The Impact of Advertising

...Waste is an image that shocks a utilitarian or a Fabian temper, but, just as parliamentary disorder and slowness is often the price of political liberty...

...What one displays, what one shows, becomes the mark of success...

...These new middle-class groups seek to be different, and in so doing create not one mass market but many new minority markets—for quality books, classical records, Scandinavian furniture, "hi-fi" phonographs and the like...

...In an economy producing so many varied goods, there inevitably ensues intensive competition for this "discretionary dollar," and that is why advertising in the future will assume an even more pervasive role than before...

...Beyond these socio-psychological effects, modern advertising has had a radical economic consequence on the structure of mass communication...

...A car becomes the sign of "the good life" well lived...

...For the rising demand for women workers in the offices, as stenographers and typists and clerical employes, beginning roughly about 1910, brought a whole flock of single women out of the home...

...But who, then, controls the network...

...and whole industries arose to cater to this need...

...Under the new arrangement, just as a magazine sells pages but retains control of the editorial content, the chain produces the shows and sells only the advertising time...

...In a curious sense, much of this social change, and with it the growth of advertising, is due to the relatively recent emancipation of women—if one goes by the American experience, at least...

...One major chain in the United States has sought to reduce the power of the individual sponsor by employing "the magazine concept...

...In commercial radio, as in commercial television, the sponsor used to control the show, the editorial content, so to speak, as well as the advertising copy...

...This in turn has led us to identify cities by reference to the bright lights of their advertising...

...All this has been done by gearing a society to change and the acceptance of change...

...And, in recent years, one must admit the commercial networks in the United States have begun to show a more responsible attitude in providing programs of good taste...

...The American economy today is an "auto" economy...

...For it was Mr...

...Obviously, one cannot talk of advertising as a social fact in a vacuum...

...This appeal of glamour has become pervasive...

...For others, particularly some American ideologues, advertising is the staff which points to a land of plenty...

...against asceticism, the lavishness of display...

...And much of the effort of automobile company executives, and of market research, goes into the diagnosis and manipulation of public taste...

...So, in an effort to meet this problem, it brings out a new, even more exclusive model, the El Dorado Brougham, and limits its sale, over the first year at least, to only 1,000 customers...

...But, more than that, advertising is part of the form of the "mixed economy" which Western society has developed in the last 50 years, wherein the incentives to work and the control of tastes and production are not directed by some centralized authority but are dispersed among many, sometimes competing units...

...Put most baldly, the function of advertising, of this handmaiden, is to seduce people, to make them dissatisfied with their standard of living, to make them want more and to make them work for it...

...In effect, Big Business sits at the controls of mass communication and becomes one of the major arbiters of taste, often with deleterious consequences...

...much as a woman buys a new spring wardrobe, seek a new one each year...

...If anything, the reality is in the opposite direction...

...One major question remains...

...What characterizes American society today is not only a rising income level, but a vast increase in the number of people with education...

...For some, this mark, coarse, vulgar, flaunting its bad taste, is a mark of Cain...

...In this delicate balancing, General Motors performs a feat of daring social engineering...

...and woe to the company which cannot match the trick—as Chrysler found out to its dismay a few years ago...

...More invidiously, ever since Gerald Lambert of the Listerine company took out of the British medical magazine Lancet the word "halitosis" and then by intensive repetition of the word in widespread advertisement infected all America with the fear of bad breath —making $20 million in the process—advertising has concentrated on arousing the anxieties and manipulating the fears of consumers to coerce them into buying...

...In that sense, advertising plays an irrational, yet necessary role in that type of society...

...Four thousand dollars is roughly the income line at which consumers, having taken care of their basic needs, have money left over to "shop around...

...For a long time, Ford resisted the annual model change...

...But where in the Eastern and Levantine bazaars stands the hawker with raucous or slyly insistent voice, there is now the neon sign, the radio and television, all amplified to a new economic and technological pitch...

...Sloan proved him wrong and in so doing introduced a new mainspring in the American economy...

...There are no simple answers to such problems created by the economics of television...

...It must produce a new car each year, sufficiently novel and attractive to entice a consumer to buy it, yet not so radically different from the old one as to cause it to lose its resale value too precipitously because it is outmoded...

...In the United States since 1950, the number of consumer spending units with after-tax income of $4,000 or more has about doubled...

...And today those efforts, once hit-or-miss, are with the aid of psychologists highly systematized...

...and the marketing of wares adapts itself, technologically, to these vast geographical requirements...

...The trick, as in clothes, is subtle changes in styling...

