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Chapter 9: Advertising
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Advertising
Throughout the twentieth century, America did not run, aesthetically, on avant-garde art.
America ran on the art of advertising.
Though advertising probably has existed to a certain extent in all cultures, it took on a
qualitatively new existence and power in the modern era: accelerating rapidly during the 19th
century, advertising became a major social force in the 20th century. We will look at print ads in
this chapter, and at television ads or commercials in Chapter 11.
Early Broadsides & Posters
Advertisements, as we know them, were anticipated by printed sheets of paper called
broadsheets or broadsides (9.1). Since the Renaissance invention of moveable type, broadsides
have been used to publicize and promote events and products. Advertising historian Ellen
Gartrell traces their evolution, noting that although the broadsides were initially text only,
“stock” woodcut illustrations of the product or service were soon added. “Broadsides were
posted prominently where they would be seen by many people. They served a role of spreading
information, especially before newspapers and other mass media became affordable and widely
available…American ones appeared by the middle of the 17th century, once a printing industry
began to be established in the colonies. After the American Civil War, with advances in printing
technologies and color lithography, as well as the increased competition among the brand-named
products, many advertising signs that were displayed outdoors began to become larger and more
colorful than the one- or two-color small broadside.”1
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9.1 A Broadside.
Larger, more colorful posters and
billboards began to supplant broadsides in
the nineteenth century. The development of
color lithography in 1870 allowed for
more—and more captivating—images to be
pasted on every available surface. Wooden
billboards (“boards for posting bills”) were
erected along railroad lines, bringing
advertising messages to train passengers.
Circuses and theaters used posters
extensively, their entertainment images
becoming the ancestors of later film posters.
French artist Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (1864-1901) created some of the most visually
arresting posters of the late nineteenth century. Physically handicapped by a congenital disease,
Lautrec was ostracized from the aristocratic realm of his forebears. He exiled himself to the
Parisian demimonde, spending his evenings with the prostitutes and entertainers of working class
bars like the Moulin Rouge. Lautrec’s lithographic posters for the Moulin Rouge, especially
those featuring the can-can dancer known as La Goulue (“the greedy one”), employed the same
angular compositions explored by his avant-garde contemporaries in the Impressionist and Post
Impressionist movements (9.2). The curving contours of Lautrec’s figures, echoed in the sinuous
letters of his poster texts, reflect the Art Nouveau style that dominated European graphic arts at
the end of the nineteenth century.
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9.2 Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril.
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Published Advertisements
The first American newspaper ad, which solicited a buyer for a Long Island Estate, was
published in 1704, in the Boston News-Letter. By 1729, Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania
Gazette newspaper included several pages of “new advertisements.” A few years later, Franklin’s
General Magazine printed the first US magazine ads.
The early power of ads was demonstrated in Phineas T. Barnum’s efforts to promote his
entertainments. In 1850, he brought Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” from Europe for a
tour of the US. He used newspaper ads, handbills, and broadsides to drum up interest in the
singer, who went from relative obscurity to national fame. Her ship was met on arrival by 30,000
New Yorkers, all attracted by Barnum’s advertising campaign.
The first US advertising agency was opened in Philadelphia in 1841. The industry grew
so rapidly that by 1861, there were twenty ad agencies in New York City. The growing
commitment to advertising can be gauged by the fact that throughout the 1870s, a million dollars
annually was spent for ads for Lydia Pinkham’s Pink Pills (9.3).
9.3 Lydia Pinkham, logo, packaging, and advertisement.
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The first book on advertising published in America was George P. Rowell’s The Men
Who Advertise: An Account of Successful Advertisers, Together with Hints on the Methods of
Advertising. A handful of other manuals were published later in the 1870s; even more how-to’s
came out in the 1880s.
Early Advertising Images
The early development of pictorial ads can be traced in the pages of Harper’s Weekly. An
ancestor of Time and Newsweek, it was a popular illustrated publication throughout the second
half of the nineteenth century. It carried the story of the impeachment of President Andrew
Johnson, was instrumental in the 1871 campaign to defeat Boss William M. Tweed in New York
City, and the Civil War was documented—and illustrated--on its pages.
Harper’s Weekly ads were initially text only. One example is a sewing machine ad from
1858, which is comprised of the lyrics of a catchy song. In the mid-nineteenth century, people
used to read ads; the fact that we now say see an ad indicates that ads have become
predominantly visual.
Advertising’s informative texts were augmented with black and white woodcut
illustrations in the 1860s and 1870s. The invention of the linotype machine in 1874 advanced the
possibilities of color printing.
Some early ads simply reproduced product labels, as the 1868 Harper’s Weekly ad for
Colgate & Co. Toilet Soaps. Other ads included illustrations generated solely for the advertising
campaign.
Humor was deployed in early ads, and with it ethnic stereotypes and the articulation of
class differences (9.4). Both were shown visually and reinforced textually. An 1865 Harper’s
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Weekly ad for Taylor & Young Pioneer Yeast Powder depicts an elegantly dressed upper-class
woman in the kitchen with her plump, plain Irish cook. The text of the ad reads:
MISTRESS. “Why, Bridget, what are you doing—nailing those biscuits down to the
tray?”
COOK. “Yes, faith, Mum, or they’d be afther liftin’ the tops off you oven, Mum—this
Yaste Powdher’s so moity powerful.”
The class differences of the two women are visually coded, with the mistress portrayed as
much younger and more attractive than her maid. Their ethnic differences are inscribed in their
use of language, particularly the Irish woman’s poor grammar and pronunciation.
9.4 1865 Harper’s Weekly ad for Taylor & Young Pioneer Yeast Powder.
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Calvin Coolidge: Advertising & the Civilization of Desire
The modern role of advertising stemmed from the nineteenth-century divisions that
caused Western culture’s social and artistic crisis of realism. Karl Marx had predicted in the
nineteenth century that workers in capitalist countries would eventually revolt because of
continuing conditions of poverty and exploitation. Two steps significantly cut off such a
revolution in twentieth-century America. One was the decision by industrialists--pioneered by
Henry Ford--to raise wages to the point that the worker could become a consumer. (Marx had
predicted a cycle of increasingly lower wages.) The second was the magnification of advertising
to the point that it could motivate workers to increased productivity--and to increased
consumption.
The possibilities of consuming as a way of life were spread by the increasingly pictorial
ads in photo-based newspapers and magazines.
By 1926, advertising had reached sufficient importance to merit a major address by US
president Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933). According to Coolidge, the basic function of advertising
was education.
“As we turn through the pages of the press and the periodicals, as we catch the flash of
billboards along the railroads and the highways, all of which have become enormous vehicles of
the advertising art, I doubt if we realize at all the impressive part that these displays are coming
more and more to play in modern life...
“We see that basically it is that of education...It makes new thoughts, new desires, new
actions...Rightfully applied, it is the method by which desire is created for better things.”
Desire, in turn, is the crucial element separating the civilized from the uncivilized:
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“The uncivilized make little progress because they have few desires. The inhabitants of
our country are stimulated to new wants in all directions. In order to satisfy their constantly
increasing desires, they necessarily expand their productive powers. They create more wealth
because it is only by that method that they can satisfy their wants. It is this constantly enlarging
circle that represents the increasing circle of civilization.”2
President Coolidge saw the importance of advertising images in the modern economy, in
which need must keep up with industrial output--even if need itself has to be artificially
stimulated by the new industry of advertising. Advertising images became icons that began to
open up a new dimension of the myth of the autonomous individual, an economic dimension that
increasingly identified freedom to choose and the satisfaction of desires with consumption. The
linking of desire with products has led some theorists to call our culture “The Culture of Desire.”
Desire is clearly the subject of the 1928
soap ad “Heart’s Desire” (9.5). The ad was
aimed at the people who were the underlying
subject of President Coolidge’s speech--the
largely immigrant working class, who were the
potential equivalent, in America, of Europe’s
nineteenth-century proletariat. The image
contains all the elements of Coolidge’s speech:
the circle of civilization, desire, productivity,
and progress. It also shows the trodden-down
bodies of those who do not quite make the grade
in such a competitive system. The civilization of
desire can also become a civilization of greed.
