Advertising – a way of life

Tony Purvis

Don Draper: This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want. How do you make your cigarettes?

Lee Garner, Jr.: I don't know.

Lee Garner, Sr.: Shame on you. We breed insect repellent tobacco seeds, plant them in the North Carolina sunshine, grow it, cut it, cure it, toast it ...

Don Draper: There you go. There you go.

[Writes on chalkboard and underlines: 'IT'S TOASTED.']

Lee Garner, Jr.: But everybody's else's tobacco is toasted.

Don Draper: No. Everybody else's tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike's ... is toasted.

Roger: Well, gentlemen, I don't think I have to tell you what you just witnessed here.

Lee Garner, Jr.: I think you do.

Don Draper: Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing is OK. You are OK.

Lee Garner, Sr.: It's toasted. [Smiles]

Lee Garner, Sr.: I get it.

(From: Mad Men (AMC, Lionsgate Television), Season 1, Episode 1 (July, 2007))

Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start. To grow up in that country was to see the shape of a culture, and its modes of change. I could stand on the mountains and look north to the farms and the cathedral, or south to the smoke and the flare of the blast furnace making a second sunset. To grow up in that family was to see the shaping of minds: the learning of new skills, the shifting of relationships, the emergence of different language and ideas. ... Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.

(Raymond Williams 'Culture is Ordinary', in Highmore 2002: 92)

Reading culture

Mad Men (2007–) is a television drama whose characters people a culture in which every aspect of that culture is read in symbolic ways. Don Draper, lead character in the series, knows that the PR/advertising firm Sterling Cooper, if it is to produce effective readings of culture via its advertisements, must make the ordinary and mundane seem extraordinary and magical. It does this via a promise of happiness, something Draper himself has yet to find. But Draper knows he needs to make a living. He knows, too, that the 'mad men' with whom he works are part of the same culture, the one in which the freedom and consumer choice promised in the advertisements make sense only against the backdrop of capitalism's production of oppression and dissensus. Whilst most people do live very ordinary lives, the series exposes how the oppression of some groups, most notably those on low incomes, but also women and African-Americans, experience the culture in ways which throw a clearer light on the actual realities of consumer- capitalism's fantasies of freedom and choice. Nonetheless, Draper's own life is ordinary; and he is believable because his ordinariness is shared by those others whose stories are told in Mad Men's narrativisation of the 1960s.

Williams' observation, that culture is ordinary, is one which refers to the same period as Mad Men. Indeed, his work during this period is written in an attempt to both celebrate this ordinariness and critique the social divisions (based on social class, income distribution, and access to education and housing) which capitalism wrought. The 1950s and 1960s were decades in capitalist history that saw consumerism and advertising become more dominant than in all the previous decades of the twentieth century (Fox and Lears 1983). But they are also decades when the wealth and glamour imagined in advertising is also matched by enormous poverty and social inequality. If the identity of the consumer is one which seems universal, so too are the effects of a free market which ensures that happiness is not quite so universal. Mad Men invites us to re-read the symbolic spaces of culture and to visualise the ordinary and the obvious as the very sites in which happiness and oppression are lived on a daily basis. Williams' view of culture also asks us to think about the symbolic dimensions of our lives in a new way. His reading is one which sees in the activities of everyday life the kernel of community. 'Culture for Williams is not, or should not be, what separates people, but what joins them in community. Culture is not for the discerning few, but for the many. It is characterized by aesthetic and intellectual scarcity only in its alienated, elitist forms' (Brantlinger 1991: 77).

This chapter will examine the ways in which culture, principally in Europe and America, though increasingly Asia and China, continues to be shaped in relation to advertising and advertisements. Central to this discussion is the theory and practice of reading culture. Here, the noun is not intended to signify an activity which is reserved for a privileged few who, equipped with a specific education and learning in (high) Culture, thereby possess greater insights into everyday life. Nor does it make assumptions about literacy where the term refers to the teaching of reading and writing in schools or literacy classes. Nor, indeed, is reading necessarily concerned with learning specific theories and methods by which to read media texts, as sometimes occurs in undergraduate courses dealing with structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics or film analysis. By suggesting that culture can be read, however, the chapter is also proposing that culture is legible but not in ideologically transparent or politically neutral ways. Rather, reading is here used in the sense Paulo Freire deploys the term in his analysis of oppression, and it denotes reading as a critical activity which is always alert to culture's political and ideological dimensions. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) outlines his call for cultural activism grounded in such reading, and it grows out of his experiences working with the poor on literacy programmes in Brazil.

Freire's critique proposes that...