The point of a proper and effective intersection of the labels, publishers and advertisers is on the not too distant horizon. Hopefully, the actual music, as opposed to the commodity of the music, will be king again.

—Josh Rabinowitz, senior vice president / director for music at Grey Worldwide (advertising agency), 2007

If you don’t have originality, you’re not in the advertising business.

—Steve Karmen, interview by author, 2009

9

New Capitalism, Creativity, and the New Petite Bourgeoisie

In this final chapter, I analyze the world of the production of advertising music as a field of cultural production in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, a field populated mainly by what Bourdieu has called the new petite bourgeoisie, whose members adhere to ideologies of creativity and the hip and the cool and who, because of their influence on the culture more generally, are involved in a project of reshaping today’s capitalism—which, drawing on Richard Sennett, I will call new capitalism—according to their ideologies, tastes, and practices.¹ A central ideological trope is that of creativity, which serves not art but as a form of symbolic capital, an ideological marker of the privileged members of this group.

The New Petite Bourgeoisie

First, let me address the question of the social group involved in making advertisements and music for them, at least for the period of the last few decades, since people in the industry in this period have been available for interviews. One of the first treatments of this new group appeared in 1979, when Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich advanced the notion of the “professional-managerial class,” or PMC, which they define as “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”² Their list of professions includes, interestingly enough for my purposes, workers in advertising. For the Ehrenreichs, the PMC began in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, but articulated strongly with the New Left and the student movement of the 1960s.

Many other writers followed with similar characterizations. Scott Lash and John Urry, for example, considered the American service class, which possesses many of the same characteristics as the PMC.³ For others, this group was the new middle class.⁴ And some have noted that this group has a generational cast: it is baby boomers, who, when they first started to emerge as a distinct class in the 1980s, were referred to as yuppies.⁵ Still others have posited a new social group that is similarly involved in cultural production, whether Robert Reich’s “symbolic workers” or Richard Florida’s “creative class.”⁶

There are thus many names and characterizations of this group, which does seem to indicate a consensus that it exists, whatever one labels it. I prefer Bourdieu’s conception of the new bourgeoisie and new petite bourgeoisie, which, like many of these other characterizations, includes cultural workers such as advertising agency personnel. Bourdieu described these groups in great detail in Distinction, and it is worth reviewing some of his claims. Bourdieu notes that these members of the new petite bourgeoisie possess an ambivalent relationship with the educational system, which includes “a sense of complicity with every form of symbolic defiance,” including cultivating a fascination for “the avant-garde underground, which is their monopoly . . . as a challenge to legitimate culture.”⁷

The new petite bourgeoisie is also comprised of “rising individuals who have not obtained all the educational capital which, in the absence of social capital, is needed to escape the most limited of middle positions.”⁸ I have found this to be the case among the people I have interviewed, though there is a split between musicians and producers; producers tend to possess less educational and cultural capital; none of those I interviewed who attended college had studied at institutions as prestigious as those of most of the musicians. Musicians, on the other hand, tend to be the more déclassé group (many of those I interviewed had attended private colleges and universities, some quite prestigious), and were usually the children of professionals. One small firm in New York City is comprised entirely of such people: Two are the children of doctors; the third is the son of an international banker. All three attended private, elite eastern colleges.⁹

Bourdieu’s argument that the new petite bourgeoisie operates against high culture helps point out that the baby boomers’ introduction of their music for use in advertising in the 1980s wasn’t simply a matter of taste, or changes in technology that brought more rock musicians into the realm of advertising. It was also a reaction against what had been dominant in advertising music: music by trained musicians who were adept at scoring music for orchestras, bands, and choruses.