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Advertising: Icons against Marxism
Just as President Coolidge’s description of advertising implied its central and political
role, American corporations were aware of its power to undercut the appeal of Marxism,
especially during the labor unrest of the period. This dimension of America advertising is the
literal content of an early Chevrolet advertisement:
“Every owner is in effect a railroad president...
“The once poor laborer and mechanic now drives to the building operation or
construction job in his own car. He is now a capitalist...His wages have been increased from
$1.50 or $3.00 a day to $5.00 or $15.00 a day...
“He has become somebody!...How can Bolshevism flourish in a motorized country...?”3
Bolshevism could not, as American political and business leaders both knew. Karl Marx
had no idea of the power of advertising.
The importance of advertising art was not in its artistic merit but in its radically new
culture-building effect. Rather than present visual or ideological challenges—as avant-garde
artists tried to do—advertiser sought to link their products with what consumers already desired.
Because they were so effective in doing so, advertising images, regardless of their artistic merit,
emerged as the decisively new icons of the modern era.
We will first explore how ads make ostensibly neutral products so desirable, that is, the
strategies used by advertisers to convince us to buy. Then we will analyze the images and ideas
in many late-twentieth century print ads.
Strategies of Persuasion
Market research began as early as 1891 when Nathan Fowler analyzed consumer patterns
and recommended in Advertising Age that because women make most of the purchasing
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decisions of their household, manufacturers would do well to direct their advertising messages to
them. Since then, ads were increasingly targeted to specific audiences.
Advertisers have deployed a range of strategies to reach these audiences. Increasingly,
they have emphasized experience over information. Rather than present us with specific detail
about their products—specifics we might think about and compare with the specifics of other
products—most ads present us with emotional appeals, seducing us with images of desirable
people, places and experiences. Advertisers deploy various strategies to do so. They seek to give
power and personality to technological products and to corporations. They also use role models
and celebrity endorsements; images of glamour and sex appeal; all kinds of humor; appeals to
our longings for stronger bonds of family, friendship and community; as well as promises of
leisure, self-improvement, and success. Advertisers integrate catchy popular music and rope us
in with contests and special promotions. They also attract our attention by manipulating the
visual elements from color to composition to compelling graphics.
Power & Personality for Technological Products
The way advertisers use personal experience rather than information about their products
can be seen in ads that give power and personality to technological products.
A Minolta camera ad perfectly illustrates this process.
First, the camera is pictured as an extension of the eye: the
caption reads: “It’s hard to tell where you leave off and the
camera begins.” Second, the caption identifies the camera with
the person: “Minolta—When you are the camera and the camera
is you” (9.6).
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A 1983 advertisement for Saab automobiles takes a slightly different approach. This
image accomplishes the first phase of the advertising process by directly fusing the car (the
technology) with the personality of the individual. The approach is obviously meant to be
humorous, but it is only funny because it dramatizes in a blatant way what we all expect from
ads in more subtle terms: “This car (an object) is an extension of you (a person)” (9.7).
9.7 Saab advertisement.
This shrewd image is calculated to have a powerful appeal to people who enjoy seeing
the structure of advertising ridiculed in its mythic and psychological pretensions. The ad
nevertheless does the same thing that it parodies: it connects a certain type of personality
(sophisticated, intelligent) with a particular product of technology (the Saab automobile). Its
underlying message is: People with superior knowledge of advertising and automobiles choose
Saab.
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Even if we as individuals actually purchase very few objects or products because of ads
like these, they still function as icons for technology in general. They keep us fine-tuned to what
is out there, just waiting for our mythic response. The theme of the Timex ads expressed it very
well: “We make technology beautiful” (9.8).
9.8 Timex advertisements.
Power & Personality for Organizations
Organizations do more than advertise their products and services; they also use
advertising art to counteract any negative effects of the way they must use people to achieve their
particular goals (making automobiles, extracting oil, etc.) These advertisements also have a two-
stage process: first, they present images that portray the organization as a single “big person”;
second, they portray its concern for the welfare, happiness, and freedom of each “little person”—
you—as primary.
America’s giant oil companies have been severely criticized for the negative ecological
and economic impact of some of their policies; they have used advertising icons to correct this
negative impression. A 1980s ARCO ad shows us that the giant hands of the corporation are
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gently restoring our environment to its unspoiled condition. Meanwhile, we can relax at home
while ARCO brings educational television programs like Cosmos into our living rooms.
Texaco ads from the 1980s announced “good news for all living things on this earth”
(9.10). The term “good news” is another name for the Christian gospel message. The distinctly
messianic tone of this advertising icon becomes even more clear when it is compared with
Edward Hicks’ 1846 painting that, through Currier and Ives lithograph copies, became
immensely popular. Hicks’ painting presented virtually the same scene as the Texaco ad (9.11).
Its title, Peaceable Kingdom, refers to the biblical description of the messianic kingdom when
“the lion will lie down with the lamb.” Texaco, evidently, is an even bigger and better “person”
than ARCO.
9.10 Texaco ad. 9.11 Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, 1835.
Notice, however, that neither of these big persons has yet said anything about selling oil.
Advertising art’s icons for organizations strive to present them as benign people, large
but lovable, pursuing on a gigantic scale what we each pursue as individuals: individual freedom.
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Famous personalities, such as Kathryn Zeta-Jones for Cingular cell phones, increase this mythic
sense of corporate personality. And what is the mythic bond or feeling these icons would like us
to experience in relation to these organizations? One ad puts it quite nicely: “You’re in good
hands…”
Like the Texaco ad that visually echoes Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom, many print ads
reference art works, art styles, and artists.
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
British art historian John Berger was one of the first scholars to examine the relationship
between fine arts and advertising. He did so in a video entitled “Fine Arts & Commerce,” the
fourth program in the BBC television series that was later summarized the series in his book
Ways of Seeing. Berger observed that in ads (which he termed “publicity images”), we are
surrounded by images of an alternative way of life, images that stimulate our imagination.
Advertising persuades us that by buying certain things, our lives will be transformed, that we
will become--like the enviable models in advertising images--glamorous. Glamour is the state of
being envied.
Berger noted that social envy is a relatively new
phenomenon. Until the revolutionary period that initiated the modern
world, birth determined where you were on the social scale. In a
culture where everyone’s social standing is more or less fixed at birth,
social envy does not exist. Social envy occurs in a society which
offers dreams of wealth and power to all its members, but actually
only allows certain people access to them. Celebrities like Tom Cruise
(9.12), Julia Roberts, and Arnold Schwartzenegger are the glamorous
or enviable personalities of our society.
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Since they both portray the powerful ideals of society, historic oil paintings and
contemporary ads have much in common. But oil paintings portrayed the lives of their subjects
as they already were. Ads, in contrast, portray our lives as we would like them to be. They
portray the lives we desire to have. In doing so, ads play on our fears that we are not desirable,
that we are inadequate as we are. There is a big gap between the ideal presented in the ads and
who we are. Ads suggest we can fill that gap with a magical purchase.
Ads add up to a philosophical system. As Berger says, advertising “is not merely an
assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the
same general proposal … It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by
buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer—even though
we will be poorer by having spent our money.”4
In focusing on ideal bodies, celebrating individualism, and integrating the human and
technological worlds, advertising images embody the same cultural values we have seen in the
Western art historical tradition from the time of the Renaissance.
Berger argued that ads have a symbiotic relationship with Western culture’s fine arts. The
visual language developed during Renaissance is still the model for our ads. Indeed, as we will
see below, Renaissance art icons often appear in ads.
During the Renaissance, oil painting was especially invented to render a tangible, real
quality. Today photography is used in the same way in ads. In addition, ads echo the devices
used in painting: devices of atmosphere, settings, pleasures, objects, poses, symbols of prestige.
