Scott McLemee: Lifestyles of Mad Men
The first three seasons of "Mad Men" (the fourth begins on Sunday) were set in a world recognizable from The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard’s landmark work of pop sociology from 1957. Reviving the spirit of muckraking to probe the inner workings of postwar affluence, Packard reported on how the ad agencies on Madison Avenue used psychological research to boost the manipulative power of their imagery and catchphrases.
To prime the consumer market, habits and attitudes left over from the Great Depression had to be liquidated. Desire must be set free -- or at least educated into enough confidence to be assertive, Advertising meant selling not just a product but a dream. There was, for example, the famous ad campaign portraying women who found themselves in public, in interesting situations while wearing little more their Maidenform undergarments. The idea was to lodge the product in the potential consumer’s unconscious by associating it with a common dream situation.
But my sense is that "Mad Men" is poised to enter a new, post-Packardian phase. At the end of the third season, several characters left the established firm of Sterling Cooper and set out to create their own advertising “shop” – all of this not very long after the Kennedy assassination. Trauma seldom stalls the wheels of commerce for long. And we know, with hindsight, that American mass culture was just about to undergo a sudden, swift de-massification – the proliferation, over the next few years, of ever more sharply defined consumer niches and episodic subcultures.
Stimulating consumer desire by making an end run around the superego was no longer the name of the game. The new emphasis took a different form. It is best expressed by the term “lifestyle” -- which, as far as I can tell, was seldom used before the mid-60s, except as a piece of jargon from the Adlerian school of psychoanalytic revisionism....
Read entire article at Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed
To prime the consumer market, habits and attitudes left over from the Great Depression had to be liquidated. Desire must be set free -- or at least educated into enough confidence to be assertive, Advertising meant selling not just a product but a dream. There was, for example, the famous ad campaign portraying women who found themselves in public, in interesting situations while wearing little more their Maidenform undergarments. The idea was to lodge the product in the potential consumer’s unconscious by associating it with a common dream situation.
But my sense is that "Mad Men" is poised to enter a new, post-Packardian phase. At the end of the third season, several characters left the established firm of Sterling Cooper and set out to create their own advertising “shop” – all of this not very long after the Kennedy assassination. Trauma seldom stalls the wheels of commerce for long. And we know, with hindsight, that American mass culture was just about to undergo a sudden, swift de-massification – the proliferation, over the next few years, of ever more sharply defined consumer niches and episodic subcultures.
Stimulating consumer desire by making an end run around the superego was no longer the name of the game. The new emphasis took a different form. It is best expressed by the term “lifestyle” -- which, as far as I can tell, was seldom used before the mid-60s, except as a piece of jargon from the Adlerian school of psychoanalytic revisionism....