Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY
with production (what went on inside the factory) with an increasing emphasis on
how best to manage consumption. As one contributor to Advertising and Selling
observed: ‘In the past dozen years our factories have grown ten times as fast as
our population. . . . Coming prosperity . . . rests on a vastly increasing base of
mass buying’ (Goode, 1926). In response, corporate capitalism reacted to minimise
the uncertainties of the free market by attempting to regularise relations
with customers. The steady movement of mass-produced consumer goods such
as clothing, cigarettes, household furnishings, processed foods, soaps and – soon
after – motor cars meant that the public had to be informed and persuaded
of their availability and desirability (Pope, 1983). The imperative need to create
consumers led, inexorably, to the development of advertising as an especially
significant element of marketing (Ewen, 1976). Seeing advertising in this way,
as ‘an organised system of commercial information and persuasion’ (Williams,
1980, p. 179), helps us to understand its role in ‘training people to act as consumers
. . . and thus for hastening their adjustment to potential abundance’ (Potter,
1954, p. 175).
It would be presumptuous to assert that this investment in advertising
yielded a straightforward return. People, of course, interpret the messages they
encounter (Schudson, 1984) and, anyway, advertising is but one part of a wider
marketing strategy that might include credit facilities, trade-in deals, and the
design and packaging of goods (Sloan, 1963). However, what an appreciation of
the dynamic and origination of advertising does allow is insight into the business
contribution to the modern-day symbolic environment.
Advertising has grown so enormously since the 1920s, in both size and scale,
that it is impossible to ignore its intrusion into virtually all spheres of commercial
activity (Mattelart, 1991; Fox, 1984). It is today an industry with global reach,
one dominated by a clutch of oligopolies such as WPP (which owns one-time
separate giants Ogilvy & Mather, J. Walter Thompson and Cordiant), and Young
& Rubicam, yet one which intrudes deep into consumer culture. From advertising
hoardings, logos on sweatshirts, tie-in television serials, mainstream consumer
advertisements, corporate puffery, sports sponsorships, to many university
professorships (the Fiat Professor of Italian, the Asda Chair in Retailing), all are
testimony to the fact that we now inhabit a promotional culture (Wernick, 1991)
where it is difficult to draw the line where advertising stops and disinterested
information starts. Moreover, as was noted earlier, this is not simply a matter
of the growth of advertising in and of itself, since the dependence of so much
modern-day communications media on advertising as the major source of
revenue itself decisively influences the informational content of a great deal
of the press and television nowadays (Barnouw, 1978; McAllister, 1996).
Finally, we might observe also that the need to manage wide spheres of
corporate activity reminds us how the advertising ethos carries over from selling
goods to selling the company. The routine concern for branding that is now part
of the lore of corporations – from Adidas sportswear to the reassuringly multicultural
image of HSBC – testifies to this tendency. It is commonplace to
encounter messages – subtle and not so subtle – that banks ‘listen’, that oil interests
‘care for the environment’, that international chemical corporations are ‘the
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