In many ways, the development of advertising paralleled that of the fine arts tradition in
western culture. In the nineteenth century, academic realism was the dominant visual mode and
the first widely distributed advertising images were based on academic paintings. Advertising
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copywriter Barry Hoffman notes that A Child’s World by British academician Sir John Everett
Millais (9.13) was “the first museum-quality painting to be used in advertising.”5 Thomas J.
Barratt, whom Hoffman calls “the father of modern advertising,” used the Millais painting in a
wildly popular 1880s advertising campaign for Pears’Soap.
9.13 Advertisement for Pears’ Soap.
As advertising entered the
twentieth century, it began to reflect
avant-garde visual modes. From the
light-infused color of Impressionism to
the geometric abstraction of Russian
Revolutionary graphics to the
rebellious and anti-establishment
approach of Dada to the dream- and
fantasy-based imagery of Surrealism to
the expressive abstraction of American
action painting, all of the early avant-
garde styles have been employed to
sell commodities.
Advertising has appropriated various avant-garde styles, stripping them of their
transgressive intentions and re-contextualizing them to promote commodities. Usually the art
styles or images in the ads have little or nothing to do with the commodities. Instead, they are
deployed to make positive associations between the commodities and the fine arts tradition, and
to generate visual appeal in the ad itself. For example, when advertisers used Russian
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Revolutionary art to promote Stolichnaya Vodka, images originally generated to promote a
communist regime were used in the service of capitalist profit.
Mona Lisa as Advertising Icon
9.14 Advertisement for Sony Beta Cassettes.
We have already seen that
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is one of
the most important icons of western
culture, so it comes as no surprise that the
painting has been used in numerous ad
campaigns. Hoffman calls Mona Lisa
“The Queen of All Media” and discusses
how “the most used, most revered, most
overdone, most frequently evoked image
in all of fine art is looked at again and
again, revealing an enigmatically
beautiful woman who is now unique for being common.”6 He reproduces ads for spaghetti
sauces, video cameras, art galleries, milk, corporate conglomerates and cars, all based on
Leonardo’s masterpiece. An early 1980s ad for Sony Beta-Cassettes (the forerunner of videotape
cartridges) used the image of the Mona Lisa (9.14) to visually establish a parallel between the
perfection of Leonardo’s masterwork and the high quality of the “picture-perfect pictures” that
consumers could expect from the Sony product.
Advertising, Freud & Surrealism
Sometimes advertising artists don’t use specific art historical icons. Instead, they allude
to art historical styles. One of the most popular styles in advertising is Surrealism, the avant-
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garde style based on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories. As Hoffman notes, “Dali and
other surrealists manipulate and distort the mundane actuality of the world we live in to reveal
the imagined world of our hidden desires. With different goals and different motives, this is
exactly the conceptual space where advertising is most often at home.”7
The relationship between Surrealism and advertising has an interesting history. Several of
the Surrealists were involved in advertising in one way or another. In addition to being a fashion
model in her youth, Surrealist photographer Lee Miller supported herself as a product
photographer for several years. Spanish Surrealist painter Remedios Varo did illustrations for
Bayer pharmaceuticals ads. Salvador Dali created an ad for Datsun, showing the car driving
across one of his signature rubbery clocks. He was hired by New York City department stores to
design window displays, using psychologically charged images to entice people to buy. Later, a
photograph of Dali himself was used in a campaign for Gap khakis.
The link between advertising and Freud’s ideas is not limited to Surrealist imagery,
however. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays (1891-1995) went from overseeing a campaign to
popularize Freud’s theories in the US to working for the American Tobacco Company, where he
developed a campaign to encourage women to think of cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom.”
Using Freud’s ideas as tools to convince people to “buy” both products and ideas, Bernays was a
founder of modern public relations.
Bernays’ work has been used for widely divergent ends. During World War II, German
propagandist Joseph Goebbels used techniques from Bernays’ book Crystallizing Public Opinion
in the Nazi campaign against the Jews. Today, Bernays’ mix of Freudian psychological insight
and public relations helps advertisers manipulate viewers cumulatively and largely
unconsciously.
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9.16 Grand Marnier Liqueur advertisement.
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Grand Marnier Liqueur has developed an ongoing campaign around Surrealist-inspired
paintings that include images of the Grand Marnier bottle (9.16). One ad shows a forest of tall
tress interspersed with gigantic oranges. A redheaded woodpecker pecks at the trunk of the
central tree, revealing the Grand Marnier bottle inside the wood. Another ad uses a painting that
echoes the pictorial devices of Salvador Dali. The clock is an orange, recalling not only Dali’s
Persistence of Memory painting, but also a statement by Dali’s friend, Surrealist poet Federico
Garcia Lorca: “One must begin to express the inexpressible. The sea fits within an orange.”8 In
the Dali-related Grand Marnier ad, the vertical bottle flanked by two round glasses would
certainly function as a Freudian phallic symbol. The bottle and glasses are placed inside a large
shell, Freudian symbol for female genitalia. What is symbolically implied, then, is sex on the
beach. Of course the advertisers don’t verbally state, “Drink Grand Mariner and you will have
great sex on the beach.” Instead, they say it visually, employing Freudian dream symbols to
telegraph that message to the viewer’s unconscious.
Advertisers know that most of us don’t
spend much time examining ads. They know that
most of us don’t even read the text in ads. Instead,
we flip through ads rapidly as we scan the content
of magazines. Advertisers hope that the visuals they
generate will affect us on a subconscious level.
Which is why so many ads use Surrealist imagery,
precisely the imagery created to depict the
unconscious world of dreams and fantasies.
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Paepcke & CCA Ads
Since the late nineteenth century, advertisers have hired well-known artist to create
advertising images. In the 1940s and 1950s, Walter Paepcke turned Container Corporation of
America into a virtual patron of the arts. He hired artists from Surrealist Rene Magritte to
Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning to Pop painter James Rosenquist to create ads for
his company. Paepcke was an idealist. In words echoing those of French utopian philosopher
Saint Simon, Paepcke wrote, “The artist and the businessman should cultivate every opportunity
to teach and supplement one another, to cooperate with one another, just as the nations of the
world must do. Only in such a fusion of talents, abilities, and philosophies can there be even a
modest hope for the future, a partial alleviation of the chaos and misunderstandings of today.”9
Whatever their visions for the future, many other corporate heads began to follow
Paepcke’s lead in using artists for advertisements. Dole Pineapple hired American painter
Georgia O’Keeffe, and De Beers commissioned Picasso and others to equate the lasting values
of art with their diamonds. The most celebrated advertising campaign based on avant-garde
artists’ work is that for Absolut Vodka.
Alcohol as Art: The Absolut Vodka Campaign
In the early 1980s, Absolut ads pictured the bottle of vodka with a halo around its neck
and a headline that read: “Absolut Perfection.” Then, in 1985, Michel Roux asked Pop artist
Andy Warhol (discussed in Chapter 12) to paint the Absolut bottle (9.17). The company was
continuing a long tradition of alcohol ads. As Barry Hoffman notes. “From the outset the
campaign followed a ruling convention of liquor advertising: make the bottle the hero. Getting
Warhol to paint the hero, however, was anything but conventional and earned unconventional
success. There is no better example of the symbiosis between high art and advertising.”10
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9.17 Andy Warhol, Absolut Warhol. 9.18 Keith Harring, Absolut Harring.
Absolut markets its vodka as an elite product unusual for its purity. When other vodka
producers also began to produce high-end “designer” vodka, Absolut introduced its art campaign
in hopes of winning back its market share. (The Absolut strategy recalls the Catholic Church’s
decision to use art to win back congregants who were abandoning the Church during the
Protestant Reformation.) After Warhol, California Pop artist Ed Ruscha and New York graffiti
artist Keith Haring were among the many artists to add their images to the hundreds of Absolut
vodka ads (9.18).
In order to convince its customers to associate its product with the rarefied world of the
fine arts, Absolute has sponsored many fine arts events, offering artists and patrons unlimited
free vodka drinks during exhibition openings and other artistic celebrations. Several times during
the 1990s, Absolut sponsored receptions, fundraisers and other art events throughout Southern
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California, donating untold dozens of cases of flavored vodka in the hopes that wealthy art
patrons would consume and enjoy their drinks.
