Frank, T. The Conquest of Cool (1997).

Thomas Frank - Conquest of Cool
(golden age, 50s, to creative revolution, 60s)
Chapter ONE
- conservative conceptions of the 60s. 1-4
o 60’s malignancy extending into 80s (think beatles revolution)
- neg imagines in mass culture 4
- counterculture and business 4 – 5
o beatles in nike ad 4
- business 5-9
- counterculture not only in 60s 6
- Arrival of the Beatles, 1964, helped trigger counterculture (they performed in mass culture – contradicting) 8
- Are any representations of counterculture ‘authentic’? How do you separate real counterculture from corporate counterculture? 7, 8
- co-option. Use of counterculture ideology in business. 7 – 9
o whether they deserve vilification or not, they process by which they made rebel subcultures their own is clearly an important element of contemporary life. 9
- many American industries didn’t view counterculture as an enemy, but as an ally in struggle against dead weight procedure and hierarchy. 9
o in late 50s and early 60s, advertising and menswear execs criticized their industries in a similar manner to the countercultural critique of mass society – over organization, lack of creativity 9
o saw countercultural American youth as a way to revitalize business and consumer order (also, desirable market) 9
o American business – in 50s, conformity. In 60s, authenticity. Tricky description. 9
Look at all the lonely people
- standard story of counterculture in 60s begins with reaction against ‘mass society’ 9
o authors cited mass produced goods, prefabricated towns, loss of individuality 10
o The Organization Man (look up in index)
- conformity 10…
- Norman Mailer – solution = the Hipster (essentially description of the counterculture). 12
o Quest for authentic experience 13
- Enthusiasm of ordinary americans for cultural revolution 13
- Beatles – bearers of liberal order were infatuated with the counterculture (esp after 1967. Gave beatles reverence, 13
- Story of counterculture isn’t binary. Not just ‘hip’ as opposite of ‘square’ 15 – theory of co-option. 15, 16
- Counterculture worked revoltion through lifestyle rather than politics 15
- Theodore Roszak – counterculture = solution to meaningless, usurped negatively by business looking to make a buck 14, 16
- Consciousness I, II, III. 14 (and 57, Bernbach)
Hip as Hegemon
- recent writings – signifiers taken by youth culture are produced in mass media, but revolution comes in the way they consume them (production v consumption). 17
- transgression is the key to resistance (violation of norms) 17
- John Fiske – mass-produced culture is both a side of oppression and rebellion 17
- In order for things to be popular, they must skirt the edge of homogeneity 18
- Business, corporate ideology 18
- Advertising – to analyze the machinations of advertising industry is to suggest that public are cultural dupes? 19
- Cant make comparisons of squaer and hip, power-bloc and people, conformity v individualism. 19
- Consumer capitalism didn’t demand conformity – it rejected all traditions and embraced desire 20
- Business Changes in 60s. 20
o Management literature, shows that relationship bw corporations and counterculture not so strange 20, 21
- Frederick Winslow Taylor – time-and-motions studied 20
- Organization Man – may have been astute social criticism, first sparks in cultural uprising that would become the counterculture. It was also a management book, a study of American business and its problems. 21
- Cold war
- Businesses tried to be more creative – management books ¬ The Human Side of Enterprise 22
o Theory X, Theory Y
- Revolution in Industrial Organization 23
o Market segmentation, demographics, targeting products to specific groups rather than everybody 23
- Construction of consumer subjectivity, advertisers attempt to call group identities into existence 24
- Pepsi – ‘cola wars’ – pepsi created and appealed to group identities --- target: YOUTH 24
o Conceptual position of youthfulness became as great an element of the marketing picture as the youth itself 25
- Connection bw management theory and counterculture 26
- Menswear and ad industries reaction to youth culture was more complex then co-option theory. Commonalities of two industries. 27
- 1967 and 1968 (years marked earlier for Beatles influence) signaled a change in the menswear and ad industries – leaning towards counterculture. 27
- space age 28
- “Placing the culture of the 1960s in this corporate context…suggests instead that the counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class, a colorful installment in the twentieth century drama of consumer subjectivity” 29
- maybe beatles / consumption and capitalism isn’t so strange? 30

Chapter TWO
- Scientific advertising, no creativity, formulas. 38…
- Cold war 47
- Mass audience / groupthought 48, 49
- David Ogilvy – first proponent of science advertising (45-47), then of creative, non-scientific advertising (50)
Chapter THREE
- Nike (beatles) 53
- In 60s, advertising suddenly idealized not the man in plain suits, but the manic ones in offbeat clothing. 54
- Creative revolution 54
- Advertising in 60s acknowledged and sympathized with mass society critique. Admitted that consuming was not the wonder-world it was cracked up to be. Sympathized with ppls fears of conformity and revulsion from artificiality (inauthenticity) and packaged pleasures. Pandered to public distrust of advertising and dislike of admen. Compared new hip consumerism to older capitalist ideology and left the latter permanently discredited. 54
- New Madison avenue’s solution to problems of consumer culture was more consuming. like Discover card commercial.
