"The Only Things That Aren't Fake Are You, Me and Sprite": Ironies and Realities in Generation X Advertising
Metro, June 1996
This 'hip' attitude is a kind of ironic nihilism in which ironic distance
is offered as the only reasonable relation to a reality which is no
longer reasonable.
- Lawrence Grossberg
One way to define GenX is as a framing device: GenX is merely a kind of
self-conscious irony, the ability to step from direct experience and watch
oneself experiencing life. The moment GenX began was the moment when the
first buster 'bracketed' his own experience, the minute someone stepped
back and in a wink-wink-say-no-more fashion, related the ironic distance
lie felt from his own existence.
- Douglas Rushkoff
This essay aims to explore the cultural phenomenon known as Generation X, its relation to advertising and the media, and the postmodern fascination with 'the real' that is evident within this relation. The term 'Generation X' refers to a cohort of young adults, born roughly between the mid-60s and mid-70s, who have grown up deconstructing media texts and who are now themselves the unwilling target of marketing campaigns. The ways advertisers try to get on-side with Generation X, a target market that declares "I am not a target market" (Coupland, 1992), often involve postmodern techniques such as pastiche, irony, parody and reflexivity - ways of playing with 'the real' - and such advertisements frequently make use of notions of 'the real', for example in slogans such as 'image is nothing' or 'it's got to be real'. Advertisers tailor their campaigns in order to be perceived as 'authentic', not as 'try-hards' or 'me-toos' - the curse of death for any cultural product, commodity or person. This article argues that in youth culture today a preoccupation with 'the real' is evident, in two rather different forms: on the one hand there is a distanciation from the idea of concrete reality, a kind of 'ironic nihilism' (Grossberg, 1989:264) which embraces the postmodern world of jumbled, depthless imagery, signifiers without signifieds; yet, on the other hand, there is a search for 'the real', for authenticity, for 'cred' which seems in a way to belie the detached 'hip attitude' Grossberg describes. I suggest that although GenX is more at home in postmodernism than preceding generations, they have not abandoned 'the real' altogether. Rather, they have adopted an ironic (di)stance in order to deal with the difficulties raised by its disappearance, but con- tinue to search for some kind of guarantee of personal authenticity.
What is GenX?
Generation X
It was these words that really spawned the mass scramble to hunt out, examine, define, make friends with and sell stuff to this strange new body of alien beings, who didn't seem to watch mainstream television or read newspapers and who had a disconcerting habit of pointing out to marketers exactly what they were trying to do in their focus groups, and intrepid marketers set out courageously into uncharted territory. Some rapidly crashed and burned (Subaru became the first casualty in claiming its new car, the lntegra, was not 'boring and corporate' but 'like punk rock'), and others learned from their mistakes. It was a long, hard, gruelling journey into the unknown, and marketers frequently succumbed to despair. "This is a generation characterized by disillusionment and alienation," sighed the president of Generation Insights consultancy, "and marketing to disillusionment and alienation is very, very difficult." (in Miller, 1992). "Xers know they're a target market, and they hate that," complained Marketing News (Miller, 1993). "They could very well be the demographic group from hell."
Quickly a stereotypical portrait of Generation X developed. Sandwiched between the baby boom of 1946-1964 and the 'boomlet' of 1977 onwards, children of recession (born into the '70s crisis and maturing during the '80s), Generation Xers, or 'twentysomethings', 'baby busters', or 'slackers' as they are also known, are a cynical, pessimistic and hostile bunch. They feel that boomers have partied through their early adulthood then promptly sold out, leaving them with a plundered and fragile environment, mass unemployment, a fragmented social structure and the aftermath of the sexual (counter-)revolution. Boomers had free love and acid aplenty, Generation X has AIDS and 'Just Say No'. Born at a time when children were unfashionable, and ignored by the boomer-centric media, they feel distanced from mainstream culture and bored by consumer hype. They're overeducated and underemployed, and often remain living at home with their parents for far longer than previous generations in order to preserve their limited financial resources. They're conservative in some ways and liberal in others, being politically apathetic but tolerant of di- versity (in the USA they are the first generation without a clear ethnic majority), aware of social problems but feeling unable to do anything about them. And they are children of the information age, weaned on television but never taken in by it, harbouring an ironic delight in re-runs of old family sitcoms but wary of anything that tries to sell them stuff. They watch Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons and MTV; they listen to grunge and rap; they wear backwards baseball caps and flannel shirts, the males have goatees and they all tattoo and pierce bits of themselves on a regular basis.