On December 14, 2003, Absolut vodka paid the Los Angeles Times to insert an ad
entitled “Absolut Wonder” into newspapers distributed to select areas of the city. Sealed in a
clear plastic envelope was a large foil cutout that could be opened to make a snowflake
decoration. The Absolut bottle shape was the central “spine” of the snowflake and was repeated
in each of the many branches of the cutout form. Consumers were urged to “Cozy up to an
ABSOLUT WONDER this winter. Created especially for the holidays, this unique drink
embodies the wonderful characteristics of the season. Show your spirit and give your ABSOLUT
WONDER a twirl. As a party favorite or as a gift, nothing complements a warm gathering of
friends during the holidays like a chilled bottle of ABSOLUT.” After detailing the recipe for an
Absolut Wonder holiday drink, consumers were told to “Set your snowflake free at
absolut.com/wonder.” At tremendous expense, the Absolut advertisers endeavored to connect
their product with both the gift giving and creativity of the holiday season. If such a link was
established in the minds of consumers, however consciously or unconsciously, Absolut could
count on higher sales throughout December.
Alcohol Advertising
Many ads promote ostensibly neutral products that do little or no damage to consumers or
to the environment. Alcohol is not, however, a neutral product. It is an addictive drug that is
responsible for many of the ongoing health problems of the Western World. At first a stimulant,
then a depressant, alcohol impairs judgment and, when consumed in excess, brings on a lingering
malaise.
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Alcoholism is one of the most deadly and wide spread diseases in America. Companies
that produce hard liquor like vodka have been prevented by the Federal Communicaitons
Commission from creating television commercials that show people drinking. Undaunted, they
have turned their time, energy, and considerable financial wherewithal to print ads. Since the
1890s, when alcohol ads first appeared in popular national magazines such as Harper’s Weekly,
they have provided a significant percentage of advertising income for US publications.
Gordon’s Gin: Woman Artist as Ad Character
Sometimes alcohol advertisers present figures who play the role of artists. A print ad for
Gordon’s Gin presents what appears to be a woman artist painting on the beach (9.19). She wears
an entirely white outfit and her male companion tugs at it to reveal the side of her large breasts.
Of course this is not really a serious woman artist. If she were, she wouldn’t be painting in all
white clothes, nor would she want her boyfriend to be pulling her clothes off as she worked.
Instead, the advertisers are using the image of an artist to mask their real intention: linking their
product with the fantasy of a sexual encounter on the beach.
9.19 Advertisement for Gordon’s Gin.
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Advertisers often use compositional devices developed by painters to direct the viewer’s
gaze. Notice that the Gordon’s Gin bottle is placed in the lower right hand corner of the ad.
Viewers scan the ad as they do pages of written text: left to right, top to bottom. After scanning
the glamorous image of two young people playing flirtatiously on the beach, the last thing the
viewer sees is the product image. Sex and romance are visually linked to the commodity.
Karl Marx used the term “reification” to refer to the capitalist process of representing a
human being as a physical thing deprived of agency or individuality. Certainly ads like this one,
which links sexuality with alcoholic beverages, contribute to reification as they represent human
interactions in relation to physical objects.
Rose’s Lime Juice: Artist as Rebel
A 1980s ad for Rose’s Lime Juice
presents a young, blonde man in his studio
(9.20). Behind him is a large painting
characterized by wild, gestural,
brushstrokes. Apparently, he is heir to the
avant-garde style of Abstract Expressionism.
Only on second viewing does the reclining
nude woman in the painting become visible.
Her raised, spread legs are seen immediately
to the right of the man’s torso.
From the waist down, it is
apparent that the young man has been painting in an avant-garde, action painting manner: his
jeans are splattered with paint. But from the waist up, his clothes are stain-free. He wears a white
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T-shirt and a black leather jacket. Combined with his short, swept-back hair, his clothes make
him look like James Dean, the young star of Hollywood cult film Rebel without a Cause (1955,
US, Nicholas Ray). That the advertisers want viewers to see the figure and interpret it as
rebellious James Dean-cum-avant-garde artist is confirmed by the text that addresses itself to
those who “prefer to part with tradition.” Rose’s Lime Juice, a product once associated with
older men who drank old-fashioned cocktails, uses advertising visuals to attract the young and
rebellious in order to expand its market share.
The Rose’s Lime Juice bottle is, like the Gordon’s Gin bottle in the previous ad, in the
lower right hand corner--the last thing a viewer would see when scanning the page, the image
closest to their right hand as they flip the page of the magazine.
Cutty Sark: Drink to Enter the Upper Class
A 1980s ad for Cutty Sark pairs a colored image of the product (once again, in the lower
right hand corner) with an elegant black and white photograph of people who drink the scotch--
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or, more accurately, actors portraying the glamorous life the advertisers want consumers to link
with their product (9.21). The text line, “When you live a Cutty above” leads the viewer’s eye to
the central male figure. Tall, handsome, with striking gray hair, he stands holding his drink and
wearing an elegant tuxedo. He appears to be giving advice to a younger, also tuxedoed man, who
reaches down to hold the hand of a seated woman one presumes to be his wife. The beautiful
woman’s hair, face and attire recall Jackie Kennedy, who was first wife of American president
John F. Kennedy, then wife of the wealthiest man on earth, Aristotle Onassis. The composition
pivots on her gaze, first towards the dog she pets, then up to two other well-attired men who
appear to be discussing something from the newspaper one holds. The ad clearly envisions the
world of wealth, power, and high finance. Cutty Sark advertisers can’t SAY that you will enter
this glamorous world if you purchase and consume their product. But they certainly imply it
visually.
“Still Killing Us Softly”: The Ideal Image of Woman
The woman in the Cutty Sark ad, like the woman in the Gordon’s Gin ad discussed
above, is beautiful, slender and white. Both conform to the ideal image of woman that dominates
mass culture; both are portrayed as the objects of the male gaze. In the widely distributed
educational video “Still Killing Us Softly,” Jean Kilbourne argues that the objectification of
women in advertising images is linked to violence against women.11
Kilbourne observes that ads sell not only products, but also attitudes and concepts. Ads
are the propaganda of American society. They teach us all to be consumers. Ads also contribute
to the cultural constructions of sexual difference. In ads, men are equated with dominance and
brutality, women with passiveness and powerlessness.
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Ads surround us with images of ideal female beauty. The ideal look is totally flawless,
totally artificial, and it is the only standard of beauty presented. Ads tell women that their beauty
depends on learning how to buy the right products. The underlying message is: You’re ugly,
you’re disgusting, buy something to change the way you are.
[SIDEBAR: Images of ideal women’s bodies have had increasing impact on American
women. 8.7 million cosmetic plastic surgeries were performed in 2003—up an astonishing 33%
from 2002—and 7.2 of the 8.7 million were women. In addition to ads, television dramas like
“Nip/Tuck” (9.22) as well as the reality programs “The Swan,” “Extreme Makeover,” and “I
Want a Celebrity Face” certainly make cosmetic surgery seem more desirable and more
acceptable.]
9.22 production still from Nip/Tuck.
Ads dehumanize, objectify and fragment women’s bodies. Ads often present women’s
bodies as another piece of merchandize--not just a thing, a thing to be sold. Turning a human into
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a thing is the first step to doing violence against that human. Kilbourne says that advertising
images do not cause violence towards women, but they contribute to a climate in which violence
against women is possible.
Kilbourne discusses other serious consequences to the objectification of women in ads.
The widespread contempt for women who are overweight has led 80% of American women to
think they’re fat and one out of five women has an eating disorder. Ads of idealized women’s
bodies may contribute to eating disorders.
Two contemporary artists have responded to the ads and to eating disorders with an
artwork that draws people together in multi-faceted ways.
