Advertising & Finale
Final week! And a fun, silly one at that. Weird advertisements are a personal passion of mine — my favourites being the Italian bread ad, the ads by Vought for The Boys, and David Lynch's 'The Third Place' ad for the PS2.
The idea of advertisement being able to silently move an audience through repeated exposure — even without a brand — is horrifying. As a society we're so used to it we barely detect it as a problem, but the thought of removing personal agency to sell something secretly is utterly insane. If you can think of things you wouldn't otherwise do due to an external force you don't know is affecting you, has your free will been compromised? This instantly reminds me of social media, how algorithms can repeatedly expose you to increasing levels of echo chambers. But this has been the case for much longer. In Harvard in 1980, there was an experiment where school newspapers were personalised for a month, slowly pushed in different political stances, and the people who didn't know they were being tested were all measured to have been pushed towards whatever stance the newspapers were meant to push them in. People are a lot more susceptible to subconscious manipulation through something much less interactive than an algorithm — even just a newspaper.
Advertisement exists to sell a product, but I think it also is shaped by the culture in which it exists. To bring free advertisement, companies are being more divisive and controversial on purpose to bait engagement. The example in class was the diamond Wheaties, but I put forward another, more extreme example: the Sydney Sweeney eugenics commercial.
Advertisements that use racist dog whistles aren't doing so because the company itself is usually racist — they want to sell more jeans. But it's the overlap between dominant culture and controversy that breeds this behaviour. Another example of intersectionality between culture and art/production — a core theme of this course. A critique I had for this lesson was that we didn't properly investigate the ethics and cultural ramifications of these ways of selling. Not to mention advertisement itself as a way of seperating the value of labour and its actual sold price being inethical itself. Come to think of it, economic systems haven't been discussed much apart from in reference to the russian revolution in the subject, I think that's a missed opportunity.
We talked about flash mobs as well, where performance art would disrupt the mundane. The videos shown were very cool, but I think David could have expanded upon the subject further. An example of performance art I personally follow is 'Agent of Chaos0' online, where different prompts for performance art are put out anonymously, and then different influencers follow the prompts each time across the world in different cultures. They go from going to the same store multiple times with the same outfit to borderline illegal activities. Sometimes performance art on social media happens accidentally — when the Instagram reel inviting friends only to see a child's graduation ceremony randomly gets 14 million views, with some people deciding to go because they're in the area, flooding a stadium with random people to watch a stranger graduate high school.
On 'how to get a job', the advice was genuinely very useful. The idea of needing more creatives in otherwise non-creative settings is important — and why I believe that UniMelb should allow for Arts/STEM degrees, as having as many different perspectives on things as possible in a creative process is incredibly important. Engineering is currently filled with defence contractors instead of renewables companies because of this, where more helpful roles to society are locked behind new ways of thinking that can't be reached with traditional approaches.
As a conclusion to this journal, and thus this course — I'd like to say thank you. As an entry into university life, this has been my favourite course, and likely will stay my favourite for a long time. It's been great, and I look forward to next semester. Thank you, David Shea! Stay weird!