So much for the stereotype. As for actual Generation X specimens themselves, there seem to be very few of them. While it is possible to find twentysomething-driven products, like underground publications, that attempt to address twentysomethings as a reasonably coherent group, they rarely seem to identify with the name of 'Generation X' ('slacker' is more of a favourite). "Just try finding anyone in his or her twenties who wants to be called a Gen-X'er", says Daniel Strong (1994), a 28-year-old goateed writer who still lives with his mother. Some however have adopted the name as their own, such as Douglas Rushkoff, editor of The GenX Reader, who describes GenX as "a life philosophy designed to help us cope with the increasingly and disorientingly rapid deflation of our society" (1994: 6).
While the majority of the twentysomething cohort are not hostile, tattooed-and-pierced slackers who totally reject everything consumerist and mainstream, the kind of lifestyle nebulously dubbed 'alternative' seems to be becoming more and more popular among young people. Certainly being 'alternative' is very fashionable at the moment, which is only one of the many contradictions that the Generation X phenomenon embodies.
Generation X has been defined as 'the paradox generation', and indeed the ideas constituting it and ways of approaching it are riddled with contradictions. Generation X is the target market that declares it is not anything of the sort, courted with anti-hype hype and anti-image images. In a sense the entire phenomenon is built on the paradoxical notion of identifying with anonymity: "Generation X is going to try to keep staying under the radar," says one executive. "That's part of their identification. If they can be identified and marketed to, they've lost their identification" (in Miller, 1993). Thus most of those implicated in the Generation X phenomenon reject the notion of a coherent identity for their age group, arguing that it is ridiculous to try to sum up millions of diverse young people in a paragraph - leading to the appropriately paradoxical notion that anyone who vigorously denies they are a GenXer probably is one.
If what I am calling 'GenX' in this context is a way of life or state of mind, like previous 'underground' or 'counter-cultural' movements such as punk, then this is precisely why naming is such a problem. Any group which is characterized by a feeling of opposition to the mainstream and ironic distance from media representations will resist labelling and categorizing by the mainstream media. As Douglas Coupland puts it, "With X, [marketers] naively continue to assume that any generation actively enjoys participating in its own selling out. Wrong. Let X=X." (1995: 72).
So if the nature of counter-cultural movements is such that as soon as they are identified by the mainstream, they reject whatever label is applied to them, then Generation X is a group constituted by those who deny its existence. (Some marketers, ever adaptable, are already on to this, like the copywriters of this glorious non sequitur for Cotton, Inc: "There is no Generation X. There are no baby busters. There is just you and the 40 million or so men and women who share common experiences, concerns and values"). While it can be argued that there is a cultural shift in predominant attitudes which marketers have picked up on and responded to, it by no means corresponds exactly to chronological age, and those who are part of it have no desire to see it co-opted by the mainstream media. Twentysomethings, for the most part, are a generation who do not want to be defined. "What is GenX? There's no answer, because that's an ignorant boomer question. Who knows? Who cares? Whatever." (Mark Saltveit, 1994: 53).
Waving or Drowning?
Once upon a time there was a non-gender-specific being called Consumerism, and another called Media, and they lived in a land called Capitalism. The two met one day and discovered they were very compatible: they both had a lot of exciting plans and ambitions and they found that together they could accomplish a lot more than what they could do alone. They fell in love and had a child, and they called the child Advertising. When Advertising got big enough the whole family started going out into the community and spreading their ideas, and soon they became the leaders of the community and they renamed it Postmodernism. Lots of beings lived in Postmodernism, and eventually they all had children, and the children were called Generation X. When Generation X grew up they all moved into their own little enclave somewhere within Postmodernism, and sometimes they would come out and visit their parents, but mostly they just sat in there and looked out at everyone in Capitalism and laughed at them. No one could understand it.