Bourdieu also observes that the new petite bourgeoisie is involved in cultural production, frequently acts as a cultural intermediary, and has devised a series of middlebrow genres halfway between what he calls “legitimate culture” and “mass production.”¹⁰ As many have noted, commercials beginning in the 1980s became more artistic, more aesthetic. Advertising agency creative personnel’s discourse on their work has changed with this shift. For example, the vice president and associate creative director of Deutch LA, who oversaw the Mitsubishi commercials discussed in the previous chapter, acknowledged in 2002 that “people hate commercials,” and that what Deutch wanted to do was “make little pieces of entertainment.”¹¹ It was in part this new attitude that prompted many musicians to make their music available for commercial use.

Bourdieu’s analysis of the new petite bourgeoisie as a cultural intermediary is dependent on high culture’s claim to prestige, and thus he makes a good deal of the new petite bourgeoisie’s middling class position. The new petite bourgeoisie mediates between high and low culture, but its mediating, and the cultural forms that result—such as advertisements—are never seen as being as consequential or prestigious as “legitimate culture.” The new petite bourgeoisie is a popularizer of high culture, Bourdieu says, but does not possess the competence of legitimate simplifiers and popularizers such as academics. The new petite bourgeoisie has to invent for itself something resembling the authority of the author apart from the modes of competence that mark the legitimate popularizers, resulting in a role of what Bourdieu calls the “presenter,” which he says is “devoid of intrinsic value.”¹² Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, in a recent and important book on today’s capitalism, similarly write of what they call “managers,” people with a talent for “sniffing things out,” who must rely on what the management literature (which they surveyed exhaustively) calls “intuition.” The success of holders of “intuition” is related not to skill or expertise, but to their affinity with the target group, which is extremely important in the ageist world of advertising.¹³ Many advertising agencies today have become presenters of obscure popular musics. Bourdieu is in effect describing the decades-old dilemma of the advertising man (and they are mostly men): they consider themselves to be highly creative, but what they create is rarely valued by the culture.

One last observation of Bourdieu’s is worth noting here, and it concerns the new petite bourgeoisie’s concern not simply with the production of symbols, as in advertising, or the mediation of cultural forms, but consumption as well. The new petite bourgeoisie, writes Bourdieu, is engaged in struggles “over everything concerned with the art of living, in particular, domestic life and consumption.”¹⁴ The new petite bourgeoisie, then, is not necessarily involved with the production of goods, but is intimately concerned with how goods are made to insinuate themselves into people’s lives.

Generational Shift

But what are these presenters, these intermediaries, sniffing out and mediating? It is rarely art; the advertising trade press is replete with discussions of the importance of mistaking advertising for art.¹⁵ Rather, it is the hip, the cool, the trendy, as we have seen. Thus, despite its usefulness, it is necessary to update Bourdieu’s analysis of the new petite bourgeoisie, because time has passed since Distinction was first published in 1979 in French; another generation enjoys a position of authority in the new petite bourgeoisie. What does this group look like now? As a class with certain structural characteristics such as those analyzed by Bourdieu, I think the new petite bourgeoisie is reasonably stable, but with some changes; the update and amplification concerns this issue of mediating cultural forms and, additionally, the attitudes toward consumption held by this younger generation in the new petite bourgeoisie, as Bourdieu saw it was beginning to take shape.

The baby boomers in the advertising industry, who were responsible for bringing about the demise of the jingle and the rise of the practice of licensing music, are being superseded by late or post–baby boomers, who now hold sway in advertising agencies and, thus, the authority to choose the musical selections to license in advertising. These are frequently people who listened to alternative radio in college or may have been involved in college radio themselves; perhaps they played in a band. According to one longtime ad industry member, “These guys are people who grew up with The Cure, with The Police, with The Smiths and they’re bringing their taste to Madison Avenue and consequently to the rest of America.”¹⁶ Time and again, this latest generation of the new petite bourgeoisie is shown to possess large amounts of knowledge of the hip and the cool—their form of capital—that can be employed in their field of cultural production.