Eating Disorders, Ads & Art
Five to eight million Americans suffer from eating disorders: anorexia nervosa, bulimia
and compulsive overeating. Even as the news media warn us about such diseases, ads inundate
us with impossibly idealized body images for both sexes. In order to address these issues
artistically, California artists Robin Lasser and Kathryn Sylva have created Eating Disorders
in a Disordered Culture, a visual research project designed for gallery and museum exhibitions,
public art spaces such as billboards and bus shelters, and the Web (www.eating.ucdavis.edu).
The beautifully designed interactive exhibition centers on a large dining table set with
plates that are incised with brief testimonies. Viewers sit at the table and use earphones to hear
personal stories of eating disorder survivors.
The exhibition walls are lined with powerful images that combine photographs of words
sculpted out of hamburger meat, burning on the grill of a flaming barbecue. Over the
photographs are texts. The piece titled Control presents a quote from Naomi Wolf: “Dieting is
the most potent political sedative in women’s history.” Interspersed with that text is a testimony
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from a woman with an eating disorder: “It was impossible for me to think of a world beyond my
plate. Calorie counting and running around the track in eternal circles, were how I spent my time.
I was obsessed with feeling in control over something. While I was trying to gain control over
my body, I was losing control of my place in the world” (9.23).
9.23 Robin Lasser and Kathryn Sylva, “Control,” Eating Disorders in a Disordered Culture.
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Lasser and Sylva’s Eating Disorders in a Disordered Culture is an artistic nexus of ritual
and cognitive enhancement presented as personal narratives in resonant aesthetic form. The work
not only informs but also builds community between people with eating disorders and those who
have been affected by people with eating disorders—which includes a lot of us. Shifting the
creative focus from artist to audience and emphasizing the importance of direct engagement with
communities through shared authorship and collaboration, Lasser and Sylva’s art is precisely the
kind of project that art historian Suzi Gablik argues can heal the societal scars that separate and
alienate us. It is art that Gablik says can build community amongst diverse people. “Community,
as it is being enacted here, is the ability to touch others in ways that matter to them—to give
them a voice… Community is the starting point for new modes of relatedness, in which the
paradigm of social conscience replaces that of the individual genius…[This is] art which speaks
to the power of connectedness and establishes bonds, art that calls us into relationship.”12 To
build community is to work against the power of ads, which are intended to address each of us as
individual consumers.
One strategy that advertisers use to address us as individuals—rather than as members of
a larger community—is to appeal to our sexual desires.
Sex Sells
We have all heard that “sex sells.” But few of use have analyzed why sex sells. One way
to begin thinking about it is to realize that as human animals, we need several basic things to
survive. First is air. Without pausing to comment on the quality of air we breathe, it is safe to say
that few of us has ever had the experience of worrying about where the next breath will come
from. Second on the list of things necessary for survival is water. Like air, few of us have been
out of reach of water. Third is food. Although there are, tragically, thousands of hungry people in
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this country and throughout the world, advertisers are not targeting them. Advertisers want to
appeal to people who have money for and access to all the food they need. Fourth is shelter.
Again, there are tragically thousands of homeless here and abroad, but they are, as John Berger
asserted, on the other side of the advertising horizon. Ads are not meant for the homeless; they
are meant for people who have homes to return to each night.
Fifth on the list of things necessary for human survival is reproduction, which is usually
accomplished by sexual intercourse, a physical action associated with powerful emotional
desires. For a thousand years now, one of the most compelling myths of western culture has been
the romantic myth. Originating in the middle ages, the romantic myth surrounds the biological
process of sexual reproduction with complex layers of desire. Today, advertising is one of the
primary venues for images of romantic desire. As President Coolidge said, advertising is “the
method by which desire is created.”
Romantic desire is so complicated today that few people in our culture are able to sustain
sexually satisfying relationships throughout their adulthood. Surveys among American college
students--young, vital, healthy people--indicate that fewer than one third of them are actively
involved in sexually satisfying relationships at any time.
In other words, one of the things that our culture spends much of its time presenting as
desirable--and this happens in all the mass media, from books to film to magazines to television--
is at the same time constructed as so complex as to be difficult to achieve. There is, as Berger
noted, a tremendous gap between what we desire and what we actually have. Advertisers
promise, visually, that through the magical purchase, this gap will be filled. Indeed, one of the
most successful clothing companies in the country is named The Gap.
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Selling Sexuality: The 2003 Abercrombie & Fitch Catalogue
One of The Gap’s biggest competitors is the Abercrombie & Fitch clothing company.
Along with individual print ads, Abercrombie & Fitch markets also its products through the A&F
Quarterly publication. The Christmas 2003 issue (sold in the stores for seven dollars) was 280
pages of photographs of breathtakingly beautiful young people, only some of whom were
wearing Abercrombie & Fitch clothes. Many of the young people were absolutely naked. In one
layout, for example, four beautiful blonde women pulled flannel underpants of a reclining young
man (9.24). On the next page, they fondled his perfectly “buff” body.
The overt sexuality of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues has made them quite
controversial. The introductory text of the advertisement-cum-magazine reads: “…we’d like to
ask forgiveness from some of the people we’ve offended over the years…If you’d be so kind,
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please offer our apologies to the following: the Catholic League, former Lt. Governor Corrine
Wood of Illinois, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Stanford
University Asian American Association, N.O.W., M.A.D.D., thong-wearing teens, Starr Jones,
Jonathan Taylor Thomas, vegans, Mrs. Claus, and the impotent. Thanks!” Coy apologies aside,
the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue is intended to provoke.
No doubt provocation was one of the intentions of the two-page layout that depicted
eleven nude people and was labeled, “Group Sex.” This layout was followed by eight pages of
beautiful nude people frolicking and embracing in an Adirondack river. Group sex has not been
so enticingly visualized since Thomas Couture’s Romans of the Decadence. Echoing erotic
devices established in Academic paintings, the Abercrombie & Fitch images suggest that young
people should desire to be flawlessly beautiful, always sexual, and always sexually available. To
achieve their desires, all they have to do is purchase the clothes illustrated in the catalogue-
advertisement.
John Lahr could have been talking about the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue when he
said, “Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.”13
Cruise Line Ads & Sex
A 1987 ad for a cruise line from the Los Angeles Times was equally egregious in its use
of sexual imagery to sell a product (9.25). The ad shows a slim, attractive woman in a white
bathing suit. She stands in thigh-deep water holding a mask and snorkel in her right hand. She
lifts her left arm to her head as if to push her hair back. She wears an expression that can be best
described as orgasmic. And between her legs slides a small cruise ship, its tall smokestack rising
vertically, aimed directly at the woman’s genitals. The ship itself becomes a phallus, and the
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cruise a promise for sexual fulfillment. Again, the advertisers don’t write come on this cruise and
you’ll have a lot of great sex. But they certainly say so visually.
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Hair Products & Sexual Bondage
A 1992 ad for Oggi hair-care products takes the sexual references even farther. A
beautiful nude woman reclines, her eyes closed and her mouth open in a moan of sexual
pleasure. Her long hair wraps around her body like bondage straps. The name of the product?
“The Moist Penetrator”(9.26).
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Bondage allusions are more explicit in 1990s ads for Golden Rifle. A partially clad
woman stands on the beach, rope wrapped around her slim body. To her right is a young man,
crawling beast-like towards her. She becomes his sexual prey, he her predator. But there is no
indication of the nature of the product in this ad. The advertisers want you to associate a certain
kind of sexuality with their product name, so that however unconsciously, you will be compelled
to purchase a Golden Rifle when you see their label (9.27).
Joop! & Priapus
Sexuality can be associated with all manner of products, from cell phones (tanned onto a model’s
stomach in one ad) to wristwatches (worn by a gorgeous nude woman in another). Often,
sexuality is associated with perfume and cologne ads.
Several ads for Night Flight cologne by Joop! depict an idealized athletic male posed on
an angular platform next to a large bottle of the perfume (9.28). A shadow in the bottle arches
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away from his torso, like an immense
phallus. However unconsciously, viewers of
the Joop! ad see the man as a modern
Priapus, the Greek God of procreation, who
was portrayed in ancient times with a large
erect penis. The ad presents the ideal male
body as a sculptural object, with a “hard
body” and an enormous sex organ. This is
the only male ideal offered in advertising,
and similar figures appear everywhere from
the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue to the
sometimes controversial Calvin Klein ads.