Baudrillard (1970, 1983), among others, provides a somewhat more sophisticated genealogy of the cultural developments of the last century than the one outlined above. Contemporary society, he argues, is shaped by the "logic of the commodity". As exchange-value replaces use-value and commodities become attached to signs or images, these images are endlessly reproduced in the media and advertising, and signs lose their connection to any stable referent, becoming 'free-floating'. All commodities are signs, and all signs are commodities. There is no longer any concrete reality but a world of images, of simulations which have become more real to us than the things they used to refer to - a world of hyperreality. Andrew Wernick, in a similar vein, argues that advertising in its broadest sense, what he terms 'promotion', pervades so many aspects of contemporary culture as to have become "virtually co-extensive with our produced symbolic world" (1991: 182): culture itself is promotional.
GenX, born and raised in this world of free-floating commodity-signs, simultaneously embraces and rejects it. GenXers are bored with consumerist hype, scornful of advertising claims that they can become beautiful and popular by making certain consumer choices, scathing about ad campaigns that depict happy people in perfect worlds. Yet they celebrate the kaleidoscope of depthless imagery that is contemporary culture, delight in it without succumbing to it.
GenX is a conscious effort to avoid engaging in anything that
requires descent into the rat race of consumerist angst, a neo-Buddhism
where attachments of any kind break the awareness so valuable to surfers
of a consumer culture. It is an ability to derive meaning from the random
juxtaposition of TV commercials, candy wrappers, childhood memories, and
breakfast treats. It is a willingness to deconstruct and delight in the
Toys 'R' Us wasteland of cultural junk while warding off the meaningless
distractions of two-party politics, falling interest rates, and phantom
career opportunities.
(Rushkoff, 1994: 5).
GenXers harbour a detached appreciation for consumer culture, an ironic distance which allows them to be at once part and not part, belonging and separate, accepting and rejecting of a world which can be fun for a while but gets tedious before too long. Consumer culture is a fun place to visit, but GenXers don't want to live there.
The media, on the other hand, is family, friend and foe to GenXers; information technology is the ocean in which they surf. Television is not only entertainment and social activity but a way of life. 'Real life' experiences are understood and described in terms of movie plots and fictional characters. Personal identity is constructed as a collage of media-transmitted images and products, you are what you consume. But again, immersion in the world of the media is countered by a detachment from it, an awareness of it that prevents being 'sucked in'.
Like any youngsters, we learned the language we were taught when we
were kids. It just happens that this is the language of advertising.
Exposed to consumerism and public relations strategies since we could open
our eyes, we GenXers see through the clunky attempts to manipulate our
opinions and assets, however shrinking. When we watch commercials, we
ignore the products and instead deconstruct the marketing techniques ...
Built into our favourite shows are characters and narrative techniques
that constanttly remind us of our relationship to the program we are
watching. Our television heroes are characters like Bart Simpson and
Beavis and Butthead, who demonstrate proper aloofness toward media
iconography as well as the skills to dissect and reconstitute television
imagery against its original purposes.
(Rushkoff, 1994: 4,160).
MTV, the mediaspace where GenX feels most at home, is often cited as an example of what postmodern media looks like. (There have in fact been moves, orchestrated by MTV, to rename twentysomethings 'The MTV Generation', an idea which carries a certain ironic charm: the anti-consumerist generation being named after a commodity). It's fast-paced, nonlinear, multi-channelled entertainnment, a blizzard of images which jumbles music video, fictional or non-fictional narrative and advertising all up together, making it very difficult to distinguish which is what, taking nothing seriously, in constant flux but without really changing. MTV was first on the scene with many techniques that advertisers are now using in other domains. Lawrence Grossberg, in his study of MTV, describes its attitude as one of "authentic inauthenticity", which "celebrates the possibilities of poses without denying that that is all they are ... [MTV] debunks every image, presenting it as precisely what it is - an image, but acknowledging that there is nothing else to choose from" (1989: 265).
GenX, then, would seem to be the archetypal postnmodern generation, born and raised into a whirlwind of images without referents, at home in a world where everything is a commodity and simulations are more real than reality. But while its embrace of 'authentic inauthenticity' is evident in sonic aspects of life, such as media consumption, it is markedly absent in other areas, particularly that of personal identity where a concerted struggle for the unattainable goal of authenticity itself is ongoing.
