Anne Chen
JACK DANIEL’S Ad Analysis Midterm Paper Parsons the New School for Design Advertising, Consumerism, and Material Culture in 20th Century America 10/4/2013
Source: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/jack-daniels-ads
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/05/21/jack-daniels-makes-frank-sinatra-one-more-for-the-road/
When Henry Ford created the assembly line system in 1913, more than just automobile parts and the Model T churned off the conveyers; packaged too was the new American Dream and consequent nuances in advertising strategies to champion this ideology. Ford arguably torpedoed the United States into the Industrial Revolution, but he also necessitated the need to now not only product products, but produce consumers to consume these products. As a result, the advertising industry was birthed to accomplish this mission, a mission that undoubtedly shared many of its roots in religious doctrine, artistic endeavor, and psychology. Hence, a fusion of disciplines, but the latter is a most interesting one to consider when analyzing two Jack Daniels advertisements, one from 1983 and another from this current year of 2013. Specifically, despite their nearly twenty year difference in conception, both ads can be understood as examples of nostalgic advertising – that is, activating the human tendency to long for the past, in their imagery. The 1983 Jack Daniel advertisement, age obvious from its vintage feel and lack of color, features a black and white photograph of two silhouetted figures in a cave. One can deduce that to the characters, this is a pivotal moment of discovery, and the text below the image parallels to this discernment: “COLUMBUS discovered America in 1492. Some 400 years later, Jack Daniel came across this Tennessee cave spring…” Here, nostalgic sympathies manifest themselves in two ways: the reference to Columbus draws upon the American consumers’ knowledge of the colonization and discovery of their great nation, and the historical snapshot of the Jack Daniel’s brand’s origins communicates authenticity, company heritage, and, when it comes to the product, quality and naturalness. In the 2013 Jack Daniel’s advertisement, the power of nostalgia as a psychological influencer in the consumer’s mind is again exploited. Frank Sinatra, a well-recognized singer
1
who the masses understand to be an ultimate symbol of style, glamor, and class. And thus, by putting such a legendary figure beside its product, Jack Daniel’s seeks to trigger within audience members an unconscious connecting of the two – that is, that if one were to drink Jack Daniel’s whiskey, then one could obtain the same captivating elegance and prestige as the famous Sinatra. Of course, the brand is also paying homage to a musical icon – the ad was released “as a special edition whiskey, in honor of Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday as well as the Chairman of the Board’s 50-year friendship with the iconic brand.”1 A large black and white photograph of Sinatra is positioned at the left of the page – to the right, a colored image of the Jack Daniel’s product itself. The name of the limited edition version of the spirit – “Sinatra Select” is placed between the two. The 2013 advertisement, then, is certainly less text-heavy than the 1963 advertisement, but in both, there is an obvious turning back of the clock, transporting consumers to by-gone eras, whether via image, textual cues, or both. In his article “From Salvation to Self-Realization”, T.J. Jackson Lears also discusses how advertisers “romance the past”2 in order to incite consumers to buy products. When it came to selling grocery foods and home products, for example, many advertising strategies “linked domestic responsibilities with nostalgia for a pristine, ‘natural’ state.”3 Lears is keen to emphasize this seeking by the consumer for a return to some “natural state”, whether it be through religion, Mother Nature, tradition, and so on. Continues Lears: “It illuminates the moral and psychological conflicts at the heart of our consumer culture. There undoubtedly existed a powerful paradox between advertising ideology and advertising rhetoric. In essence, despite the quite modern pursuit of conspicuous consumption and the growing fascination with technological prowess, efficiency, and speed, consumers still wanted to escape – not so much a
2
physical vacation from the everyday, but a temporal one. They sought “some kind of imaginative age in time or space.”4 Therefore, by injecting nostalgia into their advertisements, advertisers offered the consumer the ability to now become a time traveler. Lears brief biological snapshot of promotional guru and journalist Bruce Barton is perhaps most illuminating when it comes to understanding this constant tug-of-war between longing for the past while being a consumer of the present. “Office work and modern life in general often seemed ‘artificial’ to [Barton] … Despite Barton’s zeal for a therapeutic consumer culture, he sustained deep commitment to an imagined simpler past.”5 And this inner conflict wasn’t limited to just Barton; it was felt, experienced, and expressed in the day-to-day behaviors of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century consumers, who were finding themselves simultaneously excited by and wary of conspicuous consumption. For instance, in the 1890s, the trend of “abundance therapy”6 proliferated as disquieted Americans sought to learn how to be an individual within a democratic society. This loss of autonomy ultimately resulted in a loss of reality itself – the consumer was stuck in an inescapable limbo where what was real could not be discerned from what was not. Lears further describes this problematic phenomenon: “The autonomous self, long a linchpin of liberal culture, was being rendered unreal – not only by the growth of an interdependent market but also by a growing awareness of the constraints that unconscious or inherited drives placed on individual choice.”7 As the son of a Congregational pastor, Barton truly had one foot stuck in tradition and religious belief and the other in the revolutionary spirit of the twentieth-century consumer culture. Conspicuous consumption instructed Americans to buy, buy, buy – one’s success, character, and even self-identity hinged upon the products, goods, and services he or she purchased. Barton, combining new interests in growth, leisure, therapy, and abundance, excelled
