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There
are few paradoxes as strong as advertising--a form of
communication so helpful to our economy and the well
being of so many people, yet so destructive to our moral,
physical, and emotional growth and fitness. Advertising
has helped us by creating an economy based on spending,
which keeps money flowing, which keeps businesses alive,
which keeps jobs available. Yet how much damage has
advertising done to our psyches? The answer to that
question may never be provided.
Advertising
is based on creating dissatisfaction, on making people
want more than they have, look different than they look,
go places they've never gone. It's based on the idea of
creating a need where previously no need was seen. A
"Calvin and Hobbes" strip put it well, when
Hobbes points out to Calvin that his emotional well being
depended on a need that wasn't there until he happened to
read an advertisement for a product. This kind of
dissatisfaction, though, is destructive rather than
productive. It's dissatisfaction based on ownership (or
lack of), materialism, and aesthetic appeal, but not
dissatisfaction based on the truly productive ways of
improving ourselves.
Dissatisfaction
isn't necessarily a negative trait. If I'm dissatisfied
with the way I treat other people, then I look for ways
to improve that treatment. If I'm dissatisfied with my
job, I work harder to try for a promotion or I look for a
different job. But advertising depends on creating
dissatisfaction on a material, aesthetic, or sexual level. How many people in the world truly look like the
men and women in the ads and commercials? Look around--you
know the answer.
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Yet how many young women (and
increasingly young men) end up with eating disorders
because they're trying to present an image just like one
they've seen on television or in their magazines? They
don't listen when their friends and families tell them
that they're too thin, because they're just where they
want to be. The problem, of course, is that they don't
realize why they want to be where they are.
They've
bought into the reality offered by advertisers, the
reality that says you'll be more popular if you look a
certain way, if you drive a certain car, if you wear a
certain brand of jeans or t-shirt. It seems so obvious
that it's almost painful to see it, but try telling them
that they're wearing a certain brand name because they've
been victimized by advertisers, and they'll deny the
possibility completely. The tragedy is that wearing those
clothes or buying that car won't have the effect that the
advertisers have promised, and disappointment will join
the dissatisfaction, just adding to the problems that we
all have to deal with in our lives.
Advertisers
often work at eroding our moral character, also. One of
the more offensive styles of advertising shows that lying
is acceptable if we get what we need or want through it,
or if it can help us save face. One example of this is a
current Dunkin' Donuts ad, in which a pregnant woman
pulls up to the drive-through, pretending to be silencing
kids in the back. She buys four of a certain product,
hushing the kids the whole time, but it turns out that
all the children sounds are on tape, and she's deceiving
the drive-through person in order to buy four of the
product for herself without being embarrassed.
Why
lie about that? What's wrong with going through a drive-through
and buying four of a product, even if it is for yourself? The advertisers are implying there's something wrong with
that, and there isn't. What are kids learning from this?
I
can think of two more ad campaigns that focus on lying as
a means to an end; both of them, though, concern people on the job.
First,
there are two "traffic reporters" working for a
radio station. We see their bird's-eye view of the
highway, we hear them giving the traffic report, and we
hear the sounds of the helicopter they're supposedly in. Then they pop the tape of helicopter sounds out of the
tape player, and they drive off from the hilltop they're
on. The ad is for an SUV that can take them to such
places easily and quickly. I guess it's supposed to be
funny, but it's simply dishonest. Ask yourself this: what would happen to you on the job if
you pulled a stunt like that? But again, what are kids
learning from seeing such behavior on a regular basis on
the parts of adults, who are supposed to be role models?
The
other one was from Pizza Hut, and three or four people
from the same office are in a car when they drive by the
Pizza Hut. They see an advertised special, and they
decide to stop and eat. Then we hear them calling the
office on the cell phone, and they tell their boss or co-workers
that the traffic is horrible, and they're not going to
make it back for quite a while. They're lying, for the
camera shows the car on an almost-empty residential
street. Again, someone in an ad firm thought this type of
dishonesty is funny, and made a commercial showing lying
as one of those funny little quirks of people. Why couldn't
they get on the phone and say, "Hey, we're starving,
so we'll be about a half-hour later than we planned. We'll
work an extra half-hour when we get back"? But that
would be honest (do I answer my own question?), and the
"humor" would be lost.
So
what do we do? Ban advertising? Absolutely not--that
would run against everything that we hold dear, our
freedom and our economy and our ability to choose. But we
need to start teaching kids early just what advertisers
are trying to accomplish, and how. We need to help them
build an immunity to the wants and needs that are being
created by people who don't even know who we are, and who
don't even care, as long as we spend our money on their
products. We need to show kids the results advertisers
are looking for, and teach them the methods they're using.
Advertising
can be very positive, and there are many positive
advertisers out there who are doing great things with the
ads they pay for. We applaud them. But we have to be
aware of how they're manipulating us--and advertising is
a form of manipulation--if we want to be satisfied with
our lives. Let them do what they will, but let us see
through their methods and deal with them on a personal
basis, keeping ourselves and our minds healthy and whole,
not becoming dissatisfied with who we are and what we
have simply because someone's trying to sell us a product
or an idea. Live your life--be you, not what someone who
will never meet you wants you to be or thinks you should
be.
