Rebelliousness as a condition for engaged subordination to the authority of advertising

Cool rebellion in the sense of a declarative violation of social norms, especially at the level of image, is in the changing media and communication environment a condition for an engaged subordination to the authority of advertising. The rebelliousness that evolved from the cultural revolution of the 1960s, has also highly influenced the culture of the advertising business. When the heralds of the cultural rebellion transplanted the value of defiance into business, the latter became inherent to the business culture of advertising and assumed the function of a marketing communication tool. Cool advertising has in the use of such communication approaches found a solution for a successful advertising aimed at the single postmodern consumer and mass society at the same time. (Frank 1997) Taking into account the development of technologies, especially those of internet and mobile communication, the increased role of critical analysis of the media and communication in education, as well as the consumers' distrust of advertising caused by the penetration of the marketing discourse into everyday life, advertising has adjusted to the new characteristics of the media and communication environment. The intertwining of simulation and spectacle in the form of interactive spectacle represents the answer to new consumer demands that creates a media and communication environment allowing the transcendence of the one-way flow and exclusivity of marketing communication. This is usually not about establishing a dialogue or equal positions of power for the advertiser and the consumer, but rather exploiting the emancipatory potentials of media and communication for marketing purposes. Marketing communication often adopts communication approaches developed by media activists. Activist communication approaches are utilised because of their communication efficiency and adoption of critical discourse, which in this case usually decreases in critical potential. The interest of the advertising business in these kinds of innovative communication approaches is also a result of the mentioned cool business culture and its inherent (declarative) questioning of the social norms, which answers the consumers' distrust of advertising with quasi self-criticism and (self-)irony. This self-referential criticism is communicated and expressed in the form of a spectacle and represents an approach that makes up an important part of advertising campaigns. In our societies there exist norms of judgement, social norms of internality, which make us assign value to explanations emphasising the importance of the agent as a causal factor (the so-called internal explanations) (Beauvois 2000). As a result of these norms of judgment the processes occurring in everyday explanations of events are more affected by the social utility of the offered explanations than by the efforts for validity, which would prompt people to search for the true explanations from the viewpoint of those who determine events. The freedom communicated by the said advertising approaches is thus, thanks to the social norms of internality, reduced to an engaged subordination of the consumer to the covert authority of advertising. As such it reproduces the mechanisms of the declarative and superficial violation of social norms in the service of the marketing success of advertising