Abstract
Much like many aspects of popular culture, advertising is often overlooked by serious scholars because of its triviality. But it is precisely its ability to almost invisibly permeate our everyday lives that makes it such a crucial area of study. Our most perceptive artists have realized that promotional culture is important to include in their reflections on society. Michael L. Ross’ Designing Fictions is an empirical look at the way that narrative in the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries has contended with this influential force in both industrial and post-industrial life.
The study’s relevance to sociology is in part its considerations of what the Frankfurt School had to say about advertising and popular entertainment (particularly the novel and the new medium of television) as both inextricably linked, and detrimental to citizens’ full and undivided attention to participating in democracy. Ross correctly illuminates the complexity of this matter by observing the interplay between prominent fictional narratives of their times, and finds that there is both artistic critique as well as incorporation of persuasive advertising. For the literary artist, to merely reject an aspect of modern life that is as widespread as advertising would be flawed and one-dimensional. Ross’ study is framed as an analysis of the fulfilment of Baudrillard’s dream, which, in the words of Ritzer, was the existence of an ‘art, that instead of being in the thrall of the consumer society, would be able to decipher it’ (Ross, 2015: 3, cited in Ritzer, 1998 [1970]: 16). Taken as a whole, the works Ross looks at form the elements of that dream. These analyses mark the transition from modernity to postmodernity. Are we individuals who define ourselves by what we buy, in Bauman’s sense? Or is the story more complex? The answer is of course both.
Many of the chapters are set up as an exploration of the contrasting ways that literary figures dealt with advertising in the context of the time in which they wrote. The first looks at the reasons that Henry James and H.G. Wells objected to the new forms of promotion, the former on aesthetic grounds, the latter on ‘social and economic’ ones (Ross, 2015: 28). Advertising as a tool of political propaganda in the wake of the First World War is explored through the works of Christopher Morley and George Orwell in Chapter 2. This time period marked an important shift in advertising’s uses, as it began to merge with new methods in the psychology of persuasion. Subsequent chapters discuss the era of radio and growing concern over advertising through the lens of Frederick Wakeman and Herman Wouk’s writing, as thinkers began to look back on the advertising industry’s power; and the increasing permeation and self-consciousness of promotional culture represented in the works of Blake Morrison and Joshua Ferris.
Notably, all of the above-mentioned authors are men, reflecting the fact that advertising was a male-dominated industry from the time of its inception. However, Chapter 5 of Ross’ book sets out to include the valuable insights of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman as the promotional industry, like most occupational pursuits, began to become more gender diverse. Advertising is often aimed at women and, in particular, at their sense of self. Because advertising is often able to get inside women’s heads, it not only misrepresents them but can get them to misrepresent themselves. Its hegemonic power and the difficulty associated with overcoming that in contemporary society is most exposed when gender is taken into consideration.
Finally, the last chapter provides another layer of complexity: an analysis of the AMC cable network television show Mad Men, a show that deconstructed the promotional industry while at the same time being part of it, as is all commercial television. Highlighting the conflicts of the creator of the show with the production company, which ‘demanded more product placement, added commercial breaks etc.’ (Ross, 2015: 149), some of which were resisted and some conceded to, reveals the difficulties associated with being an artistic producer in a corporate-owned media environment. Ross writes about the show itself as a glamorization of the advertising industry at its high point, but it is always a hollow kind of glamor; the characters must continually sacrifice integrity and have few if any genuine emotional connections in their personal lives, or to the work that they do. This alienation is a perfect metaphor for Industrial Capitalism.