James Twitchell
interviewed by Mike Agger on July 11, 1996
Adcult vs. Highcult:
Is our common culture ad culture? Take our high culture vs ad culture quiz to see how you compare to other Tripod members.
"The whole concept of the generation gap was created by advertising."
Tripod: A central argument of your book is that we assemble our personalites and our conceptions of self through the products we buy. I found this to be a scary, yet probably accurate line of thought.
JT: Not only that, but gloomy people like myself who condemn American culture for its infantile entertainment and its juvenile movies and television shows miss the point. These shows are juvenile because they are intended to reach the audiences who are most concerned about making decisions between products: young people. Young people have yet to make their brand decisions. Myself, I've already bought my Levi's and I am not interested whatsoever in Calvin Kleins. So I am written off, and the young are targeted.
Tripod: The latest advertisements directed towards a younger audience feature irony as a selling point. Why has irony surged in advertising?
JT: It's a response to how young people have become a real problem for advertisers because they have been raised on steady diet of advertising. The hard sell, which in advertising is the best sell in terms of actually moving product, can no longer work. People like yourself who grew up knowing television well, the minute someone really tries to hammer you with advertising, to shame you with advertising, to make you feel anxious, you are already too smart and your finger goes to that remote control button and you are gone. If you go back and look at the advertising that your parents observed, you will find it is mostly a hard sell, because, as opposed to you, your parents were not able to move away from advertising as quickly.
With the rise of cable television and the remote control, advertising has had to make itself much more entertaining. To get to young people who have already been inundated with advertising, they have to subvert the process of selling. The minute you see the sign of the sale, you're gone. This has reduced advertising to a pathetic attempt to be your friend, and even that you see through.
Tripod: I usually recognize almost instantly when something is ad, but I also find myself rewarding ads that are particularly clever by paying attention. The Dewar's campaign is a good example.
JT: But even if you agree to be on their side, does it make you any more susceptible to buying the product? Who knows? It is also a wonderful irony that one of the things advertising has to do is upset older people to make young people happy. In other words, I have to be mildly outraged by the Calvin Klein ads to make my fourteen year old niece say: "Yes! Those are the jeans for me!" The reverse of this is the way McDonald's is selling the Arch Deluxe. They antagonize you in order to get me interested.
Tripod: Advertising is somehow in charge of maintaining the generation gap?
JT: The whole concept of the generation gap was created by advertising.
Tripod: Not your father's Oldsmobile.
Tripod: You could also argue that with the intense marketing to Generation X, the twenties are becoming a new maturation niche
JT:I agree. Also, the definition of age groups is crucial when you are selling a product like cigarettes or alcohol, because you would like to reach potential consumers before the age when they can legally buy the product. Ideally, advertisers camouflage themselves as advertising for the age past when consumers can by the product. For example, Joe Camel is very well recognized by fourteen and fifteen year olds who are too young to legally smoke. Yet, Camel claims that they are going after the twenty-five year old.
Read more of Tripod's interview with Jim Twitchell.
Test your knowledge of advertising.
