How advertising consumed the counter-culture

  • Themes: Culture, Economics

Capitalism has an extraordinary ability to assimilate and exploit the energy of any and all cultural movements. As a result, charismatic outsiders do not really exist anymore. The era of rebel branding is over.

An advert on the Nike store at Oxford Circus.
An advert on the Nike store at Oxford Circus. Credit: Matthew Chattle / Alamy Stock Photo

In the last scene of the last episode of Mad Men, the show’s protagonist Don Draper, an advertising executive, sits cross-legged in meditation. At first, he looks stern and uncomfortable; then we see his face soften into a smile. He has had an idea. The scene dissolves into its final shot: the iconic 1971 Coca Cola ad known as I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing. A diverse group of hippyish young people, standing on a hillside, sing an anthem of peace and love – and Coke.

The end of Mad Men hints at the beginning of something else. Over the course of its seven seasons, Mad Men tells the story of America’s social transformation in the 1960s, the decade when postwar conventions and hierarchies broke down and became reconfigured. Draper, a man’s man, in a tailored suit, navigates a new and unstable world in which the young and marginalised loudly demand a radically different kind of society.

Through the eyes of Don and his fellow executives we watch a series of political and cultural movements unfold: Civil Rights, feminism, anti-war protests, psychedelia. The kids behind these movements have contempt for unthinking consumerism; for the accumulation of cars and televisions and fridges. They aspire to a more equal and spiritually enlightened society than the one they inherited from their parents. They see themselves as rebelling against an emotionally uptight, grey-suited, amoral establishment. They are reaching for higher truths than those on offer in the supermarket.

Draper is half-fascinated and half-appalled by these developments, which appear to throw into question his whole professional raison d’etre: selling more stuff to more people. In the show’s final episodes, while in the midst of a personal crisis, he embarks on a road trip from New York, home of Madison Avenue, to Big Sur, California, epicentre of the counter-culture. At the same time, Don is struggling to come up with a new campaign for his biggest client, Coca Cola. The moment we seem him smile is the moment he cracks the brief. It’s also the moment he that realises the counter-culture and consumerism needn’t be antagonists after all.

In reality, of course, I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing was not dreamed up by Don Draper, though it was created by Draper’s ad agency in the show, McCann Erickson. At the start of the 1970s, the Coca Cola brand risked becoming seen by a new generation of consumers as a relic of the 1950s, much like Draper. McCann Erickson’s ad, officially titled ‘Hilltop’, represented a daring raid on the insurgent energy of youth culture. It was very successful. Peace and love were put in the service of sugar water, and Coca Cola felt young again.

‘Hilltop’ was the forerunner of a style of counter-cultural advertising that only really came into its own when the children of the 1960s were running their own businesses, and in charge of their own brands. The prime innovator and exponent of this style was Steve Jobs. Jobs was immersed in the ideas and aesthetics of 1960s and remained profoundly influenced by them for the rest of his life. For Jobs, Apple was the counter-culture, in technological form. In his vision, the Macintosh, a desktop computer, would unlock everyone’s creative potential. Standing in its way was IBM, the epitome of 1950s capitalism: a faceless corporation fit for soulless bureaucracies that turned people into machines.

If ‘Hilltop’ was the most iconic ad of the 1970s, Apple’s ‘1984’ was its equivalent for the following decade. For many, it remains the greatest TV ad ever made. Directed by Ridley Scott, the ad ran just once, in a Superbowl break, at the start of 1984. A Big Brother figure on a cinema screen declaims slogans to a docile audience of prisoners. The only figure in colour is a running woman in sports gear pursued by masked guards. She is carrying a hammer which she hurls at the screen, smashing it into white light. When the new Apple Mac is launched, says a voiceover, ‘You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984”’. At no stage in the ad do we see a computer.

These days we are so familiar with the ‘1984’ ad that we fail to see what an enormous act of chutzpah it was. Apple was appropriating gigantic political themes – freedom versus totalitarianism, individualism versus corporate power – for an ad that was essentially about IT procurement. Within a few years, Apple’s quasi-ideological, quasi-political approach to branding was taken up by other brands, foremost among them Nike, founded and led by Phil Knight.

Nike sold sports shoes; it also sold rebellion. In 1987 it licensed The Beatles song Revolution at great expense, for an ad that celebrated non-conformity in sport. The brand sought out sports stars who were not just successful at their chosen sport but who were in some way anti-establishment. The internal mantra used by its ad agencies at the time was ‘irreverence justified’. A Nike print ad juxtaposed the tennis star André Agassi, wearing big hair and colourful gear, with vintage photographs of stiff-looking tennis gents in Wimbledon whites. Agassi also featured in a TV ad with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, playing ‘rock n’roll tennis’. Nike presented itself, as Apple did, as pirates taking on the navy.

Steve Jobs was ejected from Apple in 1985 after falling out with its board. He entered an exile from his company that lasted 12 years. During this interregnum, the business adopted a more conventional, nuts and bolts approach to advertising, focusing on messages about product benefits and price comparisons. The brand did not prosper and eventually invited its founder to help out. When Jobs returned in 1997, almost the first thing he did was commission a new ad campaign. He instructed his agency that the ad should not feature any products. It was to be solely devoted to expressing the philosophy of Apple.

