Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture

by Stuart Ewen

As resistance has mounted, however, the captains of consciousness have hardly thrown in the towel. Appropriating the lingo and styles of the New Left, the counterculture, feminism, neo-agrarianism, ethnicity, drug-vision and other phenomena, the advertising industry, seeking markets, has generated a mass culture which reflects the spirit but not the cutting edge of this resistance. While advertising of the twenties spoke against the deprivations of scarcity, an increasing amount of today’s advertising and product imagery speak to the deprivations of what has been called “abundance.” Within advertising, the social realm of resistance is reinterpreted, at times colonized, for corporate benefit.