3
in creating engaging advertising copy and promotional activities which aligned with the specific doctrines of conspicuous consumption. For example, his The Book Nobody Knows (1926) and What Can Make a Man Believe? (1927) “sought to trim faith down to the business creed.8 At first, Barton attempted to tie religion with this culture of mass consumption, inherently joining advertising ideology to therapeutic ideals of abundant vitality and intense experience, suffusing the whole with an atmosphere of religiosity.”9 Yet as time progressed, Barton began to feel distressed by his past endeavors, and became “genuinely divided between consumer and producer values.”10 Appealing to the emotions of consumers – whether it is romance, fear, happiness, etc. – is a common strategy in the advertising industry, but nostalgia is the emotion which perhaps can best alleviate the anxieties of the consumer imprisoned in this “real-unreal” limbo. Although the consumer cannot physically step back in time, he or she can mentally do so through advertisements and through products themselves. By sipping a tall, chilled glass of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, for example, a man can imagine himself living back in the fabulous fifties, an era of rock n’ roll, Pop Art, and post-World War II growth. On the radio croons the soulful voice of Frank Sinatra as he sings “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” – the swinging style of the song gets the man’s foot tapping as he savors everything in that picturesque moment: Sinatra serenading him, the whiskey sliding smoothly down his throat, and so on. The comparison of the two Jack Daniel’s advertisements is revealing, as cultural interpretation of advertisements allows historians, researchers, and other academics to interpret today’s advertisements. It is vital to understand advertisements – or any cultural artifact or object – by looking at everything that surrounds that ad’s conception and story: culture, history, social occurrences, political climate, and so on. The association with a celebrity (as in the 2013
4
advertisement), or with a historical figure (as in the 1983 one) are certainly not strategies employed in merely advertisements of wines and spirits. Nostalgic advertising has been used by companies from Old Navy, Levi’s, Ford, and Mercedes Benz. The “troubled self” described profoundly by Lears in The Culture of Consumption could be thoroughly alleviated – if but momentarily, for a wonderful but fleeting moment – through the strategy of nostalgic advertising. Many advertisements transported anxiety-ridden consumers to exotic, foreign lands and places – such as India, Africa, Asia – but others offered to transport viewers to someplace even more faraway: across time itself. Turning back the hands of the clock and molting pages off of thousands of calendars, these advertisements provided an avenue of escape from the modernity promulgated by zealous conspicuous consumption ideologies. The past inherently carries a certain romance to it – a romance which cannot be captured in a modern society soaked through with unnecessary products, populated by heavy, technological machines, and overseen by numerous corporate powerhouses. Indeed, the Jack Daniel’s advertisements analyzed in this essay keep alive the idea of a true American way of life. A brief interlude from fast-paced mass consumption has been made finally accessible to the everyday consumer – through advertisements and the products they boast. Lears writes in his essay: “Bruce Barton’s early career suggests some larger speculations about the changing dominant culture in the early twentieth century. His enthusiasm for a therapeutic culture of consumption arose not only from his class interests but also from his half-conscious effort to realize a secure and independent sense of selfhood.”11 And the consumer who saw the 1983 Jack Daniel’s advertisement, as well as today’s modern whiskey enthusiast who sees the current one, are both on this same quest of self-actualization, a journey which entails the same frustrating pitfalls and tumbles experienced
5
by Barton. Nostalgic memory, then, offers a compass – a guide for consumers to navigate the treacherous waters of conspicuous consumption.
6
Works Cited 1. “Integrating Nostalgia with Today’s Marketing.” Marketing Tango. 25, June. 2013. Web. 3, Oct. 2013. http://www.marketingtango.com/integrating-nostalgia-with-todays-marketing/ 2. Stern, B. Barbara. “Abstract – Nostalgia in Advertising Text: Romancing the Past.” Advances in Consumer Research. Vol. 19, eds. John F. Sherry, Jr. and Brian Sternthal, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research. Pages 388-389. 3. Lears, T.J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” The Culture of Mass Consumption. 4. Frye, Northrop. “Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays.” 1973. Princeton: Princeton University Press. P. 186. 5. Lears, T.J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” The Culture of Mass Consumption. p. 23. 6. Lears, T.J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” The Culture of Mass Consumption. p. 10 7. Lears, T.J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” The Culture of Mass Consumption. p. 9 8. Lears, T.J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” The Culture of Mass Consumption. p. 3132. 9. Lears, T.J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” The Culture of Mass Consumption. p. 33. 10. Lears, T.J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” The Culture of Mass Consumption. p. 34. 11. Lears, T.J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic
Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.� The Culture of Mass Consumption. p. 37