "rebel
consumer" was born. Tom Frank, a founder of Chicago's
anticonsumerist zine the "Baffler," has written extensively on
the phenomenon of "rebel consumers" who defined their
"individuality" and capacity to differentiate themselves from the
herd based on the brands they consumed.
One of the earliest (and most absurd) appeals to the rebel
consumer came by way of Detroit titan Dodge in 1965. Ads urged,
"Join the Dodge Rebellion ... Swingers are switching to Dodge."
More recently, we find SUV manufacturers promising a liberated
lifestyle to those who simply "break the rules" by purchasing a
luxury vehicle.
While consumers were being sold on the idea of rebellion,
firms like the Gap and Disney (following Nike's lead) were
focusing on the now-ubiquitous idea of "branding." Branding
doesn't rely on the quality of the product, but rather the
lifestyle that the commodity supposedly affords the consumer.
Rebel consumerism and branding, both of which continued to
influence advertising for much of the 1990s, are now ceding space
to another trend: the "messaging" of finance-related dot-coms.
Naomi Klein writes in her splendid book "No Logo," "It is online
that the purest brands are being built: liberated from the
real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these
brands are free to soar less as the disseminators of goods or
services than as collective hallucinations."
A prime example of this phenomenon can be seen in a
messaging campaign from Yahoo, the mammoth Internet portal.
Anyone who has driven over the Bay Bridge toward Oakland in the
last several months has likely seen it: a deliberately cheesy
billboard lit by an array of lightbulbs and decorated with
plastic lettering, looking like nothing so much as an old 1950s
motel sign. Here, the technological wizardry of the firm is
ironically represented by a sign based on the retro, late-1950s
Las Vegas-Holiday Inn aesthetic. Since you really can't touch
Yahoo, nor does the idea "Yahoo" refer to anything in material
reality, the firm can affix to itself any conceivable image, as
long as it says "hip."
This new advertising isn't so much about branding; it's a
promotions experiment, an effort on the part of advertisers to
reach one of America's burgeoning demographics: the
irony-fattened, dot-com nouveau riche. The Bay Area supposedly
churns out 60 millionaires a day, the dailies assure us
regularly. Nationwide, three million American households hold
assets exceeding $1 million, while 1 in 10 has an income
exceeding $100,000 annually. They aren't interested in rebelling
against much of anything. But at the same time, they don't want
to come off like the humorless corporate drones of the 1950s.
Instead, they want to be pigs with panache -- in short, they want
to be ironic capitalists.
Although the rebellious aspect of late-'60s youth culture
has been dumped by many finance-related dot-coms, its legacy
still influences advertisers, as exemplified by recent San
Francisco billboard sentiments: "It's like Woodstock for
capitalists!" (for a techie job fair) or "Make Love, Not War ...
Aww heck, just Make Money."
These dot-com advertisers not only celebrate the
"liberatory" lifestyle of the 1960s but also (unlike their
predecessors) embrace a workplace setting that is "hip" and fun -
- at least for their American "symbolic analyst" workers. By the
same token, they represent a client base that makes ridiculous
amounts of money and regards the progressive desires of the 1960s
as not only misguided but unfathomable anachronisms. In short,
dot-com advertisers turn 1960s idealism into a joke for the
amusement of libertarians and capitalists.
Most consumers are in on the joke, or so they think. No
longer are '60s-style appeals designed to awaken the slumbering
yippie yearning to foment revolution with a 7-Up in hand. Rather,
the '60s are redeployed as something a bit outdated, in need of a
little sprucing up for the Information Age, New Economy
sensibility.
As Tom Vanderbilt noted in the "Baffler," "Of course they're
trying to sell me something, the ironic response begins, but I
know that, and isn't it a funny ad? The use of irony is shrouded
in another, more distant form of irony: since ads are now viewed
with sneering, condescension, and the assumption that they are in
no way effective, it then comes as little surprise that no one is
disturbed or even really notices when advertising begins to
appear in new places."
