British School Vs. Frankfurt School Analysis

This video, in my estimation, highlights the differences in these two schools of thought. First, it's an advertisement for Pepsi which can situate it directly within the purview of the Frankfurt School. There is obviously ideology at work here. First, there is the main message--"Pepsi will make you a king and/or a warrior." We see that Enrique Iglesias' emperor has his own chest full of ice-cold Pepsi; obviously it's the stuff of kings. How is he defeated? By the gladiators who "rock" it away from him by creating a rioting crowd chanting "we will rock you." We would expect nothing less from company advertising. When we look beyond that, we also can see several other "value statements" built in to the commercial.

The main characters of the video are Pink, Beyonce, and Britney Spears (pre-Kevin Federline). All are huge pop stars with a built-in following of fans of a certain demographic--tween and teen girls. This makes them the perfect individuals to hype this product and not, for instance, alcoholic beverages. Their dress and behavior in this commercial is not far off from their typical concert look or behavior. Furthermore, the ad parallels the penultimate scene in the movie Gladiator which came out several years before to huge critical acclaim and mass appeal. This similarity may appeal to a different fan-base, making the marketability of Pepsi broader, or may provide us with a familiar backstory that establishes a pre-packaged set of motives and emotional ties that suggest to the viewer how the ad is to be understood. These similarities allow for a completely passive consumption of the commercial as an advertisement; by mimicking their already developed public personas, their fans are immediately alerted to buy Pepsi. Why? Because Britney, Beyonce, and Pink do and gladiators who have survived many brutal fights in the ring do (an allusion to the movie storyline)...and all fans want to be like them--strong, sexy, gladiator Pepsi drinkers.

On the other hand, the British Cultural School would be much more concerned with the meanings drawn from imagery and messaging consumed by the audience. Here, what the women and men wear, do, and say may be considered important if it becomes important to those watching the commercial. Do watchers take away a certain idea about what it means to be a woman, a man, a pop star, and the way the influence of these individuals works? From this standpoint, we cannot say for sure what the importance of the video is until we actively watch people consuming it and creating some kind of derived meaning from it. In this way, we acknowledge that meaning is created from the ground up, beginning with people who watch the ad and translate it into something that has significance (or doesn't) for them. This is active consumption and translation at it's most relevant.

Clearly, both schools have their weak points, both focused around this issue of consumption. The Frankfurt School overly relies on the presence of an agenda working ceaselessly on the "empty shells" of the masses, dumbly watching and taking in the embedded social meanings associated with gender, power relationships, and consumption. There are people (many) who find absolutely zero worth in anything that Pink, Beyonce, Britney Spears, or for that matter Pepsi do or say. This critical approach suggests we're not as easily duped as they may have assumed. Meanwhile, the British Cultural School doesn't allow the idea of ideological manipulation to play a big enough role. While we do likely actively consume culture, we may be unaware of the ways in which values and ideas are built-in to the artifact. We bring to each piece of culture as we consume them ideologies and analytical paradigms that have been given to us through socialization; thus what may be labeled as active consumption could also be an exercise in re-inforcing systems of ideas and values that we've come to accept as "normal" or "real" without realizing that they may not be in our best interests.