Fascism met futurism met the automobile. The futurist preoccupation with speed and dynamism was expressed in a new style. At the same time fascism as a fusion of the political and the aesthetic, according to Walter Benjamin ,was well served was the Fascist desire to develop an image of monumental perfection that was both classic and modern. It all corresponded with the Edward Bernays development in America where advertising separated needs from wants which opened up the domain of social engineering and what Chomsky would call “the manufacturing of consent.”
Today’s car ads manipulate nearly every value, emotion and human desire. Be it safety, speed, security, rebellion, the status quo, environmentalism, serenity or the defiance of nature. There is no place the industry won’t go. The automakers omnipresent advertising explains the private car’s immense cultural standing. Those of us who want a landscape more amenable to pedestrians, cyclists and trolley riders must challenge the promotion of a product many times more damaging than cigarettes. Read More:http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/05/cars-and-the-power-of-advertising/
To Chomsky, the derivation of power is passed from the companies, and profiteers through media to influence the society. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” (Bernays 1972) The society then absorbs the information from media as “common knowledge” and as facts. “We are ready to believe almost anything if it comes from a recognized authority,” (Koch 1970) …It is problematic to obtain any other than advertised information. The well known misleading dependency on advertising was exposed in the movie Czech Dream (2004) a hyper reality study of two film students who use their state grant to promote the opening of an entirely fictitious supermarket in an empty field. They used slogans “Don’t Go, Don’t Rush, Don’t Spend” to draw over 4,000 people on the opening day. Their advertising agents said “We can sell products which don’t work, surely we can sell products which don’t even exist” (Klusak & Remunda 2004) Read More:http://www.perina.net/index.php/en/about-mainmenu-69/articles-mainmenu-91/manufacturing-consent-in-design-mainmenu-173
ADDENDUM:
While bigger and better roles go to the car, the real action takes place behind the scenes. Be it a change in dialogue or camera angle, auto companies have taken an increasingly hands on approach to product placement. Some changes are subtle. In The Forgotten, for instance, Volvo slipped a line into the protagonist’s dialogue, identifying the brand as her car of choice. Other changes are less subtle. After a scene with an Audi was cut from Ironman, the car company’s multi-million dollar marketing campaign with the movie was thrown into doubt. “The solution: run a drawn out shot of an Audi Q7 sports utility vehicle being saved by Ironman, complete with a sustained full frontal of Audi’s 4-ring logo.”…
…Car companies are aware of the silver screen’s value and part with big bucks for permanent spots. Aston Martin paid $35 million to unseat BMW as the official car of James Bond. In a massive agreement with Universal Studios and NBC, Volkswagen spent an estimated $200 million to see its products in Universal Films and on NBC television. Read More:http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/05/cars-and-the-power-of-advertising/
As in the morality tale Czech Dream the outraged reaction of mislead public could have been predicted, the official criticism from the Czech government only exposed the closer link of the interests of consumerism and did directly supported Noam Chomsky theory. “In its simplest level, the liberal theory of advertising is that consumers are free agents capable of making rational choices between products according to information supplied. The free market relies upon information supplied by advertising to lubricate this process” (Holder 1991) Chomsky’s argument then delusion this liberal theory….
There are many options to consumerism as we know it. This world is offering many values to choose from to build upon society, as it was documented in history. It is suggested, values opposite to the current consumerism will be ever more attractive. One of the many options is worldly asceticism. According to Max Weber, in worldly asceticism people withdraw from society by living ascetic lives, but don’t withdraw from the world. In this value system, the pleasures of the mind are considered to be superior to those of the body. It could be seen as a customers demand for more environmentally friendly information about product and that is exactly what they are getting. It is my belief however that the environment would only improve by radically lowering our consumption, which is in direct opposition to contemporary business models or/and a present systems.
It is a Liberal view to apprehend environmental advertising as clear demand of the market, yet the practice in favour of critic’s views of using the demand to only attract the customers for further consumption. “The advertisers appear to have absorbed the spirit of resistance with more radial aspect as the demand for reduced consumption levels.” (Holder 1991) Read More:http://www.perina.net/index.php/en/about-mainmenu-69/articles-mainmenu-91/manufacturing-consent-in-design-mainmenu-173
The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. But that’s the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that.
NOAM CHOMSKY, speech, Jan. 26, 2005
Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn’t meant.
BRENDA UELAND, If You Want to Write
An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
FRED ALLEN, Treadmill to Oblivion
Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.
JOHN LAHR, The Guardian, Aug. 1989
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, letter to his daughter, Aug. 24, 1940
Read More:http://www.notable-quotes.com/a/advertising_quotes.html
Satisfaction by design As mentioned earlier by Chomsky, for the fifth of the population, furniture production ranges from fully custom made pieces of fine furniture including antiques and antiques replicas to factory produced high-end small series production in good quality materials. The rest of the population aspire the values and therefore items owned by the leading class. This class is a role model of the dream to have, the items to buy, the lifestyle to live….
… As this is not possible for the majority of the population, shortcuts are provided in form of compromises on authenticity and quality without adjustment to the life style image. Those masses are aspiring the outer visual look of the lifestyle, the shell, the symbol of the values. Those people are deliberately encouraged by the systems value settings not to pay any attention to the story, the authenticity, the meaning of objects. As is any relationship, those missing personal relationships in this example to the piece of furniture are substituted firstly by the use of rhetoric to assign values of the admired part of the society and secondly by emotional context of design. Read More:http://www.perina.net/index.php/en/about-mainmenu-69/articles-mainmenu-91/manufacturing-consent-in-design-mainmenu-173
David Cromwell:A 1992 US study of 150 news editors found that 90 per cent said that advertisers tried to interfere with newspaper content, and 70 per cent tried to stop news stories altogether. 40 per cent admitted that advertisers had in fact influenced a story. In the UK, £3.2 billion is spent on newspaper ads annually and another £2.6 billion on TV and radio commercials, out of a total advertising budget of £9.2 billion. In the US, the figure is tens of billions of dollars a year on TV advertising alone. An advertising-based system makes survival extremely difficult for radical publications that depend on revenue from sales alone. Even if such publications survive, they are relegated to the margins of society, receiving little notice from the public at large. Advertising, just like media ownership, therefore acts as a news filter.
The third of Herman and Chomsky’s 5 filters relates to the sourcing of mass media news: ‘The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest.’ Read More:http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/2002—-.htm