And ads are appearing in places you'd never expect. The
stairs and floor in the Powell Street BART station are, as of
this writing, plastered with decals for Washington Mutual's
online operation. Any number of blank apartment facades in the
Tenderloin sport messages like "Want and you shall receive --
eWanted.com."
Information Age sarcasm is perhaps nowhere more obvious than
along the arteries of commerce-related transport in San
Francisco. Until early June, at the much traveled corner of Van
Ness Avenue and Mission Street, the entire side of a building was
bathed in canary yellow with Hungryminds.com's sentiment: "We've
asked the best minds in academia to join another venerable
institution. It's called Capitalism." The same monstrosity graces
the entire side of an apartment complex near oh-so-sassy
Multimedia Gulch.
As one lurches southbound on the silicon urethra that is
Highway 101, a rich vein of capitprop awaits near Menlo Park,
home to all those lovable venture capitalists. Forbes.com, its
occidental headquarters sprawling nearby, cudgels commuters with
the fuchsia notion that capitalism is "Served Fresh Daily."
Billboard alterers in New York recently improved on this banality
with the pithy "Capitalism Serves Death Daily."
Farther down 101, gouged petrol consumers learn that
Forbes.com offers "High Octane Capitalism Ahead." Not
surprisingly, the ultrarich Forbes family can afford to joke
about capitalism. Malcolm Forbes flitted about the planet in a
jet called the Capitalist Tool. His son Steve has repeatedly and
robotically run for president, touting actually existing
capitalism as his platform. And yet it's unclear whether irony
hides behind these ads. There are plenty of earnest Milton
Friedman disciples around the Forbes people. More than a few of
them are true believers -- and yet these intellectual shock
troops of capitalism are using humor as their tool.
Near the snarled nest of ramps at SFO, E*Trade does some
billboard stand-up. A massive sign proclaims, "Root of all evil
... Can't buy happiness ... Blah, blah, blah." It's really quite
shrewd, mocking a Biblical admonition (which every Information
Age sophisticate knows is utter rubbish, right?). It puts greed
squarely on the side of modernity, even if with a wink and a nod.
As "Adweek" magazine put it, "Money, the root of all evil, is a
subject rife with comic potential." Who's to say, however, that
irony doesn't also act as a splendid little buffer between the
worker/consumer's happy self-image and the disturbing realities
of corporate supremacy and its impact on communities and the
planet.
Past the sprawling, cerulean campus of Oracle, whose CEO,
Larry Ellison, recently passed Bill Gates as the world's richest
man, E*Trade further enlightens with this provocative question:
"Imagine rolling over and saying: That was better than
investing." Comment is really superfluous on this one.
Continuing down 101 near Redwood City, passing Liberate
corporation's azure, mirrored compound, the discriminating driver
comes upon this feminist ode: "A woman's place is [[CROSSED OUT:
'in the home']] on the web." So cheeky, the conflation of women's
and wealth's liberation.
Rounding out this survey of public space in America's most
"liberal" city are the ads for FT.com (London's "Financial Times"
Web site). Along the 5 Fulton line near Divisadero, any given bus
stop may still sport a poster covered with a laundry list of
nationalities including "Uzbeks," "Namibians," and "Americans"
who "all speak the same language: MONEY." With a little bit of
persistence one may come across an FT.com slogan exemplifying
just how much affinity these Brits have for Uzbeks: "Even in
countries whose name you can't pronounce, people still speak the
same language: MONEY." Jingoism is so cool, dude. And it's
cross-cultural, too!
It is just a bit curious, at a time when capital straddles
the globe triumphant, that select firms bother to promote
capitalism or greed chic at all. In the past 10 years, which have
seen the fall of communism and the declaration of the "End of
History" (thereby supposedly signaling the dawn of a free-market
Pax Americana), one would expect a less crafty pitch. But
capitalism is hardly everyone's favorite economic system, and
therefore it still needs its share of cheerleading. Tom Frank,
whose new book, "One Market under God,"is forthcoming (left-wing
marketing tie-in), contends, "The conquest of capitalism has
always been resisted by large numbers of people and it's an
ongoing battle. Some of this sloganeering is geared towards a
continuing process of legitimization."
