Michael Serazio

Michael Serazio, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing: Foucauldian analysis of modern marketing techniques that disguise or embed ads, recruiting consumers to make meaning for advertisers—as we often do in fandom. Brands position themselves as partners or advisors rather than instructors. Product placement, advergames, and the like are advertising for people who believe themselves too smart to be influenced by advertising. Advertising coopts rebellion, appearing as graffiti or in other ways signifying disruption, but only disruption in the service of profit: “The rapacious foraging for symbolic material by commercial prospectors makes genuine subcultural statements—most especially oppositional ones—intrinsically ephemeral, because they are so enticing and useful as emblems of dissent, particularly for a governmental force, marketers, trying to relate to cynical millenial consumers without the usual trappings of authority…. [R]esistance is also ‘resourceful’ for power, because it is a display of agency that can then be co-opted by the very structure that it acts out against.”

This is why marketers chase “authenticity,” but can never keep it. They want our word of mouth marketing, but only as it serves them. The free labor fans provide confers “legitimation on the cheap.” As he puts it, “‘empowerment’ begins to function as ‘employment’ (albeit without the remuneration).” (This has the benefit of requiring fewer “creatives” to be paid, too!) Also, this increased flexibility of meaning positions the brand as a container, not a dictator: “buzz agents not only tell others about the brand, they also tell the brand about itself …. Such a move is emblematic of the larger post-Fordist shift in advanced capitalism where industrial output is streamlined to be agile and customized, and the advertising pitch can be produced … ‘just-in-time’ as the conversation presents itself rather than stockpiled as media inventory.” Marketers don’t necessarily like it, but they believe that consumer creation of meaning is uncontrollable. New forms of marketing are a way to make that uncontrollability tilt in their favor anyway, so that advertisers are structuring the field and making certain outcomes more probable. They talk about consumer control, but continue to believe they can pull the strings as long as the strings remain unseen and unfelt.

There’s a fundamental contradiction between the ideology of consumer “empowerment” (within guided channels) and the marketing strategy, which is designed to obscure that consumers are being advertised to by people with commercial interests. As one informant says, “If you do it right, people never know [they’ve heard a marketing pitch]. It’s just a matter of presenting stuff in a different channel and trusting consumers to be smart enough to make their own choices”—except the choice about knowing they’re being advertised to. Serazio also ties these changes to the larger neoliberal project, where consumers are encouraged not to rely on a “nanny” marketer any more than on a “nanny” state, told they have choices and that they’re responsible for those choices, yet their circumstances are pervasively shaped and circumscribed by larger forces. “[W]hile the neoliberal state has slowly dismantled and outsourced its supported apparatus for citizen governance in the name of freedom—delegating responsibility to the individual wherever it can—these technologies and articulations of consumer governance that also accentuate freedom ultimately seek to make the consumer more dependent on the marketer.”… (altro)

Great Cover, Dense Read
This is a really tough slog, though it does get easier as the scar tissue builds. Your Ad Here has an enormously weak beginning. It starts with a bafflegab definition of guerilla marketing: “In Foucaldian terms, it is a mode of governance set upon an active subject, not a form of domination that has stereotypically defined the exercise of power.” Intrigued? For the next 40 pages it plods and plunges without giving any of the really colorful examples that make guerilla marketing exciting. Had the book begun with a dramatic example story, followed by examination of the components and how they affected the client, Serazio could have gone into all the theory he wanted and it would have added value. But instead, it is punishingly dense.

It is made much worse by all the italics and quotation marks around terms. It turns out they are neither exceptional nor special and you have to learn to ignore them or they will drive you crazy. I don’t think two sentences in a row go by without italics or quotes or both. It really makes for a pointlessly bumpy ride. By putting so very much in italics or quotes, Serazio denies emphasis to all of them.

It is also pumped with bloviated pomposity. His sources don’t explain, they explicate. They don’t warn, they caveat. Instead of him disagreeing, we get “I hesitate to endorse”. I’ve never seen so many upons, where a simple on would do. Bespeaks is a word you never hear in conversation, polite or otherwise. They all serve to slow you down and make the read difficult. I get that this is a doctoral thesis for the ages, but in published book form it really needs massive editing for us mortals.

So let me explain: guerilla marketing achieves mental buy-in by adding real value (eg. entertainment or intrigue) to the viewing experience in nontraditional forms, without overtly promoting the product, service or brand. That’s my definition.

Serazio tries to hammer the round components of guerilla marketing into the square holes made by philosophers and theorists. But getting to the soul of it is beyond him. There’s endless analysis, but it never seems to come to a point.

How much more impressive it would have been if he had included images of the ads, graffiti, events – any realization of the subversive marketing he tries to describe in (italicized) words. A screenshot from a game, a photo of a sidewalk graphic, a flash mob – there so is much visual it’s criminal to ignore it. Instead we get references – 600 of them in 169 pages. Serazio is out to prove he checked with everybody worth mentioning, and then some. It’s academic, and it’s not captivating.

He does start giving more and more examples as we get deeper in, and your interest picks up once you get something beyond theory to chew on. You crave the visits to the real world of Mad Men.

But he doesn’t even make the case that this is innovative. There seems to be nothing new about guerilla marketing the way he describes it. Jingles touted products much like hip hop artists do in their songs about champagne brands and cars. A hundred years ago people were singing In My Merry Oldsmobile. And the new plague of product placement? Radio programs used to be named directly and overtly after the sponsors. On The Lucky Strike Program, WC Fields used to infuriate the sponsors by adlibbing about his nephew Chester. That was 80 years ago. Kraft donated cases of Tang to the Apollo Space Program, and John Glenn said it was the best thing about the voyage. The rest is history. Hell, Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade is three hours of nontraditional street advertising of product mascots. (I once spent a year trying to do a counter/Hip-Hop Thanksgiving Parade that would end at MTV in Times Square and be sponsored by the Virgin Superstore across the street, but it never came together. Despite the myths, guerilla marketing is a really hard sell, even to the so-called hip.) As to the controversy Serazio cites over the novel The Bulgari Connection, this is hardly a new phenomenon either. Look at Breakfast at Tiffany’s – 50 years before. Or The Girl From Maxim’s. Or The Man From The Diners Club. This kind of marketing has always been around. Is there more of it now? Clearly. But there’s more of everything now. Who would have thought we’d all be wearing corporate logos on our shoes, our socks, our shirts, our jackets, our glasses … It’s saturation. And guerilla marketing’s role has expanded accordingly.

Usually in reviews of this kind, I list fascinating facts I don’t want to lose track of. But in this instance, I made no notes at all. The book is all about parsing guerilla marketing and squeezing it into compartments. The actual implementation and success or failure is almost a sidelight. Its importance and impact go unmentioned.

Guerilla marketing simply follows the old rules – get the brand out into as many media and venues as possible. If you can do it without paid advertising, so much he better. The more media, the better the results. At bottom, consumer manipulation is the goal, even you claim you want them to pull, and not be pushed. A creative way of achieving that should be celebrated. This book is not that celebration.… (altro)