'Alternative' lifestyles and identities are very much bound up with notions of authenticity. 'Straight' people live in the world of commercial culture, they conform mindlessly to whatever is trendy or 'the done thing', whereas 'alternative' people live for themselves, follow their own rules. The expression of resistance to the dictates of the straight world takes place through commonly understood signifiers of alternative-ness like unconventional clothes or hairstyles, tattoos, body piercing, etc., which have in recent years themselves become widely fashionable: co-opted by fashion and made trendy, they have been stripped of their countercultural meaning and reduced to depthless images - as of course happened to the flower children in the '60s and every countercultural movement since. Every 'real alternative' person knows someone who decided to 'go alternative' overnight, making a sudden image change by altering their clothes and hair, piercing their nose and listening to a different radio station. These people are understood to be not 'real' alternatives; they are seen as try-hards who deserve all the scorn you can pour on them for their feeble attempts to appear something they are not. They have the image but they have no 'cred'.
Credibility is an intriguing and all-important notion in alternative culture, meaning not believable-ness so much as integrity, as a nature of being true to oneself. Although hardcore GenXers like Andrew Hultkrans argue that "it's impossible to retain integrity in the information economy" and encourage those with "alternative lifestyles" to "sell out while you still have the chance" (1994:302-3), this attitude is not shared by the majority of young people. 'Cred' is defined in relation to image or material gain: to have 'cred' is to act with integrity, without awareness of one's image (i.e. without self-conscious attempts to be hip), and without consideration of profit potential. An example of the concern with 'cred' can be seen in the vociferous arguments between alternative music fans as to which bands have it and which don't. Bands such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana or Green Day, who began with the proper underground 'cred'entials but went on to become rich, famous and extremely popular, are seen by some to have 'sold out' simply by participating in the world of commercialism; while others argue that only when a band actively changes their sound in order to sell more records have they sold out. Such arguments are interminable, irresolvable, and yet integral to judgements of a band's worth. Pearl Jam are an especially salient example of these sorts of discussions, often cited as the archetypal Generation X band and just as often rejected as the antithesis of everything GenX stands for. For instance, was Pearl Jam's decision not to make any videos for their latest album so as to avoid MTV hype genuine, or was it a cunning attempt to generate more publicity by making such an unusual move? Was it really a 'cred' decision, or a fiendish ploy to appear 'cred'? And how can we ever know?
The paradox of 'cred' is that if you have it, you don't know you have it, and if you are aware of whether or not you have it, you obviously don't and probably never will. The notion of 'cred' exists as a justification of one's image, to give it depth and substance and history; but the whole point of having 'cred' is the denial of any awareness of image. 'Cred' says "the way I look and act is a natural outgrowth of the way I am as a person: it's the way I've always been, I didn't try to get this way for any purpose, I just am it". But of course the act of justifying your image forces you to admit that you have one and are conscious of it, qua image. 'Cred' is problematic because it is based in unselfconsciousness - a difficult state to maintain when everything you do and are is constantly represented back to yourself via the ubiquitous media.
Thus the search for 'cred' is a search for an anchoring in reality, for reassurance that you really are what you look like and are more than just a surface across which varying images and identities float. This paradoxical quest is central to alternative culture, and constitutes perhaps the most fascinating of all the contradictions around the Generation X phenomenon: if GenX is the postmoden, ironically-distanced, media-sophisticated generation, then why this search for authenticity? Why is a generation that delights in surfing the waves of consumer culture so desperate for an anchor in 'the real'?
