Promotional Cultures - Aeron Davis

RESEARCH ON PROMOTIONAL CULTURES FOR 2000 WORD TEXT

Self-promotion continues outside of work too. As Bauman (2007) notes, in order to operate in today’s society, people turn themselves in promotional commodities. Choices of clothes and goods promote the ‘commodity-self’ to others, whether at work or in leisure. CV’s, blogs and social networking sites are also used more consciously to present the individual self to a wider audience. Thus, slowly, and often imperceptibly, promotion has seeped into all areas of society, at the organizational, social and individual levels. 5

I found this interesting as it not only is something I have noticed in my generation in general but also because it is similar to what we are asked to do in art. We are expected to build up our artistic voice and practice as an individual in order to promote and strengthen ourselves as artists; these are the expectations of our chosen profession. However it is interesting to speculate that these marketable activities we undertake in order to one day sell art are actually now being picked up and applied by the general public due to pressures to socially ‘sell themselves’. It isn’t uncommon practice for people to immediately trawl through facebook and Instagram after meeting someone new, therefore to stand up to the onslaught and be accepted on all accounts it is necessary to be ‘acceptable’ across all aspects of social media.

Across each of these promotional sectors the historical story is similar. Dubious, ad hoc and questionable occupations have evolved to become ‘respectable’ pillars of business and society. Public accountability, educational standards and ethical practices emerged out of a process of professionalization. In each case, self-serving organisational interests have come to be balanced by wider public interests. Thus, the UK CIPR declares that ‘Public Relations practice is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between the organisation and it’s publics.’ […] The American Marketing Association describes marketing as working ‘to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organisational goals.’ And, for Gibbons (2009: 47), ‘Famous brands perform a naturally positive social role. Brands are a mark of standards, of quality and reliability… a mark of trust.’ 19

All of these different professional interpretations about marketing and its applicable meanings are in my opinion part of the problem. Depended on their individual vested interests, each sector of service has developed it’s own definitions and justifications for their practice to satisfy their own needs and means. Because of the plastic nature of these terms they can be re-appropriated and turned into business bywords with no regulated definition, which makes them a very effective and dangerous marketing strategy. In one breath we are made to understand that marketing is done for the good of the people, for a ‘mutual understanding’ yet by another’s definition it is in fact to satisfy ‘organisational goals’. The fact that this paragraph ends by on the words of Gibbons suggesting that brands are a ‘mark of standards, of quality and reliability’ despite the inconsistencies laid out just sentences before is, I think, summative of the way organisations have been able to pull the wool over public eyes with dependable corporate bywords like ‘reliability, trust, quality, understanding and goodwill’ whilst simultaneously being highly self interested.

Eighteenth – and nineteenth – century industrialisation required promotional culture to maintain markets for mass production and links with increasingly mobile, urbanized populations. During the twentieth century, promotional activity played a central part in the shift from Fordist, mass-production-led economies to consumer-oriented ones. Marketers, in addition to selling ready-made products to general consumer markets, began selling detailed information about consumers to producers. This was to feed back into decision-making about product development and design. As Leiss and his colleagues (2005: 130) state, ‘It was advertising that made businesspeople interested in what the consumer had to say.’ 20

I think this paragraph also builds on the points I just made, as companies put the illusion of autonomy back into the hands of consumers, all the while stripping back their actual empowerment in the consumer cycle and selling their details back into the system. These ideas are brought into perfect summary in the last quote which lays bare the reality that our opinions are only counted for the means of monetisation and increase in capital.

Search engines, such as Google, have linked advertising revenues to customer-led information searches, as opposed to traditional ‘interruption’ and ‘persuasion’ models of promotion. 20

This selling of information has led to this new development of targeted advertising. I think this comparison between the traditional forms of intervention advertising and the new method of focused ads is very interesting, as once reaching the consumer had to involve some element of invasion, either interrupting the consumer in their day to day life or persuading them into wanting to consume product. However in targeted advertising the information about us has already been sold on, from the moment we start to consume online media, and thus there is no invasion element and the promotion can directly access interested target audiences. In short, any ability to resist or turn away is minimised.