I want to consider briefly who these people are in this new petite bourgeois today and their relationship to techno and alternative music more generally. In the early 1990s, when I taught a class on popular music for the first time, my students were obsessed with arguing about which musicians or bands were sellouts and which weren’t. They had a set list of criteria: a sellout was someone who (1) signed a contract with a major label, or (2) appeared on MTV, or (3) allowed his or her music to be used for commercial purposes. This was a period when “alternative”—that is, nonmainstream—music was all the rage, when many young people in college or just out were turning their backs on “corporate music” and seeking something that they felt was less commercially compromised.

Many of these people are in the new petite bourgeoisie, and they retain their attitudes to some extent. They still have no tolerance for what they view as commercial music, and have latched onto alternative music as one of the kinds of noncommercial music that they like, for some of it has a good deal of credibility as underground music. At the same time, however, they have no compunction about using this music for commercial purposes. For them, this does not compromise the music: they believe their motives to be altruistic, in that they are helping obscure musicians survive, and they effectively wield discourses that argue for the artistic worth of commercial production, as we have seen. For example, Apples in Stereo, an indie band with deep anticommercial tendencies, decided to allow its music to be used in a Sony commercial because a friend who worked as a sound designer suggested its music for Sony’s ad. Band member Robert Schneider said in 2001, “You imagine that it’s a crass process. But it’s not like Sony used our song in the commercial, which is how it looks to the indie kid. It’s just one guy who liked our music.”¹⁷

Musicians and postboomers in advertising are using the music for their own ends, not simply accepting what the industry gives them. For this younger new petite bourgeoisie, controlling how their music is used, controlling how they consume, is all-important.¹⁸ Controlling consumption is a way of making it manageable, acceptable, which marks another more general difference between today’s new petite bourgeoisie and the one Bourdieu studied nearer its beginning. Today’s has a much less ambivalent attitude toward consumption generally. Even though it was the baby boomer generation that began the practice of licensing, the practice was quite controversial. The chief strategy officer for the advertising agency Portland Wieden+Kennedy, a late baby boomer, said:

I grew up with the Clash, and the idea of the Clash making a ton of money by being commercial was horrifying, OK? [I thought] they should not sell out. We used to talk about people selling out. Well, that’s not what’s going on in youth culture today. They fully embrace the entrepreneurial and the business side of it. Being entrepreneurial—“It’s a business, make it a success”—all of that’s got a lot of credibility among the young.¹⁹

Members of today’s late and post–baby boomer generations aren’t just shoppers, or even consumers of goods and the sign-values that the culture attaches to them, but are in effect consumer/participants. Television commercial viewers/listeners are not simply “presented” with factual materials about automobiles, as in early ads; they are not simply being shown a lifestyle they can identify with, as in more recent ads. Instead, in many commercials today, they are being invited to participate, to join the hip club; they are shown scenes they can imagine themselves in, as in the Mitsubishi commercials discussed in the previous chapter.

This kind of advertising is instrumental in forming a new kind of consumer, as well as a new kind of relationship to goods. Marketing to yuppies marked the rise of this mode of advertising. “Before yuppies,” observes anthropologist Grant McCracken, “there was no compelling connection between the Rolex and the BMW.”²⁰ Today, it is not simply that there is thought to be a connection between a car and a watch—and social class, habitus, lifestyle, and so forth. Contemporary consumption practices are more integrated into everyday life than before, as many have observed, and today’s young consumers consume unabashedly and unapologetically, while they (occasionally) discursively protect certain arenas—such as their music—from the taint of commercialism, even if that music is commercial through and through.²¹

The members of the new petite bourgeoisie who work in advertising are uniquely situated in that they, like all consumers, possess the identifiable tastes of their social group, but they have the power to share, and promote, their tastes in particularly influential ways. Bourdieu argues that each faction of the bourgeoisie wants to impose its tastes on the other, each wants to be hegemonic. In addition to their altruistic motivation of helping struggling musicians, these members of the new petite bourgeoisie are attempting to educate audiences by promulgating their musical tastes to the masses: they control the use of their music in an attempt to manipulate the tastes of others.

