1. M98 ADVERTISING Week 1: Captains of Consciousness
John Keenan

2. The blog

3. Assignment Design a campaign for a made-up brand
Analyse the campaign with theory.

4. Deadline
M98MC: 2 May 2014

5. Hello. Who are you and what do you know?

6. Things you need to know this week
Advertising’s ability to give objects and services meaning in order to sustain capitalism.
What consumer culture is.

7. ‘Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell, then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true’
Aldous Huxley

8. 5 stages of advertising Leiss and Jhally
Utility
Branding
Symbol
Personalisation
Lifestyle

12. Stage 2: Branding
1890s-1920s

13. Branding
Guarantee of quality
USP - Unique Selling Proposition

14. Mechanisation/Economy of scale = overproduction
Global competition
Reading 1: Kathy Myers Understains

15. Mechanisation

17. Pre-capitalist societies
Production and consumption are linked
Production is directly for use-value

18. Karl Marx
Capital
Commodity Production
Exploitation: paying people less than the products they produce
Estrangement/Alienation: divorced from the goods they produce
Forced to become consumers – produce goods others make
doodle

19. CapitalismZygmunt Bauman
Freedom
Means-ends calculus
Zygmunt Bauman
Reading 2 Freedom Zygmunt Bauman
Quotes 3-5

20. Henry Ford
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Means-ends calculus

21. 3 mins
93 mins
15 million
Any colour you like as long as it’s black

22. John Berger Ways of Seeing
1. Make the consumer dissatisfied
‘The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life..It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better’

23. ‘Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure
‘Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure …The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him’

24. 2. Make the consumer envious
‘The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into and object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is and offers it back to her for the price of the product’

25. 3. Make the consumer anxious
‘All publicity works on anxiety’
4.56
Watching 1: Ways of Seeing

26. Reading 3: Word in Ads by Greg Myers

28. Stage 3: Product Symbol
1920s-1960s
Product given connotations through associations with other signs.

29. ‘A key shift has taken place, from emphasising production and use of the commodity, to emphasising meanings associated with consumption’
Myers p.22

30. Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure
Sign: ‘basic element of meaning’
a sign occurs the moment something makes sense to us

31. Sign
signifier (DENOTATION)
signified (CONNOTATION)

39. c o t

40. Signs are polysemic.
temptation
Teacher’s pet
Clean teeth
healthy
food

42. Connotations are arbitrary
EVIL
DEATH
SOLVENCY
STRONG

43. A product can mean anything
Any product can have any connotations
Advertising gives products connotations

44. Connecting an object with an object

45. Connecting an object with a world

46. Connecting the object with a person
Reading: Decoding Advertisements Judith Williamson

47. Stage 4: Personalisation
1960s-1980s
Adverts were targeted at types of people and the product was included in activity.
Focus groups were more crucial to the creative process.
Demographics, psychographics, life-stage targeting.

48. Stage 5: Lifestyle
1980s - present
From the 1980s products were sold much more as accessories to a ready-made lifestyles.
The whole way of life was shown, sometimes through ‘slice of life’ adverts and the product was a small part of this, subtly included into the narrative.

49. Utility - health drink

50. Branding
Branding - cure headaches (USP); bottle differentiated; logo

51. Product Symbol

54. sex
America
Christmas

56. sex
America
Christmas
world harmony

57. The first time, the first kiss
Oh! what feeling is this?
Electricity flows
like the very first kiss
The first time, the first Coke
Oh! what feeling is this?
Electricity flows
like the very first kiss

58. sex
America
Christmas
World harmony
First kiss

59. Personalisation
People connected to product, audience targeted more specifically, product given human qualities

60. Lifestyle
Product made to seem like an essential part of a way of life

63. Consumerism To consume – to take in
‘the active ideology that the meaning of life is to be found in buying things and pre-packaged experiences’
Bocock, 1995: 50

64. Culture
Raymond Williams
High
Popular
Way of life

65. Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive
John Berger 3.39
Watch: John Berger Ways of Seeing

66. The Jerk

67. ‘constantly moving happiness machines’
Sigmund Freud
Edward Bernays
‘constantly moving happiness machines’
Herbert Hoover29/4/2002 The Century of the Self
Century of the Self

68. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

69. Captains of Consciousness

73. mindcasting
pp. Posting a series of messages that reflect one's current thoughts, ideas, passions, observations, readings, and other intellectual interests. . *

75. Be Like No Other
Pseudo-individuality Adorno

76. Who is our captain?
Who is your captain?

77. I consume, therefore I am
I am consuming my way into an identity and work allows me to do this. Think of the identities I could buy.

78. Me

79. TV characters
places
other cultures
What else do I consume?
books
Food (object/meaning)
musicians
education
films

80. “False needs” Raymond Williams Advertising: The Magic System (1962)
Because of advertising we live in fantasy

81. We are what and how we produce and consume

82. Fighting the captain
No Logo

85. Is there a way out?
Watch: Noam Chomsky Manufacturing Consent