Advertising to African Americans in the 60s/70s[T]he Negro today is the last big uncommitted force in the battle for the consumer dollar. His $27 billion income is new wealth; it is spent generously, but where it will gain the most value. There are 19 million of these new buyers today, and in major markets across the nation they can now force the outright success or failure of mass marketing campaigns.

Sponsor, October 1962 (quoted in Weems, 96).

http://www.businessinsider.com/20-ads-that-changed-how-we-think-about-race-in-america-2013-2?op=1

Weems: Co-optation

[E]arly 1960s' ad campaigns that sought to promote the image of an integrated society were replaced with attempts to exploit blacks' growing sense of racial pride. The development of the "soul market" illustrates corporate America's attempt to adapt to African-American consumers' political and cultural reorientation. Corporate marketers co-opted growing black pride by extolling the virtues of African-American life and culture. (Weems, 103)

Thomas Frank: Challenging myths about advertising and the counterculture

How do we tend to see the relationship of postwar consumer culture to the counterculture and other forms of youth rebellion in the 1960s?

How does Frank prompt us to reconsider that perception?

What does he say about “the countercultural myth”? (Frank, 5)

Myth #1: The counterculture was a catastrophe that threatened longstanding American institutions

 [R]ebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment, used to promote not only specific products but the general idea of life in the cyber-revolution. Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright "revolution" against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming. 

Myth #2: The Counterculture was great, until it was co-opted Mainstream culture was tepid, mechanical, and uniform; the revolt of the young against it was a joyous and even a glorious cultural flowering, though it quickly became mainstream itself. Rick Perlstein has summarized this standard version of what went on in the sixties as the "declension hypothesis," a tale in which, "as the Fifties grayly droned on, springs of contrarian sentiment began bubbling into the best minds of a generation raised in unprecedented prosperity but well versed in the existential subversions of the Beats and Mad magazine." The story ends with the noble idealism of the New Left in ruins and the counterculture sold out to Hollywood and the television networks.

Both assume that the counterculture was: “a fundamental opponent of the capitalist order” “the appropriate symbol….for the big cultural shifts that transformed the United States and that permanently rearranged Americans' cultural priorities” “constituted a radical break or rupture with existing American mores”

[A]ll sixties narratives place the stories of the groups that are believed to have been so transgressive and revolutionary at their center; American business culture is thought to have been peripheral, if it's mentioned at all. (Frank, 6)

How does Frank complicate this?

“cultural changes … identified as ‘counterculture’ began well before 1960”

“the world of business and of middle-class mores—was itself changing during the 1960s”

(Frank, 6)

Postwar American capitalism was hardly the unchanging and soulless machine imagined by countercultural leaders; it was as dynamic a force in its own way as the revolutionary youth movements of the period, undertaking dramatic transformations of both the way it operated and the way it imagined itself.

Frank, 6

[A]t the heart of every interpretation of the counterculture is a very particular—and very questionable—understanding of corporate ideology and of business practice. (Frank, 7)

1968 Ad for Columbia Records

[I]t was and remains difficult to distinguish precisely between authentic counterculture and fake: by almost every account, the counterculture, as a mass movement distinct from the bohemias that preceded it, was triggered at least as much by developments in mass culture (particularly the arrival of The Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots. Its heroes were rock stars and rebel celebrities, millionaire performers and employees of the culture industry; its greatest moments occurred on television, on the radio, at rock concerts, and in movies. (Frank, 8)

Frank vs. Adorno and Horkheimer[T]he prosperity of a consumer society depends not on a rigid control of people's leisure-time behavior, but exactly its opposite: unrestraint in spending, the willingness to enjoy formerly forbidden pleasures, an abandonment of the values of thrift and the suspicion of leisure that characterized an earlier variety of capitalism. . . . (Frank, 19)

Bill Bernbach "I warn you against

believing that advertising is a science.“

"Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.“

"Research can trap you into the past.“

Classic Car Commercial montage

Volks Wagon “Funeral,” 1969

Volks Wagon, “Snow Plow”

Alka Seltzer, “Poached Oysters”

American Tourister, “Gorilla,” 1970