Century of the Self

[After WWI, corporations] were frightened of the dangers of overproduction, that there would come a point where people had enough goods and would simply stop buying. Up until that point, the majority of products were still sold to the masses on the basis of need...What the corporations realized they had to do was transform the way the majority of Americans thought about products. One leading Wall Street banker Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers was clear about what was necessary. "We must shift America," he wrote, "from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America: man's desires must overshadow his needs."

- from the BBC documentary, Century of the Self. See the film here on Youtube.

Bill Moyer on Public Broadcasting

The mission of public broadcasting was to create an alternative channel that would be free of not only commercials, but free of commercial values...[NBC, ABC, and CBS] had made their peace with the little fantasies and lies of merchandizing... There are things in this country that the market will not provide: public education, public art, public schools, public broadcasting, public toilets. I mean there are things that are not profitable but that still serve a value. I think the most important thing we [public broadcasting] can do is to continue to treat Americans as citizens not just as consumers. If you look out and just see an audience of consumers, you want to sell them something. If you look out and see an audience of citizens, you want to share something with them. And there is a difference.

- Bill Moyers on Fresh Air 4-30-2010.

What if?

Imagine a women’s magazine that positively featured round models, short models, old models – or no models at all, but real individual women. Let’s say that it had a policy of avoiding cruelty to women, as some now have a policy of endorsing products made free of cruelty to animals. And that it left out crash diets, mantras to achieve self-hatred, and promotional articles for the procession that cuts open healthy women’s bodies. And let’s say that it ran articles in praise of the magnificence of visible age, displayed loving photo essays on the bodies of women of all shapes and proportions, examined with gentle curiosity the body’s changes after birth and breast-feeding, offered recipes without punishment or guilt, and ran seductive portraits of men.

It would run aground, losing the bulk of its advertisers. Magazines, consciously or half-consciously, must project the attitude that looking one’s age is bad because $650 million of their ad revenue comes from people who would go out of business if visible age looked good. They need, consciously or not, to promote women’s hating their bodies enough to profitably hungry, since the advertising budget for one third of the nation’s food bill depends on their doing so by dieting. The advertisers who make women’s mass culture possible depend on making women feel bad enough about their faces and bodies to spend more money on worthless or pain-inducing products than they would if they felt innately beautiful.

from The Beauty Myth (1991) by Naomi Wolf

72 and sunny

72 and Sunny makes some of my favorite ads, including those for Bugaboo, Callaway, and, of course, Discovery Channel.