Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool

...Advertisers viewed Americans as a faceless lot who yearned for nothing more than tail fins and TV dinners, a view that appalled Packard because it assumed that consumers acted out of irrational need rather than rational choice...

...He takes as his example that impresario of countercultural whimsy, Abbie Hoffman...

...Fast...

...To churn out Reeves-style ads, agencies maintained huge research, art, and copy departments, and they delegated work according to a Taylorized production process• and a rigid chain of command that deterred collaboration among different departments...

...Even assuming Frank is right, Hoffman's hostility to consumerism is little more than Bill Bernbach redux, since Steal This Book epitomizes Hoffman's ability to market a rip-off of mass-society critique...

...With the publication of best-selling masssociety critiques like William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) and Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Waste Makers (1960), many Americans grew outraged about the fraud and perfidy lurking behind the facades of Madison Avenue...

...This last point is especially crucial, for thanks to some amazing archival legwork Frank is able to muster enough evidence about the motives of ad executives to demolish one of the more tired arguments about advertisements, one made most recently by James 112 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 Twitchell in Adcult USA (1996): the claim that ads simply mirror consumer desires...

...In fact, although advertisers do link mass-produced products with corporate-sponsored images of rebellion, this marketing strategy has the baleful consequence of scotching dissent only if people like Rosser Reeves are correct in thinking that consumers are a bunch of dolts who will devour whatever semiotic bone is tossed their way...

...Frank himself admits that the Bernbach-inspired creative revolution "may have questioned hierarchy, conventions of public speech, and the meaning of consumer culture, but it was fundamentally a market-driven phenomenon," one designed to rejuvenate an industry suffering from creative doldrums and sagging profit margins...

...DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 113...

...Frank presents no evidence that Bernbach read Whyte or Packard, for instance...

...DESPITE ITS strengths, The Conquest of Cool can't bear the weight of Frank's conclusions about cool's social implications...

...Whereas magazine ads for Detroit's Big Three used Technicolor to glamorize tailfinned behemoths, early VW ads were in a minimalist black and white, and they either highlighted the VW's functional ugliness or downplayed its visual features altogether...

...Fast...

...Call it the retailing of revoluII0 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 tion: gray-flannel rebels trumpeted consumer goods as antidotes to the waste and obsolescence of mass society...

...If this is the case, then it is too generous to credit Bernbach with developing a full-blown mass- society critique, since he attacked consumer culture only to rehabilitate its propaganda arm, the advertising industry, which was partially responsible for creating a mass society in the first place...

...And like the advertising revolution, the "Peacock revolution" fizzled out during the recessions of the early 1970s...

...The results were often banal— Anacin provides "Fast...

...Whyte alerted readers to the demise of entrepreneurship under the postwar business world's stultifying regime of technocratic efficiency...

...They made cool into an instrument of obsolescence, thereby clinching the profitable relationship between retailing and revolution...

...Say what you will about these pursuits— that they are bourgeois, that they are middlebrow—yet it's hard to deny that they are rooted in a social philosophy and a sense of outrage over consumerism's squandering of social and intellectual resources that are a bracing counterpoint to a cool ad campaign for the VW Beetle...

...He lives in Brooklyn...

...Most important, the ironic wink, not the fauxpopulist taste test, reigns supreme...

...Bernbach accomplished nothing less than the transformation of advertising into anti-advertising, Frank explains, because he "harnessed public mistrust of consumerism— perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age—to consumerism itself...

...But is Bernbachian cool really equal to mass-society critique...

...In The Conquest of Cool, the true iconoclasts of the 1960s are advertisers and menswear producers, whose malaise was so profound that they turned on the very industries and emblems of conformity they had created in the 1950s—not to eradicate consumerism, but to use distrust of consumerism to make commodities all the more alluring...

...All advertisements are bogus, the argument goes—except, of course, the ad making the argument...

...In both content and style, the campaign scorned the puffery and obsolescence that fueled the automotive industry...

...Bernbach, whose career Frank finds both fascinating and alarming, is the pivotal figure of The Conquest of Cool...

...Countercultural malcontents like William S. Burroughs and Lou Reed have elbowed aside lab-coated spokespeople...

...Mass-society critique and cool simply occurred simultaneously, and for similar reasons...

...Instead, he chronicles the decisions of a managerial elite...

...you can't attack one while making an ally of the other...

...He wants to explain the genesis of the most profound cultural revolution of the 1960s, one that has gone unremarked among historians of the decade: a business-driven transformation of consumerism that made rebellion against consumerism into consumerism's ideology...

...This is a bleak conclusion in part because it is such a vague one...

...Frank is right...

...Shortly after the ABC "Don't Think" ads first appeared in NewYork City subway stations this past August, someone, or a group of protesters, was undeceived and pasted stickers on them that declaimed: "ABC/DISNEY: Sweatshops in Haiti/Union-busting in the U.S...

...At mid-decade, menswear embraced the counterculture—its sartorial daring, its taste for rock music—as a symbol of its own rebellion against conformity...

