Reading Notes: Cool Advertising

For this week's reading notes, I chose to write my post on Chapter 3 of Rice's book Writing About Cool. So far, I've enjoyed this chapter the most and I feel that it puts a lot of the book that we've read so far, into perspective, at least for me.

First of all, Rice still starts out his chapter by pointing out the dichotomy between the use of the word 'cool.' As Rice states on page 23, Rice makes the point that "cool serves advertising's financial needs by providing an attractive forum for youth culture." But a sentence later, he also makes the point that "certain groups use cool in order to resist the lures of advertising." Thus, as he has suggested earlier in the book, the use of cool can be used in a good way or a way that's not as good-to make the money. Furthermore, he goes on to discuss in what ways cool is used in the area of advertising.

Rice suggests that terms familiar to us can be used in order to serve their own interests. In other words, terms familiar to "youth culture can be appropriated and redone in order to serve their own economic interests." So what is this concept of appropriation? Appropriation, according to Rice, means taking a concept out of its original context and redoing it in order to serve an individual's own interests. Basically, what comes to my mind here, is that it is simply taking something out of context purposely for individual gain. An instance of this idea of cool and advertising is that by attaching 'cool' to a product or action, an individual believes that by purchasing a product or partaking in that action, they too are cool. The advertisers persuade you of this and change your attitude to make one believe so. Furthermore, to help their cause, advertisers associate certain 'cool' actors or sports stars to solidify this idea of cool, which Rice explains through his example of Nike.

Alright. So this is basically easy to understand, because we have been growing up with major advertisers putting 'cool' in our faces not to mention a MTV culture. But does this concept of 'cool' actually work. Are advertisers responsible for starting trends like the ipod craze or clothing styles simply by their association of the word 'cool' with such items? Basically, does this advertising and appropriation work, especially when many of us grow up being told not to be a part of the crowd and to be an individual? Or do we simply follow the individual by jumping off the bridge right behind him?