- Bill Bernbach, towering figure of advertising world in 60s. Doyle Dane Bernbach agency (DDB) was ‘unchallenged leader of creative revolution of the 60s.’ changed the culture of advertising. 55…
o First adman to embrace mass society critique (volkswagon campaign), to appeal directly to powerful public fears of conformity, manipulation, fraud, powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. 55
o Invented a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism – perhaps more powerful cultural tendency of the age – to consumerism itself. 55
o Bernbach was enemy of technocracy long before counterculture raised voice of protest 56
o Rationalized creative operation 57
- Creative revolution 59
- Age of ‘groupthink’ (groupthought) began to end in early 60s. 59
- Cars were markers of managerial efficiency in the worst Organization Man way. Volkswagon turned that on its head. 61…
o Most car ads were contemptuous of consumer intelligence, and consumers knew it. In wake of The Hidden Persuaders, The Hucksters, the quiz show scandals, FTC lawsuits against fraudulent advertisers, consumer skepticism toward advertising was at an all time high. Volkswagon took this skepticism into account and made it part of their ad’s discursive apparatus. Spoke to consumers as canny beings capable of seeing through the puffery of Madison avenue. 63
- Volkswagon ads were peppered with ‘honest’ humorous admissions about how ugly, bad, small their cars were and acknowledged that it wanted to make money. Not only did it actually speak to consumers as adults instead of babies, it also turned traditional notions and structures of salesmanship around. 63
o Mirrors and appeals to the countercultural animosity towards the traditional and its desire to subvert structure.
- Volkswagon ads showed awareness of and sympathy for mass society critique and actively contributed to the discourse, composing cutting jibes against the chrome-plated monsters from Detroit and proffering up volkswagens as badges of alienation from the ways a society whose most prominent emblmes were the tailfin and the tract home with a two-car garage. 64
- Other attacks by Volkswagen – 64…
- V.Wagen critique extends to other objections 64
- V.Wagen was anti-car – signifier of uprising against cultural establishment. 67
- In 50s, V.Wagen known as nazi product. 67…
- Irony implicit in fact that V.Wagen’s hipness was a product of advertising, the institution of mass society against which hip had declared itself most vehemently at odds (just like beatles?). co-option theory turned upside down. 68
- V.Wagen ads – form of anti-advertising that worked by distancing a product from consumerism. Introduced America to a new aesthetic of consuming. 68
- What distinguishes the advertising of the creative revolution is that it takes into account – and offers to solve – the problems that consumerism had created. 68
** - hip would become the dynamic principle of the 60s, a cultural perpetual motion machine transforming disgust with consumerism into fuel for the ever-accelerating consumer society** 68 --- beatles

Chapter FOUR
- Howard Gossage, adman, attacked American commercial culture just like Frankfurt School – creative revolution 75, 76
- American advertisers would rank among country’s most visible critics of mass society. This skepticism would be the ideological point where the advertisers of the 60s parted ways from its predecessors. 76
- Jerry Della Femina – memoir, 1969. Describes agencies as places of fear. 78…
o If Della Famina was the bullshit barometer he believed himself to be, by the end of the 60s, the American adman was not a touchy defender of consumer excess, but a jaded scoffer contemptuous of the institutions of consumer society, scornful of the imbecile products by which it worked, and corrosively skeptical of the ways in which the establishment agencies foisted them on the public → like the counterculture. 80
- George Lois, artistic advertisements, hated institutional procedures that made bad advertising 80…
o Until creative revolution, he said, production of American advertising was smothered by rigid, representative codes of dullness-inducing rules. 80
- Defining characteristic of post-Organization white-collar workers is a powerful artistic impulse. 81
- Lois formed own agency with Fred Papert and Julien Koenig (copywriter of v.wagen ads). PKL very successful, specialized in creative outrage, signaled changing dynamics in american admaking. 82 → example of anger towards establishment.
