Скачать или смотреть Ian Leslie — How Advertising Consumed the Counterculture

Ian Leslie reconstructs the rise and fall of “countercultural branding”—when the rhetoric of the 1960s was repurposed to sell products. Beginning with Mad Men’s nod to Coca‑Cola’s “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” it shows how brands learned to wrap goods in the language of peace, authenticity, and rebellion. Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl spot cast IBM as Big Brother; Nike operationalised “irreverence justified”; and Apple’s “Think Different” canonised creative outsiders, even borrowing civil‑rights iconography, to turn consumption into a quasi‑movement. The second act explains why this window closed: today’s corporate giants can no longer play the plucky rebel; the counterculture became corporate culture; and polarisation punishes brands that gesture at politics without credibility, as in the Kendall Jenner–Pepsi fiasco or the Bud Light backlash. The result is fragmented “tribal” marketing rather than universal rebel appeals. The lecture offers a concise cultural history of how capitalism absorbs opposition—until the pose ceases to persuade.

Ian Leslie is a British writer on psychology, creativity, and culture, author of Curious, Conflicted, and John & Paul. Before writing full‑time, he worked as an advertising strategist—experience that grounds his analysis of branding and culture.

Key Topics
02:02 Mad Men and Coke: the origin story of rebel branding.
06:01 Apple’s “1984”: product marketing as ideological insurgency.
10:25 Nike’s “irreverence justified” playbook.
12:27 “Think Different” to Rosa Parks: canonising the outsider.
13:35 Why the era ended: Pepsi’s misfire and polarised brand activism.

The published anthology
https://bokforlagetstolpe.com/en/book...

The essay
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/ho...

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