Advertising and the conquest of culture

Abstract

Thomas Frank's important The conquest of cool: Business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism usefully described the advertising industry's “conquest of cool” in the 1960s and beyond, the co-optation of the hip and the cool for the purposes of advertising marketing. This article argues that, since Frank's book appeared, the “convergence of commerce and content” – as the advertising industry calls it – has meant that the production of content is even more entwined with advertising than ever before. The first part of this article describes this shift with particular attention paid to the production of advertising music, which increasingly employs well-known rock, hip-hop, and other popular musicians. The analytical portion of this article draws on the studies of Richard A. Peterson and others on the rise of the socially elite “omnivore” consumer of cultural products to argue that advertising has played a crucial role in this shift, emphasizing the cool and the trendy. Last, the article updates Pierre Bourdieu's influential notion of cultural capital, for, if social elites are more omnivorous in their tastes, then cultural capital today must increasingly be associated with knowledge of the trendy, not only the fine arts.

Keywords:

• advertising
• Bourdieu
• cultural capital
• music
• taste
• trendiness

Acknowledgements

In some ways this article is a theoretical updating and extension of my ‘‘The changing shape of the culture industry; Or, how did electronica music get into television commercials?’’ (Taylor 2007), and so I would like to thank again Ronald Radano for the invitation that led to that article. Further thanks go to audiences at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the School of Music at the Australian National University, and the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, who provided invaluable responses. And, as ever, deepest thanks go to Sherry B. Ortner.

Notes

1. “Cool”, “hip”, “trendy” – all are difficult to define in the usage of the advertising and marketing industry and are somewhat interrelated. For a history of “hip”, see Leland (2005); on “cool”, see MacAdams (2001). See also Heath and Potter (2004). For a recent industry perspective, see Kerner and Pressman (2007).

2. See their web site: http://www.mavenstrategies.com.

3. See http://www.myspace.com/bigmacchant.

4. For a discussion of the rise of corporate sponsorship of tours, see Seiler (2000).

5. A good deal of what counts as “ethnography” among marketers is enough to make academic ethnographers cringe; one author characterizes ethnography as the observation of “consumer behavior in a natural environment”; ethnography is described as a “discipline” that “borrows its techniques from the science of anthropology and allows marketers to study consumers in their everyday habitats” (Wasserman 2003, 21).

6. Such as Mariampolsi (2006), Sherry (1995), and Sunderland and Denny (2007).

7. See http://www.zandlgroup.com. See also Grossman (2003).

8. For another report on this industry, see Gladwell (1999).

9. On the importance of the trendy in organizing “eclectic” tastes, see also Bellevance, Valex, and Ratté (2004).

10. Useful treatments of this new social group appear in Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich (1979), Gans (1985), Lash and Urry (1987), Pfeil (1990) and van Eijck (2001).