- PKL very successful (first to sell stock publicly). Lois left in 67 to ‘kick the curse of bigness’ and set up another shop. PKL’s success didn’t nec make it an ‘establishment’, but lois said it turned him from an artist into a supervisor. 83
- 60s vision of agency operations: in other businesses, management make the critical decisions. In advertising, the copywriter / art director make the decisions, because the ads are what advertising is all about. 84
- Lois’s new firm – Lois Holland Callaway – anti-organizational extreme. Agency would do important stuff and hire other people to do the rest. 84
o Kept employees to a minimum, thus maximizing creative freedom. Lois argued that openness is a necessary precondition to realizing the central element of his advertising: outrage. 84

*** - In order for an ad to work, Lois argued in 1991, one had to cause outrage. Good advertising, therefore, is synonymous with rebellion, with difference, with the avante garde’s search for the new…[quote] Advertising should stun momentarily…it should seem to be outrageous. In that swift interval between the initial shock and the realization that what you are showing is not as outrageous as it seems, you capture the audience. *** 84-5
- Lois’s techniques necessarily militate against whatever is acceptable at present…the adman must live in perpetual rebellion against whatever is established, accepted, received. 85
- The emersonian adage could be updated to fit the creative revolution: He who would be an adma must be a nonconformist. → like counterculture 85
- Lois’s ads challenged different industries. Herald-Tribune ad was shut down by CBS president, ads for Edwards & Hanly (brokerage firm) was monitored by new york stock exchange (many ads forced to be removed). The new capitalism was beginning to challenge the white pillars of order everywhere. 86
Chapter FIVE
- As creative revolution followed DDBs success, ad industry began to recognize non-conformity as a dynamic element of advertising and of the ‘permanent revolution’ of capitalism itself. 89
- The basic task of advertising, it seemed in the 60s, was not to encourage conformity but a never-ending rebellion against whatever it is that everyone else is doing, a forced and exaggerated individualism. → like counterculture. 90
- Addressing the ‘real’ problems of society and outlining the ‘real’ differences, then, would be the story of advertising in the 1960s. → counterculture desire for authenticity. 90
- Creative revolution, still market-driven 90
- After 15 yeas of predictability and utopian fantasy, American capitalism suddenly developed an enthusiasm for graphic sophistication, for naturalism, for nonconformity, and for willful transgression. 90
- By 1966, the anti-principles of creativity had become rule book stuff in their own right 92
- The primary goal of unleashing all of this creativity was not to overthrow capitalism, or even necessarily to make the workplace happier, but to jump-start the engine of change that drove consumer culture. 94
- Admen should have an automatic distrust of received (traditional?) ideas. → like counterculture. 94
- Willingness to defy convention was good for creative personnel, it made a fine brand-image as well. --- this brand image was often illustrated with icons of youth culture.
