Chapter 22 Exercises: Advertising Culture and the Manufacture of Desire

These exercises develop skills in historical analysis, ideological critique, and the identification of advertising's propagandistic dimensions. They connect the chapter's historical case studies to contemporary advertising environments.

Exercise 1: Tracing an Identity Claim Across Time

Individual | Research and Analysis | Estimated time: 3–4 hours

Select a currently active consumer brand that has been advertising consistently for at least ten years. Identify and collect at least ten distinct advertisements or advertising campaigns spanning the full period — using the brand's official archives, industry databases such as AdAge or Adweek's campaign archives, or the Internet Archive's collection of historical advertisements.

Step 1: Document the Identity Claim

For each advertisement or campaign, identify the core identity claim: who does this advertisement promise you will be if you use this product? Record the claim as specifically as possible — not "attractive" but "the kind of man who is effortlessly sophisticated in professional settings," not "healthy" but "the kind of mother who is in control of her family's wellbeing."

Step 2: Map the Evolution

Create a timeline of the brand's identity claims over the decade. How has the claim changed? Consider the following dimensions: - Has the aspirational identity shifted in social class position (more aspirational or more accessible)? - Has the gender construction of the normative user changed? - Has the racial construction of the normative user changed? - Have the emotional registers shifted (from security to freedom, from belonging to individuality, or vice versa)?

Step 3: Connect to Social Context

For each significant shift in the identity claim, identify what was happening in the broader social context. Was the brand responding to social movements? To demographic shifts in its consumer base? To competitive pressure? To regulatory changes?

Step 4: Analyze the Stability

What has remained constant in the brand's identity claim across the entire period? This stable core is the brand's deepest ideological commitment — the social arrangement or value system it is most fundamentally selling. Analyze what this stable core reveals about the brand's understanding of its consumers and about the social values it is both reflecting and reinforcing.

Deliverable: A 1,200–1,500 word analysis with your timeline attached. Include at least one direct quotation from each major campaign you analyze.

Exercise 2: The Manufactured Tradition Template

Individual | Case Analysis | Estimated time: 2–3 hours

The De Beers diamond engagement ring campaign demonstrates that advertising can create genuine social norms — practices that come to feel like timeless traditions — from nothing. This exercise asks you to apply the same analytical framework to another manufactured tradition.

Choose one of the following examples, or propose your own with instructor approval: - Valentine's Day chocolate (Cadbury and the heart-shaped box) - Mother's Day flowers (the history of commercial florist industry advocacy) - The white wedding dress (Victoria's wedding and its commercial aftermath) - Engagement rings for men (a more recent attempt at norm-manufacturing) - New Year's Eve champagne (and who drove that association)

Analytical Questions:

1. Pre-manufacturing baseline: What was the actual practice before the advertising campaign? How widespread was the practice, and what forms did it take? (This requires historical research — do not assume the current practice is old simply because it feels old.)

2. Commercial interest: Who had a commercial interest in establishing this practice as a social norm? How did they organize their campaign — through direct advertising, through celebrity seeding, through press manipulation, through industry-coordinated messaging?

3. The specific manufactured elements: Identify what was invented that now feels natural. This could be a specific price norm (the two months' salary equivalent), a specific form (the heart-shaped box rather than any other packaging), a specific occasion linkage (roses specifically on Valentine's Day, not other flowers), or a specific emotional meaning.

4. The "forever" mechanism: Did the campaign include an element designed to make the practice feel natural and timeless — to conceal its recent and commercial origin? What was that element?

5. Current status: Is the manufactured tradition still fully operative, or has it come under challenge? What challenges has it faced, and from what directions?

Deliverable: A 1,000–1,200 word case analysis modeled on the De Beers analysis in the chapter. Your analysis should be specific enough that a reader who did not know the history would learn it from your account.

Exercise 3: Anatomy of a Political Advertisement

Individual | Primary Source Analysis | Estimated time: 2 hours

Select a contemporary political advertisement — from a presidential, senatorial, or gubernatorial campaign, or from a significant ballot initiative campaign. The advertisement should be from the last four election cycles (2016–present) and should be publicly available through a recognized archive (the Living Room Candidate archive, the Wesleyan Media Project database, or the YouTube channels of campaigns or advocacy organizations).

The Political Advertising Fingerprint

Apply the following analytical framework, adapted from the chapter's discussion of the evolution of political advertising from commercial advertising techniques:

1. The Product Advertising Techniques

Identify which specific commercial advertising techniques are being employed: - Is the advertisement selling an identity (who the voter is, or who the opponent is) rather than a policy position? - Is it using emotional association rather than factual argument? - Is it employing fear, pride, disgust, or aspirational desire in a way that would be recognizable in a product advertisement? - Is it using visual and sonic production techniques (music, editing pace, color palette) borrowed from commercial advertising?

2. The Factual Claim Test

List every claim in the advertisement, explicit and implied. For each: - Is it a factual claim that could be verified? - Has it been verified? (Use fact-checking resources: PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Washington Post Fact Checker) - Or is it an emotional/identity claim that is not in principle verifiable?

What proportion of the advertisement's content is factually accountable versus emotionally associative?