Third, promotional culture has played an essential part in the rise of independent media and communication, from the printed press to broadcasting and the internet. In several histories of advertising (e.g., Leiss et al., 2005; Fletcher, 2008), the development of many media formats went hand in hand with expansion of advertising. Since the 1920s, advertising has provided two-thirds of newspaper and magazine income in the US. 22

This little bit of information interestingly ties the use and distribution of print to advertising. As I have begun to learn from my print classes, print not only covers almost everything we consume as individuals in day to day life, but has also exponentially expanded artistic opportunities and abilities the world over, allowing artists to collage, overlay and copy media more widely than ever before. It is interesting to think how inextricably linked the printing press is to the most core aspects and development of both art and advertising, and what that says about other similarities we could draw.

As Tuten says in her book on advertising (2008: 4): ‘Consumers have embraced media democracy and the industry has responded by creating and encouraging consumers to create and co-create content.’ 23

This quote linked with my earlier discoveries about the consumer selling of information back to advertisers as well as the quote from Leiss; ‘It was advertising that made businesspeople interested in what the consumer had to say.’ I can’t help but this is in many ways an extension of that. What better way to constantly collect intimate data on key consumer markets, than actually encourage them to create, edit and upload it themselves?

For such critics, promotional cultures encourages individuals to fetishize and desire commodities they do not need or which are even harmful to them. Thus Galbraith (1991 [1958]) argues that many of the ‘wants’ and ‘desires’ of consumers are not natural but created by advertisers on behalf of producers. Producers create wants to maintain a ‘dependence effect’. At the same time, promotion obfuscates the true relations of, and extreme inequalities generated by, capitalist democracies. 28

I found this point interesting as well. Many of the items we call ‘essentials’ to modern life are actually entirely unnatural and unnecessary, but are deemed ‘essential’ by our consumerist definition. This is effect is reinforced by ever changing fashions and planned obsolescence, to ensure consumers are forever chasing the next trend, dependant on the next season of updates in order to validate and reinforce their ‘commodity selves’, as mentioned earlier.

Socially generated values are replaced with the market-generated ones. Thus, for Williams (1980), the ‘magic system’ of advertising turns minds away from social, communal thought and towards self-interested goals and satisfactions. But users ask for satisfaction of human needs which consumption, as such, can never really supply. Since many of these needs are social – roads, hospitals, schools, quiet – they are not only covered by the consumer ideal; they are even denied by it, because consumption tends always to materialize as an individual activity’. Online promotional media, with their offering of networked personalised profiles, blogs, wants, likes and ‘digital confessions’, similarly encourage a sense of ‘hyper-induvidualism’ and social polarization (Baltrushat, 2011; Dwyer 2011).   In effect, promotional culture not only sells commodities, it also promotes a set of accompanying values, norms and beliefs about society, markets and human relations. Consumption, markets and individualism are presented as the norm, and communal activities and welfare states as problematic (Bauman, 2005, 2007). 28-29

This quote further reinforces some of the deep-rooted dissatisfactions generated by capitalism and the problems caused for wider society by a populous which is conditioned to focus primarily on individualism. I think in many ways public art discourages this, particularly in comparison to museum art, as it turns art from an individual experience, into a public one. It encourages communal engagement with art, and has reach beyond just the standard artistic institution and into the wider sphere of the social realm.

Marketing and other promotional activity also encourage the standardization and homogenization of cultural production. This point was first made by the Frankfurt School (see Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979 [1947]; Adorno 1991) in relation to the transformation of art, music and culture into commodities produced by the ‘cultural industry’. Cultural producers, like industrial producers, attempt to standardize production while simultaneously presenting outputs with a ‘pseudo-induviduality’ to maintain sales. 31

