Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing

6. Managing Agency in the Regime of Engagement

154 > 155 effectiveness must ultimately be judged—but this consumer subject is strategically engaged to act without the sense of being acted upon in any way. This makes the program of exercising authority a complex, delicate, and even, at times, invisible task. Just as those who run schools, businesses, and prisons face the challenge of controlling individuals while concurrently recognizing and reconciling those individuals’ need to feel they are “not slaves, but free,” as Nikolas Rose puts it, so too is the marketer confronted with the conundrum of compelling consumer behavior while self-effacing that contrivance by appearing in variously disinterested, anti-establishment, flexible, and autonomous guises.5 Freedom is, foremost, the fulcrum for this negotiation of governance, for consumers are obviously not automaton slaves lacking agency in the marketplace (just ask Edsel or New Coke), so invisibility is the way power tries to pull the strings behind the scenes to manage that freedom. Of course, there are no guarantees when it comes to youth subjects so often bemoaned as unmanageable. Invisibility is, then, a means of legitimizing power, because it foregrounds surrogate forces—ambiences, resistances, grassroots, and amateurs—in place of its own obvious, vested, disciplinary intentions and impositions. “To govern is to recognize that capacity for action and to adjust oneself to it,” Rose argues. “This entails trying to understand what mobilizes the domains or entities to be governed: to govern one must act upon these forces, instrumentalize them, in order to shape actions, processes and outcomes in a desired direction.”6 Although advertising is, fundamentally, in the business of “conducting conduct,” the industrial discourse (both trade press articles and interviews with professional practitioners) apparently prefers not to speak in such terms. This is because the project of contemporary consumer management— this “regime of engagement” that is informed by the participatory logic of the cool sell and executed through guerrilla media placement—is a project that tries to structure agency and elicit attentiveness through happenstance discovery; it accommodates a façade of content objectivity and disinterested space while self-effacing its own authority and intent; it democratizes and collaborates with subject autonomy and more populist communicative flows; and it opens up the brand as a more flexible, contingent textual form. It is, in short, persuasion without the heavy hand: governance that tries not to seem like governance. The marketers I spoke with will likely disagree with this conclusion and disavow the implication that their work is in any way deceptive. To be clear, I’m not asserting that these guerrilla tactics are somehow “brainwashing ,” “subliminal,” or even necessarily “deceitful” à la Hidden Persuaders. 156 > 157 philosophy of governance that animates them; it is a philosophy wherein the power over the consumer subject is softer, more subtle, and more sophisticated than ever before—where programs of determination are, paradoxically, dependent upon practices of freedom. Power through Freedom “Discovery,” as heard so often invoked by name and in principle, represents a way of framing that attempt at power as something empowering for the subject it is visited upon. It is a way for macro-level machinations to work through the agency and fundamental sovereignty of that subject by setting out the parameters of governance rather than persisting overtly and restrictively —structuring that “possible field of action” in order to instrumentalize influence that emerges from “below” rather than being obtruded from “above.” Indeed, discovery, as opposed to persuasion, in some ways mirrors the semantic difference between power and domination that Foucault identified : the former, unlike the latter, presupposes more of a self-determining subject and makes possible a means of embedding the objectives of the ruler in the free choice moment of the ruled.7 Guerrilla marketers structure the project of agency by attempting to precipitate consumption without really forcing it—“casualizing” the imposition as much as possible. Domination would simply seek to make consumers buy, which it, of course, cannot do; power, on the other hand, seeks to “make consumers willing,” as pithily summarized from an Adweek line in chapter 1.8 We saw this repeatedly: from the epigrammatic formulation in Cole & Weber’s mission statement (“let them say yes”) to the consultant-speak catchphrase Alex Wipperfurth coined to explain Pabst Blue Ribbon’s improbable ascendance among young hipsterati (the “brand hijack”). “Let” has so often been the operative verb in the execution of this governance, because “let” allocates a sense of sovereignty rather than stripping those addressed by power...