And they are, by and large, successful. Many observers of the music scene have noted the rise of interesting music on television, thanks to workers in the advertising industry. Joan Anderman of the Boston Globe wrote in 2001, “The Ad Guys—historically derided as smarmy salesmen—are suddenly the hippest DJs around.”²² Barry Walters included Dirty Vegas’ “Days Go By,” discussed in the previous chapter, in his list of the top 10 dance music tunes of 2002 in Rolling Stone, observing, “Madison Avenue is the new MTV.”²³ And fans write in to Internet newsgroups wondering about the music they’re hearing in commercials; some enterprising fans compile lists of ads and the music used on them, though this activity has largely been superseded by a commercial site, adtunes.com. Record labels affix stickers to the cellophane of CDs saying, “As heard on the such-and-such commercial.” CD “reviewers” at amazon.com write how they discovered a particular band through a commercial.

Last, and most suggestive in my efforts to detail the new generation of the new petite bourgeoisie, for these post–baby boomers, “legitimate culture” is of no import or interest; Lance Jensen didn’t know Michelangelo’s name (as recounted in the previous chapter), even as he compared advertising work to painting the Sistine Chapel: creative work made to order.²⁴ The new petite bourgeoisie attempts to confer legitimacy upon itself not by brokering high culture or importing techniques associated with high culture into the production of advertisements. They remain intermediaries, or presenters in Bourdieu’s sense, but are instead presenters of hip, underground culture, not high culture. Their capital isn’t opposed to legitimate cultural capital; it is slowly supplanting it. The structure and practices identified by Bourdieu are intact, since the new petite bourgeoisie still performs a mediating function, but it is mediating not high culture, but hip and the cool. The new petite bourgeoisie in advertising is not educating mainstream viewers about the glories of art, but instead is introducing them to the sounds of the underground. While Bourdieu understood the changing cultural landscape of France when he studied it as increasingly displaying a conflict between “legitimate culture” and more commercial values, this next chapter in the story he began doesn’t simply argue that commercial values have become ascendant—even dominant—but that the new petite bourgeoisie has retained its mediating function, its taste-making function, although its taste is organized not around “legitimate culture” but around the hip and the cool.

Now, as musician Ben Neill (born in 1957) said, “There is no difference between something that is considered art and something that is a commercial.”²⁵ Whether or not this statement is “true” is not the point: the point, rather, is that musicians like Neill are increasingly common, and their practices are organized around these kinds of statements and positions.

Advertising employs people of a particular social group in a particular field of cultural production who have the power to extend their tastes beyond this group. In doing so, they help demonstrate that advertising is not simply part of a “top-down” process by which the faceless cultural industries impose their wares on an unsuspecting public. The advertising industry is populated by real people on whom structures act, and they, with their increasingly important role not just in the purveyance but also in the production of popular culture, possess the ability to influence structures themselves, bringing their taste for hip music to the mainstream. Today, unlike what Bourdieu described in Distinction, the new petite bourgeoisie in the advertising industry and other parts of the cultural industries has managed to make its own ideology of the relationship to goods—the hip, the cool, the trendy—increasingly dominant, crowding but not yet replacing the bourgeoisie’s use of art, by aligning itself with DJs, independent record labels, popular musicians, and so forth. The yardstick by which taste is measured is now more likely to be knowledge of the trendy than knowledge of high art.²⁶

I am thus not describing, as Bourdieu was in Distinction, a struggle within the dominant group over the definition of legitimate culture (between the old bourgeoisie with links to the past, and the new, which was more technocratic and commercially oriented) but, rather, the ascendance of the values of the new petite bourgeoisie in its struggle to capture legitimacy from the dominant group. The new petite bourgeoisie’s quest for legitimacy is increasingly effective as it erodes the value of high culture and as its credibility as mediators, or discoverers—or even creators—of the trendy grows.

