The last issue of Creativity offers Jeff Goodby’s point of view on outdoor advertising in the context of a rather funny anecdote about a recent mishap. Before telling his story, Goodby shares with us his “Warholian” vision of this controversial medium: “Make it public, talked about, outrageous, challenging, beautiful, resented…” If you are interested in examples, please do get you hands on Galvin Lucas and Michael Dorrian’s brilliant Guerrilla Advertising, which has a strong focus on outdoor communications and compiles some of the greatest initiatives of the past few years, a must read.
Interested in another source of inspiration? Well, all you have to do is take a walk and pay attention to what street artists are doing in your area. Street art, as a communications discipline and an art form, has a unique ability to digest the feeling and personality of the community and spit its messages in the kind of outrageous and challenging manner that Goodby referred to in his note. This form of communication is driven by a necessity to stand out from the clutter [legal and illegal] as opposed to be passively and orderly integrated with the urban environment. When done right, it can contribute to reinvent public space in a way that is not only memorable but that actually depicts local culture from the inside out.
After climbing ¾ of a mile on the Williamsburg bridge from Manhattan via Brooklyn, bikers and pedestrians are greeted by a sign that is meant to inform people of where they are [New York City, etc] and who built it [the corresponding department]. Locals decided that this information, while relevant, is redundant and for years have opted for enhancing the sign and adding another dimension to its message. This “welcome” sign is far from static and changes rapidly according the mood of the community. Here is its latest iteration, kind of bittersweet and certainly cheerful, after all spring is already here.
Jean Baudrillard contributed to the literature around consumption and its actors in a unique manner, his approach was more related to the object and its mythology than to the politics and ideology that provides context to consumer society. The Economist referred to him as a philosopher of consumerism, denoting his importance in a world that is in part sustained by people in their role as consumers. This week’s obituary in the magazine is devoted to the philosopher and there is one paragraph that captures an essential insight that defines him in many ways:
“…in his world, both the liberal and the communist narratives of history had collapsed. ´The end of history’ was no longer universal capitalism and democracy or the victory of the proletariat. It was summed up for Mr. Baudrillard by a lone man jogging, obvious to his surroundings, hearing only the music of his own sound-system and aware only of the statements he himself was making: health, fashion, endurance. He was running straight ahead, but with no end in view.”
As an insider and even a symbol of postmodernism, Baudrillard was probably too aware of the unnecessary baggage that came with any side of the political spectrum, he wasn’t a philosopher of the left precisely because the left was incompatible with his object of analysis: it was and still is too easy to produce a critique of consumerism that is aligned with the moral values of the left. Such a task would have been far from an intellectual challenge. On the other hand, by detaching himself from the dichotomy of good and evil [or left and right for that matter], he could provide an honest point of view with actual influence in modern life.
The “lone man jogging” has no vision of the future, perhaps because for him the future is happening now and it is more interesting to focus his energy on the kind of statement that he wants to make now, in the future. On the other hand, the statement is clear: we are what we do, but beyond that, we construct ourselves with the tools available on today’s consumer society that usually manifest themselves in a complex system of products, services, and brands, all powered by media.
Right at the center of this system is advertising, and Baudrillard certainly understood its inner mechanisms. In an essay published in 1970 titled La Societé de consommation, available in English here under the title Mass Media Culture, he explained that advertising, beyond the true and the false had to work by eliminating “meaning and proof… inducing tautological repetition,” which was then validated by the public through the act of purchasing.
What Baudrillard meant is that advertising’s technique is rooted in a message house [borrowing the term from PR] in which its message narcissistically focuses on the product it advertises to the point that it becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” which relies on a “circular argument.” At the end advertising worked through repetition: “It is thus repetition itself that everywhere ensures effective causality.” Let’s keep in mind that almost all of his work was produced at the peak of the success [even control] of traditional mass media, and this had an intrinsic effect on his views of advertising and popular culture in general.
Almost three decades later mass media is no longer limited by the traditional players and a seemingly unlimited number of options are available to society at large in most western countries. This changes the rules of the game for advertising, and probably makes Baudrillard’s point even more relevant today than in 1970 because advertising no longer can survive on the basis of a persuasive monologue about itself and much less betting on repetition as essential to its success. Today, advertising needs to do exactly the opposite: open itself to a dialogue in the context of the brand but supported on a real viewpoint while assuming that there is only one opportunity to establish a relationship with its audience.
Revisiting the work of such an extraordinary thinker should not only be a pleasure but also a matter of life and death in today’s troubled communications industry. By devoting an entire career to develop a philosophical system surrounding signs, objects, and symbolic acts, Jean Baudrillard left us with a rich toolbox packed with intellectual gear ready to tackle today’s challenges with the substance needed to make any real impact.
Starting this week you might have noticed a new category: Mediology. The idea is to reclassify old posts that are somehow related to this method of analysis as well as to stimulate new writing in this area.