...T0 MAKE his case, Frank places business culture, and particularly advertising, at the center of the history of the 1960s instead of the periphery, which leads him to reject several standard portraits of the era...

...THE CONQUEST OF COOL: BUSINESS CULTURE, COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE RISE OF HIP CONSUMERISM by Thomas Frank University of Chicago Press, 1997 272 pp $22.95 0 VER THE past decade, cool has become the trademark of American consumerism...

...The copy, meanwhile, relied on plain speech and humor to ridicule Detroit's annual restyling sprees...

...Much of The Conquest of Cool hangs on this assumption...

...The 1960s are more than merely the homeland of hip," he offers, "they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent...

...Screaming guitar solos, psychedelic graphics, and jump cuts have supplanted bar graphs and pie charts...

...The guiding spirit of DDB, Bernbach rejected most of the industry tenets that drew Packard's ire...

...All this probing and manipulation," he wrote, "has seriously anti-humanistic implications...

...Like the young insurgents, people in more advanced regions of the American corporate world deplored conformity, distrusted routine, and encouraged resistance to established power...

...Now products existed to facilitate our rebellion against the soul-deadening world of products, to put us in touch with our authentic selves...

...When the youth-led counterculture did emerge in the mid-1960s, the advertising and menswear industries "imagined it not as an enemy to be undermined or a threat to consumer society but as a hopeful sign, a symbolic ally in their own struggles against the mountains of dead-weight procedure and hierarchy that had accumulated over the years," Frank writes...

...But in another sense those upstarts weren't revolutionary at all, for they were still engaged in business as usual.• JOHN PALATFELLA writes regularly for Lingua Franca and In These Times...

...Like turn-of-the-century ads that trafficked in images of middle-class bliss, and like postwar ads that traded in images of conformity, today's ads, though they employ images of rebellion, peddle the same tawdry promises of self-transformation, and still tout consumerism as the only viable American dream...

...For one, his account diverges from current trends in radical scholarship on mass culture, which often document the subversive doings of disenfranchised consumers...

...Surely Frank is not the only person to have endured thousands of cool advertisements yet remain skeptical of their patently fatuous images of dissent—and the brutal class realities those images conceal...

...it anticipated them by a good half-decade...

...Whereas some young insurgents embraced anti-anticommunism, corporate dissidents opted for cool...

...Reeves's method was to conduct market studies and sift through reams of product data to devise a Unique Selling Proposition, a quality that distinguished one brand of product from all others...

...Tom Frank has distinguished himself in the pages of In These Times, the Nation, and the Baffler, of which he is editor in chief, as an outraged critic and historian of hip consumerism, a modern Isaiah crying out in a wilderness of navel-piercing salons and Gap ads...

...In the late 1950s and early 1960s," Frank contends, "leaders of the advertising and menswear businesses developed a critique of their own industries, of over-organization and creative dullness, that had much in common with the critique of mass society that gave rise to the counterculture...

...ABC, for instance, last year launched an ad campaign that promoted its fall lineup by mimicking some oft-repeated complaints about television...

...He must make his imagination function under the strict discipline of attaining a commercial goal...

...For all the ways the creative revolution of the 1960s made advertising's store of images hip, and thereby altered the ideology of consumerism, the reasoning behind ads remains unchanged...

...The triumph of cool is especially apparent in advertisements, as Madison Avenue has discarded the scientific ethos that dominated the trade during the 1970s and early 1980s in favor of an antinomian spirit...

...Whereas conservatives like Robert Bork blame the counterculture for the demise of traditional values in the 1960s, Frank claims the source of permissiveness during the era was capitalism itself, in the guise of advertising and menswear, which disparaged tradition and celebrated individualism and revolt...

...For his part, Packard exposed how advertisers used motivational research to manipulate consumers and planned obsolescence to package superfluous commodities...

...Creativity flourished as little as collaboration...

...Yet its also undeniable that Bernbach had a profound impact on advertising, and when tracing the strands of that story Frank is resourceful and engaging...

...and rather than regarding cool as evidence that business coDISSENT / Spring 1998 n 109 BOOKS opted the counterculture, he claims cool first bubbled up in the minds of alienated capitalists...

...Nor, to Frank's mind, did Madison Avenue co-opt the counterculture's attacks on postwar conformity...

...No longer can the copywriter, like Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, view life through his own magic mirror," Reeves insisted...

...Well, maybe...

...Indeed, like the VW, the ads themselves were so similar in format that in 1963 DDB produced an ad containing nothing but instructions on "How to do a Volkswagen ad...

...One kingpin of ulcer gulch was BOOKS Rosser Reeves, chairman of the Ted Bates Agency...

...There is a twist to Frank's portrait of the Peacock revolution, however...

...Frank sets his history in the Madison Avenue of the early 1950s, otherwise known as ulcer gulch, a monument to overorganization, market research, and the precedents of advertising past...

...He valued creativity over motivational research, favored collaboration between artists and writers, and frowned on conformity and planned obsolescence...

...If you spotlight their differences, though, it becomes clear that their coincidence might be little more than just that...