3. The Daisy Ad Lineage

Connect the advertisement to the lineage of emotional political advertising described in the chapter. Does it employ the Daisy Ad technique of emotional juxtaposition without explicit claim? Does it employ the Willie Horton technique of implicit racial or social threat? Does it employ the Swift Boat technique of attacking personal credibility rather than policy?

4. The Democratic Problem

Based on your analysis, write a 300-word assessment of what this advertisement asks voters to do — evaluate policy, form emotional associations, or construct identity — and what the consequences are for democratic deliberation if this technique is generalized across the campaign.

Deliverable: A structured analysis following the four sections above, 1,000–1,200 words total, with the advertisement cited and a link provided.

Exercise 4: Movement Appropriation in Contemporary Advertising

Individual | Research and Observation | Estimated time: 1.5–2 hours

The Virginia Slims case established the template for advertising's appropriation of social movements: take the emotional energy of a genuine political struggle, attach it to a brand identity, and sell the product as a vehicle for participating in the movement's aspirations — without actual alignment with the movement's goals.

Part 1: Identification

Find a current example of a brand using the imagery, language, or emotional register of a genuine social movement to sell a product or service. Consider movements including but not limited to: racial justice and Black Lives Matter; LGBTQ+ rights; environmental activism and climate justice; women's rights; disability rights; immigration rights.

Your example should be an actual advertisement or advertising campaign, not merely a one-time statement. It should be a sustained brand association, not an isolated response to a specific event.

Part 2: Structural Analysis

Apply the Virginia Slims template:

• What is the genuine movement and what does it actually want? (Be specific about the movement's stated goals and actual advocacy positions.)
• What does the brand want? (What is the commercial interest that the movement association serves?)
• What is the claimed alignment? How does the brand represent its relationship to the movement? Does it claim to share the movement's goals? To support the movement financially? To embody the movement's values?
• What is the actual alignment? Does the brand's business model, labor practices, supply chain, and political lobbying actually align with the movement's goals — or does the advertising alignment coexist with practices that contradict the movement's objectives?
• Who bears the cost of the contradiction? If the brand is profiting from movement imagery while its practices contradict the movement's goals, who is harmed by that contradiction?

Part 3: The Ethics Question

In 400–500 words, assess the ethical dimensions of the case you have analyzed. Is there a meaningful difference between the Virginia Slims case and your example? Does it matter if the brand donates money to movement organizations? Does it matter if the brand's leadership is personally sympathetic to the movement? Does it matter if the advertising increases public awareness of the movement's concerns?

Deliverable: A 1,000–1,200 word analysis organized around the three parts above.

Exercise 5: Design and Deconstruct — Group Project

Group (3–4 students) | Creative and Critical | Estimated time: Full seminar session plus preparation

This exercise has two phases. In Phase 1, the group designs an identity-based advertising campaign. In Phase 2, the group analyzes its own campaign as ideology.

Phase 1: Design (Preparation before seminar session)

You have been hired by an advertising agency to create a campaign for a fictional product. Your product is: Vantage Point — a premium instant coffee brand positioning itself against Starbucks. The product itself is objectively indistinguishable from mid-range instant coffee in blind taste tests. Your target demographic is urban professionals aged 25–40.

Design a campaign that includes: - A campaign tagline - A description of two television/video advertisements (you do not need to produce them) - A description of the visual identity and imagery (models, settings, lighting, color palette) - A social media strategy identifying what lifestyle content the brand will associate with - A celebrity or influencer strategy

The campaign must be identity-based — it must be selling who the consumer is, not what the coffee tastes like.

Phase 2: Deconstruct (Seminar session)

Present your campaign to the seminar. Then, as a group, analyze your own campaign using the following framework:

1. What social world does this campaign construct? Who is the normative Vantage Point consumer? What class, race, gender, and lifestyle position do they occupy? What does the campaign implicitly say about people who do not drink Vantage Point?

2. What authentic human desire does this campaign redirect? Following Williams's "magic system" analysis: what genuine human need (for community, recognition, stimulation, meaning) does this campaign address by attaching it to a coffee brand?

3. What ideological commitments are embedded in this campaign? What does the campaign assume about how fulfillment is achieved, what identity is made of, and what the relationship is between individual purchase and social belonging?

4. What are the systemic effects of this campaign as one of thousands? If every brand is constructing identity associations and redirecting authentic human desires into commercial channels, what is the cumulative effect on the social imagination? What forms of fulfillment are made invisible?

Deliverable: A 10-minute presentation covering Phase 1 (the campaign) and Phase 2 (the analysis), followed by a 500-word written reflection from each group member on what the exercise revealed.

Reflection Questions for All Exercises

These questions are not graded but are offered for personal reflection and optional seminar discussion:

• Is it possible to be genuinely immune to advertising's identity claims, or does the social world advertising has constructed mean that the only immunity is complete social isolation?
• If advertising's manufactured desires have created real social norms and real social meaning — as the De Beers case demonstrates — does it matter that the norms were manufactured?
• Should political advertising be regulated for deceptive emotional manipulation in the same way that commercial advertising is regulated for deceptive factual claims? What would such regulation look like, and what would it cost?
• Bernays never expressed regret. What does that tell us about the relationship between technique and ethics in the propaganda professions?

Chapter 22 | Propaganda, Power, and Persuasion