Customer Reviews

The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism

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in fact, Frank's point is that advertising did NOT necessarily co-opt counterculture. if he labors over anything, it's his assertion that the Creative Revolution in business practically preceded the existence of a widespread counter-culture movement. as far as his scorn, it was rather obviously directed only at the baby-boomers and historians with bad memories...the ones who insist that 60s youth culture was completely non-commercial, the ones who need to believe in The Man (especially the man in the gray suit).

i thought that the book was extremely engaging. frank is very insightful, and his writing is entertaining. i laughed a lot, and said, "Right, exactly!" so many times. i did not get any sense that frank had any real trouble with the conquest of cool or even consumer culture. he develops his thesis so precisely that there was no room for censure. as far as offering a solution--the book doesn't present any Problem to be solved. it's an examination of the relationship between commercial and counter culture. Most importantly, it's a rethinking of that relationship through the lens of the late 50s and 60s.

Thomas Frank has written one of the most important, and yet baffling, works on understanding the Megamachine and like others of his type (Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul), it will strike so close to home as to be actually uncomfortable to read and digest and still view the world as before. The thesis that Madison Ave. invented the counter-culture by co-opting the hip underground culture of the time is both brilliant and obvious; so obvious, in fact, that its very simplicity caused it to go unnoticed for years. That is the very essence of the Megamachine, the ability to absorb humanist and revolutionary trends, only to revise them in the very image of the machine and counter to their intended purposes. Only when up against another machine (fascism, Soviet Marxism, Chinese Marxism) does the Megamachine have to posit counter values. (i.e., Hollywood propaganda: "Why We Fight," Red Scare films, why Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Dresden, were necessary for freedom, etc.)

I remember an interview with a rock star of the 60s who boasted that by publishing his music the Establishment was laying the very seeds for its own destruction. Nonsense. Nothing truly subversive would ever be allowed to pass through those hallowed commercial halls. Frank's book shows just how insidious the Megamachine is in its cultural hegemony.

An excellent examination of consumer culture and the way that corporate America has tried to deal with, understand, and co-opt youth culture (or did youth culture co-opt advertising?) Frank gets to the bottom of it all in an always entertaining look at advertising from the Madison Avenue years through the sixties. His examinations of various ad campaigns - such as Volvo who insisted in their ads that their cars were ugly and at least not as filled with defects as the cars they used to make - are insightful and well researched. In fact, this book is a necessary primer for anyone doing research on youth culture. It helped to change the way that I think about these issues and has become a text that I refer to often.

Being familiar with Thomas Frank's cultural criticism of the 1990s (see his brilliant _One Market Under God_, along with the two _Baffler_ anthologies), when I saw the title of this volume I immediately assumed it was yet another expose of how the culture industry co-opts the trends and fashions of genuinely cool youth. I was completely wrong -- what Frank has done is far more fascinating.

In this volume, Frank goes back to the "template" of all modern stories of revolution, the 1960s, and takes a look at things from the point of view of the corporate executives. What he finds is shocking: executives weren't trying to co-opt the counterculture language of revolution, they were actually there first! They genuinely believed in shaking things up and continued to promote these ideas even when the public wasn't into them.

Growing out of his dissertation, the book is a little more dry than some of Frank's other work, but his brilliant prose shines through the academic form. Through meticulous historical research, excerpts from period documents and books, and interview with the players involved, Frank reconstructs the story of the generation, telling the tales of ad executives who quit The Organization to pursue their creative whims and the fashion planners desperate to kill the gray flannel suit. The result is a book that changes the way you think about the generation.

In "The Conquest of Cool," reporter Thomas Frank writes of the evolution in the advertising industry from the rigid science and philosophy espoused by past masters like David Ogilvy to the creative, rule-breaking, no-rules era (about 1959 to about 1970) begun by Doyle, Dane and Bernbach's revolutionary Volkswagen print ads, which were introduced in 1959. Frank's text shows how advertising's images of consumption evolved from phony promises of a better life for white, nuclear families to the hip-based brand of product cool that still exists today. Eventually, Frank gets to what this reader assumed to be his point: advertising's co-optation of counterculture's cool and the way both groups influenced each other. But he merely asserts this radical shift in advertising (truly the bellwether of contemporary culture) happened overnight and illustrates his points with examples from the cola and menswear industries. But rampant generalization doesn't spoil Frank's fascinating dissertation. He's done his homework, speaks passionately about his subject and maintains an unusual conversational approach (half academic, half deranged fan). Once the reader forgives Frank's multitude of overgeneralizations and the way he casually mixes media (in an era where distinctions became quite noticeable), there is actually a lot to consider and much to enjoy in "The Conquest of Cool." A special bonus for ad-addicts is the 19 print ads reproduced in the center of the book.