...In that sense, advertising, and its help-mate the instalment plan, are the two most fearsome social inventions of man since the discovery of gunpowder...

...A $10-billion business is devoted to making Americans work harder, earn more, and buy more products that they don't really need The Impact of Advertising By Daniel Bell What marks a great city if not its lighted signs...

...The advertising men themselves and the intellectuals seeking to be different set a new status style by buying "foreign cars"—Jaguars, Hillman-Minxes, Porsches and Volkswagens...

...What can be more stifling and soulless than harnessing the talents of creative artists and writers to turning out minute-long cartoon strips, or 30-second jingles that will "sell...

...One can plead in partial answer that this may reflect only the irrationalities deep in man or woman themselves—the desire for status, the desires, like the plumages of birds, to display...

...The emphasis in all these advertising appeals is on glamour...

...Passing over in an airplane, one sees, through the refractions of the night sky, the clusters of red, orange, blue and white signs shimmering like highly polished stones...

...But in extending the market, and in binding people together in new ways, modern industry and its handmaiden, advertising, do play a new social role other than hawking goods...

...Advertising is an integral aspect of the consumption economy...

...Against frugality, selling emphasizes prodigality...

...A few years ago, General Motors introduced a long, low look, with racy fins, while Chrysler kept its high, boxy, comfortable body—and fell back disastrously in the race...

...Status is the spur, and status is demonstrated in the different "badges of consumption...

...The major styling changes that are introduced, say, in the high-priced cars quickly become translated into the medium- and low-priced ones, just as a Dior model is quickly copied on "Seventh Avenue," New York's mass-production garment center...

...People with low standards of living tend to lead common styles of life...

...Certainly if one freedom remains, then hope is never lost: It is the freedom . . . not to listen...

...As Professor Galbraith has written: "A hungry man could never be persuaded that bread that is softened, sliced, wrapped and enriched is worth more than a cheaper and larger loaf that will fill his stomach...

...The center of a city is a market, a bazaar...

...Of the ten biggest-advertised products in the United States last year, nine were automobiles (the tenth was Coca-Cola) . Over $150 million was spent on advertising alone to sell these cars...

...In the postwar years, the influx of married women into industry brought a new demand for durable goods like homes, cars and television, and for luxury items, and this stimulated new advertising appeals...

...Almost all human societies, traditionalist and habit-ridden as they have been, tend to resist change...

...If one asks, therefore, what is the social impact of advertising, the most immediate, obvious, yet usually unnoticed and therefore accepted consequence is to transform the physical topography of the city...

...I have dealt mainly with the United States because it is the area I know best, and because, with more advertising than any country in the world—over $9 billion in 1955 alone—the United States shows perhaps the direction in which other countries may follow, or which they may avoid...

...This arises because of the growth of what sociologists call "discretionary spending power...

...Sloan who introduced the idea of the annual model change, and successfully induced the United States consumer to trade in his old car and...

...The desire for a high standard of living is a relatively modern, largely Western, and until recently mostly urban desire...

...It produces 7 million passenger cars a year...

...Though these changes primarily influence the style of life, manners, morals, dress, taste, food habits, and standards of entertainment, sooner or later they affect the more basic patterns—the structure of authority in the family, the role of children and young adults, and ultimately the different goals of achievement in the society at large...

...Does not everybody want more...

...Driving a Cadillac is at first a mark of success, but in a democratic economy, when the badge becomes too easily purchasable, the manufacturer begins to worry about his investment, just as General Motors is worrying now that so many Cadillacs are being bought by Negroes and members of minority groups in an effort to display the badge of their social advancement...

...But in the opulent society there is a new motor of competition, not llio rationality of price but the irrationality of multiple product...

...In the United States today, there are 3,300 advertising agencies employing 45,000 persons...

...These are the negative aspects of advertising...

...You taught me language," said Caliban, "and my profit in't is, I know how to curse...

...But, in the process of imploring, the aural nerve of homo Americanus has been tightened to the most excruciating pitch...

...By 1960, there may be 36 million...

...Advertising is the handwriting on the wall, the sign in the sky, the bush that burns regularly every night...

...Yet, this function—to stimulate dissatisfaction—is relatively recent, for the goods that people want—the automobile, the washing machine, the radio, television, electric iron, electric toaster, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher—are all products of the last 40 years or less...

...The American citizen, as Fortune once noted, lives in a state of siege from dawn to bedtime: "Nearly everything he sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells is an attempt to sell him something...

...The desire for so many different things creates not a conformity of standardized product but variety, and, in the constant shifting of taste, inevitably large waste...

