Let Them Eat Lifestyle

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The roots of liberation marketing can be traced back to the 1960s, but its true debut was the famous 1984 TV commercial that introduced Apple's Macintosh computer, in which herds of people in gray were freed from the iron grip of Big Brother's propaganda telescreens. (Ironically, the announcement of Microsoft's "rescue" of Apple featured Bill Gates on a telescreen eerily similar to ones in that commercial.) The ad was remarkable not only for the way it was filmed and when it was shown (during the Super Bowl, of course), but for daring to accept, and even endorse, the darkest vision of consumer society. We are a nation of lookalike suckers, it told us, glued to the tube, fastening intently on the words of the Man. Until the Macintosh arrives, that is. The commercial set the tone not only for future Macintosh advertising, but also for the entire body of propaganda for the cyber-revolution that now deluges us every day: Computers are liberating; they empower us; they let us mouth off at authority.

Nowadays, you'll find liberation marketing everywhere -- even in ads for chewing gum. Doublemint, for example, abandoned its happy jingle to tantalize us with a vision of the workplace as adult hell and its product as a glimmer of childlike innocence that we can enjoy surreptitiously anywhere. In the "Drivers Wanted" series of Volkswagen commercials, each installment identifies some aspect of consumer society which driving a Volkswagen enables you to resist: fakeness, overwork, boredom, compartmentalization, hierarchy. Especially moving is the spot which describes the soulless glass-and-steel office blocks, in which you are imprisoned.

One of the curious subtexts of liberation marketing is how often commercials are set in the workplace and how they mirror contemporary management philosophies favored by the sponsor, the advertising agency, or the target audience. This is done explicitly in a French Macintosh ad: A rich Italian businessman explains to his son that workers are there to carry out orders and not to think. Otherwise, they'd want to change things, and this does not lie within the scope of their abilities. The voice-over comments: "There are different ways of running a company. Here's one." The Apple logo appears on the screen. The voice-over continues: "Luckily, there are others."

But this kind of anti-establishment approach would never work for the all-devouring Microsoft, which has to find some aspect of mass society other than the spectre of Big Brother to set itself against. Instead Microsoft celebrates a libertarian outlook by showing how it foils bureaucracy.

Contemporary youth culture is liberation marketing's native tongue, but it will also scour history for long-dead emblems of hip, as in the Gap ads featuring Chet Baker, Montgomery Clift, and Jack Kerouac in khaki pants. Since the Beats are, apart from some of the early avant-garde artists, just about the earliest glimmering of the rebellion-through-style against mass society that defines liberation marketing, they and their works are a revered canon of contemporary advertising. In one Volvo commercial, the only spoken words are lines from Kerouac's On the Road. But it's important to Volvo that we understand that the ad campaign is true to the spirit of Kerouac, not just the image. The print ad reads: "Always the romantic, John remembered to bring On the Road. Not one of those new printings he'd seen in the bookstore at the mall, but the original one that he had stored away in the attic." Even advertising is down on mall culture! Find the authentic item in an attic somewhere, and hang it from the rearview mirror in your Volvo!

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