The New Petite Bourgeoisie and the New Capitalism

I have tried in the preceding chapters to present a historical narrative of music in advertising, though not a strictly chronological one, since this history is multiple, with many of its parts simultaneously intersecting and diverging. Clearly, however, as is well known, capitalism seems to be endlessly adaptable and flexible. One can make that generalization, and another: that capitalism, at least in the United States, is always encroaching—another well-known point.

What I think this study has shown is that the advertising and marketing industry has proved to be endlessly inventive in devising ways to encourage people to participate willingly in consumer culture and to purchase commodities. The industry hasn’t just supported consumer culture, it has played a powerful, and perhaps the principal, role in making consumer culture what it is through the three major phases I have examined here. Through increased market segmentation and niche marketing, today’s capitalism—whether one calls it late, postindustrial, neoliberal, global, post-Fordist, disorganized, new, or something else altogether—has insinuated itself ever more effectively into people’s everyday lives.²⁷ If we increasingly inhabit a world of commodities, those very commodities seem to be almost like intimates, as they are marketed to us in terms of our lifestyles and animated, and given meanings by advertising as well as social uses. Consumption has become, therefore, far more than the simple acquisition of goods, but the mean mode of relating to goods, and to one another, a point made some time ago by Jean Baudrillard in his influential attempts to understand the new capitalism in France, positions that are arguably more relevant in the United States today.²⁸

It is clear that people in the advertising music industry are not simply making (or choosing) music that they and/or their clients believe to be appropriate for a particular commercial, but that they are attempting to affect listeners—not just trying to get them to make a purchase, but on a deeper level. The term for this is impact, defined by Joyce Kurpiers as “an audience member’s physical, physiological or emotional response to audiovisual stimuli infused with meanings and values.”²⁹

Some have argued that this new capitalism relies more heavily than earlier ones not just on the production of knowledge but on the production of culture. Scott Lash and John Urry, early articulators of this position, noted in 1994 how “economic and symbolic processes are more than ever interlaced and interarticulated; that is, that the economy is increasingly culturally inflected and that culture is more and more economically inflected.”³⁰ Subsequent authors have pursued much the same line. Allen J. Scott, for example, posits what he calls the “cognitive-cultural economy,” in which today’s economy is driven by certain key sectors such as technology, services, and “cultural products industries.”³¹ Another author argues for a new “promotional culture” that has increasingly suffused every aspect of contemporary life.³² The cultural industries are influential not simply for the goods they produce in capitalist cultures but for the ideologies they purvey, ideologies of consumption, and of the importance of youth and the hip and the cool.

Creativity as Calling in the New Capitalism

In addition to intuition, noted above, central to many different considerations of today’s capitalism is the question of creativity (or talent, as Richard Sennett writes³³), and it is indeed a dominant theme in the discourses of advertising workers, and workers in the cultural or “creative industries” more generally.³⁴ For most in the industry, advertising clearly isn’t viewed as art, but it is seen as a product of creativity, an ideology that arose with the advent of our modern conception of art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.³⁵ It was the Creative Revolution of the 1960s that was most important in bequeathing to today’s industry the creativity trope as it is now understood. Now-legendary figures such as William Bernbach believed that advertising could be an art—and advertisements should be produced with this in mind.

What you have to say, however right it is, will not even be noticed unless you say it in a way that hasn’t been said before. How do you break through? Only with ideas that reach people, that move them, that they respond to, that they listen to because they want to hear. And the talent to do that is the talent of an artist.³⁶

As Stephen Fox writes of this period, “Gray-flannel anonymity gave way to personal expression.”³⁷ The new attitudes of the Creative Revolution influenced the production of music, though first this influence was more discursive than sonic, since it took some time for popular musics to find their way into advertising music, as discussed in chapter 7. Nonetheless, the trade press and how-to guides latched onto the idea of creativity fairly quickly. One musician said in 1962, “Things in the jingle jungle are looking up. . . . People are beginning to realize that jingle writing is a highly creative art and in many instances, the jingle is the springboard for an entire campaign.”³⁸ And the first-published how-to guide is clear: “I simply can’t emphasize too strongly that our tool of success is creativeness [sic].”³⁹