Mediology was conceived in the late 90’s by Régis Debray, as “an original mode of coming to knowledge” [as opposed to a doctrine or a science], with the objective of closing the gap between technology [usually lowbrow media forms like TV and cinema] and culture [mostly highbrow forms like art and literature], disintegrating the conception that they operate against each other. In Debray’s own words, “it is time to think them systematically one by the other, one with the other.”
As a method of analysis, Mediology proposes a thought process that systematically correlates a “symbolic corpus [a religion, a doctrine, an artistic genre, a discipline, etc…], a form of collective organization [a church, a party, a school, an academy] and a technical system of communication [recording, storage and trace circulation].” The result is an attempt to make sense of the transformation of media by culture and the transformation of culture by media, understanding media as a system that is composed of technology and the popular culture that evolves around it.
By looking at the modern media landscape through the eyes of the mediologist, we could bump into insights that can potentially help us evolve our skills as media producers and analysts of new manifestations of the digital age such as social media or user generated content, which certainly take the concepts of culture and technology to a whole new level, perhaps forcing us to become mediologists in our own right.
Just to provide a simple, practical example, consider this one grabbed from Régis Debray’s official Mediology site:
“A study of the desire for immortality would be welcome in itself, but it would become mediological only if one endeavors to show how this intimate aspiration changed under the effect of painting, the photograph, cinema, television, in short, with the apparatuses of the collective imaginary.”
Another fascinating trait of this area is rooted in its theoretical background and its aim to understand and modernize the body of knowledge that we have inherited from “the intuitions of great pioneers” like “Walter Benjamin, Valéry, McLuhan, Walter Ong, etc…” in an effort to build a coherent “ecology of culture.”
Debray’s 1999 Le Monde Diplomatique article explaining Mediology is available here courtesy of Georgetown University.
Umberto Eco usually dismissed the term “mass culture” as too broad and vague to mean anything at all. In a series of essays published in the early 60’s and titled “Apocalittici e Integrati,” Eco recognized that the generic ambiguity of mass culture is in part responsible for the radical debate about its value and effects in society, leading to the development of two opposed mindsets: the apocalyptic and the integrated [my translation, not sure is accurate].
Probably the best way to understand each side of the debate is through their manifestation in the media. The apocalyptic approach resides in texts about mass culture, as opposed to the integrated, which emerges from the texts produced by mass culture. This dichotomy led to the series of essays on media, popular culture, and modern society that today deserve a second look in the context of a very different landscape that might have an amplifying effect on the apocalyptic and integrated.
The base of Eco’s view can’t be detached from the fact that in the 1960’s [and 70’s, 80’s, 90’s…] both sides of the equation were represented by members of an elite that controlled the means of production of mass culture, the attention of society, or both. The typical apocalyptic was embodied by professors, writers, journalists, and other intellectuals. The integrated was more involved in the process of actually creating mass culture in TV, radio, print, advertising, etc.
Both camps had in common one trait of the pre-digital era: access to filters. Prominent intellectuals could have their voice heard in certain media vehicles because their reputation ensured an audience. TV executives could essentially do whatever they wanted as long as it attracted viewers and advertisers.
What happens to apocalittici e integrati when the filters disappear?
As the line between consumers and producers blur and access to the media is not necessarily linked to influence, these two characters mutate into hyper-versions of themselves. The “culture” in mass culture seems to be reinventing itself by the “mass” which probably fuels the argument of the apocalyptic, perhaps transforming them into superapocaliptics at the same time that makes the point of view of its nemesis not only stronger but also faceless and hence harder to aim at.
Here is a link to Rocco Capozzi’s essay on Eco and Mass culture, which deals with interesting questions on a subject that seems to be more relevant today than almost five decades ago.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find the book in English, perhaps the full series of essays published in the book titled “Apocalittici e Integrati” is only available in Italian and Spanish, let us know if you find the English-language version, this is certainly a reading that is worth the effort.
Courtesy of Advertising Age’s Agency of the Year comes this short clip of Terence McKenna on Marshall McLuhan [below], uploaded to You Tube exactly one day after The Wall Street Journal published, in his Five Best book column, Steve Cone’s top five books on “the secrets of selling” [including marketing, advertising, etc], of which McLuhan’s Understanding Media is the top choice.
Steve Cone, author of “Steal These Ideas: Marketing Secrets That Will Make You a Star,” describes McLuhan as a “genius who understood why mass media holds us in its grip and never lets go,” similar to the effect of drugs, if you will. Which is precisely McKenna’s point, who compares media with drugs with his usual eloquence.
The bottom line, and running the risk of becoming repetitive, is that the thorough understanding of the effects of media is essential to navigate the modern world of communications, for which McLuhan seemed to be preparing us four decades ago. Understanding media under McLuhan’s vision oftentimes stands at the opposite end of the traditional view focused mainly on reach and frequency [advertising, marketing, etc.] or on the effects of particular genres i.e. violence [academia]. We should welcome all points of view about McLuhan’s work because, regardless of whether it was right or wrong, it pointed towards an important direction as agreed in this case by two professionals coming from two radically different camps.
If you have a few more minutes, check out Wired Magazine’s May 2000 article on Terence McKenna, a truly amazing piece.
