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My so-called Zeitgeist: Discuss what's meant by the word "mainstream" in Table Talk's Media area

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But critiques like Dee's don't account for the genuine scorn that some such ads have generated in the mainstream advertising community -- in particular, the daring, self-referential "Dick" campaign for Miller Lite beer. This 1997-98 campaign, presented as the work of "Dick," an advertising "genius" shown in a thick-sideburned yearbook photo, played off stereotypical beer-ad promises of sex and charisma, associating Lite with ugly, Dadaist images: fat, sloppy drinkers, a pitchman licking a Lite bottle in gruesome close-up.

By Dee's logic, the Madison Avenue Politburo must have given "Dick" creator Fallon-McElligott four big red stars for its opus of self-deprecation. But in fact the campaign inspired an almost moral backlash in the industry press for pissing on the grave of Lite's revered "Tastes Great, Less Filling" ads, and flat-out glee when Miller dropped the flagging campaign last fall. Ad Age ran Miller's decision as its lead story, and commentators practically called for Fallon-McElligott's heads. "Heads should roll," wrote Rance Crain in the Nov. 30 Ad Age (oh, did I say "practically"?); the campaign was "utterly stupid, ill-conceived and (most important) wasteful ... Corporate chieftains will conclude, with more than a little justification, that advertising is not a very effective marketing tool." Crain was further "appalled" that Miller was nonetheless including Fallon-McElligott in its new agency review for the brand.

Of course Crain makes a point, especially the "stupid" part -- many of the Dick ads were sophomoric combos of stale kitsch jokes and insult humor -- but he gives the lie to the assumption that the advertising machine, by definition, absorbs any kind of resistance and can't be offended from within. You can skewer any self-conscious ad with the insight that It's Trying to Sell You Something: But if it has to cop to its own manipulations to do it, is it so implausible that that might be actual progress rather than a plot?

And anyone who believes that all spoofing of marketing is tacitly rubber-stamped by Corporate Central might look at last week's firing of editor Michael Hirschorn of Spin. As Hirschorn once told Mediaweek, he tried "to build the magazine from just being a music-industry bible to also being a youth-culture bible." Hirschorn's success was that he recognized there was no point in distinguishing entertainment product from the rest of the product (electronics, clothes, food) pitched at his youthful readers; and his downfall -- the "creative differences" Miller Publishing cited for terminating and buying out Hirschorn -- was apparently that he treated both types with too little reverence.

During Hirschorn's year and a half, the magazine ran numerous features taking apart the mechanics of the entertainment biz and street-fashion marketing, and included, until recently, the acerbic front-of-book "Product" section, which included arch write-ups on the consumer goodies foisted on Spin's young readership. Hirschorn calls the focus an outgrowth of his immersion, and that of his features editor, David Moodie (formerly of Might), in brand-saturated magazine culture: "When you spend a lot of time in the media world ... you spend way too much time seeing through the manipulations and messages that are targeted at you, so you want to pick them apart."

Without rejecting consumer culture outright, Spin gave its audience a subtler, more engaging and effective read on it than most academics'. "Rather than a kind of Marxist response, where you have to smash the system," Hirschorn says, "I think young people tend to be amused and view it as a kind of parlor game, where you have to pick apart the old folks' efforts." Now, the knock on Spin's brand of knowing snidery is that it all serves those old bastards' interests: that the features and sarcastic charticles simply feed a general weary cynicism among kids, who'll keep buying the product while maybe feeling somehow superior to it -- plus, somebody gets what amounts to a free ad. But that hardly explains Hirschorn's getting his walking papers.

Granted, Hirschorn's deposal may just prove that publishers are simply more naive than advertisers are. "[Advertisers] don't respond favorably if you make fun of their product," he says, "but they respond favorably to that idea, that kind of metaconsciousness about marketing and pop culture." But it certainly shows that the work in Spin, both immersed in and skeptical of the marketing world, was more than ineffectual ironic quislingism. The problem with the Frank-style critique is the absurd amount of credit it gives advertisers; by these defeatist arguments, the same folks who bring you, say, the clumsy, youth-pandering Mazda Protege ads ("Charlie works in cyberspace/Backslash dot com all day long") are wily, omnipotent Goebbelses who can enslave us at whim with a few scribbles on a white board. Really they're more like quasi-anthropologists, sometimes brilliant, sometimes bumbling, always perplexed by a tribe that's constantly changing on them. Advertising critics argue, correctly, that youth marketers rely on constant change to make room for new product; but that change still makes them nervous, as the "Dick" campaign and attendant uproar showed.