Today, discourses and ideologies of creativity completely suffuse the world of advertising. There is the creative process, Creative Revolution, the trade magazine Creativity; there are creative directors, creative teams, creative fees, creative conferences, and still more; virtually everyone I interviewed used the term. Andy Bloch, for example, told me:

The creative level . . . you know it’s just a dishwashing liquid, but we have to get a great director, and we have to make it look great, and we’re going to do something cool and different, and the music . . . we don’t want it to sound ad-y at all, it’s got to sound cool. As far as I’m concerned, the music that we make, and other people in this industry make on the high end, is probably . . . more cutting-edge, more interesting than pop music. Or it’s as good, and sometimes they take more chances.⁴⁰

Anthony Vanger was more blunt: “Advertising is a way to be creative, and you get paid a lot of money for it.”⁴¹

Even producing a cover version of an existing song for a commercial is thought of as creative, as Josh Rabinowitz told me:

I’m from kind of an objectively creative standpoint. . . . It’s kind of cool to come up with a new creative thing. If it’s taking an old song and doing a rearrangement of it, a cover version of it, to me that’s a pretty cool thing. Sometimes you come up with something . . . you’re taking a great song and making it your own. We did that with a Sony spot, a year ago, the song “Carry On” by Crosby, Stills, Nash. . . . That was a great opportunity to do something, and work with a really gift ed artist, Alana Davis. To me, that’s being really creative, . . . taking a song, making it, contemporizing it a little bit, but certainly making it Sony’s own song, Sony Electronics’ own song.⁴²

Figure 9.1 Andy Bloch. (Courtesy of Andy Bloch.)

Dissenters, I should point out, are rare. David Ogilvy said that creativity was too grandiose a word to describe what advertising people do. He acknowledged that he had gotten credit for being “original” and “creative,” but he was proudest of an advertisement he wrote to attract industry to Puerto Rico that was very successful. It wasn’t “creative,” he said; it just did its job. He does not like advertising that tries to be art, tries to take on the aesthetic trappings of art.

I don’t like aesthetic advertising and I don’t like clever advertising. . . . I’m not out to produce commercials which appeal to your aesthetic or intellectual taste at all. That’s not the object of the exercise. I’d go broke if I do that. I just want to sell you / [get you to] try my product tomorrow, you see. And you know that can be done painlessly and pleasantly and not offensively. I want you to say, “What a very interesting thing. I never knew that about that product. I think I have to try it.” That’s the reaction I’m looking for all the time.⁴³

And Bernie Krause, who was the only one of my interviewees who offered a critique of what advertising musicians do, told me that he got out of the business because,

after blowing through hundreds of spots, I just got to the point where I didn’t want to contribute to any more commercials. I could not find a single compelling reason to spend another creative moment writing music, the purpose of which was to compel folks to buy more things they just don’t need, you know—like another pair of 501s or a lipstick or a Big Mac. . . .

If you value your creative work and your level of expertise, soon enough you’ll get to a point in your life where you’ll begin to take stock of what you’ve done. The question for me was, “Did I want my legacy to be an archive of sixty, thirty, or twenty seconds worth of jingles?” Just thinking about that option was giving me hemorrhoids. Luckily, I found a much more life-affirming path.⁴⁴

Yet even Krause uses the words creative and creating to describe this labor.

Figure 9.2 Bernie Krause. (Courtesy of Bernie Krause.)