You Are What You Consume
The art of advertising, according to Leiss, Kline and Jhally (1986: 279), has passed through four distinct phases since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, not clear-cut discrete divisions but simply times at which certain strategies (all of which are still used today) were dominant. First was the 'Idolatry' phase, roughly between 1890 and 1925, in which advertising emphasized the usefulness of products, focusing strictly on the object itself. During the 'Iconology' phase, from 1925 to 1945, products took on symbolic qualities; owning a particular commodity connoted certain attributes to the consumer, but these attributes were still tightly bound up with the nature of the object. In the 'Narcissism' phase, 1945 to 1965, products became personalized and consumers were encouraged to make purchasing decisions based on what interpersonal rewards products could bring them. By the 'Totemism' phase, 1965 onwards, products had become emblems of group membership, indicators of 'lifestyle', their intrinsic properties hardly relevant at all. Totemic advertisements tell us that by consuming certain products we can make statements about who we are, zany and uninhibited, sophisticated and elegant; through symbolic display we can align ourselves with one or another subgroup of society, a task advertisers are only too happy to help us out with. With the rise of niche marketing, where consumers are broken down into ever-more-specific groups according to their 'lifestyles' and targeted accordingly, the consumer and not the product has become the focal point of most advertising.
In a formula that mass-marketed consumption has made general, such
ads represent product X as semiotically equivalent to a set of culturally
recognizable signifiers for value-complex Y, which induces purchase by
converting the product, in turn, into a (value-enhanced) symbol for just
these mythified social and psychological 'goods'.
Wernick, 1991:
94)
'Lifestyle advertising', then, is that which depicts groups of people with varying attributes, but always beautiful, happy, successful at what they do, and popular, doing their thing which in some way (it need not be explicitly shown) involves consumption of the product being advertised. Coca-Cola, for example, is an expert at this type of marketing: people are encouraged to believe that drinking a particular kind of carbonated caffeine and sugar drink will enable them to cavort freely on beaches with many other gorgeous and happy people just like themselves: "To drink this product, or even just to have it in hand, is to unite, ecstatically, with the constructed/interiorized imaginary of ourselves." (ibid., p93). Lifestyles themselves become commodities, attainable and definable through modes of consumption.
This is precisely the kind of advertising that Generation X supposedly hates. GenXers refuse to be taken in by promises of a better life through consumption, by meaningless product differentiation, by stereotypes of their ideal selves. (I am not trying to imply that all twentysomethings are innately cleverer than preceding generations, just that they are more media-literate and cynical). Above all they will not be manipulated. This is what makes them an advertiser's nightmare. They are a market that hates advertising, that sees through all its tricks and wants to makes fun of them. They don't want their own lifestyle sold back to them by boomers, they just want honest product information, no bullshit. If they have to have ads at all, they want ads that speak their language, ads that are hip, ads that are genuine.
The advertising industry, sent into a flat spin by this unpleasant new phenomenon but determined to get a handle on it somehow (although some considered it better to cut their losses, write off Generation X and concentrate on their younger siblings who hadn't yet formed such anti-social attitudes), soon came up with guidelines as to how to recapture these finicky consumers. These include not talking down to or patronizing them, making realistic offers, using irreverent or bizarre humour, not taking themselves too seriously, making 'ads that admit they are ads', avoiding sexism and stereotypes, being diverse, playful, relevant, and honest, and most of all, not being a 'try-hard' or a 'me-too' (i.e., making a calculated effort to achieve an image that is not really your own) - having credibility is possibly both the most important, and the most difficult, criterion (Shoebridge, 1993; Purvis, 1993).
To look at some ways in which marketers have tried to employ these strategies, I want now to use a few specific advertisement examples (all of which except one - the Coke rap - have been sourced from articles on Generation X and marketing), and pick out what I perceive to be some salient points.
Ironies
- Macaulay Culkin is sitting in front of a house with a cute little girl, who leans over to kiss him but is thwarted when he declares "I'm not really your boyfriend, I'm an actor. And this house isn't real, it's a set". He pushes over the house facade, revealing the set behind it, and exposes two more actors backstage: "And these aren't really your parents, they're just extras". Offering the girl a Sprite, he comforts her with the words "The only things that aren't fake are you, me and Sprite", at which point the girl turns into a cardboard cut-out and is carried off stage.
- Callers to Coke's 0800-number consumer feedback line are informed that any messages they leave "may be used in advertising or exploited in some other way we haven't figured out yet".
- Billboards for PepsiCo's Priviet Vodka, under the title "Amazing Russian Vodka", declaim the vodka's exciting properties, such as "Changes colour when mixed with fruit juice!", or "Just the right size for a groovy shindig!".