...Whereas advertising's insurrectionaries initially pitted cool consumerism against obsolescence—the VW against the Cadillac— menswear designers and retailers used fashion to accelerate production and marketing cycles...

...In The Waste Makers Packard drew on John Kenneth Galbraith and Reinhold Niebuhr when he urged Americans to reverse the postwar trend of "private opulence and public poverty" Besides recommending conservation of natural resources and increases in government spending on public education and health care, Packard encouraged readers to undertake private pursuits, such as painting, sculpture, and reading, to cultivate a more reflective way of life, an antithesis to the world of getting and spending...

...A 1961 ad pictured a spotlighted VW, with the caption, "The '51 '52 '53 '54 '55 '56 '57 '58 '59 '60 '61 Volkswagen...

...He proposes that cool first became a dominant advertising style not in the mid-1980s but the late 1950s...

...In The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, his ambitious new study of the advertising and menswear industries of the 1960s, Frank channels his outrage into some serious historical spadework...

...Bill Bernbach, Frank writes, "was Madison Avenue's answer to Vance Packard...

...As such, Steal This Book is a rebuke to "the softer, gentler counterculture of 1967" that, devoted primarily to storming the barricades of style, complemented hip consumerism...

...Ads for Nike, Reebok, and Benetton regularly flatter consumers by poking fun at advertising, effectively saying, yes, we know you're too cool to fall for consumerism and all its ills—its conformity, shoddiness, deception, and waste— which is precisely why you're cool enough to buy our product...

...Frank calls Hoffman's 1971 tract Steal This Book, with its assorted schemes for stealing life's necessities, "a direct subversion of consumer society" and "commodity fetishism...

...One ad didn't even picture a VW, except for a pair of tire tracks in the snow...

...For Packard, advertising embodied the failings of a democracy in the thrall of corporate capitalism: its materialism, waste, and mind-numbing conformity...

...Moreover, while Packard, like Bernbach, DISSENT /Spring 1998 n III BOOKS attacked conformity and planned obsolescence, he didn't think designing hip advertisements, or buying a car, could cure those ills...

...Moreover, he thinks the symbolism of advertisements, rather than testifying to the qualities of the goods advertised, is an index of advertising's internal dynamics— its need to revitalize itself as a creative industry...

...For Packard, consumerism and the modern advertising industry go hand in hand...

...Yet the true test of Frank's hypothesis would be to consider how people experience hip ads...

...Frank's explanation of the revolution that engulfed the menswear industry reprises the basic points of his history of advertising...

...Manufacturers use advertising to attempt to control markets, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can use it to control minds...

...In the early 1960s, an industry whose profits were stagnating under the conventions of mass society— literally the gray flannel suit—experienced a creative rebellion...

...And it's equally hard to deny that Bernbach, hawking a stripped-down mass-society critique, was little more than an opportunistic trader in images that cheapen emotions and inflate expectations—that is, an advertiser...

...relief"— but Reeves didn't mind because he thought consumers were a shade more intelligent than lab rats...

...Books are overrated," cooed another—and this from a company that published Joan Lunden's Healthy Cooking...

...Cool sparked a revolution in the advertising industry, and Frank puts his history of that upheaval into the service of a more ambitious project...

...He emerges as an unsung New York intellectual, a cagey thinker who criticized mass society through its defining medium— advertising...

...Here he veers from standard left accounts of the 1960s, in which the counterculture, squandering its contrarian idealism, sells out at decade's end to mass culture...

...Frank views the historical coincidence of cool and masssociety critique as proof of their similarity...

...In certain respects Frank has written the history of a sensibility, and nothing is more evocative of that sensibility than the advertising campaign for Volkswagen that the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency (DDB) launched in 1959...

...Bernbach and other advertisers did spark a creative revolution in the advertising industry, one that comported well with the counterculture...

...It's erroneous to draw the conclusion that cool advertisements—and by extension capitalism itself—are impervious to criticism BOOKS based solely on an analysis of their content...

...Much of it seems to represent regress rather than progress for man in his long-standing struggle to become a rational and self-guiding being...

...One didn't fuel the other...

...Frank hypothesizes that advertisers preempt criticism of consumerism with advertisements that poke fun at themselves, using skepticism about consumerism to promote brand loyalty...

...The closest Frank comes to addressing reception is in his concluding chapter, where he speculates about hip consumerism's effect on the counterculture...

...He produced ads—like the VW campaign—that relied on graphic minimalism, mocked consumerism, and affirmed defiance and alienation...

...Packard mixed his utilitarianism with a sense of civic good to preach a decidedly republican kind of social gospel, one that envisioned a commonwealth of small producers participating in a thriving public sphere...

...Don't worry, you've got billions of brain cells," assured one ad...

...And with that pitch, cool, the precursor to the ironic wink, was born...

...Hoffman's encomium to theft seems more like the apotheosis of consumerism, KMart variety: the desire to get something for nothing...

...What changed during the 1960s were the strategies of consumerism, the ideology by which business explained its domination of national life," Frank ventures...