I'm not sure these questions really have concrete answers, but I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks about the issue. A really interesting case to study when thinking about advertising and its role in creating culture is the Burrell advertising agency. They are known for marketing towards urban youths and African-Americans. It might be helpful to think about Burrell and their ad campaigns in relation to the questions I posed.
In our last class meeting we discussed the idea of "owning" a cultural artifact - we discussed salsa, reggaeton and hip-hop. I'd like to broaden it even more, and ask who owns culture itself. I know it sounds super meta, but I am thinking in specific terms. For instance, Burrell under the category of "African American Market" have the following caption:
"Who, while you were sleeping began to surf, eat Thai food, drive SUVs, listen to Faith Hill, stay at the Ritz, vote Republican, not to mention dominate the PGA tour, but who occasionally, still listens to Aretha Franklin and do that handshake with that bumping fists thing."
This quote is describing the African American market, and the word market here is important. Clearly, an entire demographic is understood in terms of how they consume (or how the ad agency WANTS them to consume). It might be important to note that Tom Burrell is an African American man, and the firm is known for being urban and in tune with the Black community. Does this fact change your opinion on the questions I asked at the beginning of the post? (Who creates culture, are these advertisers creating culture?) And most importantly, who owns this culture?
Here is a McDonald's ad put out by Burrell:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds72jFNeLDg
I also recommend perusing their website, there are a lot of ads that I couldn't find on youtube or Google....I wonder why....
It's really funny to me how we find ourselves questioning not only the goals and objectives of the advertising companies, but the outrage that results because we are now the things being sold. Information about our buying patterns and the things that we enjoy is worth billions, yet companies choose to only target certain markets that I feel are known for their sense of overall consumerism. With regard to the whole African-American theme and who owns culture, I definitely feel as though the companies own our perception of culture and everything that we'll ever consciously think about it or that it represents. I think it's important for us to also realize that just as we're being sold to these companies for the sake of advertising dollars that not only do we have to the ability to not be consumed consumers, but also that companies are just going to be greedy and suck ridiculously no matter how we view them.
ReplyDeleteI think that since companies know what we want as they see as around they target to get products that will sell.But I don't think it identifies all African Americans.I think people have to create their culture to adapt and survive in the world. Sometimes you have to change up your culture to accommodate for everyone else. This is why it's commodified in today's society.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that when studying culture we can't ignore "the economic context that surrounds and shapes it," as Jhally points out. The "marketplace of ideas" metaphor isn't just a metaphor, ideas are bought and sold in the context of intellectual property. Speech and ideas are protected by copyright laws, which encourages creation because of the assured ownership. Yet the ownership of ideas that are a large part of a culture (Disney is the frequently maligned corporation because of its stringent protection of its copyright). On a larger scale, however (salsa, reggaeton, hip-hop), I don't think these broader cultural practices can be said to be owned. Advertisers try to make aspects of culture marketable, as in the advertisement above (which by the way is really weird and problematic on so many levels) but no one entity can own a collective cultural quality.
ReplyDeleteIn relation to the question that Samantha posted asking if the media creates culture, Burrell Agency says: "We make brands part of the culture any culture, even your culture"
ReplyDeleteClearly the agency acknowledges that their role in the market is to inscribe brands and products into culture... to transform brands into cultural practices, to fixed this products in a daily experience...
Sounds to me that they don't own culture, but is their interest to dominated the social and economic practices that in the end are also factors that condition culture through the power of capital, and media.
Now, to answer your question as to who creates African American / Urban culture, yes I know they are different, but at the same time they are often portrayed to be similar, I would say that, who creates African American culture is not really a question that can be asked here, because its not as simple as that. the Burrel agency, does not intentionally go out there and say, we're going to set the standard and norm for the African American community, no. Rather, they go there and try to "recreate" African American communities with the product they're pushing placed inside the communities. Now, if that is actually creating a culture, that is up to you. But I take this back to the class, where we did not say that the major recording labels create regaethon, but rather, they own regaethon, or the results of regaethon.
ReplyDeleteSo, I guess who owns African American culture. Well, we can say that Burrel does reap the benefits of African American culture and does promote a certain image of African American culture. And they simple do reap the benefits, through the medium of TV.
