Discussing Paul Rutherford's Endless Propaganda

Paul Rutherford's Endless Propaganda introduced the various different ways advertisers try to reach out effectively to an audience. Shock propaganda is just one of the methods advertisers employ as they try to sell to their product. This type of advertising leads to controversy much of the time. Social and moral boundaries are pushed in order to create a buzz or stir that make people react.

For many shock ads, the product is not an actual item. It can be an idea or school of thought that is being promoted. The ads that one group presentation brought in were shock ads that were asking for support for a neo-natal care unit because there was not enough space for the babies that were being born. The ads were quite shocking in nature. They made people uncomfortable because of the graphic nature of the images presented in the ads, especially the ad that featured the baby hooked up to the wires as the problem and a hammer as the solution. It was interesting to watch everyone's reaction to the ads in the class because it was very apparent that Americans are not used to shock ads.

It's these ads that are the most appealing to me, however. I love the shock value they send rippling through the community. I think by making people gasp and want to turn away is a great way to get a message across. If it's about an issue that needs awareness and shocking people is the only way to open people's eyes and minds to it, then by all means, shock them.

Shock advertisements are the advertisements you remember. They grab your attention, even when you do not want them too. There are so many ads out today that it is difficult to make YOUR ad stand out from all the others. Shock advertisement seems like a way to do that. One example of a company that did that is the United Colors of Benetton. Rutherford says that,

The Benetton Group is one of those new, innovative, global enterprises that have captured the fancy of theorists, sometimes referred to as post-Fordists, who seek to explain how industrial society and the economy have been transformed in postmodern times (157).

The discussion of the Benetton Project in class was not as in depth as it could have been because only a few people had heard of it. This surprised me because I remember being aware of it at its height and I was around 10 years old at the time. We discussed the ad of the black woman nursing a white baby and why we think it was so controversial. Honestly, the idea of the role of "black mammy" never occurred to me. I had always known that Benetton wanted to represent their fashion line as a vibrant line that injected color into their consumer's lives. To me, this ad symbolized this while also taking a position of racial harmony.

Their first ads were not so controversial, however. They did not try to make a political or social statement as much as later ads did. The first ad campaign featured adults in one, kids in another, of different races and colors wearing bright clothes. That was it. Nothing like the later ads of a man dying of AIDS with his family gathered around him, or a young black youth with a gun slung over his shoulder and carrying a femur.

These ads created quite the stir, as they were extremely unordinary. The company's founder, Luciano Benetton, gave this as his reason for the extreme advertisements:

The purpose of advertising is not to sell more. It's to do with institutional publicity, whose aim is to communicate the company's values (...) We need to convey a single strong image, which can be shared anywhere in the world (museedelapub.org).

They definitely succeeded in conveying a single strong image. It may have confused consumers at first as to what the product was they were selling, but once that was known, the United Colors of Benetton became famous for both extreme ads as well as stylish, quality clothes. As a pre-teen when Benetton was at its height in the early 1990s, based just off the advertisements I had seen I wanted to buy their clothes. The first time I was went to a Benetton store, I HAD to buy something, just so I could own something from the store with the amazing ads that I saw in magazines.

Some people may have thought that Benetton went too far with their ads and in the process, damaged their reputation more than put it out there in a positive light. But Benetton did not seem to suffer and the message they wanted to send out to consumers was accomplished while also still selling their clothes.

The book discusses cause marketing in the section about shock ads. Some companies try to link their name with a cause of some sort, to sponsor a public good.

Cause Related Marketing is a commercial activity by which a company with an image, product or service to market builds a relationship with a cause or number of causes for mutual benefit (165).

This is common, seeing big brand names of companies in conjuncture with a worthy cause, such as helping raise money for a debilitating disease. Most companies seem to do this nowadays in order to be seen in a positive light as a company that does not just want good sales numbers, but also wants to be seen as a company that cares about the community in which their consumers live, or about the consumers themselves.

The ads that surprised me the most that seemed to be a bit of both of these, but for a different purpose, were the political ads. The Daisy ad that is discussed in the beginning of the book seemed to be a scare tactic, as well as a shock ad, but what was being shown was to benefit the viewer. By voting for that candidate, the scenario presented could be prevented. I had never really thought of political ads in this way before, maybe because I never fully paid attention to the ads anyway.

Overall, I think most ads try to present some kind of shock value to them, even the really tame ads. If it jars your attention, then the ad has done its job to an extent. If you remember the ad as well as the product and the company, then it was a successful ad. Since there are so many ads thrown at us all the time these days, I think shock ads should be used more and more because they are what we don't expect. They really do grab our attention and make us think, even if we do not like what we are seeing. Making the consumer uncomfortable may be the new way to approach advertisement because Americans have seen everything else. It seems shock advertising is naturally the next step to take in the progression.