Calvin Klein Ads: Objectifying The Bodies of the Young & Low Class
Calvin Klein ads are notorious for objectifying men as well men as women. Their ads for
Obsession perfume depict young, well-tanned, athletic models in erotic embrace. When the
idealized, sculpture-like figures of the models are posed in front of architectural structures, the
images recall the idealization of the human form employed for propaganda purposes by the
Nazis.
In the 1990s, some of the Calvin Klein models were portrayed in tacky interiors
resembling trailer parks, so that they were coded as low class. Art historian Richard Martin
observes that Klein’s transgression in such “tawdry” images comes from exposing the class
distinctions in a country that pretends to be classless.14 Like the low class prostitutes in
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nineteenth century avant-garde paintings, the “trailer trash” youths were sexually available but
stripped of their human dignity.
Calvin Klein ads are also notorious for objectifying and sexualizing very young models.
The company used a Richard Avedon photograph of Brooke Shields for a 1980 ad. The 15-year
old model was paired with what Martin terms a “provocative declaration”: “Nothing comes
between me and my Calvins” (9.29).15
9.29 Richard Avedon, advertisement for Calvin Klein Jeans.
In the summer of 1995, Calvin Klein ran an advertising campaign that was so
transgressive that the FBI considered prosecuting the company for violating child pornography
laws. Magazine ads showed apparently pre-teenage models in semi-nude provocative poses. One
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ad, for example, featured an upskirt crotch shot of a young girl. Another parallel ad showed a
boy with cut-off jeans so short that his underwear was visible. Radio spots aired at the same time
employed a middle-aged man’s voice telling a young girl how attractive she was in the “Calvin
Kleins.”
The synergy of the magazine and radio ads suggested—at a minimum—a precocious
level of sexual awareness in what appeared to be preteen models. The direct glance of the young
girls in the ad referred to above reproduced the precise shock effect of Manet’s Olympia, who
disturbed 19th century Parisians by locking her gaze with theirs in a moment of mutual
recognition. Olympia, however—in the painting and in real life—was herself an adult, and was
clearly represented in an adult sexual context.
Calvin Klein, of course, knew from avant-garde examples like Manet’s that public
outrage evoked by provocative images could give him invaluable free publicity and the
reputation—among those hungry for ways to prove their unconventional uniqueness—for being
avant-garde, cutting edge. Most of all, the emotional kick of outraging middle class values could
then be transferred to any commodity bearing the CK label: underwear, glasses or perfume.
Calvin Klein is a leading exploiter of sex-as-shock, but advertising’s appropriation of the
avant-garde tradition is that ANY shocking emotion can be conjured up and laminated onto a
product…and then transferred to the buyer, who feels more “cool” or avant-garde, without going
through the avant-garde creative process.
Advertisers and corporation have learned that they can use any powerful emotion to
create an ersatz form of avant-garde shock or “cool” to connect their commodities with the
emotional lives of consumers. Another example is Benetton’s “The United Colors of Benetton”
campaign.
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“The United Colors of Benetton”: Avant-Garde Shock to Sell
The Benetton ads have used a truly astonishing array of photographs, including scenes of
incredible human suffering—none of which have any relationship to their products—in order to
give their label a sense of transgressive avant-garde cool. Photos of child laborers in the Third
World, of a young man dying of AIDS (who looks like Christ), or a bloody scene after a terrorist
explosion have all been used as ads whose only text has been “United Colors of Benetton”
(9.30).Unlike the aborted FBI prosecution of Calvin Klein in America, however, the German
government in 1995 successfully prosecuted its case against three Benetton “Shock”
advertisements and had them banned in Germany. The legal language of the German court
summarized the immorality that can underlie advertising’s practice of “avant-garde” shock:
“Benetton is trying, through its depiction of the intense suffering of living things, to
evoke a feeling of compassion on the part of the consumer and to suggest that it is sympathetic.
In this way, Benetton tries to enhance its name and its business in the mind of the consumer.”
9.30 Advertisement for United Colors of Benetton.
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The defense of the ads by a Benetton spokesperson makes the avant-garde shock strategy
even more evident. After accurately noting that the very nature of advertising is to make intense
emotional appeals, Marina Galanti concluded: “The idea behind our advertising works…” She
added that other companies “just use different emotions—greed, lust, whatever.”16
Galanti explicitly stated that any emotion would do, as long as it is strong enough to enter
the emotional inner world of the viewer. She went on to comment that Bennetton regularly visits
European art schools to pick up on emerging avant-garde styles.
[SIDEBAR: Advertising attempt to link and commerce is most obvious in a two-page ad
in Vogue magazine from May 2004. On the right hand page is a photograph of the Infiniti G35
Sport Coupe. The entire left-hand page is filled with the names of avant-garde art movements
from Impressionism to Fauvism to Surrealism. Scanning left to right, readers see all the labels
for artistic creativity, then visually link them with the image of the car (9.31).]
For most of its history, advertising was primarily directed at European and Euro-
American consumers. Benetton’s ads of global suffering were placed in magazines primarily
marketed to comfortably middle class white readers.
Historically, people outside advertising’s intended audience have been visually presented
as “Other.” In other words, ads have continued to self/other bipolar opposition of Western
culture, visually communicating to their intended audiences a sense of dominance and
superiority over those on the other side of the “advertising horizon.”
Advertisements & the “Other”
Anthropologist William O’Barr has studied the representation of people considered
“Other” by the Euro-Americans who have dominated the US advertising industry. He argues
“that the representations of foreigners and other categories of outsiders who appear in
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advertisements provide paradigms for relations between members of advertising’s intended
audience and those defined as outside it. These paradigms constitute an ideological guide for
relations between the self and others, between us and them. The most frequently depicted
qualities of such relationships are hierarchy, dominance, and subordination.”17 According to
O’Barr, in order to understand such images, we must ask three questions. First, how are the
people in a certain cultural category ideally portrayed? Second, how do the people in that
category relate to others? And third, how are these relationships depicted?
In the 1920s, US railroads promoted their services by offering
trips through the great American West. One Santa Fe railroad
ad from 1929 shows three smiling white children leaning out
the window of a train car. The text reads, “Gee! We are going
to see real, live Indians. Here is a real Out West Outing—the
Indian Detour, Grand Canyon, Colorado Rockies, California”18
(9.32). The “Indian Detour” is offered as one of six possible
selections for summer train trips, alongside the natural wonders
of the Grand Canyon and California. To equate Native Americans with physical spectacles is to
treat them like objects and thereby de-humanize them.
The same approach can be seen in a Kodak ad that O’Barr reproduces (9.33). The ad
features a photograph of Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly. An “All-American” family of mother,
father, and two kids is seen on the left. The father points his camera to the scene unfolding to the
right. In the center of the photograph, framed by the towering stone spires of the canyon, a
Navajo woman in traditional attire watches over her sheep. The text of the ad refers to the
“grandeur” of the scenery—but does not acknowledge the people who own and live on the land.
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The Native American residents are subsumed by the spectacle, as fodder for the camera’s
mechanized gaze.
O’Barr discusses what he calls “photographic colonialism,” which parallels economic
and political colonialism. Taking photographs of the Other, making their image one’s personal
property, is a form of exploiting others to satisfy one’s own desires. Ads both practice and
encourage this activity.
A recent ad for the Bahamas Islands practices the same kind of objectification of the
Other. A beautiful black woman reclines in shallow ocean water, contentedly resting her chin on
her left hand and looking seductively at the camera (9.34). The text reads: “Let’s assume I’m an
Island. I’ve got the bluest waters in the world. Beaches like cream colored silk. Great big
romantic hotels. And all around me, I’ve got sleek white yachts with rich men inside.”19
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Sexualized and sexually available, the woman-cum-island is an object offered up for tourist
consumption.
