Michael Cusumano Jomc 170 001 July 18 2006 Ads Fads and Consumer Culture The author of Ads Fads and Consumer Culture Arthur Asa Berger is professor emeritus of broadcast and communication arts at San Francisco State University where he taught from 1965 2003 Berger received his Batchelor of Arts in 1954 from The University of Massachusetts at Amherst It only took Berger two years later to receive his Masters degree in 1956 from The University of Iowa Then in 1965 Berger completed his education at The University of Minnesota Minneapolis and received his Ph D His areas of concentration during his time in school were media criticism cultural studies humor and communication theory Berger could be considered one of the forefathers of studying popular culture In 1973 Berger produced his first book Pop Culture In a time when popular culture was rarely talked about or considered Berger understood its importance and knew how it can influence American advertising Berger has become a well known figure in analyzing advertising s influence on American society and is a preeminent scholar in the field of American popular culture studies In just over 30 years Berger has published over 60 books To name a few of his books they are Seeing is Believing An Introduction to Visual Communication Media Analysis Techniques Cultural Criticism Signs in Contemporary Culture An Introduction to Semiotics and Essentials of Mass Communication His latest book published in 2005 Shop til you drop Consumer Behavior and American Culture is considered one of his finest achievements To gain specific insight into writing Ads Fads and Consumer Culture Berger was granted a visiting professorship from the Advertising Education Foundation to spend three weeks at Goldberg Moser O Neil advertising in San Francisco In the book Ads Fads and Consumer Culture Berger develops his own theories as to how advertising influences Americans purchasing The main point of this book can be broken up into three main areas To teach readers how advertising works to suggest how advertising has affected American society and culture and to help readers learn how to interpret and analyze advertisements and commercials Berger xv One area of concentration in the book that Berger focuses on is our resistance to advertising Many people who consider themselves adproof are actually influenced unknowingly by advertising just by the looking at their purchase behaviors over time Berger writes Advertising is an important part of our culture and many of our ideas and notions have been influenced by the enormous amount of advertising we are exposed to as we grow up Berger xiv Advertising affects consumers differently and to those who think they are not influenced by advertising Berger thinks otherwise Berger suggests the average person in America can be subjected to 15 000 commercial messages each day Berger 101 Another important fact about advertising is that it is always around us one can not escape it If one typed the word advertising into the search engine Google 35 800 000 web sites will show up that have the word or mention the word advertising in them Berger xiv Berger examines in Ads Fads and Consumer Culture in further detail the affects of advertising on consumers society and American culture He also discusses the system that is used by marketers to segregate consumers demographic psychographic and geographic information This book also analyzes the famous 1984 Apple ad and breaks it down to help readers see the commercials underlying message plus the reason why it became the second best commercial among all ads in the year 1984 Finally Berger deals with the topics of sex and advertising political advertising market research utilizing the VALS 1 and VALS 2 methods and advertising in American s culture 2 Advertising in American Culture The world of advertising is continually growing and is especially on the rise in American society In the United States Advertising is a 200 billion industry Berger 1 The cost to create an average commercial is anywhere between 300 000 and 400 000 with most of that money going towards television production costs For example in one of the famous Got Milk commercials Berger breaks down the costs that were included in the production of this campaign On just television production alone it cost 281 000 Berger 2 It is also important to keep in mind that the production of a commercial does not include medium purchases So airtime for a commercial or an advertisement can run into the hundred thousands to millions of dollars Advertising is around us continually whether we like it or not However there is not a clear cut method that can show why a consumer exactly purchased a certain product because they saw an advertisement about it Advertising does help consumers gain information about products and could lead to a purchase decision There is a method that many social scientists have used to see advertising s psychological influence on people Berger uses the SocialPsychological Model to explain that just because a person sees an advertisement it does not lead to any decision making This approach which often is quite sophisticated in terms of research design frequently indicates that advertising has little or no effect on respondents Berger 13 Berger goes on to use the post hoc ergo propter hoc argument This argument says that Just because Y follows X does not mean that X caused Y Berger 15 To further explain just because John sees a television commercial for beer and then drinks a beer it does not mean the commercial made him do it 3 Throughout this book Berger uses the phrase Running it an advertisement up a flagpole to see if anyone salutes What he means by this statement is the idea of corporations and organizations spending millions of dollars to run advertisements in the huge world of media and then seeing if consumers will respond to the messages being delivered see if anyone salutes These companies assume people are irrational when it comes to spending This may be true given the fact that many Americans today are more concerned with materialistic wealth Berger uses Sigmund Freud s idea of the human psyche the id I want it now the superego don t do it and the ego mediates between the id and the superego to help explain consumers psychological behavior playing a large role in a purchasing decision Advertisements appeal to id elements in our psyches and our desires for gratifications of all kinds I want it now and seek to avoid