Chris Carlsson of San Francisco's anticorporate zine
"Processed World" explains the phenomenon this way: "This is a
self-referential world we live in. Most advertising represents a
self-described triumph full of hubris as well as a certain
insecurity. There's a tremendous disconnect between received
messages and daily life." Could it be that the last 20 years,
which have seen the largest upward transfer of wealth in the
history of peacetime in the Western world, cultivated a cynicism
so impregnable that even moneyed suburbanites can't hack a
straight dot-com pitch without an axe?
During the Cold War, America represented itself as a bastion
of freedom and democracy that would hold out against commie
totalitarianism and dictatorship. Now that America has
established itself as a "hyperpower which dominates in all
spheres," as the socialist French foreign minister likes to put
it, we can be more honest with ourselves. The values expressed by
our leaders now echo those of a different era, reflected in the
assessment of President Coolidge eight years before the New Deal:
"The business of America is business."
As if to parody Cold War values --and of course to show just
how clever it is-- Mediaplex, a high-tech advertising firm, uses
its BART ads to depict a knockoff of the Eastern Bloc realist
worker aesthetic. Dressed in differing hues of button-down
casual, an assembly-line phalanx of grinning, briefcase-toting
businesspeople marches under the slogan "New Internet Advertising
Technology for a New Tomorrow." Communism as camp -- unthinkable
10 years ago in America -- is now a rallying cry for consumption.
These, we may presume, are the new laws of history. Capitalists
of the world unite!
What, then, is the cost of irony? Is an inherently sinister
sentiment somehow less sinister because it's being presented
facetiously? Although a really smart academic might posit that
irony decenters the subject, the short answer is a decided no.
This sick capitalist satire is actually more corrosive than
"rebel consumerism" because it inherently trivializes asking
questions about our economic system. If capitalism is so strong
that it can laugh at itself, imagine just how ridiculous its
critics appear. Embedded in this flabby, toothless irony is the
conviction that capital is unassailable.
Rock pusher Tom Vanderbilt tackled the question of irony
this way: "Does anyone still believe that the MTV generation is
'suspicious' of advertising?... [Cultural managers] assume
matter-of-factly that sarcasm and irony are enough to placate
critics.... Why is this even possible, now that advertisers have
seized upon irony as the cultural in-joke of the century?"
Advertising is continuing its unremitting quest to permeate
each and every public space, thereby creating a landscape in
which commercial messaging becomes our lived environment.
Advertising has become so ingrained in our daily lives that it
appears natural, part of the scenery, so pervasive that many are
barely conscious of it at all.
An ad for E*billboards puts it clearly enough: "catch people
when they have time (and the mindset) to pay attention to your
message. At Convenience Stores. Train Stations. Newsstands. Gas
Pumps. And other locations, even elevators. People pause. People
pay attention. Over 160 million monthly impressions, 18 major
markets and growing."
This continual seepage of the commercial can be
counteracted, however, and in a variety ways. As a practical
matter, affecting the content of advertising is a sticky wicket
fraught with First Amendment implications. But there are some
remedies. Vermont, for instance, has banned large billboards in
the entire state. Is this too much to ask in America's number one
tourist city?
More systemically, federal tax laws allow the multinational
arbiters of human happiness to deduct 100 percent of their
advertising expenses from their taxable income. Wouldn't it be
nice if the public didn't have to finance its own brainwashing?
Numerous forms of subversive media --the most high-profile
being "Adbusters," a Vancouver-based antiadvertising magazine --
are disseminating information on the depredations of advertising.
Closer to home, the San Francisco-based Billboard Liberation
Front has been "improving" the sentiments of local corporate
Molochs like the Gap for years now. It only seems natural, then,
given the laws of physics, that with the spread of advertising,
there just might gestate an equal and opposite reaction.
