Phil Hopkins - Mass Moralizing: Marketing and Moral Storytelling

Mass Moralizing

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hopkins, Phil, 1958

Mass moralizing : marketing and moral storytelling / Phil Hopkins.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7391-8851-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-8852-1 (electronic) 1. Mass mediaMoral and ethical aspects. 2. CommunicationMoral and ethical aspects. 3. Marketing. I. Title.

P94.H658 2015

175dc23

2015000455

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

I want to thank the students in my many Media and Ethics classes for bringing a number of the ads and commercials analyzed in this book to my attention, and my daughter, Rebecca, for first calling my attention to the Lancme and French McDonalds ads. I want to thank her in particular for all the years of watching, analyzing, and discussing marketing together with me, and my son, Isaac, and wife, Lisa, for their tireless review of this work in progress and equal patience with my constant deconstructions of whatever we happened to be watching together. Some material in this book was originally published in different form in the chapter Mass Moralizing in Amir Hetsroni, Advertising and Reality (New York: Continuum Press, 2012) and is used with permission of Bloomsbury Academic. The American Century advertisement is used with permission of American Century Investments Inc., American Century Services. All other advertising material is used under the Fair Use Clause, Section 107, of the Copyright Act of 1976, which protects the unlicensed reproduction of media for the purposes of criticism, commentary, and education.

What are the... implications of our whole form of life? Is the confusion about values and the absence of larger meanings that seem to characterize many Americans the result of life contexts that produce more confusion than clarity?

It is a well-established and much discussed fact that each of us encounters a great deal of mass media every day in what many refer to as our consumer culture. There is what amounts to a subsidiary industry whose primary task is reflecting upon media and our consumption of it. Since Marshall McLuhan famously informed us that the medium is the message, many others have addressed this powerful force in our lives, often decrying its vast influence and predicting no good to come of it.

One such alarmist, Jeffrey Scheuer, in The Sound Bite Society, warns that our electronic culture fragments information into isolated, dramatic particles and resists longer and more complex messages. These characteristics work against ambiguity and non-binary thinking and reasoning that appeals to causal, contextual, or environmental considerations, he argues. Scheuer believes that our sound bite culture in fact reinforces a contrary vision: one that focuses on the immediate and the obvious; the near-term and the particular; on identity between appearance and reality; and on the self rather than larger communities. Above all, he believes, it has created a society that thrives on simplicity and disdains complexity. While his specific conclusions about political party control of mass media discourses are indeed questionable, this analysis of its larger structural character is not wrong.