The Conquest of Cool

Thomas Frank. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. University of Chicago Press, 1997

Frank considers the standard binary historical narrative of the 1960's--in which the conformist, sterile world of the Fifties was challenged from below by a youth-driven counterculture which was fundamentally at odds with the conservative world of corporate capitalism, only to be eventually co-opted by the latter in the wake of post-Vietnam/post-Watergate disappointments--to be at odds with what he learned studying business management literature of the era, as well as the advertising that supposedly change-averse Madison Avenue created. In Frank's telling, the counterculture came not as a shock to the leaders of advertising in the 60's, but rather as the producer of a welcome ready-made vocabulary to express the dynamic structural and conceptual changes they felt the industry needed. The counterculture was seen as an ally and a source of energy, ideas, and (superficial) content by the men (and some women) who sought to remake the world of advertising and consumption in 1960's America.

The dissatisfaction with conformity and older modes of consumption were bubbling in the world of advertising and business long before the counterculture came along to be supposedly co-opted. The embrace of "youth" and "youthfulness" wasn't just about a large and affluent new demographic group--after all, Frank points out that the advertising of the era had little to say to young members of Nixon's "Silent Majority". Instead, constant appeals to "youthfulness" allowed advertisers to transcend previous discourses of consumerism which were stale and no longer effective.

The rhetoric of rebellion and non-conformity for their own sake--as virtues in and of themselves--became the basis of the new consumerism; one which is with us still.