This was Tom Frank (founding editor of the Baffler, for those in the know) University of Chicago dissertation on advertising, and is absolutely fascinating. Frank's main focus is a Frankfurt School/classical Marxist critique of how the early 60s anti-advertising of people like Bill Bernbach (the guy responsible for the classic early VW beetle ads) worked to help create our ideas of 60s counterculture. As such, it's of interest to anybody fascinated by cultural theory, 20th c. American history, or corporate cultures and advertising. However, it's also useful to anybody involved in marketing, planning or advertising (even if your political views aren't of the college Marxist with capitalist parents school), simply because it's just a great history of advertising in the 20th century, and shifting attitudes towards advertising as a profession, from the idea that advertising was a hard science (propounded by David Ogilvy and others) to the idea that advertising was "an art." Most importantly, it's a fantastic read-Tom Frank is a great writer with a fantastic turn-of-phrase, and is better thinker than 90% of academics in the humanities today.

For those who occasionally wonder 'what are they thinking?' when confronted with the effulvia of advertising, Thomas Frank provides a cogent and often hilarious explanation that is spot on from beginning to end. It is hard to imagine a better reference for those hoping to understand the 'mind' of the businessman, whose thankless task is to penetrate the cacaphnous clutter of the affluent society (even as its affluence groans under the incubus of credit card debt and shrinks in the vise of job loss). Of course the ingenius solution is to associate the supernumerary product with the alienation of the customer, and thus is born the 'we're hip and we're on your side' approach that has been bombarding viewers every four minutes for the last thirty-five years, and whose prototypical consequence is a herd of middle class vagabond children gaily emblazoned with Coca Cola logos.

For those with a lingering romantic idea of human potential, the concept of rebellion through consumption may seem every bit as transparent as a USP, but the truth about advertising seems to be identical with the truth about television and is embodied in the Seinfeld Principle: if you run it long enough people will buy into it.

Meanwhile, those of us who are alienated (or baffled) by the inanities of our age have Thomas Frank for solice. Apparently still in his thirties, Frank has written three of the most entertaining and insightful books of the last twenty years, and while the other two (One Market Under God and What's The Matter With Kansas) have made him personna non grata among toadying intellectuals, even they have been unable to find fault with this one, which a person can safely read in public without coming in for special scrutiny as a potential security risk.

Frank's work with the Baffler and the Reader has always been enlightening and entertaining. As essays for the casual reader, his writing can do a lot of eye-opening. However, I don't think he can sustain his brand of cultural criticism for a book-length work. The problem, after Frank's thesis is repeated for the umpteenth time, is you finally say "So?" I personally always wind up picturing Frank in clothes he has spun himself, living off beans he is cultivating in a backyard seed plot, entertaining himself by sneering from his garret's window at the shallow "lifestyles" of every human being on the planet (except his own). I've always disliked the hypocritical, distant stance people like Frank (whose views I happen to mostly share)adopt when they tackle these issues. The great problem is how to relate these kinds of ideas without pretensions of immunity to the dominant cultural malaise, without relentlessly stereotyping the middle class, and without the hopelessly easy targeting of lame ducks, ducks that Frank seems to consider strong and insidious. Tom Frank, what are the alternatives? Where are the solutions?

America does have a lot of culture though whatever culture you may find, it in all probability isn't *counter* to the culture of business. And take a second glance if your being told otherwise. We are a business run society -- You can't emphasis that enough. If you want to be hip with what's going on, study the business world and advertising. The cool crowd claiming disinterest in consumption or even opposition to capitalism and all it represents just leads the rest on the way to the mall with their credit cards in hand, regardless of how unintentional they may be. Cultural politics has gotten us nowhere really.

Anyway, I heartedly agree with those that say Thomas Frank is one of the greatest writers around and this book is essential reading for...well, I'd say YOU probably. Are you interested in our history as Americans? Do you enjoy reading fascinating books that challenge stale, conventional narratives of our shared social history? Are you interested in that era forever known as the 60s? You want to learn about culture and consumerism?

though sometimes wordy, this analysis of the history of advertising in America in the '60s is exhaustive and engrossing. i've never read anything like it. reading this book has made me extra-aware of the advertisements around me and more sensitive to the ways i interact with them. if you enjoy the baffler or have fun laughing along with Fast Company; you will love this book.