One of the most noticeable characteristics of these ads is the quality of self-awareness, explicit or implicit, that most of them display. Honesty is one way to deal with cynicism, and 'ads that admit they are ads' employ this strategy. As with the Coke message, the feeling is created that "yes, we know that we're trying to manipulate you into buying our products, and we know that you know it, but if you know that we know that you know, and we don't care, then it's all right". It's okay to manipulate people as long as you are upfront about doing it; in other words, advertisers can "absorb popular criticism of advertising by turning the criticism to become part of their meta-message" (Goldman and Papson, 1991: 71).
But reflexivity is more than just a way of attempting to negate cynicism; it's a way to play with ideas of reality, to step outside of and make obvious the (fake) diegetic world that most advertising sets up. The Macaulay Culkin Sprite ad does this most obviously, explicitly and deliberately deconstructing its own set(-up). While reflexive techniques are by no means new to advertising, they have only infrequently been used in the past, whereas now they seem to be more and more common. Other examples include a Pizza Hut TV spot, in which a customer asking for the $6.95 special, when offered more information on it, says "I know, I saw it in the ad". "You can't have," says the employee, "this is the ad." "I knew that," says the customer. And Coke have a few short spots in which a man appears on the screen and proceeds to clean it, from inside the TV set, with a window-washing device - or look straight out of the set at the viewers and laugh hysterically.
Self-parody, another way of playing with reality, is also a technique evident in many of these spots. The Priviet Vodka billboards parody the extravagant but empty claims and earnest attempts at hip slang of conventional advertising. One soft-drink company in Scotland, after finding its lifestyle beach-frolic ad to be the source of much hilarity and scorn amongst its target market, retained the visuals but replaced the soundtrack with a parodic voiceover by comedian Angus Deayton, transforming embarrassment into hip simply by taking the piss out of itself. The copywriter of the Priviet slogans, Howard Marguiles, describes his technique as "anti-advertising" (in Miller, 1992); a phrase which brings to mind Baudrillard's description of "proving theatre by anti-theatre, proving art by anti-art ... Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form" (1983: 36). "Anti-advertising", then, would seem to describe a process by which ads make fun of ads in order to be accepted as ads.
'Irony', as Winona Ryder's character discovers in the archetypal Generation X movie Reality Bites, is a word which seems to be inherently undefinable. Most of us can do no better than her "I know it when I see it!". It is extremely difficult to pin the term down to a meaning any more specific than something involving a "discrepancy or incongruity between words and their meaning, or between actions and their results, or between appearance and reality. In all cases there may be an element of the absurd and the paradoxical." (Cuddon, 1977: 331). Irony is central to the GenX attitude, being "every GenXer's true birthright" (Hultkrans, 1994: 301), and it's very evident in these examples of Generation X-targeted ads: in the extolling of Priviet Vodka's amazing qualities, in Coke's blithe admission of their exploitation of their customers, in the final twist of the Macaulay Culkin Sprite spot where his companion turns into cardboard.
Romantic irony, a more specific form of ironic technique, can be
described as:
an awareness, a sensibility, that [the writer] does
not expect his [sic] work to be taken wholly seriously - and does not wish
it to be. He conveys this tone and attitude (thus inviting a complementary
tone and attitude in his reader) by being at once critically aware of what
he is doing and why he is doing it... Thus he is fully conscious of the
comic implications of his own seriousness.
(Cuddon, 1977: 572)
This seems to fit as an overall description of the techniques described above - reflexivity, parody, irony - that copywriters use to get on-side with Generation X (often referred to as the 'wink, wink, hey, we know' strategy). By playing with representations of 'reality', you automatically put yourself at a remove from it. The use of reflexivity, self-parody and irony in advertisements constructs a place for the viewer outside of the world they depict: they allow viewers to dabble in the world of consumerism without feeling personally implicated in it or responsible for it. These techniques all involve a sense of awareness and self-awareness, of detached observation, of not taking things seriously, and a use of subtle dry humour: they are all ways of stepping back and laughing.
