Nonfiction: Your Ad Here
Michael Serazio, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing: Foucauldian analysis of modern marketing techniques that disguise or embed ads, recruiting consumers to make meaning for advertisers-as we often do in fandom. Brands position themselves as partners or advisors rather than instructors. Product placement, advergames, and the like are advertising for people who believe themselves too smart to be influenced by advertising. Advertising coopts rebellion, appearing as graffiti or in other ways signifying disruption, but only disruption in the service of profit: “The rapacious foraging for symbolic material by commercial prospectors makes genuine subcultural statements-most especially oppositional ones-intrinsically ephemeral, because they are so enticing and useful as emblems of dissent, particularly for a governmental force, marketers, trying to relate to cynical millenial consumers without the usual trappings of authority…. [R]esistance is also ‘resourceful’ for power, because it is a display of agency that can then be co-opted by the very structure that it acts out against.”
This is why marketers chase “authenticity,” but can never keep it. They want our word of mouth marketing, but only as it serves them. The free labor fans provide confers “legitimation on the cheap.” As he puts it, “‘empowerment’ begins to function as ‘employment’ (albeit without the remuneration).” (This has the benefit of requiring fewer “creatives” to be paid, too!) Also, this increased flexibility of meaning positions the brand as a container, not a dictator: “buzz agents not only tell others about the brand, they also tell the brand about itself …. Such a move is emblematic of the larger post-Fordist shift in advanced capitalism where industrial output is streamlined to be agile and customized, and the advertising pitch can be produced … ‘just-in-time’ as the conversation presents itself rather than stockpiled as media inventory.” Marketers don’t necessarily like it, but they believe that consumer creation of meaning is uncontrollable. New forms of marketing are a way to make that uncontrollability tilt in their favor anyway, so that advertisers are structuring the field and making certain outcomes more probable. They talk about consumer control, but continue to believe they can pull the strings as long as the strings remain unseen and unfelt.
There’s a fundamental contradiction between the ideology of consumer “empowerment” (within guided channels) and the marketing strategy, which is designed to obscure that consumers are being advertised to by people with commercial interests. As one informant says, “If you do it right, people never know [they’ve heard a marketing pitch]. It’s just a matter of presenting stuff in a different channel and trusting consumers to be smart enough to make their own choices”-except the choice about knowing they’re being advertised to. Serazio also ties these changes to the larger neoliberal project, where consumers are encouraged not to rely on a “nanny” marketer any more than on a “nanny” state, told they have choices and that they’re responsible for those choices, yet their circumstances are pervasively shaped and circumscribed by larger forces. “[W]hile the neoliberal state has slowly dismantled and outsourced its supported apparatus for citizen governance in the name of freedom-delegating responsibility to the individual wherever it can-these technologies and articulations of consumer governance that also accentuate freedom ultimately seek to make the consumer more dependent on the marketer.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
This is why marketers chase “authenticity,” but can never keep it. They want our word of mouth marketing, but only as it serves them. The free labor fans provide confers “legitimation on the cheap.” As he puts it, “‘empowerment’ begins to function as ‘employment’ (albeit without the remuneration).” (This has the benefit of requiring fewer “creatives” to be paid, too!) Also, this increased flexibility of meaning positions the brand as a container, not a dictator: “buzz agents not only tell others about the brand, they also tell the brand about itself …. Such a move is emblematic of the larger post-Fordist shift in advanced capitalism where industrial output is streamlined to be agile and customized, and the advertising pitch can be produced … ‘just-in-time’ as the conversation presents itself rather than stockpiled as media inventory.” Marketers don’t necessarily like it, but they believe that consumer creation of meaning is uncontrollable. New forms of marketing are a way to make that uncontrollability tilt in their favor anyway, so that advertisers are structuring the field and making certain outcomes more probable. They talk about consumer control, but continue to believe they can pull the strings as long as the strings remain unseen and unfelt.
There’s a fundamental contradiction between the ideology of consumer “empowerment” (within guided channels) and the marketing strategy, which is designed to obscure that consumers are being advertised to by people with commercial interests. As one informant says, “If you do it right, people never know [they’ve heard a marketing pitch]. It’s just a matter of presenting stuff in a different channel and trusting consumers to be smart enough to make their own choices”-except the choice about knowing they’re being advertised to. Serazio also ties these changes to the larger neoliberal project, where consumers are encouraged not to rely on a “nanny” marketer any more than on a “nanny” state, told they have choices and that they’re responsible for those choices, yet their circumstances are pervasively shaped and circumscribed by larger forces. “[W]hile the neoliberal state has slowly dismantled and outsourced its supported apparatus for citizen governance in the name of freedom-delegating responsibility to the individual wherever it can-these technologies and articulations of consumer governance that also accentuate freedom ultimately seek to make the consumer more dependent on the marketer.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.