surprisingly obtuse effort from Thomas Frank, The premise of this book is to challenge the notion that the counterculture of thes was some kind of organic and pure force that was subsequently coopted by consumer culture.
Instead Frank argues that the counterculture was in some ways a product of changing advertising techniques that the values of the counterculture were prefigured by changes in advertising.
The Conquest of Cool's style is very academic and somewhat repetive, What's more, it is a long way from making any kind of definitive point that massive social upheaval that began in thewas based solely or primarily on responding to changes in advertising style.
Frank is convincing in showing that changes in popular culture were reflected in changes within advertising agencies and in the candor of the ads that were produced by those agencies.
But that's hardly surprising is it There is very little cultural ground that did not undergo serious change during this period, Frank demonstrates that there is more going on than the familiar story of capitalistic cooption, but does not demonstrate that the basic framework of the narrative is wrong.
On the other hand, the book is interesting as a straightforward history of some aspects of advertising, especially automobile advertising, It also has a good chapter on Coke and Pepsi's never ending feud, But it doesn't hint much at Frank's future as a political theorist, and doesn't succeed in the fundamental challenge to popular conceptions as some others seem to think it does.
.
When I first picked up this book, I figured it would be something along the lines of Naomi Klein's No Logo or Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's The Rebel Sell, which come at the issue of consumerism from opposite angles but ultimately, somehow, end up in the same place.
This was not the case with The Conquest of Cool, This book is an academic read that studies the evolution of advertising from thes to thes, It doesn't speak of how capitalism coopted the social movements of thes, but rather how it drove them, and created a generation of superconsumers, Advertising of thes pushed individuality from conformity in order to drive sales, and wow, was it wildly successful,
It isn't until the final chapter where Frank gives us a couple of sentences about how consumer culture occasionally coopts social movements particularly anticapitalistic social movements in order to dilute them.
By and large, this book strives to illustrate how the changing standard of advertisements in thes helped to drive the change of conformist squares to hip, individualistic consumers, who would always be there to buy the new fashions and trends.
Some readers might find this book dry again, it is written in a very academic style, and I found the overall point Frank was trying to make got a little bit lost, but it was a very interesting look at the history of advertising in the decade where it underwent the most changes.
Una de las predicciones más acertadas del Brave New World de Huxley fue la de imaginar una sociedad donde el desinterés por la publicidad es un rasgo de filisteísmo.
Cómo llegamos a esto En principio, un libro sobre la historia de la publicidad durante el momento fundacional de nuestros valores léase "lo que lo que se supone que debemos desear" está en buenas condiciones de responder esa pregunta.
Los primeros capítulos de The Conquest of Cool, de hecho, son muy prometedores, Nos invitan a ver la interacción entre lo hip y lo square de forma más matizada que las fantasías de la derrota de los conservadores y la nostalgia de lo que nunca fue de los apólogos de loss.
A medida que pasan las páginas sin un punto de referencia fuera del microclima viciado de las agencias de publicidad un mundo a escala que reproduce los conflictos entre técnicos y bohemios que ocurren en ámbitos menos miserables , va quedando claro que Thomas Frank no está interesado en responder esa pregunta, y que ni siquiera está lo suficientemente distanciado de su objeto para considerarla.
Leer una alusión no irónica a una "Revolución Creativa" en publicidad es una experiencia tan abominable que tienta al lector a darle a Adorno la razón que nunca tuvo.
Bajo el régimen de una ilustración sumisa a los medios masivos, un libro de cultural studies historiográficamente nulo como este puede y será leído como un tratado de estética.
Es un prospecto bastante triste, porque con todas sus observaciones ingeniosas, The Conquest of Cool es en definitiva un libro complaciente, un sucedáneo de historia cultural listo para ser disfrutado sin sobresaltos por creativos y fanboys de Mad Men.
I think I'd hoped for a little more on business culture and hip consumerism, but this is mostly a fairly repetitive history of advertising in thes ands, with a chapter or two on fashion.
I got led to this through a podcast's referencing it, and honestly, the hour long podcast covered most of the interesting bits, This could have been a very long essay, and much of the book feels like filler, Although the essay would have been very interesting, While the youth counterculture remains the most evocative and bestremembered symbol of the cultural ferment of thes, the revolution that shook American business during those boom years has gone largely unremarked.
In this fascinating and revealing study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joinedand even anticipated by such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men's clothing business.
"Thomas Frank is perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment, "Gerald Marzorati, New York Times Book
"An indispensable survival guide for any modern consumer, "Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Frank makes an ironclad case not only that the advertising industry cunningly turned the countercultural rhetoric of revolution into a rallying cry to buy more stuff, but that the process itself actually predated any actual counterculture to exploit.
"Geoff Pevere, Toronto Globe and Mail
"The Conquest of Cool helps us understand why, throughout the last third of the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly confused gentility with conformity, irony with protest, and an extended middle finger with a populist manifesto.
