Using Self-awareness to Identify with Hipsters

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Advertising

This advertising campaign is aimed at hipsters and uses self-awareness to identify themselves with their target demographic. The ad features a man who has many characteristics of a hipster (he is wearing plaid, wears glasses, has a comb over, wears a V-neck shirt) meeting with a therapist to discuss his problems with Internet Explorer.

 Self-awareness and the ability to poke fun at yourself is one of the core elements of hipsterdom. Self awareness allows one to look at one's own faults from an outside point of view and enjoy in the entertainment of making fun of yourself. In this way Hipsters enjoy the 'irony' in being self-aware of how uncool they are. According to Barthes, we are all stereotypes, and a hipster's ability to at least recognize one's own culture is an element of self-awareness. In this Internet Explorer ad , the company attempts to do just this. Internet Explorer actually distances itself from it's former products by having the commercial's protagonist be an internet explorer hater. However, the new IE9 is "actually pretty good" he says at the end. It's like Microsoft is saying "We know our products used to suck". Notice even how at the end of the ad, the product isn't even called Internet Explorer, it's now 'IE9'.

Here, the goal of the ad is to capture market share from competitors by hoping that people who left internet explorer to go to Chrome or some superior product will now come back, or at least hate it less. It's identifying with it's staunchest opponents by interpolating your distaste for Internet Explorer. As if it's saying "Hey, you seem like a person who hates internet explorer, well here's you in the ad". Once the viewer has accepted the fact that the ad has admitted to creating faulty products, it's requests to try it's new products become more credible.

Second IE ad

The stereotype that hipsters drink PBR is probably one of the most well known clichés about hipster culture. In fact, it's now so cliché that hipsters reject it as being 'too mainstream'. The reason that Hipsters began drinking PBR was because it was ironic; it was a beer originally marketed marketed towards blue collar workers in the Midwest. Internet Explorer attempts to piggyback some of the success of PBR by using the similarities between IT and PBR; that they both are/were thought of as uncool or rustic.

It's almost saying that you should use Internet Explorer ironically, as no one uses it any more because it's so lame. Even in the television commercial, notice how the son's mom is using Internet Explorer to update her blog on "Gluten-free Gingerbread". Internet Explorer is purposefully displaying how uncool it is. Hipsters are all about rejecting mainstream and doing things that no one else does, Internet Explorer uses this opportunity to market to hipsters by basically saying to use their product ironically. 

Ad for Urban Eatery

This ad is pretty risky as it pokes a lot fun at Hipsters. The ad is hoping though, that the hipsters self-awareness will allow them to laugh at themselves by identifying with the description that the chalkboard gives. The restaurant clearly does advertise to hipsters in that it sells "fresh ingredients from local farms" and then repeatedly insults hipster culture in a somewhat condescending fashion. Hipsters are also very self-important, so perhaps the description of Hipster will being in the consumer through their own ego. After all, people love being told about themselves. This ad gambles that the viewer will stick around to read the whole ad (it is way longer than 8 words and contains no pictures) mainly because self-important people want to know what labels they fit in to.

 Perhaps though the ad is so dead-on in it's depiction of what a hipster should be like, that it is using interpolation to prime people into thinking that if they eat at Urban Eatery they will be like the person described in the ad. It appeals to the theory that we buy our identity through our commodity culture. And that if we eat at 'Urban Eatery' (notice event the hipness in the name) we will be the cool, vaguely disinterested hipster described in the ad.

All the ads targeting hipsters perform subgroup hails by focusing on the 'look' and habits of hipsters. The ads  then focus on a self-awareness to bring down the hipsters skepticism and force-fields to traditional advertisements.