Advertisers try to create a story or lifestyle identity for consumers to buy into. They try to create needs out of consumers, when really they are wants/desires; these desires turn into "needs" through effective advertising. Certain brands speak to certain lifestyles. For example, Nike doesn’t sell shoes. Nike sells a lifestyle that is Nike. As we noted in class from the Jhally reading, the audience is the (commodified) product. As Dr. Valdivia noted, “we’re being sold and we’re paying for it,” a notion I would guess most consumers are ignorant of (go figure). The interesting thing is that, as consumers, we consent to this implicitly. Our hyper-consumerist culture is detrimental in myriad ways, yet we keep buying into it, literally. Advertising agencies buy us as audiences and sell us to companies for profit. In this process, we’re the workers. Another key point is that our culture encourages us to think of ourselves as consumers. I think if citizen consumers started realizing their capacity and agency as producers, a positive paradigm shift could begin brewing, one in which consumers are aware of the realities behind the processes of commodification and consumption, and realize that they are the conduits through which it happens. Advertising is critical to big business, which is critical to our hyper-capitalist, hyper-consumerist society. What do you think would need to happen for advertising to become less powerful? Do you think this is even possible? Kelly Necastro post-blog
ReplyDeleteWell, as we spoke about in class i think we are all cultural producers in some way but once you intersect it with capitalism or the marketplace, there is the exchange and hieirachy that makes it so that some have more power and say than others. As such some have more material ownership and resources to influence culture than others, but we are ALL infact producers and owners to some degree and we all still have agency.
ReplyDeleteTo the Burrell point. This is really interesting to me because as some of you may remember I am a former Advertising industry employee. Actually I worked with Burrell while working for P&G. Burrell is by far the most respected as it relates to the black consumer. Blacks in the industry have a really tricky place in the industry because they are part acctivist and part capitalist. Take Moss Kendrix for example, Kendrix certainly has a legacy as it relates to the transformation of Black images in the media. http://www.prmuseum.com/kendrix/moss1.html
If you read up on Kendrix, he used African American's buying power to influence issues of change and visibility etc. He was fully aware of the political economy of social justice being linked to consumer culture. Whites who owned businesses were not interested in marketing to blacks because of the inferiority myth. (Tom Burrell writes about this in his book that just came out Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority) Because of the inferiority myth, Blacks saw discrimination in various aspects of their lives. Advertising, Public Relations and media generally was embraced as one way that change perception of blacks and eventrually change the treatment and reception of blacks in the U.S. This of course is more assimilationist and traditional in nature, those like Garvey might argue that the problem is that we are trying to fit into a system and place that was not meant for you and thus you can never be fully free. The representation project in itself, some would argue is pointless because at the end of the day capitalism is still capitalism which has a system of hierarchy involved. That system often is linked at its inception to slavery and the marking of difference and the devaluing of humans to laborers and products. This is what is at the root of the 'African American market'. Blacks have gone from being products to services to consumers and owners. They do ALL of these stages to this day at the same time though there has been significant changes to decrease the intensity of the earlier positions blacks occupied. (pt 1/2)
So the african american ad agency becomes a contested place. Some see it as a place of liberation and change, others see it as racist or at least a distraction from true freedom which may not be achieveable in a consumerist society--despite representations. I think it is interesting that Burrell wrote his Brainwashed book AFTER he left Burrell...either way, even if he felt he was doing good things for the black community by changing the representations...arguably, he and the company still assisted in the systematic commodification of black culture. They walked their clients through 'urban culture' and corporatized the myth of discovery. White clients are always discovering the black market. When there is that confusion and ambiguity, Burrell inserts itself as tour guide and expert. Racism and segregation has intensified the myth of discovery because it is percieved that we are SO different. In fact, Burrell states time and again that Blacks are not dark skinned white people. This is DEFINATELY true. But what has happened is that these agencies have commodified both the difference that was asigned to our culture by whites as well as true cultural difference and have made millions off of it. It is far less profitable to focus on our similarities across cultures. Beyond that, it starts to get tricky because advertisers who see similarities will nessecarily boil the audience down to a uniformed 'white' subject as a commod denomonator...the universal subject arises in the form of multiculturalism. So I am not sure where the balance is. Yes we are different in some ways...yes we are the same in some ways. An extreme of either case is problematic. Ad agencies, even black ones stand to gain from commodified difference. We have ALWAYS been the product as well as the consumer. There is some intersectionality that needs to be examined as it relates to black industry employees and ad agencies working within the dominant formula to create change and to resist within the commodified construct.
ReplyDeleteAs an overview to his book, you might be interested to know that the 10 questions that guide Burrell's book are:
1. Why cant we form strong families
2. Why do we conform to black sexual stereotypes
3. Why are black and beautiful still contradictions
4. Why do we keep killing each other
5.Why do we neglect body, mind and spirit?
6.Why cant we stop shopping
7. Why do we expect so little of each other and our selves?
8.Why do we so wittingly give up control of our lives
9. Why can't we stick together?
10.Why is the joke always on us?
Doesn't sound like a man who owned and ran the most sucessful black owned ad agency in the world huh? This is why i said its interesting this was released AFTER he left. (pt 2/2)
I feel that the people with in the culture create the character of the “culture”. Culture is more than just one’s skin color. Culture is created amongst people who have several commonalities or one central belief. Thus in my opinion, the individuals that are with in the culture are the owners of that culture. For instance, just because walmart sells ipods does not mean that they are the owner of ipods. Walmart does not have the ability to reproduce an ipod they can only distribute what the company (owner) provides them with. This is the same for advertisers. They can only market what the culture gives them to advertise. Advertisers just commodify the culture not create it.
ReplyDeletewho owns culture? great question. Um--another spin on an old question......who owns identity?
ReplyDeleteI want you guys all to check out this website. It's called Exodus international.....
http://www.exodusinternational.org/
Maybe we can use some answers generated by this BOOMING business to answer who owns culture/identity.....and who owns AGENCY? funny question, that last one.....but it is the only way to explain how SOMETIMES, others are allowed to step in "when you're not doing good to yourself"...am i right?
something to read in particular;
it's called Homosexuality; A Family Matter....
http://www.exodusinternational.org/content/view/929/150/
Who OWNS the grief associated with an individual coming out as gaaayyyyy?
I also agree with a lot of the other blog comments. When talking about advertising companies and when you ask the question, "are they creating culture?" I do not think at all that they are. For one most advertisements are made to get someone to be a certain product or idea. Advertisement companies as we see from this blog companies are created to create marketable ways to attract certain groups of people. So as nibia said...these agencies are transforming these products into daily cultural practices.
ReplyDeleteJhally talks about how it is not only the products, but the audiences which are sold through advertising. To do this, they have to make sure that they identify the audience they are selling to. In the case of the Burell advertisements, this audience is the African-American population of the United States. Personally, I do not see the McDonald's advertisements as being outwardly offensive or perpetuating negative stereotypes of the Black community, but I definitely do recognize that they are targeting a specific population. The characters in the commercial are African-American, and say some lingo that was invented in the Black Community like "For Real", but beyond that, I do not see any other signifiers. In doing this, the Burell agency has attempted to identify an audience and speak to them, but not in a disrespectful way, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteI remember when this commercial came out...there is also another McDonald's commercial that does the exact same thing, which is trying to target African-American consumers. In the commercial, an African-American couple are singing along with an R&B beat about what else...chicken nuggets. I though this was very stereotypical for an African-American to not just eating chicken, but singing to it.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how Jhally believes that we the audience are the ones who are being commodified, as in these 2 commercials show, they are selling African-American culture...whatever that means
This Post-Blog has so many broad yet intriguing questions presented. Jhally's ideology that the audience is bought by the companies seems so contradictory and confusing. If this is the truth, than aren't the audience creating culture itself? Oftentimes we feel more comfortably blaming mass-media for the creation of our societal capitalist values and culture, yet if we in fact ARE the mass-media, than we are the cultural creators.
ReplyDeleteYet how are products even being sold if we are just regurgitating our own embodiment? If Burrell is not selling McDonald's, but really African American culture represented through the commodified African American audience, is McDonald's simply a psychological "side"?
I don’t think Burrell own’s African American culture I just think they are doing what any other advertising company does. Which is pick a demographic of people to target and sell a image or product to them. That doesn’t mean they own Black culture they just appeal to it.
ReplyDeleteI remember when I first found out about Burrell. I was excited to see something that I believe identified with the black cultural. Finally someone who heard our voice and can get us out in the media the right way. I agree a lot with Olivia, along with many other class members, when she states "It's true that when studying culture we can't ignore "the economic context that surrounds and shapes it," as Jhally points out." many cultures do have an economic value and at often times I believe it starts to consume the culture and it begins to make it into a different type of culture. In reference to african americans and advertising using the culture to represent it in a form of commidification, I have come to the understanding in life that there is only one side of my the culture that will be shown to the public and commodified, and that’s the side that many feel is entertaining. The truth never and authenticity never sales
ReplyDeleteI agree with Tichina and Olivia's comment about no one entity being the representation for a culture. We own our culture based on our lived experience. Outside perceptions of culture, I feel are disguised as ways to understand and relate to other cultures especially when they are advertising to Blacks and do not identify with African American culture. Also, this gives reason to why I was upset at some of the representations of Black society in movies such as The Princess and The Frog in which stereotypes of African-Americans were played out dramatically. Well, for one, its Disney. Number 2, I felt a bit offended and managed to enjoy the movie because I identified with some aspects moreso than others. However, this is due to the fact that I do not own every aspect of the culture in which they've assumed. I've shaped it to my way of living and my perspective (my experiences). We are the commodities because they want us to enjoy these things and still use our very nature to make money. So, true! However, if you have no tools you cannot complete a project. These are the same things that we see in Audrey Lord 's writing of "Dismantle the Master's House." They are commodifying the difference. We are the difference. This is what makes this a complex idea that could not possibly be explained with any type of dichotomy.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Nibia and Bola I think that advertising companies have one goal and its to sell their product and make it known. When a company sees that a specific group of people can be targeted they will definitely attack until they can get as much of their product into their culture and make it seem like having that product is part of the culture. In my opinion that is just them reassuring that they have that groups consumption, but I don't think that at any point they own the culture at all.
ReplyDelete