[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Tom Frank: Perpetual Revolution (Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2001)

[Aldon Hynes <ahynes1@yahoo.com>]

Hmmm.... As I read this, I cannot help but think about
the parallels between nettime and advertising...

youth counterculture has some sort of innate
transgressive power

call boldly for the breaking of "rules", and insist
defiantly on being "extreme" 

And there is far, far too much of it

must shock and startle in order to deliver its payload




--- geert lovink <geert@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> (fwd via kees stad and the pandora list)
> 
> Le Monde diplomatique 
>
<http://www.en.monde-diplomatique.fr/2001/05/03bigsellfrank>
> 
> May 2001
> 
> Perpetual revolution
> 
> by TOM FRANK
> 
> (Author of The Conquest of Cool (University of
> Chicago Press, Chicago,
> 1997) and One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism,
> Market Populism and
> the end of Economic Democracy (Doubleday, New York,
> 2000)
> 
> One of the most tenacious myths of the "culture
> wars" that have been going
> on in the United States for over 30 years is that
> youth counterculture has
> some sort of innate transgressive power; that the
> eternal battle between
> hippie and hardhat, disco-dweller and churchgoer,
> individualist and
> conformist, is every bit as important a struggle as
> the one between
> classes once was.
> 
> This belief in the significance of the war between
> hip and square is
> accepted as holy writ not only by avatars of
> academic cultural studies,
> but by our entertainment and marketing industries as
> well. To tune in to
> prime-time TV programming at any time during the
> 1990s was to hear
> corporate America, through its advertising, beat the
> drum for
> "revolution", call boldly for the breaking of
> "rules", and insist
> defiantly on being "extreme" despite the bosses and
> suits and
> church-ladies. Every product - from powerful
> four-wheel drives to tennis
> shoes to lemon-lime soda pops - was presented as the
> cherished
> accoutrement of youth rebellion, consumed to a Jimi
> Hendrix guitar solo or
> a favourite passage from Jack Kerouac or the spicy,
> sassy rhymes of 1990s
> street culture. Cordless drills that finally let you
> be yourself. Perfume
> dealers who liken themselves to indigenous peoples.
> Software makers
> determined to give power to the people. Alternative
> stockbrokers.
> 
> Nike, notorious for having its shoes made in
> sweatshops by Asian
> teenagers, describes itself to American teenagers as
> a bearer of
> "revolution". Both Apple computers and the Gap
> clothing stores have
> decorated their corporate facades with the images of
> various avant-garde
> celebrities. Clenched fists are everywhere in
> evidence. Seven-Up imagines
> a worldwide evil conspiracy determined to prevent
> consumers from drinking
> Seven-Up.
> 
> Why is American commercial culture is so
> aggressively cool these days? One
> explanation, at least, is demographics. The
> advertisers study youth
> culture in order to talk to youth. They mimic the
> status system of the
> American high school because that is the way to sell
> more Sprite, or more
> Reeboks, or more Levis. But this theory does not
> account for the broader
> acceptance of hipness by the advertising industry or
> the intensely cool
> culture of the ad agencies themselves or the
> deployment of defiance to
> sell products to consumers who are more than 18
> years-old. They don't play
> those Hendrix songs to sell four-wheel drives to
> kids at high school.
> 
> Hip culture clearly expresses something far more
> fundamental about
> consumerism than marketers' interest in young
> people. Since the 1920s
> consumerism has given voice to an order in revolt
> against older,
> production-oriented values. It emphasised pleasure
> and gratification
> against the restraint and repression of the puritan
> tradition. It
> celebrates fashion and obsolescence instead of
> thrift and continuity.
> Youth is valued over age. Change over tradition. The
> new over the old. The
> hip over the square.
> 
> CULT OF THE HIP
> 
> Advertising's obsession with hipness also arises
> from the peculiar
> problems of the advertising industry. Since the
> 1960s advertising
> executives have consistently found that their target
> audiences quickly
> grow jaded and doubtful of the claims that
> advertising makes. Advertising
> interrupts TV programmes. Advertising phones us
> during dinner time. It is
> often insulting and stupid. And there is far, far
> too much of it. These
> days average Americans are exposed to about a
> million sales pitches a
> year. Cutting through this clutter and getting
> around the audience's
> distrust have become the industry's two greatest
> problems.
> 
> To get over them, advertising people have erected a
> cult of creativity in
> which advertising must shock and startle in order to
> deliver its payload.
> Advertising reveres the new not only out of
> structural necessity - today's
> product is always better than last year's model -
> but also because novelty
> is the only way to get a sales message across. As a
> result, the people who
> craft advertising tend to be extremely hip: the
> unstructured office is an
> invention of Madison Avenue, as is the now
> omnipresent tradition of casual
> dress in the workplace.
> 
> French advertising executive Jean-Marie Dru
> described the now-standard
> creative procedure in his 1996 book Disruption (1).
> In order to sell
> whatever deodorant or allergy remedy it is he has
> been assigned to sell,
> the adman must identify some social "convention"
> (one of those "ready-made
> ideas that maintain the status quo"), then smash it
> in an orgasmic process
> that Dru calls "disruption". "Stir the pot, alter
> the rules, wake up the
> consumer and create change", he says - all this to
> figure out a way to
> align the brand for which he toils with some larger
> "vision" of human
> liberation.
> 
> Successful brands, then, are those that declare
> themselves at war with
> social conventions of all kinds. Dru lovingly
> describes commercials in
> which prudish old folks are humiliated by
> pleasure-loving youngsters, in
> which Guinness beer is adopted by young
> nonconformists as "a new way of
> expressing their own individualism," and in which
> old-fashioned
> hierarchical management ideas are derided by
> Macintosh, whom Dru describes
> as "an antiestablishment company."
> 
> One convention, though, is specifically off-limits
> to the corporate
> "disrupter": brand loyalty. "In fact, there is no
> paradox, no
> contradiction between disruption and increasing
> brand loyalty," Dru
> reassures us. "If companies and brands do not
> disrupt, there is an
> increased risk that consumers will become blas and
> lost interest in
> brands. With disruption, their interest and loyalty
> is renewed."
> 
> The process is presented as at once mundane and
> apocalyptic. Every
> management writer these days is calling himself a
> "revolutionary". But
> some people have something much greater in mind: the
> colonisation by
> business of nothing less than the notion of social
> justice. For a brand's
> vision to succeed, Dru asserts, it must be "made of
> dreams", a process
> which he illustrates with quotes from various
> figures 
=== message truncated ===


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