Postwar advertising arose to manufacture demand once government guaranteed sales ended
Evidence
With the war behind them, one question kept the good folks of the technostructure up at night: if the government would no longer guarantee sales and prices, where would they find enough customers ready and willing to pay for all the chocolate bars, cars and washing machines that they were planning to manufacture using the capacity hitherto dedicated to producing bullets, machine guns and flame-throwers? … The New Dealers in government took it upon themselves to help the technostructure secure foreign customers – which as we shall see triggered another of the great metamorphoses of twentieth-century capitalism. But as for domestic customers, that’s where Don Draper came in. His stock-in-trade? Opening the technostructure’s eyes to the boundless possibilities of founding a new market for our attention on a bed of raw emotion. The technostructure had the manufacture of things fully under its control. With Draper’s help, it could now look forward to manufacturing the necessary desire for them. Paying Draper a large salary to lounge around for most of the working day was a small price to pay for such an extraordinary power. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 150
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘founding a market for our attention’ theme connects directly to the reader’s platform-surveillance focus and anticipates the attention-economy critique central to later chapters. — connects to: Post-war advertising shifted from selling products to manufacturing and commodifying desire. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 119; Wartime ads sold promises of future plenty when goods were unavailable — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 136; Wartime propaganda’s end left a vacuum that postwar advertising filled — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 430 (+5 more)
- SEED: The line that advertising manufactures desire rather than just promoting products is the seed for an essay on how attention capture predates digital platforms.
Broader Connections
- Post-war advertising shifted from selling products to manufacturing and commodifying desire.
#expands(0.90) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 119 - Wartime propaganda’s end left a vacuum that postwar advertising filled
#expands(0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 430 - Mass production forced advertising to both create demand and manufacture brand reputation
#qualifies(0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 201 - Wartime ads sold promises of future plenty when goods were unavailable
#corroborates(0.72) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 136 - Postwar American consumption was politically constructed
#expands(0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1721 - Post-war capitalism discovered attention as a new market.
#expands(0.72) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 126 - Advertising compels consumers to identify with and demand the products imposed on them
#qualifies(0.70) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 98