Both Ogilvy and Krause, however, belong to different generations from workers in today’s industry, for whom creativity is the central trope used to describe what those involved with music in advertising (or the “creative” side of things more generally) do. The term is so fetishized, invested with so much potency and meaning, that it needs to be thought through further. Perhaps because asking whether or not advertising is art would too often result in a negative answer, advertising workers focus instead on the concept of creativity. That is, they know they don’t make art, but, like artists, they do possess creativity. “Art” is distanced, unobtainable—like God—but can still be paid homage to through worldly activity as labor in advertising, and it is “creativity” that constitutes this labor, standing for duty to God. As Fritz Doddy, creative director at Elias Arts, told me in 2004, “I have to remind these guys that it really is, it’s commercial art. It’s art. It’s commercial art. It doesn’t mean that it’s any less or any more. You have to aspire toward art, and those are the rewards that you get.”⁴⁵

What is interesting in this field of cultural production is the way that musicians and other creatives in advertising are drawn to being creative as though called, in the Weberian sense. But the master they serve is not God or Art but Creativity; the justification for what they do is not spiritual but an almost mystical belief in the significance of their work as creative people as being somehow remote from the world of selling and crass commercial culture. In this context, I have found useful Max Weber’s discussion of the calling, which he traces from Martin Luther, establishing that this conception can be found among most Protestants.⁴⁶ What was new with this conception, writes Weber, was “the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume.”⁴⁷ In this sense, “The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.”⁴⁸ Weber’s position is neatly characterized by Derek Sayer, who writes, “What matters is not what one does, but the spirit in which one does it.”⁴⁹ Given the assumptions that what one does in advertising is (according to most) not art, what matters in this context is not what one does—make advertising—but the creative spirit in which one does it. It must be remembered that the origins of the modern understanding of creativity are akin to the divine, as Christine Battersby writes.⁵⁰

While I’m not sure if there are many people called to advertising, there are many people in and out of advertising who feel called to be creative and who use the concept to justify what they do, to valorize it. Further, the ends to which advertising is put in such a (Weberian) system are salutary since, after all, the acquisition of property is the fruits of labor, and the labor of these people is constructed as creative. Advertising agencies make money on their creative labor, and they can justify the sale of the goods that they sell and the consumer culture they fortify. Weber writes that the concept of the calling gave entrepreneurs a clear conscience, for it allowed them to do what they did in the knowledge that they would receive eternal salvation.⁵¹ Today, divorced from religious asceticism, “victorious capitalism” has resulted in a culture in which the idea of duty toward one’s calling is deeply sedimented, even for those whose work cannot be seen as being among the most elevated pursuits.⁵²

The constant dynamic between the business side and the creative side of the industry, the world of numbers and the world of ideas (another important trope in the industry), gives an almost mystical power and authority to the idea of creativity for those on the creative side of the advertising business, for this is what they believe separates them from the business side. The creative side possesses creativity; it creates and gives sustenance to ideas. William Bernbach said that research, which creatives see as an unacceptable intrusion of the rational into their creative processes, would get in the way of the creative impulse in making an ad; “I consider research the major culprit in the advertising picture. It has done more to perpetuate creative mediocrity than any other factor.”⁵³

In a sense, to continue the Weberian framework, the frequent battles between the business and creative sides of the industry represent a contest between a highly rationalized and bureaucratized wing of the business and its opposite—the creative side—attempting desperately to remain, or at least seem, ineffable, mystical, enchanted. Yet even creativity is subject to the ideological workings of the marketplace, for as many have written, once workers in the industry have aged out of the main target demographic of the product they purvey, their opinions count less, no matter how creatively fecund they might actually be.

The struggle over creativity could seem to make advertising agency creative workers appear to be heroes of a sort, despite their role in selling needless commodities and further inculcating the ideologies of consumption in their listeners and viewers. Theirs is a way of attempting to survive the unprecedented voracity of capitalism and the iron cage of rationalization that accompanies it, even as they serve capitalism.

In concluding this book in this way, I am attempting, as I have throughout these pages, neither to celebrate nor to condemn what musicians and other creative workers in the advertising industry do: both, and neither. These workers are part of the myriad contradictions of today’s capitalism with which we are all, to varying degrees, complicit. For it has become impossible not to be.