Realities
Coke's recent move away from its old sun-and-surf imagery to a more street-smart look (which Pepsi's Australian branch manager described as Coke's "desperate" attempt to appear "groovy" (in King, 1993)) entailed a young man driving a taxi through New York and rapping the following lines:
I got a message I want you to hear it There's a point to be made and I want to clear it People are people don't care how they look We're all pages from the same good book Take me I am original man The millionth generation of the human clan I'm real there's no mistaking it You get a feel when anybody's faking it You got to be like Coca-Cola the real thing The high appeal thing Get Real Get Real Reality it's all the same to me You are what you hope and what you want to be As for me I got a simple scheme I build the world a home and furnish it with dreams I want to teach the world to sing In perfect harmony I want to buy the world a Coke And keep it company It's a new world and in the new morality Everyone has a right to reality Get Real Get Real
In another Sprite ad, over a montage of quick flashing images, a young black man describes the way some soft drinks try to sell you their products by telling you that they'll make you beautiful or famous. He says he doesn't want to be sold things by celebrities, he just wants something that tastes good. The slogan is "Image is Nothing. Thirst is Everything. Obey Your Thirst."
In a Converse spot entitled "Ugly", a not-especially-good-looking young man comments: "There are a lot more what you call ugly people in the world than beautiful people. We don't have perfect airbrushed bodies and we don't want them. We don't want to live in a beer commercial. The point is not to be beautiful. The point is to be yourself."
Another common theme besides the use of various forms of ironic humour in Generation X ads is the thematic concern with 'the real' many of them share, attempting to position their products as 'authentic', unlike all the other 'fakes' that abound. Macaulay Culkin's line "The only things that aren't fake are you, me and Sprite" indicates this fairly overtly, as does the Sprite spot cited here with its slogan "Image is Nothing", the Levi's slogan "It's got to be real", or Coke's "It's the real thing" (revived in the '70s from its 1942 origins). This trend is also evident outside of advertising, for example in 'reality programming', like television shows Cops, Rescue 911, and Sylvania Waters. MTV recently ran its own reality drama, depicting the antics of several twentysomethings living together in a warehouse, called The Real World. Baudrillard describes this search for authenticity as "the panic-stricken production of the real and the referential" (1983: 16); when reality disappears from beneath us we engage in a desperate struggle to reassure ourselves that it is still there, that we are still on solid ground.
Miles Orvell has documented such a search for 'the real' in early
twentieth-century America, when:
the world of ads was a paradise in
which things were more real than in our everyday world, yet that 'reality'
had to be guaranteed over and over again ... It was as if there was some
defect in everyday reality that had to be remedied by the more authentic
reality of the object to be consumed. (1989: 144-145).
And again today it seems to be reality that these ads are really selling. If it's true that, as the ugly guy in the Converse ad tells us "We don't want to live in a beer commercial ... The point is to be yourself", then it must be that we want to live in a Converse commercial instead, because there we can be ourselves. The rappin' Coca-Cola taxi driver, in a supremely ironic statement "You got to be like Coca-Cola the real thing", seems to be pushing reality as a lifestyle option: in a society of simulacra where the only real things are commodities, it is only by consuming Coke that you too can get real (Hultkrans, 1994). Similarly, what is really being sold in the "Image is Nothing" Sprite commercial? Is it an image-less soft drink? Or is it still soft drink X attached to value-complex Y, but where Y is the image of someone who doesn't care about image? Who is real enough not to have to care? Who is real enough, indeed, to step back and laugh at those who aren't?
So much for a reaction against lifestyle advertising: what is happening here, in response to Generation X's disdain for selling-by-imagistic-association, is by no means that ads are rejecting images, but that they're attaching anti-image images, images of sincerity, of no bullshit, images of authenticity, to their products. Generation X is still being sold back to itself: it's just that ideal selves are no longer beautiful, successful and popular, but 'real', authentic, with 'cred'.
Goldman and Papson (1991) have described in detail the way in which the
Levi's 501 Blues campaign of the 1980s drew on discourses of authenticity
and self-awareness to counteract youthful resistance to commodity culture.
