THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMM.. PRESENTS:

ADVERTISING AND CONSUMER CULTURE

SCREENABOUTIn this edition of Things That Make You Go Hmm.., we will be investigating the frequency, relevance,

and repercussions of online advertising, as well as the way that online users are interpolated into consumer cul-ture through the ideological impact of advertising.

FACEBOOK GETTING ALL PANOP-TIC

The high volume of users on Facebook may indicate why this social networking website proved to be the Internet platform in which the most ad-vertising occured. While scrolling through the ‘newsfeed’, one is exposed to various and fairly obvious advertisements that line the right side of the web-page. It’s difficult to gage whether or not these ads have been specifically chosen, are catering to previous Internet searches and visits, or if these ads have been ran-domly generated. The ads are fairly gen-eral and are associated with food, travel-ing, and credit cards. Only the ‘Vagisense’ ad suggests perhaps an intentional gender target audience.

The previously mentioned ads do not attempt to appear hidden or unnoticeable. Their peripheral placement allows the user to scan over them because they are not the forefront of atten-tion. It is the ‘suggested posts’ that are very conspicu-ous in this way. These posts show up in the middle of the screen, and are included as

part of the updates, such as statuses, uploaded pho-tos, etc, that one anticipates while scrolling through their newsfeed. It’s seems sneaky to include these ad-vertisements here because they are included with all our friend’s information, and thus are essentially cam-ouflaged to look like information one has signed up for. What is even more interesting is that these ‘sug-gested posts’ are the advertisements that have clearly taken this writer’s own data as they are the most relevant to her age, gender and location. The first ad is for women 18 years and older, while the second is advertising a chain of restaurants in Old Montreal.

The surveillance of these ‘suggested posts’ are related to the metaphor of Foucault’s Panopticon. The information and data that Facebook is able to gather suggests a strong sense of ambiguous surveillance online. Because the user is mostly unable to understand the mechanics of how they are being watched online, this surveillance parallels with the Panopticon’s design.

PINTEREST GRANTING US OUR AGENCY IN RETURN FOR FREE LABOUR

Pinterest is an interesting outlet to observe in this context because though it does not contain any pop-ups or advertisements that line the sides of the screen, it is still essentially a warehouse for product placement and free labour. The design and marketed purpose of Pinterest is to allow users to organize and categorize their ‘pins’, which are often products, into different boards. The website is an excellent example of how consumer culture has been able to sell this notion of or-ganization based on personal preferences back to us in return for free labour derived from the consumers. Pin-terest is able to cleverly disguise this free labour be-cause the consumer is, after all, receiving the service of being able to exchange, share, and categorize their different photos. Pinterest also supports the concept of “commodity fetishism” (Williams, 2009, p. 14)) by granting the consumer agency in making these deci-

sions. Simply scrolling through the home page allows one to see the names

of featured users, most of which are women. Popular titles of boards include recipes, travel, home, clothing, shoes, and accessories. The link between these featured women and the stereotypically gender specific content that is featured suggests that women are the intended audience of this website. With this in mind, Pinterest offers itself as as example of the advertising in-dustry as “a vehicle for hegemonic capitalist power” (Hackley, 2002, p. 221). Although Pinterest can be used to organize ideas that don't necessarily refer

to a specific brand, one can assume that most consumers don’t realize the way they are being interpolated into con-sumer culture when they are participating in this organiza-tion of their favourite products.

Scrolling through the home page also re-veals how Pinterest has cleverly attempted to dissociate itself as domi-nantly concerned with consumer culture, and marketed itself instead as a tool for sharing ideas. Here one can find beautiful pictures of street art, unassociated with any particular brand or even artist, which is a bit strange. But among these street art

photos are dispersed photos of clearly marked products such as Calvin Klein boots and Oasis brand running shoes, both with comments below the photos

expressing why these boots are great. There’s a sense of trust that a user has about perhaps purchasing these products because they are being told they are great by a fellow consumer instead of an advertiser.

YOUTUBE AN AMBASSADOR OF CONSUMER CULTURE AND CAPITALISM

Similar to many widely used websites in which an individual possesses their own account, YouTube struc-tures their website and their adver-tisements to adapt to a user’s previ-ous activity. By providing users with a search engine that has access to millions of different types of videos, the user is granted a sense of agency in terms of choosing what types of media they will consume. However, while navigating through the website, YouTube manipulates this agency by gathering cultural knowledge of this user and con-stantly recommending videos based on the information they have gath-ered about their previous video choices. The corporation’s process of gaining cultural knowledge from their users provides them with the potential to shape the user’s behaviours.

When first entering the home page of YouTube, an advertisement for an online women’s clothing shopping website is visible in the corner of the screen. This writer suspects that this has been generated according to cul-tural knowledge that has been detected of her. This type of peripheral adver-tising is expected, and is easy for one to ignore. However, another form of

advertising comes from the mandatory 30 second commercials that one must watch before watching a music video. On this particular day the same commercial for Nissan seems to be playing before every single music video watched on YouTube, while a large ad for Old Spice acts as a banner that lines the home page.