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The Bahamas Island woman is constructed as sexual and content to be so. Earlier in
advertising history, images of Africans and African-Americans pictured them as non-sexual but
as very, very happy to serve their white masters and matrons. Hotels, railroads, alcohol, even
business machines--all used ads that featured images of black male servants with wide smiles of
pleasure. This continued into the middle of the twentieth century when the Civil Rights
Movement challenged advertisers to think beyond such stereotypes.
Similarly, images of happy female servants appeared in US advertising from the late
nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth. The most frequently deployed stereotype
was the happy mammy, best known as the advertising mascot for Aunt Jemima pancake flour,
maple syrup and other breakfast commodities. The Aunt Jemima character is plump and dark-
skinned. She wears a scarf on her head, a shawl around her shoulders, and a white apron over her
long skirt. She always has a big grin and wide open eyes.
In an ad for Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour
that ran April 10, 1920 in The Saturday Evening
Post, Aunt Jemima is drawn as a humorous
cartoon character holding a tall plate of
pancakes (9.35). Behind her is a crowd of white
people whose plates are being filled with her
pancakes. The only text of the ad is what Aunt
Jemima is saying: “Lawzee! mekkin’ pancakes
is th’ mos’ impawtines thing ah does, than
which dere aint no better, effen ah does say so!
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Jes mah flour and water, on de griddle an—whuf! dey’s done honey. Grab em!” Like the 1865
Taylor & Young Yeast Powder ad we discussed, the Aunt Jemima ad depicts class differences
visually by portraying the upper class white people as well dressed and Aunt Jemima as poorly
attired. Also like the Taylor & Young ad, the Aunt Jemima ad reinscribes class differences with
text, assigning the lower class subject very poor language skills. In the Aunt Jemima ad, racial
differences coincide with class distinctions, reinforcing the superiority of the white people over
their happy servant. (As we will see in Chapter 12, US artist Betye Saar deconstructed the Aunt
Jemima stereotype in an iconic artwork of the 1970s.)
Cigarette Ads
The first ads for tobacco appeared in 1789, when the Lorillard brothers advertised snuff,
cigars and smoking tobacco in a New York newspaper. By 1889, James B. Duke was spending
twenty percent of the profits on his cigarette sales on ads.
One of the first brand names for tobacco was the Bull Durham brand. During the
American Civil War, both Confederate and Union soldiers raided farmer John Green’s tobacco
crop outside Durham, North Carolina. After the war, many of the survivors wrote him,
requesting more of his tobacco. Green named his product Bull Durham in 1868. It soon became
the largest selling tobacco brand in the world (9.36).
In 1907, Bull Durham tobacco ads on New York City Fifth Avenue buses and trolleys
caused a commotion due to the “male-obvious” depiction of the bull in the ads. (The term “male-
obvious” was a “proper” early twentieth century reference to the fact that the bull’s genitals were
depicted.) The drivers were arrested and the pictures confiscated due to the “offensive nature” of
the illustrations. The legal case eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court.
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9.36 Advertisement for Bull Durham and late nineteenth century product packaging.
But the controversy did hurt tobacco sales. In 1918--the final year of World War I--the
US War Department purchased the entire output of Bull Durham tobacco. That year, the
American Tobacco Company advertised, “When our boys light up, the Huns [i.e., the Germans]
will light out.”
Controversies over cigarette advertising continued throughout the twentieth century. In
1974, U.S. Representative Henry Waxman released a secret office memo from the R.J. Reynolds
Company documenting their efforts to develop an advertising campaign that would entice the
youth of America to begin smoking. (R. J. Reynolds produced Camel, Winston, Salem, and
Doral cigarettes, among other products.) Waxman and other anti-smoking activists instigated
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more rigorous control of cigarette advertisement. Their efforts also led to the national movement
to ban smoking in public places. (College students may be amazed to learn that smoking in the
college classroom was not only permitted, but a common occurrence, when many of their parents
and grandparents were young.)
Cigarette advertisers often associate smoking with freedom and with healthy, outdoor
activities. A February 1987 ad for Camel cigarettes shows a white man in outdoors attire seated
on a rustic balcony that juts out over a wide, calm river. Apparently exhausted from exploring
the surrounding jungle, he lights a cigarette and prepares to smoke as his reward after a hard day.
Pristine nature, healthy and athletic work—these are hardly the logical outcomes of tobacco
smoking. Yet the image says they are.
The text of the Camel ad reads,
“It’s a whole new world,” eliding the
“new” taste of the cigarette with the
European discovery and conquest of
what they called the New World, and its
Native American inhabitants. This
elision is reinforced by the visuals of
the ad: the man’s clothing which
identifies him as an explorer or possible
discoverer of the “untamed”; the
“untouched” nature that surrounds him;
and the wide, jungle-lined river that
recalls the Amazon (9.37).
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Virginia Slims
As early as 1919, a writer in Printer’s Ink magazine had already commented on advertising
portrayals of women with cigarettes in “smart social settings.” He interpreted such images as “an
insidious campaign to create women smokers.” Not much has changed since then.
The Virginia Slims ads of the 1970s are outstanding examples of successful advertising art.
The series portrays women’s liberation through episodes that illustrate the historical record of
male domination (9.38).
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Almost every Virginia Slims ad shows a “before” and an “after” scene. One ad presented
the theme of work this way: the photograph showing “his work” featured a paunchy middle-aged
man relaxing with a cigar in his mouth and his feet on the desk. The adjacent photograph
showing “her work” pictured a woman bending over a mop and bucket. The bucket, in turn, was
surrounded by a dozen or so other objects: a pot, a broom, a feather duster, and so on. These
objects, presumably, would still be there long after “his work” with the cigar was finished.
These “before” and “after” snapshots were done in monochrome color of very old
photographs. They represented yesteryear.
“Today’s woman” appeared in the large, white open space below the drab-colored
photographs. She was shown--as she is always shown in the Virginia Slims ads--as energetic and
happy: she was smiling and, as always, dressed in high-fashion clothes (the name of the designer
is usually on the side of the ad). She was also smoking.
This series of ads is crafted with remarkable skill to appeal to any woman who is
sensitive to women’s grievances against men. The ads not only document women’s
monochrome, victimized past, they show with ritually reinforced precision how to achieve a
liberated present: through high fashion, the right cosmetics, and, of course, the right cigarette.
All it takes is money and the right commodities. The series hints that smoking itself just might be
the best revenge against male-dominated history.
This ad exemplifies the mythic process underlying advertising art: the image first links a
product to a personality within the advertisement; second, the experience of the image links the
product-personality to the intended viewers (a woman who smokes and is sympathetic to the
theme of women’s liberation).
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The Marlboro Man
The male icon found in Marlboro ads has been as successful and widely distributed as the
Virginia Slims females. The Marlboro Man is an American cowboy (9.39). Handsome and
athletic, he is descendant of the mythic figures who conquered the American West. A rugged
individual, he still rides horses on the open range, still wears a glamorous cowboy hat and still
wears guns in his hip holsters. One two-page Marlboro ad portrays two cowboys riding from the
upper right towards the three horses in the lower left. They raise their lassoes, about to capture
the wild mustangs they’ve trapped between large boulders. They perform these strenuous and
daring deeds outdoors, where no sign of human habitation is visible. For actual men, chained to
desks in urban offices, the text “Come to Marlboro Country” must have great appeal.
The virility of the Marlboro appeal is underscored in another ad, a close-up of the
cowboy’s lower torso. The Marlboro man holds a carton of cigarettes right where his gun or
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holster would be. The carton functions as a large phallic symbol. The advertisers can’t say in
words that smoking Marlboro will make you sexier, but the image deliberately links Marlboros
and virility, in a visual appeal to unconscious desire.
In late 2004, Malboro augmented its print ads with a series of mailings. One included a
Cook Like A Man Cookbook. The barbecue recipes were touted as “The last male art form.”
Readers were told that “Man is at the top of the food chain.” Clearly, Marlboro was continuing to
link its product with a powerful sense of masculinity.