The television spots used actors who looked like 'real people' rather than
models, characters which:
connoted authenticity, appearing hiply
self-aware of themselves - as consumers, and as people displaying their
signs. This enabled Levi's to define its sign value as appearing
unconcerned about the sign value of one's clothing. (p. 75)
Despite the difficulties of working with 'real people' ("when other
advertisers had tried that in the past, it came across as not real; it
came across as 'pretending' to show consumers enjoying the product", said
the executive creative director, p. 76), the ads successfully conveyed the
impression of hip individuals hanging out in the streets, doing their
thing and wearing Levi's. The characters playfully acknowledge the
presence of the camera: in one spot, a man looks directly into the camera,
appearing unconcerned that he is being filmed, good-naturedly holds his
hand up to block his face from the camera, then steps outside the shot,
out of our sight, then back in again, grinning. Goldman and Papson note
that this transgressive behaviour could provoke a self-reflexive awareness
of the fact that this is a constructed advertisement, and a rejection of
those premises, but:
... instead of exposing the ideological
construction of commodity signs, this ad fashions the self-reflexive
hipster into the newest - most 'authentic' sign yet. (p. 78)
The final irony: in this early example as in later Generation X-targeted spots, the anti-consumerist, anti-image attitude is packaged, sold, and transformed into a commodity-lifestyle of its own.
So...
It would certainly be overly simplistic to imply that just because these themes of 'the real' are used in ads - created, for the most part, by boomers - that automatically means such concerns exist amongst their target market. However, we can ask why is it so hard for advertisers to get to GenX? The dilemma that advertisers are faced with is how to sell to a group that doesn't want to be sold to in the first place, and demands that anything it does consume has to be 'authentic', not try-hard or me-too. To deal with these demands, advertisers can make overt efforts to prove their 'authenticity', such as the Coke rap (which, to be fair, was produced for a slightly younger market than the ultra-sophist Generation X), or, appearing less contrived, the Converse "The point is to be yourself" spot. Trying to prove your authenticity is always a risky move, given that if you have to prove it, you generally ain't got it. So another way round the problem of 'getting in under the radar' of Generation X (as many marketers describe their task) is to become 'anti-advertising' or 'meta-advertising': ironic, self-mocking, and totally up-front about what you are and what you want. The easiest way to deal with the need for credibility is to avoid the issue of authenticity altogether: to take a step back, put yourself at one remove from 'reality' and adopt an ironic detachment; deliver the 'knowing wink' (Goldman and Papson, 1991) that says "the only ones who really know what's going on here are you and me - let's just stand back and laugh at everyone else". "Irony," as Baudrillard notes, "preserves what little reality the world has" (in Hultkrans, 1994: 301).
Thus both GenXers and advertisers trying to target them have seized on irony as a useful tool in a culture where reality is so problematic: when you can never be sure what is authentic and what isn't, and when that uncertainty threatens your own sense of identity as a genuine person or acceptance of your product as a hip thing to buy, the best way to deal with it is to be ironically self-aware, and not take anything seriously. Rather than putting yourself on the line trying to prove your authenticity, just stand back from the issue altogether: wink knowingly, show a hint of a secret grin, and keep 'em guessing.
References
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Notes
- Throughout this paper I have in general used the highly contested term 'Generation X' to refer to the media-created marketing phenomenon and 'GenX' - an admittedly not much different word, yet one more often used as a term of self-identification - to refer to those actual subjects constituted by this discourse.
- While the label 'Generation X' and the first conscious efforts of marketers to target this group originated in the USA, they spread rapidly to other countries, and the kind of youth culture to which they refer exists in remarkably similar forms around the Western world. The global homoogenization of media and youth culture, and the ever-increasing use of new communication technologies, mean that young people on opposite sides of the world have more in common than ever before. Being a New Zealander working in Australia on a phenomenon spawned in the USA, I have found it necessary to focus on the perceived similarities between young people and the way they are marketed to in the western world, rather than exploring the regional differences. The advertisements discussed in this paper come from a number of different countries, and I have not attempted to differentiate between them.
- The impetus for the use of this term was Douglas Coupland's 1990 novel of that name. Coupland, who took the label from a sociology text, denies that he was describing a demographic in his book but rather a "way of looking at the world" (1995: 72), increasingly common in young people but not inherently related to chronological age. lndeed he vehemently rejects the marketing phenomenon that he is often held responsible for sparking off, urging those targeted by it to "refuse to participate in all generational debates".