Advertising compels consumers to identify with and demand the products imposed on them

Evidence

On it, chalk-white, was a careful imitation of awkward writing. The words said: ‘What we want is Watney’s.’ The brand of beer was presented like a political slogan. Not only does this billboard give an insight into the nature of up-to-date propaganda, which sells its slogans as well as its wares, just as here the wares masquerade as a slogan; the type of relationship suggested by the billboard, in which masses make a commodity recommended to them the object of their own action, is in fact found again as the pattern for the reception of light music. They need and demand what has been palmed off on them. They overcome the feeling of impotence that creeps over them in the face of monopolistic production by identifying themselves with the inescapable product. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 98

Categorization

• CANDY: The deliberately-crudely-chalked Watney’s beer billboard that mimics a real slum wall is a fun, self-contained anecdote.
• SHARE: For anyone interested in advertising history: the 1930s Watney’s slogan billboard trick is a perfect example of pseudo-participatory branding.
• ADDENDUM: Reinforces ‘On Sacrifice’ themes of identification with and capitulation to superior power — the listener’s self-surrender paralleling ritual submission.
• XREF: connects to: Predetermined needs reduce the consumer to the eternal object of the industry — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110; Advertising costs entrench incumbents by replacing competition with exclusion; Repeated slogans sever language from lived experience, linking advertising with totalitarian control. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121 (+15 more)

Related

• Advertising costs entrench incumbents by replacing competition with exclusion (similarity 0.89)
• Advertising’s power to create demand is contested partly by definition (similarity 0.79)
• Advertising manipulates consumers into wanting what they are made to want. (similarity 0.79)