I find the advertising side of it really interesting and definitely relevant to my own practice.
Here are the pretty unorganised notes from the seminar, typed up.
This will be with a view towards completing a small task for next week, which is to list the 10 most important points raised in Adam Curtis' documentary 'Century of Self' along with relating those points to an analysis of at least one image from mass media, which will be interesting.
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SUPEREGO - Rationalised, social decisions. Based upon morality and growing up in social situations and what the world and culture tells us is right and wrong.
EGO
ID - Repressed, scary, unrationalised, sexual thoughts. Kids all use ID alot.
PENIS ENVY - Girls understand they have no penis. So they have no symbolic power like their father, so they want a penis. Idea of power. Houses are patriarchal.
CASTRATION ANXIETY - Boy sees mother and assumes she had been castrated, has anxiety of getting his own penis removed
OEDIPUS COMPLEX - unconscious thoughts repressed about childs desire to have sexual relationship with mother and kill his/her father.
OEDIPUS MYTH - Son of King of Troy. King of Troy goes to oracle - wise man/woman. Tells King of Troy that his newborn son will overthrow and kill him. The king banishes his newborn son, Oedipus. Oediupus grows up unknowing he's the King's son. He grows up to become a sort of leader and starts a sort of revolution. He overthrows the King of Troy anyway and takes his bride. Has sexual relationships with her, not knowing she's his mum. He finds out and blinds himself.
EDWARD BERNAYS - Nephew of Freud - THE CENTURY OF SELF documentary
LACAN
Freud. Primitive and repressive forces.
Using Freud's theories to control crime, in age of democracy. Edward Bernays uses Freud's ideas, especially in American society.
Manipulating the masses. Something which is all over the place nowadays.
Vienna, hated Freud's ideas as it was probably a threat to their absolute control.
Mass produced goods tapping into our unconscious desires and using those to the producers advantage and creating sales.
DR ALFRED PRITZ.
Wasn't good. Frightened for the Vienna empire.
Freud thought we had repressed feelings which we didn't access. Too dangerous.
A barrie. Prevents unconscious feelings from emerging.
Austro-Hungarian war unleashed the primitive forces in humans. The empire didn't want this.
Woodrow Wilson - Democracy for Europe. Bernays advised the government. America portrayed Wilson as a liberator of the people. Bernays wondered if the same type of persuasion could be used for peace. Not war.
'public relations' was the new term for manipulation and a way of coming across to the masses, with Bernays playing a big hand in it.
Ivy Lee and Edward Louis Bernays established the first definition of public relations in the early 1900s as
"a management function, which tabulates public attitudes, defines the policies, procedures, and interests of an organization... followed by executing a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance."
Bernays was fascinated with his Uncle Psychoanalysis writings.
Bernays: Persuade against taboo. He wanted to make it socially acceptable for women to smoke in the burgeoning tobacco industry, pretty much all used by men in America.
March in the streets. Bernays managed to convince and trick a group of women taking part in the march to smoke a cigarette. Bernays coined the term "Torches of Freedom" and the selling point was born.
Now women wanted to be a part of this march for freedom and to represent an ideal and movement. Cigarette sales for women in America soared.
Idea of selling desires, lifestyles. Made the women feel more independent. Can be linked to psychoanalysis, the idea of a cigarette being a penis, a symbol of power.
- Selling products you will feel better once you have them. Idea of NEED / WANT. Bernays started, or was atleast one of the first to really bring about in mass culture, the idea of wanting a product simply because you want it. Emotional attachment to the product.
OVERPRODUCTION
Because of the war and industrialisation in America and Henry Ford's assembly line invention, America was producing far more goods than what people needed. For example if you have a car, you dont NEED another car. This is where psychoanalysis and using desires came in.
Products used to be sold as necessities. Crisis of capitalism > constant needs to expand
Bernays job was to product new types of customers.
Bernays influence and innovative approaches to advertising:
They started associating products to famous stars.
Product placement in movies
Red carpets with the stars dressed up in the products of his clients
Fashion shows inside department stores
Portraying cars as males sexual dominance - still are for some brands. e.g. Hummer
"Why do you like short skirts?" ... "There's more to see!"
Previously Americans were citizens. Now they were CONSUMERS.
Politics also took notice and started to become more involved with Public relations as a very important aspect to running the country.
Bernays arranged for Freuds worked to be published in America for the first time ever. Freud's works became a revalation and had an extraordinary effect on America and made it kind of re-evaluate itself and peoples perceptions and desires. Highly controversial too - still is.
Freud was starting to become more and more pessimistic about humans. More and more withdrawn from society.
He also studied into how Unconscious feelings and repressed feelings can be triggered in large crowds. Rational decisions, from the conscious and Superego. Disappear.
ENGINEERING OF CONSENT.
MARLBORO MAN. none of these in terms of the image and focus of the posters...have much, at all, to actually do with smoking. They're designed to tap into our subconscious desires and for you to want to buy the cigarette for reasons maybe not even visible in your own mind when buying. You just automatically want to buy them, to make a statement and to associate yourself with the lifestyle shown. You don't need but you want.
You become attached to goods. For example if you have a cigarette you're free, or you're a cool cowboy
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if you're a women you're challenging male power symbolically, cigarette as penis
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Base human desires in the ID > Society becomes a kind of happy brainwashed society
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People become poorer and companies become richer. Kind of a passive, obedient and dormant society >
Companies and ad men are manipulating desires, in a way manipulating society and the economy and in a way the world
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It also stops revolutions and people revolting like in Russia
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Consumerism becomes a form of social control
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"happiness drug"
Marlboro county. Cigs and cowboys. You'll feel like a cowboy if you smoke. John Wayne.
It was a way of getting mens sexuality back and to make them feel dominant and important again, as womens sales were increasing so much men switched to cigars! Which is quite hilarious.
RECLAIMING MACHISIMO
In Britain, Tobacco is no longer allowed to be associated with glamour, sexy, sport, success in business, femininity or masculinity, or even seek to actively persuade people to start smoking.
Saatchi and Saatchi had a famous ad campaign for SILK CUT. Attached to our repressed, unconscious ID desires. The name Silk Cut - low tar. Weakness? Women? They were generally thought of as a female cigarette. Purple. Sexy in a unconscious way.
There are definite themes and thoughts that come to mind when looking at the ads, even though they don't explicitly say any of these. It's just how they're interpreted automatically in our minds through culture and society shaping our minds and desires.
- colours
- luxury
- femininity
- bedsheets
- male
- sexual power
- penis
- sex
- gash
- Knives
- Sexual violence
- Sexual superiority
- Power
- Penetration
- Desire
Male unconscious desires.
Our minds and perceptions are now shaped through society, media and social situations. For example a person that has never smoked a cigarette will know plenty about a cigarettes and that they're bad for you. He won't have any actual physical evidence of it, he probably didn't actually do his own experiment. We believe what we're told by the media and I find this really interest, there's definite truth to the idea of social control.
Such as the legality of Tobacco and the illegality of cannabis. Something which grows, yet it's classed as a drug yet there's chemically engineered pills, drugs essentially, such as Aspirins that can kill you much instantaneously bought over shop counters. Alcohol is a drug too and impairs your judgment much more than cannabis probably does. Why? There's hidden agendas everywhere.
Animalistic ID instincts.
Sexual violence symbolism with the Psycho shower curtains in the Silk Cut ads.
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