It seems that there are two main categories of advertisements on YouTube. Firstly, there are ads that seem to have been generated specifi-cally for the user. These are smaller scale companies, but more relevant to the user’s interests, such as the online shopping sites. Secondly, there are much larger scale corporations that are being advertised in a more adamant manner, such as Nissan and Old Spice. For example, while the smaller scale ads are put in the corner, the larger scale commercials become mandatory to watch before videos, or line almost the entirety of the top screen. While this advertising space is likely very expensive, advertising is what funds the revenue of YouTube. Therefore, because the advertising industry has such a great influence on the website, YouTube essentially becomes another am-bassador for condoning consumer culture and capitalism.

PEREZ HILTON IS A MASTER OF CUL-TURAL KNOWLEDGE

Perez Hilton is an online blogger who blogs mostly about celebrities and popular cul-ture. He is likely one of the leading bloggers of pop culture in North America, and therefore receives a huge number of on-line hits each day. As with any other media outlet, the revenue of the blog is

likely derived from the money advertisers pay for commercial space on the blog.

Once entering the blog, most of the visible advertising is on the side margins of the page, marking a fairly clear distinction between what is blog

material and what is sponsored advertising. Most obvious is the way that the blog addresses the user as a Canadian. It even highlights a section of ads, asking the user to “please support our Cana-dian advertisers”, which is very confusing because the companies below are not actually Canadian. Many of the ads are for female online shopping sites, which suggests that females are the target audience of the blog. Another featured ad was for a credit card company. The combination of online shopping websites for women and credit cards strongly suggests an alliance with the attitudes of capitalism and consumer culture. The values and aspirations of these types of advertisements are incredibly superficial and promote a recur-ring cycle of consump-

tion.What is less obvious is the way in which

the user consumes celebrity gossip, and the way in which this consumption then con-stitutes advertising. Perez appears to be a wizard in terms of un-derstanding the cultural knowledge of celebrity gossip, popular lingo, and current trends. His

entire blog is dedicated to providing the public with both positive and negative gossip, but it’s not because of his ability to regurgitate information that he’s making money. He’s making money be-cause of the interest he’s generated from the public. This illustrates the way that both celebrities themselves and their actions are being commodified and sold back to the public. Perez has become the messenger of this infor-mation and has succeeded in delivering interesting enough information that advertisers are motivated to pay him for commercial space. While his suc-cess is admirable, this process exposes the way one must submit to this cap-italist system in order to succeed. This combination of alleged advertise-ments, online shopping sites, credit cards, and the actual blog material,

celebrity gossip, reveals the very shallow tastes of which this demographic profile is catering to.

SUMMARYAs Ohmann put it, “with the growth of new cities new demands have

arisen - new avenues of consumption have been opened” (1996, p.106). The same can be said regarding the development of the cyber world. Many web-sites depend on advertising to generate their revenue through purchasing commercial space. Consequently, in such cases said websites must then generate enough interest, as well as attract relevant enough audiences, in order to motivate advertisers to make these purchases.

Advertising has taken on a panoptic position in terms of the surveil-lance it imposes on consumers. The Internet is an incredibly valuable re-source for advertisers because through monitoring data of users, they are able acquire information regarding user’s habits and preferences. A recur-ring pattern of the observed ads was that they were catering towards a young person, some of them specifically for young women. Many were for online shopping websites, credit card companies, or restaurants whose loca-tion’s were close by. Additionally, there were also many advertisements for large scale corporations that took up large commercial space of a website, and sometimes were mandatory to observe in order to view something.

Corporations have become “repositories of consumer cultural knowl-edge” (Hackley, 2011, p.212), allowing them to reconstruct cultural meaning which essentially renders advertising as an “ideological force” (Hackley, 2011, p.212). What is most evident regarding the presence of advertising on high volume websites is the cultural knowledge that advertisers have gained of users. The advertisements present during this particular process revealed that they understood that the user was a young female, and presented many relevant ads accordingly.

The cultural knowledge across these websites aren’t necessarily at-tempting to sell one particular thing back to the user. Rather, they are in-stead simply interpolating the user into their created structure and ideology of consumer culture. What unites all of these advertisements together is con-sumption. In many ways the Internet lends itself as a vehicle of convenience to the advertising world. If one feels motivated enough to visit one of these shopping sites, one could choose a few items and have their credit card charged all in a few minutes time. All of these websites are enabling individu-als to spend money.

In reference to Ohmann, the real estate of consumption has expanded towards the Internet, and advertising has followed this move mercilessly, en-veloping this new medium. Those who are spending a lot of time on these websites are being targeted in ways that are specific to them, however as a whole, both the websites themselves and the users are both forced to partici-pate in this constructed system of consumer cultureas a result of the power that corporations now hold over society.

REFERENCESOhmann, R. M. (1996). Selling culture: Magazines, markets, and class

at the turn of the century. London: Verso. (Ch. 6 Advertising: New Practices, New Relations, 106-117).

Williams, Raymond. (2009). Advertising: The Magic System. In Matthew P. McAllister & Joseph Turow (Eds.), The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader (13-24). London: Routledge.

Hackley, Christopher. (2002). The Panoptic Role of Advertising Agen-cies in the Production of Consumer Culture. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 5(3), 211-229.