The ‘Think Different’ TV ad featured a series of 20th-century innovators and visionaries, using black and white footage. It started with Albert Einstein but included an array of prominent 1960s rebels: Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Muhammad Ali. ‘Here’s to the crazy ones,’ said the voiceover. ‘The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers… They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo… They push the human race forward.’ As with ‘1984’ the audacity was immense: the ad even featured Martin Luther King, who might have been baffled to find himself used for commercial ends. Unlike ‘1984’, this was a long-running, multi-media campaign. A subsequent bus-side ad featured an image of Rosa Parkes – a meeting of medium and message that some might consider a little on the nose.

‘Think Different’ set the stage for the launch of Apple’s iMac computer, the first in a run of hugely successful product launches which reached its apotheosis with the iPhone in 2007. In the early 2000s I worked as a brand strategist in the advertising industry, including a stint at Apple’s ad agency, TBWA/Chiat Day (I didn’t work on the Apple account). Apple was the most exciting brand in the world, followed by Nike. Every ambitious marketing director wanted to emulate them. As a result, the counter-cultural style, or what you might call rebel branding, became widespread. Indeed, for the 2000s it was the dominant mode of marketing. Nearly every brand wanted to position itself as a ‘challenger’ – a plucky upstart disrupting the status quo. This applied even to brands which dominated their categories – which were the status quo. Agency meeting rooms hosted high-minded PowerPoint presentations. Brands weren’t just selling product benefits or even emotional associations anymore; they sold belief.

Rebel brands liked to present themselves as engaged in a cultural transformation; one that was related to the product they sold if only tangentially. IKEA wasn’t just selling self-assembly furniture; it was on a mission to transform the interior décor tastes of the British public (it succeeded). You were either with it or against it. Harvard business professor Douglas Holt, author of an influential book called How Brands Become Icons, called this ‘cultural branding’. He advised brands to create ‘identity value’ for the consumer: a feeling that you handed over money you were in some sense on the right side of history.

Challenger brands always went up against an enemy: either a competing brand, or something more nebulous like social conformity. The first question for the ad agency to answer was not, what should this brand say or sell to people, but what should this brand stand for? The second was, what should it stand against? (In fact, it was often the other way around – start by identifying a social ill you want to overcome and then define yourself as the remedy). The multi-category brand Virgin didn’t just sell plane tickets or gym membership or mobile phones; it was on a mission to smash a corrupt status quo and empower the consumer in whichever category it entered (a pose that became hard to sustain when it won a government contract to be a train operator, thus enabling it to reap the financial benefits of a regulated monopoly). Richard Branson, very much a child of the 1960s, was the living embodiment of Virgin’s soft rebellion.

Steve Jobs called an end to the Think Different campaign in the early 2000s. This came as a surprise to many in the ad industry, including some of those in Apple’s ad agency. It was a popular and cherished campaign which won multiple industry awards. But Jobs only ever saw it as temporary, stage one in his masterplan for world domination (we usually talk about masterplans for world domination in jest, but in the case of Jobs and Apple it was literally true).

In Jobs’s mind, the point of Think Different was to rally the troops, the Apple diehards, around the brand’s tattered standard. Hence its powerful appeal to those who liked to see themselves as counter-cultural and operating at an angle to the mainstream. But he believed that ‘Think Different’ would ultimately restrict Apple to a niche, albeit a large and profitable one. Since the future of Apple was to be mainstream, it could no longer pretend to be nonconformist. Jobs didn’t want Apple to fight the establishment but to take it over: to take down its pirate flag and become the navy. He succeeded in this mission more than anyone could have anticipated.

As he was to many trends, Jobs was first in and first out. Across the rest of the ad industry the rebel branding paradigm lived on for a few more years. It was given a bolt of life by Barack Obama’s triumphant 2008 presidential campaign. In his battle for the Democratic nomination, the young senator from Illinois used the rebel branding portfolio of techniques: slogans and iconography which invoked the struggles of the 1960s in a dreamy, insubstantial way. Like Apple, his campaign constructed a narrative of an irresistible, ‘bottom-up’ movement of the people rebelling against a corporate overlord (for IBM, read Hillary Clinton).

By the second decade of the 21st century, however, challenger branding was on the wane. Definitive news of its demise came in 2017 when Coca Cola’s old rival, Pepsi, made a ham-fisted attempt to appropriate the cultural energy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which had become prominent in the wake of the Ferguson protests. Pepsi made a commercial, the purpose of which, it said, was ‘to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding’. ‘Live for Now,’ as the ad was titled, did achieve Pepsi’s goal of unifying its audience, although not quite in the way it intended.

The ad is worth describing in detail. To the accompaniment of a song by Bob Marley’s grandson, the ad opens with a shot of an Asian cellist on a rooftop and shows smiling young people marching with signs that say things like ‘Join the Conversation’. Ashley Jenner is modelling for a photoshoot. Invited to join the march by the Asian cellist, she takes off her blonde wig and hands it to a black woman. When Jenner comes across a line of white police officers, she hands one of them a Pepsi, a moment captured by a photographer in a hijab. The policeman takes a sip, and everyone cheers.

