A current ad from Levi’s, the jeans company, runs lavishly across six full magazine pages. The ad portrays the shifting sands of young love, featuring photographs of five young couples, with captions telling us how long (or briefly) each couple stayed together. The captions read: (1) “Callie & Ty, three years”; (2) “Callie & Noah, one year, five months”; (3) “Noah & Kim, two and a half years”; (4) “Jeremy & Kim, eleven months (not counting three week break-up)”; and (5) “Jeremy and Andrea, a week and a half.” But then we move beyond young love. The final scene shows Andrea hugging an unnamed girlfriend. Just behind the two roommates, on the kitchen wall, is an art poster declaring, “Mis Padres se Divorcian” (My Parents Get Divorced). The Levi’s caption underneath reads, “at least some things last forever . . . Levi’s: they go on.”

Commercial advertising is arguably today’s most influential cultural grammar. It makes sense to tease out what these dense and expensively constructed pieces of communication tell us about ourselves. In this case, the message to young magazine readers could not be clearer. Love doesn’t last. Relationships come and go. Marriages don’t last either, not even your parents’ marriage. The only thing that lasts in life is the brand name that you can purchase from our company. I don’t know what is more upsetting: the lie about our society contained in this ad, or the truth. 

Much to our benefit, the recent history of advertising has attracted the attention of Thomas Frank, a leftist intellectual who writes for publications such as The Nation and In These Times and edits a Chicago-based journal called The Baffler. He is the author of The Conquest of Cool, a fascinating study of the U.S. advertising and menswear industries in the 1960s. Frank’s focus is the massive cultural transformation from “square” to “hip” that began in earnest in the 1960s — more the brainchild of Madison Avenue, as Frank sees it, than of either the political New Left or the youth rebellion on college campuses — and that remains today “the cultural mode of the corporate moment, used to promote not only specific products but the general idea of life . . .” 

Thus: “Today there are few things more beloved of our mass media than the figure of the cultural rebel, the defiant individualist resisting the mandates of the machine civilization. Whether he is an athlete decked out in mohawk and multiple-pierced ears, a policeman who plays by his own rules, an actor on a motorcycle, a movie fratboy wreaking havoc on the townies’ parade, a soldier of fortune with explosive bow and arrow, a long-haired alienated cowboy gunning down square cowboys, or a rock star in leather jacket and sunglasses, he has become the paramount cliché of our popular entertainment, the preeminent symbol of the system he is supposed to be subverting. In advertising, especially, he rules supreme.” 

Frank’s analysis of the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach — especially their astonishing Volkswagen campaign that began in 1959 — is alone worth the price of the book. DDB’s Volkswagen ads helped to shift the cutting edge in advertising decisively from “square” to “hip,” especially by playing upon the consumer’s desire to be an individual, to separate from the conformism of mass society.

In this sense, what advertisers increasingly sell is not simply the product — this toothpaste makes your teeth whiter, this cola tastes better — but instead pure symbolism aimed at psychological gratification that, on the face of things, has little or no discernable relationship to the product. Are you an individualist, different from the herd? Buy this car. Are you a member of the elite? Use this credit card. Want some stability? Want a relationship that will last?  Buy these jeans.
Frank stresses the remarkable durability of “break the rules” symbolism within this genre of ads, as in “Somebody has to break the rules” (Dash laundry detergent, 1967) or “Break a Silly Rule” (Smirnoff vodka, 1970). But more recently, I’ve noticed that many “hip” ads, especially those aimed at teenagers and children, now bypass narrative completely and hardly (if at all) even refer to the product being advertised. Instead, these post-meaning ads seek strictly to create a mood or vibe. The young viewer — too cynical for any direct pitch and intimate with the grammar of advertising — is then permitted on his or her own, as it were, to associate the mood with the product.

Does this remind you of anything? Replacing explication with mood-manipulation is also increasingly popular in our political debate. Think about Vice President Al Gore on national television at his party’s last two conventions, telling us at extended length in 1996 about his sister’s death from lung cancer, and at equal length in 1992 about his son’s suffering due to a car accident, as if publicizing these private tragedies constituted reasons to vote for him. I don’t mean to single out Gore; there are many other amazing examples of this same phenomenon. Or think of how political advertising, even more than commercial advertising, is now almost completely “hip,” largely devoid of old-style pitching and, increasingly, lacking any serious content. 

Of course I realize that there is another, quite different way to look at advertising. It is the “natural” language of an economically and politically free society. It is what happens when the state does not dominate life and therefore does not, by and large, seek to control what people say. In the commercial realm, the spread of purely symbolic advertising, as practiced by Levi’s — or by Gatorade, when they promise us that in buying their drink we will “Be like Mike” — is inevitable in our breathtakingly affluent society, where more and more people are willing and able to pay serious money for precisely these evanescent suggestions of status and differentiation.

True enough, I suppose. But I still lean the other way on this issue. Commercial advertising today strikes me as s standing cultural reproach to the possibility of character and integrity. Shouldn’t those of us who declare our concern about deteriorating child and family well-being, and about the state of civil society, be more interested than we are now, and more dismayed than we are now, about the meaning and current directions of advertising? 

Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 4, 227-228.