As Lotz (2007: 15) states about US television, in ‘the “post network” era… Viewers now increasingly select what, when and where to view from abundant options.’ Most significantly, it is the Web 2.0 sites of the last decade, such as YouTube, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, which have really enabled consumers to engage actively with ‘conversational media’. Such sites build on two-way interactive and dialogical features of the Web. Search engines, independent fan and comment sites, and social networking spaces allow consumers to look for, assess, review and share, all while they consume. Increasingly, it is consumers or ‘prosumers’, who are ‘co-creators’ and promotors of online content, including videos, pictures, viral buzzes and comments. 39

 This quote further reinforces earlier statements about the market's requirement for active consumers and content creators. In terms of street art this is a very interesting aspect, as it is this active 'co-creator' ethos which has massively boosted the scene over the last decade, along with social networking sites such as Instagram and Pinterest which asks users to build up a profile which acts as a kind of visual collage of a persons interests, likes and tastes. When a passerby notices a piece of cool public art which peaks their interest, they are motivated to take a picture and share it on their social medias, partly influenced by the 'commodity self' which we have already discussed. As the piece of art still often bears it's initial creators physical tag then association is passed back via the new post as a free form of promotion in itself, so in this sense my medium has directly benefited from promotionally saturated culture we live in. However it is for this reason that I think street art can be such an effective tool to subvert and combat consumer capitalism; by fighting fire with fire it is possible to get the ideas conveyed by a piece of public art to have a much wider reach, and actually utilise the same promotional channels laid out in this book, for a better purpose

Second, promotional culture offers social and psychological guidance to individuals. In late or post-modernity, the pace of change increases, people are more transient, and traditional sources of guidance, such as community, religion and family, are less assured. So individuals look elsewhere to identify norms, values and practices and fashions. Simmel (2002 [1903]) identified this issue in his observations of urban dwellers in the sprawling new European metropolises. Consumption was one of the individuals could reassert their psychological autonomy ‘in the face of overwhelming social forces’. 41

I found this quote linked nicely to a quote from Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism; "The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value [...] In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts." By homogenising and monetizing aspects of culture, capitalism reduces their influence and thus induviduals are effected in the ways described above.

For Leiss and his colleagues (2005: 89): ‘Quite simply, induviduals need guidance… In the consumer society, marketing and advertising assumed the role once played by cultural traditions and became the privileged forum for the transmission of social cues.’ Lury makes a similar point in relation to modern brands. In an ever hastening cycle of new goods and services, brands offer ‘continuity over time’. This maintains a sense of security and longevity while also enabling multiple and repeated changes of goods. 42

This quote is related to earlier mentions of brand identity and trust, but also follows on from the earlier point by outlining where people go next once their culture has been monetized; they seek that fulfilment in the promise of happiness promised in clever adverts and slick advertising ploys.

For de Certeau (1984: 16), the individual reappropriation of everyday goods is also a low-level act of opposition: ‘The tactics of consumption… lend a  political dimension to everyday practices.’ Renters make properties their own, in defiance of property owners, by changing the décor, having wild parties, and hiding or ignoring building problems. At work they can steal small items, make use of their facilities for non-work purposes, take long lunches and call in sick when well. Fiske (1987, 1989, 1996), in his studies in the US and Australia, took this sense of oppositional cultural reconfiguration further: ‘the distribution of power in society is paralleled by semiotic struggles for meanings. Every text and every reading has a social and therefore political dimension.’ Consumers therefore act as ‘semiotic guerillas’, subverting the apparatus and objects of material culture at every turn. 43

 Although I agreed with this point, I was led on to a counter argument from the pages of Mark Fisher's Captalist Realism, as he described how rebellion can be co-opted into actually benefitting the greater consumer machine in a way which makes it nigh impossible to combat. "What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream."