- Nonconformity was fast becoming the advertising style of the decade, from the office antics of the now-unleashed creative workers, to the graphic stle they favored, to the new consumer whose image they were crafting. 95
The creative workplace
- as advertising theory changed, agency organization and management did as well. Creative revolution affected not only the way admen thought and the ads they produced, byt also their everyday business practices. Decentralized, nonhierarchical anti-organizations. 95
o rebelled against assembly-line agencies 100
- old-school industries began to draft creative’s to change their luck, but then still applied old-school rules. 103

Chapter SIX
- by 1996, creativity had merged with the counterculture. 105
o advertisings strange and sudden infatuation with countercultural imagery, overnight conversion to rock music 106
- counterculture was an ideal expression of the new vision of consuming that theory-y capitalism, with all its glorious flexibility, instant communication, and rapid obsolescence, was bringing into existence. 106
- youth became dominant industry fantasy.107
- hip people famously hated Madison avenue and the plastic civilization for which it stoof, and yet advertisers could never seem to get enough of their criticism, their music, or the excellent trappings of their liberated ways. 107
- youth culture – size of demographic, economically powerful…not all demographics though. Advertising wanted counterculture youth, not normal youth. 109
- admen in the 1960s loved rock and roll, or at least claimed they did. Musical references. BEATLES. 113
- honesty (authenticity) and sense of humor was required to advertise to youth or young-minded. 117
- Revolution against conformity was most definitely not a revolution against consumerism or the institution of advertising…the counterculture was ultimately just a branch of the same revolution that had swept the critical-creative style to prominence and that many believed was demolishing theory x hierarchy everywhere, from Vietnam to the boardroom. 118
- **Use of Youth culture / youth imagery not entirely new thing in 60s – done since 20s. 118
- youth had a meaning and appeal that extended far beyond the market proper. Think young. 118
- “The counterculture seemed to have it all – the unconnectedness which would allow customers to indulge transitory whims, the irreverence that would allow them to defy moral Puritanism, and the contempt for established social rules that would free them from the slow moving, buttoned down conformity of their abstemious ancestors. In the counterculture, admen believed they had found both a perfect model for consumer subjectivity, intelligent and at war with the conformist past, and a cultural machine for turning disgust with consumerism into the very fuel by which consumerism might be accelerated.” 119
- Beatles – ‘yellow submarine art’ 120
- Countercuture revolutionized America’s consuming ways 122
- ‘American advertising took the side it did during the cultural revolution of the 1960s not simply because it wanted to sell a particular demographic, but because it found great promise in the new values of the counterculture. Conformity, other-direction, contempt for audiences, ad Reevesian repetition were good neither as management styles nor as consuming models, the creative revolutionaries now proclaimed.’ 123
- Consumer cynicism towards mass society. 126
- ‘love power’ 128 (beatles – all you need is love, now used)
Chapter SEVEN
- ads became hip in the 60s. 133
- inflections of non-conformity, artists, mocking consumerism (when consumerism mocked, it was consumerism as understood by the critics of mass society 148)
o weird because advertising is well known as one of the primary engines of conformity. 139
- promse of ‘commercialized hip’ 150
- Ads – feminism 152…
- Pepsi – differentiate from coke. The uncola. We want to be different. 163
Chapter EIGHT
- Cola wars 169
- BEATLES 177 use in Pepsi commercial?
Chapter NINE
- peacock revolution
- new fashion arrive with BEATLES, hippies, and student revolts 187
- BEATLES 190
- 1967, counterculture hit the media as a ‘thing’ 191
Chapter TEN
- revolution probably most overused word in 60s. 208
- by 1967, the rebel had become a paragon of consumer virtue. 209
- By mid-1968, industry ads for products that enabled wearers to signify their defiance of convention, their hostility to rules and tradition were commonplace. 211
Chapter ELEVEN
- figure of the cultural rebel 227
- Even through the ‘revolution’ capitalism remained firmly in the national saddle. 228
- Mark Crispin Miller – televisions pseudo-subversiveness is an essential element of the way it works. Unlike the telescreens in 1984 which demand that people revere authority. Television gains their assent by mocking authority, by leaving only itself. ‘TV would seem to be an essentially iconoclastic medium…and yet it is this inherent subversiveness toward any visible authority that has enabled TV to establish its own total rule – for it is all individuality that TV annihilates, either by not conveying it or by making it look ludicrous.’ And, Miller observes, this strategy has proven particularly lucrative as countercultural participants became prime middle-ages consumers in their own right. 231
- ‘Regardless of its objective ‘content’, and regardless of whether it even exists, rebel youth will always be found to fit the same profile, and will always be understood as an updating of the 1960s original. 234
- The 60s are more than merely the homeland of hip, the are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent.