A Review of Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society

“Attacking advertising is like throwing thumbtacks in the path of a herd of stampeding elephants”

A bold statement for Arthur Asa Berger to make, yet, ironically, exactly what Berger aims to do time and time again in his book, Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture. Loaded with thumbtacks, Berger doesn’t intend to take down the elephant, but to show fellow poachers the dangers of the beast he so valiantly attacks.

Berger’s work and area of studies are vast and diversified. He received his Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota and has taught broadcast, electronic communications, and even a short-course in advertising. He’s published over a 100 articles and more than 60 books.

Berger is well versed to speak on communication and culture studies, but he makes it clear his stance on advertising is from an outside-looking-in perspective. The book pulls from many of his observations both as a consumer and on ethnographic experiences at Goldberg Moser O’Neill and an unnamed London agency. While his use of quotes from advertising agency professionals bolsters a few of his claims, they often aren’t very celebratory of the industry and one has to wonder of the context the quotes were pulled from.

One such “insight” reads, “When I’m having a hard time thinking something up, I run through the seven deadly sins – sloth, envy, and so on – to look for ideas”. Insightful. Another thumbtack for the cynic. Those from outside the advertising industry can easily see this quote as malicious intent on the industry’s part. It’s all about positioning.

Throughout the book, Berger positions himself and consumers almost as “victims” of advertising and the industry as the “others”. A good portion of the information and arguments about advertising he made I found myself easily nodding along to, it was entry level course content after all. Yet, the more he referenced Freud or Wilson Bryan Key’s work on subliminal advertising – two theorists whose work has been largely criticized as uncreditable and inapplicable in advertising – I became more hesitant of his arguments and shaky proof.  

Furthermore, he claims that advertising agencies operate with a level of uncertainty. Within the first page of the book he says “[those] who work in the industry have difficulty proving that [advertising] works” and often comes back to the metaphor of agencies “running it up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes” as if their actions are unintentionally successful. As a student of the industry, I found such a claim to demonstrate advertising illiteracy.

Many of the theories and explanations presented in the book on how advertising effects culture seem overly simplified and off-track to what many advertising strategist use today. For example, where population segmentation is a vast and popular form of understanding the consumer in agencies, Berger suggests the formation of only four consumer cultures.

For the cynical consumer, Berger’s claims go down easy and righteously. After all, advertising is the “other” with which we – the consumers – are manipulated and mold by. While literature on the pitfalls of advertising are nothing new, I found Berger’s analysis to rely heavily on pathos positioning rather than strong logic.

Not all share this opinion. In a double review of Berger’s Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture and Michael Dawson’s The Consumer Trap Sue Alessandri commends Berger’s approach, calling it “even-handed” compared to Dawson’s “personal” vendetta against marketing. She goes on to say Dawson “destroys his credibility in the eyes of the reader by equivocating”. She makes some of the same arguments against Dawson that I myself find necessary to make against Berger. Perhaps if I had read a poorer handling of the topic before Berger, I similarly would have been more agreeably subdued.

Ingrid Piller writes a similar review, calling Berger’s book a “concise introduction to advertising communications” – a statement I can easily agree with. However, Piller closes with saying she is skeptical of his intentions to teach the consumers how to analyze the advertisements, arguing it “would assume that people are mainly rational actors”. A good point, but one I argue Berger intentionally makes up for in emotional appeals.      

After all, he says himself he hopes his readers will be better able to “resist “saluting” when some advertising agency… “runs it up the flagpole””.

References

Alessandri, S. W. (2006). [Review of the book Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture: Advertising's Impact on American Character & Society, 2d ed./The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life]. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly,83(2), 433-435. Retrieved from http://libproxy.library.unt.edu:2089/ehost

Berger, A.A. (2015). Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Piller, I. (2001). [Review of the book Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture]. Discourse & Society, 12(4), 551. Retrieved from

http://libproxy.library.unt.edu:2251/doi/pdf/10.1177/0957926501012004007

Saegert, J. (1987), Why marketing should quit giving subliminal advertising the benefit of the doubt. Psychology Mark., 4: 107-120. doi: 10.1002/mar.4220040204. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mar.4220040204/full

Sage Publishing. Arthur Asa Berger. Retrieved from https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/author/arthur-asa-berger