Along with Thomas, I, too, was arrested by Dallas Smythe’s discussion of advertizing in our mass communication media. I particularly relished the “free lunch” model of media that he sets forward: subverting our usual impression that commercial content is “the price we pay” to enjoy our media programming, Smythe asserts that “[. . .] the central purpose of the information, entertainment, and ‘educational’ material [. . .] transmitted to the audience is to ensure attention to the products and services being advertized” (6). In other words, it isn’t that programming is central and advertising is a means to an end; rather, it is the advertising that is central, while the programming is a peripheral project aimed at attracting attention and favor toward it.
I want to suggest here that today our media outlets are today taking the “free lunch” model to aggressive extremes, with the lunch portions becoming ever scantier and the advertising increasingly becoming the main course. Either that or the media outlets simply mix the two together in a sort of indistinguishable goulash.
One of the best examples of an outlet that hawks this brand (pun intended) of marketing-saturated programming is MTV. There’s an excellent PBS Frontline program from a few years back called The Merchants of Cool that I used to show to my freshman classes at Ohio University when we read a few essays on consumerism. In it, a University of Illinois Communications professor, Robert McChesney, explains:
"Everything on MTV is a commercial; that’s all that MTV is. Sometimes it’s an explicit advertisement, paid for by a company to sell a product. Sometimes it’s going to be a video for a music company, there to sell music. Sometimes it’s going to be the set that’s filled with trendy clothes and stuff, there to sell a look that will include products on that set. Sometimes it will be a show about an upcoming movie, paid for by the studio—though you don’t know it—to hype a movie that’s coming out from Hollywood. But everything’s an infomercial: there is no non-commercial part of MTV" (Merchants of Cool).
McChesney’s suggestion of MTV as a sort of “marketing-only medium” breaks down Smythe’s dichotomy of programming (“news, features, and entertainment,” according to the great quotation Smythe pulls from Humphrey McQueen) and advertisement: in the case of MTV, if we take McChesney’s suggestion, it’s not that the programming aids the advertising; it’s that the two are one and the same.
I think it’s fair to say that MTV has revolutionized the way that marketing and programming intermingle in our contemporary media, but it does have precedents. One that I think is particularly illustrative is The Monkees, the mid-1960s TV show about America’s loveable pop ‘n’ roll foursome. It’s no secret that the Monkees (the group) were modeled after major groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones. I like to imagine that the board meeting that produced the Monkees started off as follows: “You know, kids sure seem to like those Beatles, but there’s one problem: we’re not getting rich off of them. Now, how can we figure out a way to do that?” Although the prompt for that question was the success of the British Invasion, the answer was uniquely American: a pop group that was simultaneously a television program. The Monkees show, like MTV today, had no non-commercial content. Either it showed the group “performing” their hits in order to sell records, or it showed the group being cool and fun in order to sell their image and, again, more records. Oh, and then there were Monkees lunchboxes, toys, trading cards, costumes, and other assorted products.
Where does The Monkees differ from MTV? Well, The Monkees was a single show that ran for two years. MTV is a network—nay, a media giant—that has been at the center of pop-culture television for twenty-seven years. MTV has branched out, too: sister channels, MTV movies, MTV books, etc.
The big joke these days with MTV is that there is no music on it anymore. I’ve got two ideas about this. First of all, today the internet brings people music videos in a much more expansive and convenient way than MTV could, so a few years ago they recognized that and focused their energies on a different kind of programming. Secondly, I think they realized that the kind of programming that they created in music’s place—largely reality TV—is even cheaper than music videos and every bit as commercial and marketable.
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