Barbie
Barbie didn’t give girls choices—it gave them costumes for adulthood, and sold the wardrobe first.
Advertising
The industry that pays for most of the culture and is rarely credited.
- 25
- in culture
- 9:14
- average
- 231 min
- in total
- 77
- across the network
All briefs
Celebrity branding
Celebrity branding doesn’t sell products—it sells borrowed trust, and trust evaporates the moment the celebrity stumbles.
Consumer identity
Consumer identity is not who you are—it’s how brands make you legible to themselves.
The Engineering of Consent
Consent isn’t won—it’s engineered, and that’s why democracy still hasn’t caught up.
Internet personality
It is not a person. It is a position in a platform economy.
Subliminal stimuli
Subliminal stimuli don’t hijack your will—they only nudge what you already intend to do.
Adbusters
Adbusters diagnosed media inequality in 1989—and never updated the remedy.
Clickbait
Clickbait isn’t lazy writing — it’s fraud dressed as curiosity.
Culture jamming
Culture jamming doesn’t break the system—it just makes the system quote itself back at you.
Guerrilla marketing
Guerrilla marketing doesn’t build brands—it borrows attention and returns nothing.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing doesn’t sell products—it sells the illusion that influence is neutral.
Lifestyle Marketing
A hip-hop producer turned corporate jingles into a concept album—and revealed how much of American sound design was built to sell things.
Native advertising
Native advertising doesn’t inform—it disguises. And it works too well.
Campaign advertising
Campaign advertising isn’t about democracy—it’s about control of attention, and the rules governing it are already broken.
Product placement
Product placement isn’t subtle advertising—it’s uncredited labour performed by the audience.
Shock advertising
Shock advertising doesn’t change minds—it hijacks memory.
Viral marketing
Viral marketing isn’t organic—it’s sponsored distribution turbocharged by algorithms.
Yellow journalism
Yellow journalism wasn’t about lies—it was about selling papers by weaponising outrage, sympathy, and spectacle.
Attention economy
It’s not about distraction—it’s about who owns your finite cognitive time, and how they bill for it.
Jim Henson
He didn’t animate puppets—he rebuilt them as extensions of the human hand.
Andy Warhol
Warhol didn’t mirror consumer culture—he weaponised its machinery to expose art’s surrender to it.
Consumer culture of China
China’s consumer culture wasn’t born in shopping malls—it was forged in the rubble of autarky.
Fashion photography
Richard Avedon
Avedon reoriented fashion photography away from garment display and toward psychological exposure. His studio-based, strobe-lit method eliminated contextual cues—exotic locations, props, soft light—to force attention onto the subject’s face, posture and tension. This served his aim: revealing untypical aspects of character. But it undermined fashion photography’s primary function—portraying clothing. His work helped define America’s image of style and beauty, yet did so by diminishing the very thing being sold.
Pop art
Pop art didn’t celebrate consumer culture—it weaponised its grammar to expose art’s own pretensions.
Street art
Street art isn’t rebellion—it’s a negotiation over who gets to speak where, and on what terms.