Hawai‘i Studies on Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022. xi, 282 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 9780824890346.
In the final chapter of Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads, Olga Fedorenko observes the dwindling number of commercial posters in the cars of the Seoul subway system. Advertising has largely migrated to mobile phones, fixing riders’ attention on their individual, hand-held devices. This shift is emblematic of the end of an era of a particularly South Korean form of public media: advertising as a valued source of national moral discourse. Fedorenko takes us beyond the semiotic analysis characteristic of much of the scholarship on advertising. Her central argument is that advertisements are far from simply marketing messages designed to stimulate consumer desire; rather, advertising both reflects the historical specificity of the local context in which it appears, and simultaneously plays an under-appreciated role in mediating local forms of culture and capitalism. Fedorenko examines the political and social forces that shaped South Korea’s advertising industry, and in doing so she provides new views of Korean history.
Flower of Capitalism is motivated by a peculiarity of South Korean views regarding advertising: “Historically in South Korea, the cultural logic of advertising prescribed that the commercial interests of advertisers be subordinated to the considerations of public interest” (3). Fedorenko traces this in part to an episode during President Park Chung-hee’s autocratic administration (1961–1979): one of the major newspapers carried a declaration criticizing government censorship and promoting free speech. Park responded by pressuring companies to pull their advertisements to strangle the paper of revenue. In protest, the newspaper printed blank pages in place of the missing advertisements, and for several months thousands of supporters paid for small, anonymous ads to keep the newspaper afloat. Fedorenko uses this story to mark a critical moment giving rise to the South Korean popular view that advertising revenue undergirds the freedom of journalistic expression, and therefore is an essential element of a capitalist democracy. Fedorenko argues that this idea went further: South Koreans came to believe that advertisers should prioritize the public interest over the commercial goal of increasing sales. Advertisers were expected to fulfill citizen desires for public-spirited campaigns even in preference to clear and targeted marketing messages. It is extraordinary that this philosophy underlay domestic advertising in a context in which fostering consumption was a central political economic objective and where media savvy K-culture became a keystone of national development.
Flower of Capitalism provides clearly documented histories of South Korean advertising infrastructure, situated in the developmentalist and authoritarian political economy of the mid-twentieth century and the neo-liberal democracy that pivoted the millennium. Fedorenko shows how the interconnections between the government and the large corporations (chaebol) are reflected in the shifting constraints on broadcast and print media and laws mandating the censorship of advertising. When the government banned the chaebol from media ownership, the chaebol invested in their own corporate advertising agencies through which they wielded influence both via the messages which emphasized their place in a harmonious nation, and through their tactical deployment of advertising fees which gave them leverage to suppress negative media coverage. Even after South Korea emerged from military rule, Fedorenko argues that citizens continued to see advertising as a key institution supporting free expression in advertising-funded media and in advertisements themselves. Ultimately, South Koreans’ recognition of these multiple effects generated and sustained popular vigilance regarding advertising as a form of media art and as an element of the political economy.
While much of Flower of Capitalism reads as a work of cultural studies, Fedorenko’s research methodology includes ethnographic engagement inside an advertising agency, observation of the deliberations of an advertisement oversight board, and elicitation of popular responses to everyday encounters with advertising. These anthropological methods allow Fedorenko to explore the ways advertisers themselves construe their own roles as creative people who impact culture, and, from the other side, how members of the South Korean public engage with an advertisement’s multiple messages. In chapter 3, Fedorenko draws on her work at an advertising agency to illustrate how “South Korean ad makers…developed their own ideal of good advertising [that]…that approximates socially engaged art” (72). In chapter 4, Fedorenko details the process of after-the-fact content review of advertisements (which had replaced pre-publication censorship), examining the ways members of the review board evaluated risqué or misleading advertisements against their expectations of canny or gullible consumers. Fedorenko argues that this process generated expectations of a consumer population equipped with the tools of ironic detachment and sophisticated judgment, in effect producing consumer dispositions. In the next chapter, Fedorenko turns the tables, showing how South Korean publics both conform to these expectations and continue to demand that advertisers consider their public obligations to cultivate national bonds. Fedorenko draws on texts she collected from volunteers who wrote about their reactions to advertising in their daily lives, as well as netizen and blog posts about advertising. The penultimate chapter looks at how consumer activists targeted both advertisements and corporations in “an attempt to actualize the dreamworld of a capitalism prioritizing human needs and serving popular democracy” (196). The book closes with an epilogue recognizing that the context of advertising, and therefore its social impact, has been transformed by the shift to online media.
Fedorenko engages relevant literatures and arguments in media studies, anthropology, and Korean studies, although some of her theoretical interventions might have been profitably discussed more expansively in her text. That said, Flower of Capitalism demonstrates the scholarly value of close attention to advertising as a cultural field. Fedorenko sheds new light on South Korean industrial, commercial, and cultural development in its dynamic political contexts. Flower of Capitalism can be read as a back-stage history of an under-examined domain of South Korean media in the years just before K-culture won over the world. The materials Fedorenko analyzes are illuminating, and they interlock provocatively with the growing field of studies of media productions in the era of the Korean wave. But Flower of Capitalism goes beyond the glitz of hallyu to the battles, large and small, over what South Korean media sells, to whom, and why.
Laura C. Nelson
University of California, Berkeley