Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool provides an invaluable argument for anyone who has ever scoffed at hand-me-down counterculture from the '60s. Through a spirited and exhaustive analysis of that era's advertising, Frank demonstrates that the celebrated youthful rebellion of America's middle class during the '60s was not so much co-opted by The Man, but cocreated by advertising geniuses to move product. Frank calls it "hip capitalism": the use of satire, "good-humored alienation," and revolutionary rhetoric to promote This Year's Brand, to segment markets, and to recast the purchase of mass-produced goods as an act of radical self-expression.
No example better serves Frank than Bill Bernbach's wildly successful ads for the Volkswagen Beetle, starting in 1959. Not only did this campaign launch the "creative revolution" in advertising, it presented Volkswagen as the antiestablishment automobile. Buying a Bug, however, hardly defied conformity or threatened "mass society." After all, the cars were identical and had been commissioned by the leader of the most insidious mass society in modern history, Adolf Hitler. "That by the end of the decade the Volkswagen had acquired an image that was more hip than Nazi must be regarded as one of the great triumphs of American marketing," Frank writes. "The irony that several of the creators of this image were Jewish was trumped by the irony implicit in that Volkswagen's hipness was a product of advertising, the institution of mass society against which hip had declared itself most vehemently at odds."
As the quote suggests, Frank's a bit of an academic. He's also a man unafraid to repeat himself or overreach the limits of a critique that assumes from the get-go that advertising well represents society. No matter. Conquest not only puts a cork in graying ex-hippies who like to recall their VW-bus trips as transgressive, but further serves to inoculate audiences to the hip capitalism that's everywhere - including these pages - today.
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