Sennett (2006: 2) similarly documents the erosion of employment security and working conditions among middle-class professionals. Employees have to change jobs and careers with greater frequency, and struggle to build up strong social ties and ‘craftsmanship’ in their occupations: ‘The fragmentation of big institutions has left many people’s lives in a fragmented state: the places they work more resembling train stations than villages.’ As Bauman (2005, 2007) observes, the pay and conditions of developed, consumer led economies are increasingly seen as a hindrance to competitiveness and profits. Their response is to cut wages and jobs. Ironically, this undermines the same demand-led economic model that drives the consumer society. 46

Critics pose a series of questions which undermine several key elements of consumer-audience perspective. Resistance is limited, ‘over-romanticized’ and easily absorbed by evolving modes of capitalism. Consumer society reshapes the employment conditions of consumers themselves, often in problematic ways. It is a wasteful and unsustainable mode of socio-economic system, reliant on finite resources and financial manipulation. 49

Danesi talks of a natural ‘taxonomy of human needs’ and suggests that brands are more successful if they score highly on a ‘connotative index’ (CI). A high CI has a greater ‘psychological force’. So, certain letters, such as ‘X’, geometrical forms, images and words have a greater CI value and thus a greater psychological pull. 57

This is something I found very interesting. I am very interested in symbolism and ideography, as ways of expressing a concept through indirect visual means, therefore learning that I could convey further meaning and control my audiences interpretation of my work further by carefully selecting letters based on an index value of interesting-ness definitely made me want to research into this further.

The technologies and manufacturing processes that underpin commodity production are disguised by ‘referent systems’ based on ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’. Thus ‘Ideology functions by misrepresenting our relationships to the means of production: and advertisements … show us our “natural” relationship to that revealed’ (ibid.: 136). Barthes (1973 [1957]), too, deplores the ‘ideological abuse’ inherent in presentations of ‘naturalness’ in mass culture. He deconstructs how the chemical and abrasive condition of the detergents Persil and Omo is disguised with appeals to ‘whiteness’, ‘purity’ and ‘care’ and, at the same time, their manufacture by the multinational company Unilever is covered over. Adverts also legitimate and disguise real corporate activities and behaviours by an appeal to enduring human values, desires and narratives. 59

This paragraph also bore relation to my own practice. Much of my work is about reconnecting people with nature in an urban setting, to remind passers by about the greater ecological consequences of their lives, however in this sense advertisers use natural ideography to do the exact opposite. By covering undesirable qualities with natural references they utilise instinctual acceptance for organic matter over unorganic in the same way they may chose the colour scheme of a natural flower as it is instinctually pleasing to the eye. Thus even mother nature itself becomes monetized and manipulated for promotional means.

Nava (1992; 1997: 45) and Crane (2000) argue that the so-called victims of advertising – youth, minorities and women – have become increasingly immune to advertising’s commodity fetishism and identity stereotyping. In Nava’s studies, advertisers were forced to acknowledge, within their own ads, that their teenage targets were ‘knowing’ and cynical about advertising itself (see also Leiss et al., 2005). She concluded that ‘what emerges is a much greater interpretive opennesss then the textual analyses allow’. 63

 "While French students can still be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a matter not of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can't do anything about it. But that 'knowledge', that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy" - Mark Fisher, Capitalism Realism

Typical of many industrial accounts is a propensity towards technological determinism. Sola Pool (1983) describes the advent of the printing press in Europe in 1450 as nothing less than a revolution. It was essential for the growth of Protestantism, the codification of law, the evolution of science and agriculture, increased literacy and education. Daniel Bell (1973) posits that new technologies were responsible for changing society from an industrial-based to a service-based economy. 87

 See my earlier notes on the printing press and it's links between art and advertising.

Art provides another example. For the 1990s, the average sale price at auction of an artwork moved between $22,791 and $45,135 (bar a spike in 1996). Then between 2002 and 2007 the average suddenly climbed, from $49,763 to $329,824, increasing by multiples of more than six and a half (Artnet). 176

This statistical summary of the changes in values of art over time was of interest to me. As interest in the arts has become increasingly fashionable once again in the eyes of many, and marketing has increased it's influence, the prices of artworks have grown exponentially.