Unsurprisingly, this no doubt sincere tribute to current political activism did not go down well with activists or anyone else. In the face of widespread and angry condemnation, the ad was withdrawn and Pepsi apologised for it. Arguably, Pepsi was the original rebel brand: it began pitching itself as the voice of the young generation early in the 1960s. It was therefore fitting that it should sound the death knell on the whole genre.

Why did rebel branding become a losing game? I see three main reasons. The first one is success. As Steve Jobs anticipated, the rebels became overlords. Apple became one of the biggest and richest companies in the world; Nike and IKEA and other leading examples of this style became global behemoths with complex supply chains that left them exposed to political attacks. It was no longer viable to pose as upstarts fighting the status quo, or as noble avatars of social progress. Of course, the rebel stance might in theory have been taken up by a new generation of smaller brands (and in some cases it has been, as we’ll get to) but two other social changes have made rebel branding much harder to execute across the board.

One is the disappearance of large counter-cultural movements. A counter-culture requires some kind of dominant culture to be counter to. The rock and rollers of the 1950s; the hippies of the 1960s; the queer scene of the 1970s; the grunge artists of the 1990s: all of them stood against and apart from mainstream society and culture. That was what gave them energy and ‘identity value’. But in Western societies, at least, the story of the last half century has been one of increasing liberalisation: opening up the gates of the citadel and letting these outsiders in. This is partly down to political changes resulting from successful campaigns for gay rights, black civil rights in America, and women’s rights. As society became more liberal, brands which had associated themselves with these liberal causes became harder to distinguish from any other brands (if there is one imperative in marketing, it is to be distinctive). To stand up for diversity and inclusion was once seen as an act of counter-cultural rebellion and a commercial opportunity; now it is the boilerplate of every corporation’s HR department, and thus no longer a selling point.

Capitalism has an extraordinary ability to assimilate and exploit the energy of any and all cultural movements, including those that are in some way oppositional to it. Brands have always found a way of selling the image of outsiders back to insiders, but, partly as a result, charismatic outsiders do not really exist anymore. Every new cultural idea, however radical or subversive, gets absorbed into the mainstream, which is made up of a million different splinters rather than one dominant form. The velocity with which marginal ideas or people become widely accepted and over-familiar has been accelerated by the internet and social media, as has fragmentation. It is hard or impossible for brands to find novel cultural stances. Counter-cultures were like forests that marketers used for wood; over time the landscape has become denuded.

The other big social change is more directly political and applies with particular force to the world’s biggest consumer market, the United States, where the environment for brands has become more political and more polarised than ever. If it was once possible to make vague, handwaving gestures towards liberal causes and expect universal acclaim, now to do so is to risk overt opposition, and in some cases a fierce backlash. Nobody knows this better than Anheuser-Busch, owners of what was once America’s biggest beer brand, Bud Light.

In 2023, Bud Light hired the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote its brand, as part of a wider effort to attract more younger consumers. The Mulvaney initiative was a small one, and the brand’s marketers did not anticipate any controversy. But it was leapt upon by conservative celebrities and influencers who saw it as a political gesture, and one that was not to their liking. A consumer boycott was organised, to remarkable effect. Bud Light sales crashed, as did the share price of its parent company. The damage was lasting, too: Bud Light, which once seemed unassailable, is no longer America’s number one beer.

The lesson marketers are learning is that there is no longer any space for the quasi-political gesture. If you are going to draw on the febrile energies of modern politics, you have to go all in. Ben & Jerry’s, once an amiable, hippyish ice cream brand, now takes strident stances on hot button issues like the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It has decided that its core target is young and left-wing, and that alienating anyone who doesn’t share its politics is not so much a bug as a feature of this strategy. After the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, the deodorant brand AXE solemnly declared its support for a peaceful transition of power. On the other side of the divide are overtly conservative brands, such as the coffee brand Black Rifle, which is designed to appeal to military members and veterans.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, Nike ventured back into the political space when it supported the American football star Colin Kaepernick’s campaign against racism and social inequality, which involved a rebellious stance against the NFL. But Nike has since retreated to more neutral territory, focusing on sport rather than politics. Most big brands have followed suit, having become more cautious after witnessing the chilling examples of Pepsi and Bud Light. Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer of P&G, the world’s biggest consumer goods company, remarked in 2024: ‘In today’s world, moving into areas of advocacy that are outside of your brand’s wheelhouse, that’s where things can get undone.’

If the rhetoric of rebel branding lives on, it is in the place where Steve Jobs was king: Silicon Valley. Every ambitious tech start-up has a mission to change the world – to make a dent in the universe. Tech founders pitching for investment routinely identify some aspect of the status quo that deserves to be smashed and present their app as the battering ram. These disrupters no longer draw on the liberal idealism of the 1960s. Their ambition is more prosaic and perhaps more honest: to make a billion dollars. But they still love to meditate.

If you enjoyed this essay by Ian, listen in through the link below to him in conversation with EI’s Alastair Benn:

Author

Ian Leslie