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

by Stuart Ewen

Ads mirror the widespread judgment that mass-produced goods are junky and unhealthy. Products are advertised as if they contain this anticorporate disposition—praised for their organic naturalness and their timeless quality. Modes of anticorporate resistance and sentiment reappear in the ads themselves, miraculously encased within the universal terms of the market. General Mills reinforces corporate hegemony in the name of natural cereals—a harkening to a precorporate, idealized past. The automobile industry offers machines for wish fulfillment—at the same time hoping to contain those wishes within the domain of the cash nexus. From the oil industry comes a more authoritarian image to confront the loci of resistance. Oil industry ads are singular in their ability to say, “We know you don’t like things as they are, but we’re the boss and that’s the way it is!”