In the case of the art market, promotion works across multiple networks and formats (see Thornton, 2008; Lewis, 2009, 2011). Individual contemporary artists promote themselves, as do their dealers, museums and auction houses. But promotion is also applied to whole art styles and movements, nations and periods. As Thornton (2008: xiv) states: 'Great works... are made- not just by artists and their assistants but also by the dealers, curators, critics and "collectors" who "support" the work.' Those professional insiders she observes are as likely to view modern art acquisitions as part of an 'investment portfolio' as they are to value them on meaningful or aesthetic grounds. In her account, collectors and dealers inflate values, spread rumors and entice media coverage with a view to influencing prices. 179

And this paragraph which follows a few pages later goes a long way to decipher why. The higher up the price range you look, the more artworks are purchased for the investable qualities of the artist, as opposed to the nature of the artwork itself. Because of this sales are driven less by taste or saleability of the subject, and are instead dictated to by the skills of the marketing team behind it. It also bore similarities to the ideas discussed by Fisher in Capitalist Realism, where items in a museum only bare the worth that culture places on it, and that worth is assigned by the 'system of equivelence' mentioned. Without the museum and the insitution that surrounds the objects, they do not have the same worth, just as how without an insitutional network of curators, collectors, critics and dealers working together, the artwork doesn't reach as high a value.

NOTABLE CONCLUSIVE POINTS

Promotion has always been part of human communication and social interaction. Induviduals and organizations have actively engaged in promotional practices, no matter how basic or instinctive, for many centuries. However, what has changed is that promotional culture has become a more central, influential part of communication and social relations, just as financialization, globalization and new communication technologies have. The shift towards greater promotion has taken place largely over the course of a century. It's growth and wider dissemination gathered pace in the postwar years and developed faster still from the 1980s. 191

Great writers, artists, inventors and performers (and academics) are more likely to invest in promotion of their own public persona as a means of disseminating their work.192

However I also believe promotional culture is implicated in many negative short-term outcomes and longer-term social trends. In the short term, it matters large states can persuade their publics of the case for illegitimate wars abroad using propaganda. It is problematic that those presidential candidates with the biggest advertising budgets and best spun personalities have a strong electoral advantage. It is destabilizing when billion dollar contracts are won under false pretences or junk is turned into respectable investments with clever financial promotion. In the longer term, it is very alarming that large oil companies are able to undermine legitimate scientific research about global warming to the extent that political and public doubts remain. It is concerning that induviduals over-consume to levels that are unsustainable both personally and globally, while debt and obesity levels rise, finite resources are depleted and large-scale poverty continues. 193

Several themes flow through multiple chapters in this book. One of these is the discourse of induvidualism, something that promotional culture encourages in various ways. For years, critics have noted that advertising focuses on induvidual rather than collective needs and wants. Promotional messages are frequently targeted at single actors, encouraging self-reflection and dissatisfaction, as well as the promise of personal enhancement. Personal goal-setting and notions of induvidual 'choice', 'liberty' and 'advancement' are all wrapped up in promotional appeals. In turn, induviduals are encouraged to promote themselves. Personal self-promotion is percieved as a practice that is nevessary for achieving social and career success. 

Over time, promotional culture has also influenced a series of cultural and cognitive anchors and values. It feeds into larger, longer term erosion of 'trust', 'ontological security' and wider value systems. Part of this can be put down simply to promotion's false promises. Promotional hard sells invariably fail to deliver on their semi-subliminal claims. Gold jewellery does not bring everlasting love. New mobiles do not bring alienated teens lots of new friends. Fast cars and leather jackets do not make middle-aged men more sexually appealing. 'Hope', 'change', 'compassionate Conservatism' and the 'third way', said with a charismatic smile, can prove to be quite meaningless in practice. The more skilful promotional strategies convince, the greater sense of disillusion and distrust when post-sale delivery fails. In the longer term this is likely to erode trust in those parties, institutions and corporations that over-promote themselves and their wares. 

Adverts and promotional imagery repeatedly pick up, cut and paste, and rearrange accepted images, norms and values. What it is to be male or female, or to relate to one's class, age, race, religion or home town are subject to faster, more fragmented and contradictory shifts. Promotional culture adds to the sense that meaning, identities, places and values are only temporary, superficial things.