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We're EWEN CRAZY!

[ Interview by Darcy Cosper ]

Before then, in the '60s, percolating within overt political issues like civil rights or the Vietnam War, was a visceral reaction to commercial culture. Part of the counterculture was about taking the inflated promises of consumer culture turning them upside down, making a mockery of them. That had an immediate impact on commercial media and advertisers, not just college kids smoking dope . . . especially since the people who work in advertising are often artists and writers, people who share in a counterculture sensibility. (By the way, a lot of people who were blacklisted as artists and writers during the McCarthy era went into advertising. That's a story that hasn't been told yet.)

If you go back and read the literature of advertising, from the '20s onward there's this continued rant about consumer resistance. Then, in the '60s, consumer resistance became viewed not as some thing to battle, but as something that could incorporated in the very message of advertising. Instead of fighting consumers who think you're full of shit, the whole idea became to join the opposition. And that gives includes the kind of irony that begins to enter advertising in the '70s, and the pseudofeminist appeals, and you begin to have black faces appearing in advertising.

Around the same time, with the rise of the youth movement, demographics became an issue. (People actually worshipped youth back then, unlike now, where the whole Gen X concept is about these stupid kids.) Demographics before then wasn't about quality of life, but quantity; the categories were about the amount of money people have. GM produced Chevrolet and Pontiac and Buick and Cadillac, all of which basically look the same but each is geared toward a different income group. Now, not only are the demographics much more sophisticatedly done, but the media themselves are geared toward much more specific demographics. The entire entertainment and information system is built around demographics.

SF!: How does having all these advertisers incorporating consumer resistance effect critics' like, say, Adbusters? What role should critics be playing?
Ewen: Adbusters, although it's done noble work in raising issues about the triumph of the market place, has a strong sense of pleasure anxiety. It is continually asking its readers to feel guilty about having any material desires. The problem with capitalism is not that it continually serves people's material desires but that to a large extent it denies them. Otherwise, people wouldn't always be hungry for more.

In developing alternatives to consumer culture, I think it's important to never to give up on the idea of satisfaction but rather to raise issues about whether the promises actually satisfy, and to look for ways both material and social to make satisfaction more real and possible.

SF!: Now that advertisers are constantly making fun of themselves, can parody really accomplish much? It seems like they've just absorbed it.
Ewen: I don't think the issue is whether parody does or doesn't work well, it's what we have. It's technique and form; it's genre. The issue isn't whether you use it, it's the only thing you can do. We use the language that we have available. It's a question of how consciously you use it. Parody is about having an acute awareness of form. We live in a world where form increasingly replaces substance, and where form (appearance, self-presentation, etc.) is itself considered to be of value. The awareness of how ideas are communicated is of enormous importance in terms of how ideas will be seen, processed, and understood. That is the key to why people so reflectively use form as an element of content. Even if they don't reflect on it, they still do it.

Advertisers that use parody say it will remind people of another ad, and that was their purpose. Another other way to look at it, though, is that those ads are reflections of a world in which almost everything out there is an ad. It's the idea that the most powerful thing you can reference is another ad, something else on TV, because that is what has the most reality for people.

SF!: What's the point of reference?
Ewen: Early advertisements had within them a dialogue between everyday life and the life promised us by the ad. Your life is miserable, you're lonely, unsuccessful, nothing's happening, use this product and all will be changed. Built into those ads is the assumption that there's a world of the ads, and that there's another thing called everyday life.

We live in a society where the very existence of everyday life or objective reality is something that's increasingly in question. And once you have a situation where there is no reality, there is only representation--there are no products, just ads--then you have a situation where ads refer to ads in one way or another. Some do it very self-consciously, others without any self-reflection whatsoever.

I have a great '80s ad for contact lens solution, and in the foreground is a woman in a very sexy dress. The problem is that she is wearing glasses with thick lenses. In the background are a bunch of people wearing evening clothes and having a really good time at a cocktail party, and you can see that it looks like a liquor ad. The point is if she had used this solution, instead of being in the ad for contact solution, she'd be in the ad for vermouth. While that ad didn't overtly parody another campaign, the alternative offered is a different ad. And I think those kind of dialogues exist all the time.