project/billboards

There is a fine line between publicity and advertising. While anyone can see the difference between a full-page ad promoting a soft drink and a two-line classified offering part-time work, it is easy to slide from one mode into the other. This slippage between simple intermediation and a full-scale advertising campaign is what hampers thinking about the question. The classical theory underpinning the function of promotion is that of imperfect competition, or ‘non-price competition’, formulated in 1933 by the post-Keynesian economist Joan Robinson and, quite independently, by Edward Chamberlin of the Harvard School. Non-price competition occurs when, in conditions of oligopoly, the businesses concerned avoid a price war for the sake of their own profit margins, instead competing by promoting the products themselves, in particular by special offers. The increased promotional costs remain advantageous compared with the predictable alternative: loss of income through competitive price-cutting.

As to how effective advertising is in increasing sales, whether it is useful in the short or the long term, and how successful it may be in a contest with other promotional campaigns (‘voice share’ rather than ‘market share’): these questions have been under discussion for a century, with no conclusion in sight. The one thing certain, if we borrow a metaphor from physics, is that advertising is the channel through which money is transferred from industry and finance to the mass media: it is the ‘black box’ that takes in money and emits information. Advertising is the main instrument by which, especially in the twentieth century, the dominant economic interests have financed information. This link between money and information has appeared unbreakable, even in the most radical conception of press freedom: modernity has not succeeded in conceiving a means of creating pluralism in information that is not based on a plurality of economic powers. Hence the difficulty of conceiving pluralism of information in a regime of collective property.

While it may look like we are getting something for nothing, advertising-financed culture is not free. We pay environmentally, we pay with our self-esteem, and we pay with our attention, privacy, and knowledge. But we also pay with our pocketbooks, and this is key. Advertising is, in essence, a private tax. Because promotional budgets are factored into the price we pay for goods, customers end up footing the bill. That means that, all together, we spend more than $700 billion a year on advertising, a tremendous waste of money on something that has virtually no social value and that most of us despise.

Advertising, after all, doesn’t feed or house us, or educate us, or enlighten us, or make our lives better or more beautiful. Instead, advertising makes our culture less spirited and fearless, more servile and uninspired. Surely all that money could be better spent producing something we actually care about.

The point of capital's sponsorship of cultural and sporting events is not only the banal one of accruing brand awareness. Its more important function is to make it seem that capital's involvement is a precondition for culture as such. The presence of capitalist sigils on advertising for events forces a quasi-behaviouristic association, registered at the level of the nervous system more than of cognition, between capital and cultural. It is a pervasive reinforcement of capitalist realism.

This was the secret, it seemed, of all the success stories of the late eighties and early nineties. The lesson of Marlboro Friday was that there never really was a brand crisis—only brands that had crises of confidence. The brands would be okay, Wall Street concluded, so long as they believed fervently in the principles of branding and never, ever blinked. Overnight, “Brands, not products!” became the rallying cry for a marketing renaissance led by a new breed of companies that saw themselves as “meaning brokers” instead of product producers. What was changing was the idea of what—in both advertising and branding—was being sold. The old paradigm had it that all marketing was selling a product. In the new model, however, the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand, and the selling of the brand acquired an extra component that can only be described as spiritual. Advertising is about hawking product. Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence.

6
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society's unreality. In all of its particular manifestations -- news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment -- the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle is also the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the modern production process.

From the point of view of capital, the representation of value is more important than the physical form or useful properties of the labor product. The particular kind of commodity being sold means little; the net gain is everything. A portion of the labor of society must therefore be devoted to the accounting of value. As capitalism becomes more complex and develops into its monopoly stage, the accounting of value becomes infinitely more complex. The number of intermediaries between production and consumption increases, so that the value accounting of the single commodity is duplicated through a number of stages. The battle to realize values, to turn them into cash, calls for a special accounting of its own. Just as in some industries the labor expended upon marketing begins to approach the amount expended upon the production of the commodities being sold, so in some industries the labor expended upon the mere transformation of the form of value (from the commodity form into the form of money or credit)—including the policing, the cashiers and collection work, the recordkeeping, the accounting, etc.—begins to approach or surpass the labor used in producing the underlying commodity or service. And finally, as we have already noted, entire “industries” come into existence whose activity is concerned with nothing but the transfer of values and the accounting entailed by this.

The disinvestment in higher education may be more explicable in terms of labor-market requirements. Today’s vectoral class has no need of the mass worker. Labor is bifurcated between a small core of a highly skilled hacker class using or designing information technology and a vast precarious population whose jobs have been deskilled by the same information technology.19