His voice is an exciting addition to the soporific public discourse of the late twentieth century, "T. J. Jackson Lears, In These Times
"An invaluable argument for anyone who has ever scoffed at handmedown counterculture from the 's, A spirited and exhaustive analysis of the
era's advertising, "Brad Wieners, Wired Magazine
"Tom Frank is, . . not only oldfashioned, he's antifashion, with a place in his heart for that ultimate social faux pas, leftist politics, "Roger Trilling, Details
This book is an advertising classic that describes how advertisers have taken what is "cool" which usually involves the trends of nonconformity and rebellion and packaged it, and resold it to the nonconformists.
Perfect example: Even hippies shop for clothes that suit their fancy, and at the beginning of the production line is managers that are picking apart the hippie psyche and marketing to that demographic.
This concept, which is refered to as cooptation, is not the only topic that is breached, but allinall, the book tells of how "cool" has been interpreted and successfully adapted by advertisers to sell "cool".
Not too long of a read, aboutpages, but it covers the basics of hip consumerism, Even though this is a somewhat old book, the universals of cool are still valid, and we live in a world permanently occupied by cool, You could even say that the whole idea of revolution postwar, and ramping up mids was borne of Madison Avenue, decidedly antconformist and even antiscience, Think "The Dodge Rebellion" ins car commercials, The soul of America is in many ways the result of advertising and marketing, It's when the creatives rebelled, and now the meme of rebellion has been completely acculturated,
"In, advertising writer Nicholas Samstag contributed a long essay to Madison Avenue magazine entitled "You Cant Make a Good Advertisement Out of Statistics, ” By then the argument that advertising was “more an art than a science” had definitely been won, he noted, but the traditional hostility of business for something as nebulous as art had made this difficult to put across: “the men who pay for advertising are ill at ease in the presence of artists.
”
I also recommend sitelinkThe Origins of Cool in Postwar America This is a rare book where I had a hard time deciding between the "academic" and "popular" history categories.
Are the two mutually exclusive Maybe not in this case I let the publisher decide for me the University of Chicago Press is undeniably an "academic" publisher.
The author is probably best known as the editor of "The Baffler," which is described on the back of the book as a "cultural criticism journal, " His other accomplishments do seem confined to the area of journalism and commentary of current events, but nevertheless, this is a wellresearched work of history, as well as an unusually entertaining read.
Frank's thesis with this book is fairly simple: that the socalled "counterculture" of the sixties, far from being coopted by consumer culture, was in fact intrinsically linked to it from the outset.
The values which this subculture espoused were, in fact, anticipated within advertising culture by at least a decade, and they meshed perfectly with the message of liberation through personal choice rather than mass action which advertisers used when targeting youth.
Frank observes that "fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright 'revolution' against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace" within the mass cultural products of the United States, even up to the time of his writing, and this, he says, comes from an attitude that started on Madison Avenue long before it reached HaightAshbury.
Frank traces the development of this attitude in literary sources and memoirs of advertising executives, who strove, from the lates onward, to be the hippest folks around, and who challenged management theories that encouraged conformity for the simple reason that conformity didn't sell.
By the time of the summer of love it was easy for advertisers to market to young people, as with the "Uncola" campaign ofUp, because these people had grown up speaking the same language as the advertisers themselves.
Frank's use of sources does at times leave one wondering what might be left out of the picture did older more "conformist" styles live longer in ads for laundry detergent, say, than for cars and soda pop But the argument presented is fascinating and worth considering for anyone interested in the cultural history of the United States.
Throughout his book, Thomas Frank conveyed the idea that even through their rebellion, the youth ofs were bound to consumerism, They couldnt escape consumerism, though they tried, While conformity had been a “bulwark” of mass society, thes meant an endless string of appeals to “defy conformity, to rebel, to stand out”, and “to be ones self”.
This appealed to mankind as a whole, because it allowed them to essentially justify the consumption of goods while still retaining their individuality, Through the ages, mankind has sought an identity a way to stand out and be counted, The rise of hip consumerism was the answer for thes, Franks book aides in better understanding the marketing and advertising side of thes, but it also sheds light on a common theme found even today: consumerism isnt going away but evolving.
What then was viewed as rebellion against hierarchy or conformity, is what can be called today as the be yourself or believe in yourself movement, The book is fairly welldocumented, crediting oversources, There were definitely a few dry areas and some repetition in the lastchapters on hip consumerism, but overall Frank still effectively conveyed the effect of youth culture on the rise of hip consumerism.
While not a book for your average reader, it is a useful addition to the library of anyone interested in business, history of the latter half of the nineteenhundreds, or consumerism culture.
Thes was an age of embracing the unexpected, throwing off the shackles of conformity, and turning consumerism into something fashionable, .
Collect The Conquest Of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, And The Rise Of Hip Consumerism Authored By Thomas Frank Volume
Thomas Frank