...In so transforming the physical heart of the city, replacing the old duomos, or municipal halls, or palace tower, advertising has placed its own "burning brand" on the crest of our civilization...

...Similarly, the cost of reaching a mass audience fosters oligopoly in broadcasting itself and reinforces the unique position and power of the modern patron, the commercial sponsor...

...why should the consumer buy a small car, even a new one, when he can have a big car, one or two years old, for the price of a small one...

...Yet, if America is a high-consumption society this is due to other and perhaps more basic habit changes, and, while few social processes can ever be attributed to one man, to the extent that they can one might argue that the revolution in consumption and spending patterns in contemporary America is due to Alfred P. Sloan, the man who is the grand panjandrum of General Motors...

...The second-hand car is the poor man's car, which is one reason why there has never been a small economy car produced in the American market...

...Not really...

...Advertising got into its stride at the same time, as these industries began making their appeal to the female consumer...

...No creature is more uxorious today than the American consumer, and this submissiveness drives him to buy...

...What is the role of advertising in all this...

...But in a complex society like the United States, with its radically new impulses, advertising also performs a number of new "mediating" functions...

...Getting ahead today is not a matter of climbing a social ladder, since there is not one distinct scale, but of having a "nice modern house" and all the appurtenances that go with it...

...As Anthony Crosland has pointed out, heavy advertising is one of the factors which lead to oligopoly—that is, the domination of a market by a few great firms which can afford the heavy expenses entailed...

...One of its roles in the women's magazines (all of which are products of the consumption society), the house-and-home magazines, and the sophisticated journals like the New Yorker is to teach people how to dress, to furnish a home, the wines to put away, the cheeses to cultivate—in short, the styles of life appropriate to new middle-class status...

...Without the whetting of the consumer's appetite, no annual sales turnover of any size would be possible...

...Henry Ford, a crabbed, frugal man of artisan habit, felt that the consumer would buy his Model T Ford, available usually only in black, and use it until it fell apart...

...There is the fear that such enormous pressure creates a standardization of taste, a conformity—and uniformity—in the style of life...

...This may well be...

...And groups develop different "status styles...

...To carry on this assault, a whole new industry has arisen...

...To break through his protective shell, the advertisers must continuously shock, tease, tickle or irritate him, or wear him down by the drip-drip-drip of Chinese-water-torture methods of endless repetition...

...There is more advertising in the United States, however, not because salesmanship is a peculiar American virtue or vice, but because of the comparative opulence of the country...

...In the centers of the great cities, Times Square, Piccadilly, the Champs-Elysees, people throng the walks and gather under the blinking neon signs to share in the sense of the milling crowd...

...It absorbs vast quantities of steel, rubber, glass, textiles (for upholstery), leather, chrome, and so on...

...Selling, in fact, has become the most striking activity of contemporary America...

...In the last analysis, it can only be the demand of the consumer, his own education and taste...

...For many persons, the entire apparatus of advertising, its major social roles as I have described them, is irrational...

...so waste is the price of free consumer choice...

...General Motors, in fact, is probably the most successful sociologist the world has even seen...

...this year, there will be about 2.5 million young Americans in college, while the number in the college faculties alone is about five times the BBC's Third Program listening audience...

...In one sense, modern advertising differs only in degree from the function it has always performed, going back to the most primitive centers of exchange...

...It is the mark of material goods, the heralding of new values...

...there are now almost 26 million such units...

...The sight of these familiar crossways, with their crush of exotic displays, each seeking to catch our eye, quickens our emotions and provides a ready identification of home...

...All this is part of the transformation, of the Western world at least, to a high-consumption society...

...Tt mav well be that main' of our fears are excessive, that the pliability of the consumer, like that of the "indoctrinated" Communist youth, is an exaggerated fact...

...Such fears, it seems to me, arise out of an oversimplified image of society—as if society were some tabula rasa with a message that could be mechanically imprinted upon it...

...For where the market was once the range of a man's voice, or the limits of an open square within a crowded city, the market now, with fast trucks, trains and aircraft, is regional, national and even international...

...These young women, achieving an independent income for the first time, started buying clothes, cosmetics, entertainment...

...The "social function" of advertising is to stimulate wants, to make people work harder and earn more...

...Many a person, subject to the hackneyed jingle, the raucous voice, would repeat Caliban's curse...

...A consumption economy, one might say, finds its reality in appearances...

...In addition, there are a whole host of subsidiary crafts—photography, modeling, broadcasting, printing—that are employed indirectly by this great battering ram, and often with what waste...