Throughout the 1980s, US artist Richard Prince re-photographed images from the
Marlboro Man ads, isolating the depictions of rugged male individualism and separating them
from their contexts in the media (9.40). In doing so, he performed a critical deconstruction,
compelling viewers to consider how such advertising images serve to generate what Prince has
called “wishful thinking.” In an ironic essay titled “The Perfect Tense,” Prince discussed the
media’s pervasive affect on creating one’s sense of reality.
9.40 Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1991-92.
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“Magazines, movies, TV, and records…He had already accepted all these conditions and
built out of their givens, and to him what was given was anything public and what was public
was always real.”20
Prince was one of many late twentieth-century artists whose work addressed the impact
of advertising and the mass media. We will discuss others in Chapter 12.
Winston Ads, Protested
In February 1986, Winston cigarettes
embarked on a campaign that appeared to
link their product with patriotic heroism.
One ad shows a handsome man leaning out
of a helicopter. He wears a life jacket and
points down towards what must be a
situation requiring his (heroic) rescue (9.41).
The text proclaims that Winston is
“America’s Best.”
A version of this same ad was placed
on a large billboard near the beach in
Venice, California. In March of that year, some guerilla artists repainted the image to protest
both the ad itself and US intervention in Latin America. The central “hero” was transformed into
a Marine holding a large gun. The text was changed to read “Contras, America’s Beast” and the
cigarette box was reconfigured as a crate of missiles. Over the red and white Winston label the
guerilla artists painted “100 Million,” their estimate of the cost of the American intrusion into
Central America.
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Anonymous artists protested the Winston ads. Why don’t more consumers protest?
Adbusters & Culture Jamming
One strategy of protest is “culture jamming”--the insertion of oppositional material into
the same mass media that produce dominant cultural messages. Mark Dery writes that culture
jamming is “artistic terrorism directed against a media culture that manipulates information to
manufacture consent. ‘Jamming’ is CB slang for the illegal practice of interrupting radio
broadcasts or conversations between fellow hams; ‘culture jamming’ intrudes on the intruders,
investing ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with revolutionary meaning.”21
With its culture jamming images and essays, Adbusters Magazine is, in fact, a form of
published protest. The magazine staff researches and exposes the relationship between
advertising and pressing social issues. The controversial July/August 2004 issue, for example,
posited a relationship between the mass consumption promoted by ads and world terrorism,
suggesting that both lead to global destruction. The issue was introduced with a provocative text:
“It isn’t just bombs, police raids on TV and ‘sleeper cells’: terrorism also comes wrapped in
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plastic. The embrace of consumer society inflicts a different brand of terror upon the world. The
monster ego is born uncontrolled, uninhibited, wanting more and more and more…”
Other pages juxtaposed photographs of little boys playing with toy guns and mock
testimonials by little girls who manipulated their parents to get them to buy toys and clothes. One
such “testimonial” read: “My dad is so dumb, I can make him do anything. Like we were
shopping last night and we went past the toy store and I said I wanted to go in so we did. I saw
the Powerpuff Girls Pj backback in yellow and there was one left so I asked him to buy it and he
said no. I screamed until I went all wobbly and I had to sit down and told him he didn’t love me.
He looked sad and said I was his little girl and he loved me very much, and he bought it for me.
He always does.”
Later in the issue, an image of Islamic children (recognizable as such because one little
girl was wearing a black chador garment) who were playing marbles on the street was contrasted
with a photograph of a chubby US boy seated in front of a television, eating potato chips and
playing with the remote control. Another image of Islamic children on a swing set was paired
with an apparently anorexic US girl instant messaging on her computer. In a final photographic
pairing, a chubby US family reclining passively on a wide white leather couch while watching
television was placed opposite a stark black and white image of two Arab men. The caption read:
“watch the war; live the war” (9.42).
The culture jamming that Adbusters performs highlights the bipolar opposition of gender
issues in children’s advertising, calling our attention to how ads teach little boys to play at war
and little girls to be manipulative in order to get what they want. It also exposes the we/they
opposition that is fundamental to wartime ideologies. In doing so, Adbusters underscores the
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basic premise of ads, which is to make us desire more and more commodities—and to connect
our accelerating consumption with emotional satisfaction.
Why aren’t there more critical voices? Have ads undermined the critical process? One
answer is that ads have appropriated the strategies of rebellion and protest that once
characterized the avant-garde challenge to traditional cultural values.
Why Johnny Can’t Dissent
Thomas Frank, in his essay “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent,” argues that ads have
appropriated rebellion, protest, and nonconformity, thereby absorbing the strategies that
previously would have been used to criticize them. According to Frank, the countercultural ideal
“holds that the paramount idea of our society is conformity, [the kind of conformity that is] most
conveniently summarized with images of 1950s suburban correctness. You know, that land of
sedate music, sexual repression, deference to authority, Red Scares, and smiling white people
standing politely in line to go to church. Constantly appearing as a symbol of arch-backwardness
in advertising and movies, it is an image we find easy to evoke.”22 The countercultural ideal,
originally developed in protest of such conformity, is now capitalist orthodoxy.
Frank argues that “[t]he problem comes in how easily any idea, deed, or image can
become part of sponsored world.”23 He observes, “With its reorganization around information,
capitalism has developed a new mythology… according to which the breaking of rules and the
elimination of rigid corporate structure have become the central article of faith for millions of
aspiring executives.” Business execs “envision themselves as part of the great avant-garde
tradition of edge-livers…hip is their official ideology.”24 Frank goes on to list several advertising
slogans that purport to celebrate hip nonconformity, but in actuality reinscribe conformity to the
philosophy of advertising, which is, that we are what we consume.
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Some of the slogans he lists are:
Burger King: Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules.
WXRT-FM: If You Don’t Like the Rules, Change Them.
Dodge: The Rules Have Changed.
Swatch: The Art of Changing.
Arby’s: This is different. Different is good.
Hugo Ball: Innovate Don’t Imitate.
Each of these slogans espouses the kind of counter-cultural rebellion that was once
exclusive to the avant-garde. Thomas Frank’s incisive article invites readers to ask some
profoundly important questions. How can artists maintain an avant-garde position in the face of
the advertising industry’s appropriation of once transgressive artistic practices? More
importantly, how can viewers resist the seductive messages of advertisements in our Culture of
Desire? How can individuals construct identities outside the parameters of the market?
In Chapters 12 and 13, we will look at some art created by people who grapple with these
questions.
1 Ellen Gartrell, “More About R. C. Maxwell Company Outdoor Advertising” <http://scriptorium.llib.duke.edu> 2 Calvin Coolidge, quoted in Frank Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1961) 619. 3 Quoted in Jane Stern and Michael Stern, Auto Ads (New York: David Obst Books, Random House, 1978) 21. 4 Berger 131.
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5 Barry Hoffman, The Fine Art of Advertising (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2002) 14. 6 Hoffman 54. 7 Hoffman 70. 8 Janet A. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, The Art and Life of Remedios Varo (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988) 30. 9 Quoted in Hoffman 86. 10 Hoffman 112-13. 11 Jean Kilbourne, “Still Killing Us Softly” (educational video). 12 Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991). 13 Quoted in Hoffman 39. 14 Richard Martin, “A Matter of Class: The Ultimate Fashion Taboo” New York Times, September 1995. 15 Martin, “Class.” 16 Mary Williams Walsh, “German Court Bans Shocking Benetton Ads; Panel labels as ‘immmoral’ the clothier’s campaign on HIV, oil slicks & child laborers” Los Angeles Times, Friday, July 7, 1995. See <http://www.aegis.com/news/It/1995/LT950705.html> 17 William H. O’Barr, Culture and the Ad, Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994) 2. 18 O’Barr, figure 3.9. 19 O’Barr, figure3.8. 20 Richard Prince, quoted in Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998) 326. 21 Mark Dery, “Oppositional Cultures, A conversation with Stuart Ewen on culture jammers, social activism and the new iconography” Adbusters, Volume 2, Number 2, 59-60. 22 Thomas Frank, “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent” Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, eds. The Business of Culture in the New Guilded Age, Commodify Your Dissent, Salvos from the Baffle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) 32. 23 Frank 36. 24 Frank 36-44.