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The cumulative effect of initiating
our children into a consumerist ethos
at an even earlier
age may be profound. As kids drink in the world
around
them, many of their cultural encounters--from books to
movies to
TV--have become little more than sales pitches,
devoid of any moral beyond
a plea for purchase. Even
their classrooms are filled with corporate logos.
Instead
of transmitting a sense of who we are and what we hold
important,
today's marketing-driven culture is instilling
in them the sense that little
exists without a sales
pitch attached and that self-worth is
something you buy
at a shopping mall.
"No one ad is so bad,"
says Mary Pipher, a clinical psychologist and author
of The
Shelter of Each Other, a best-seller about family
life. "But the
combination of 400 ads a day creates
in children a combination
of narcissism, entitlement, and
dissatisfaction."
David Leonhardt and Kathleen Kerwin
Hey Kids, Buy This!
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There are huge advertising
budgets only when there's no difference between
the products. If the products really were different, people would buy
the one
that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment.
Advertising teaches people to be stupid.
Carl Sagan
Contact
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Isn't it
possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud,
presenting
an image of America taken seriously by no one, least
of all
the advertising people who create it?
David Riesman
The Lonely Crowd
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It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to
see
the rich asking for more money. And advertisement
is the rich asking for more money.
G.K. Chesterton
The New Jerusalem
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Advertising
treats all products with the reverence and the
seriousness due to sacraments.
Thomas
Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
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The
paradox [of advertising] is that we get two sets of
messages coming at us
every day. One is the "permissive"
message, saying, "Buy, spend, get it now,
indulge
yourself," because your wants are also your needs--and
you have plenty
of needs that you don't even know about
because our consumer culture hasn't told
you about them
yet! The other we would call, for lack of a better word,
a "puritanical" message, which says, "Work
hard, save, defer gratification,
curb your impulses." What are the psychological and social consequences
of
getting such totally contradictory messages all the time? This is
what you would call "cognitive
dissonance," and the psychological consequence
is a
pervasive anxiety, upon which the political right has
been
very adept at
mobilizing and building. The puritanical
message comes to us from a variety of sources: from
school,
from church, often from parents, and every so
often from political figures
when they refer to "traditional
values." Hard work, family loyalty, the capacity
to
defer gratification--these are supposed to be core,
American values,
the traits that made our country great
and so forth.
But the
permissive message, as I said, comes to us chiefly in the
form
of advertising, which is a force to which family
therapists should perhaps
devote more attention. Advertising is inescapable; it is fed to us in dozens
of
forms and in more and more settings.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Spend
and Save
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I just saw an
ad the other day that I couldn't believe. There was
this woman--and
I think it's degrading to womankind--she was going
out of her mind over a
new product called "A Thousand Flushes."
Here she was in her toilet,
saying, "Oh, I love this product!" and,
"My life is
complete!"
Good God--if your joy depends on "A Thousand Flushes," you're
sick!
Leo Buscaglia
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If a person had delivered
up your body to some passer-by,
you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in
delivering up your own mind to any
reviler,
to be disconcerted and confounded?
Epictetus
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All the
papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the
advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
George Orwell
Why I Write
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One
of my favorite students from a few years ago was named Ramon.
He
was a great person--he tried his best at all he did, he worked
hard at learning from everyone he met, and he was a very giving
soul. There was one thing about him, though, that I was always
able to give him a hard time about: his clothes. More often than
not, Ramon would be dressed top to bottom in Nike clothing, and
the swoosh and the brand name were on his hat, his shirt, his
pants, and his shoes.
"How
much is Nike paying you to advertise for them?" I used to
ask him, and he used to tell me that Nike wasn't paying him
anything--he was paying Nike for the "honor" of
advertising for them.
This is
one of the sadder tendencies of our commercial culture--
advertisers are recruiting people to live life with
their logos on their clothing, their cars, their uniforms, their
backpacks. You name it, and it's probably got a highly visible
logo on it. If you're an athlete or actor or any other extremely
popular person, they'll pay you an awful lot of money to wear
their clothing, but the rest of us have to pay for the
privilege. Tiger Woods gets paid millions of dollars every year
to wear Nike clothing, but Ramon has to pay inflated prices in
order to be able to advertise for Nike.
How do
we get so wrapped up in the desire to have certain clothing that
we're willing to pay to wear their ads? I know what the psychologists
and psychoanalysts would say, but their explanation is rather long
and drawn out. As simply as possible, it seems that we're trying
to send a message about our own tastes and preferences to other
people by deciding to wear certain logos. In theory, this
expression should attract others with similar tastes and
preferences, which should help us to make contact with other
people who are like us.
In
practice, though, the wearing of logos acts more like a barrier
on both ends--sender and receiver. Many people read the logos to
mean "If you don't like what I like, stay away."
This
isn't an unjustified interpretation of the message, as many
people (especially high school students) actually use logos in
this way. Much of their self-esteem and self-image is wrapped up
in that logo and the message it sends, and which person who
wears an over-priced Tommy Hilfiger shirt to school wants to be
seen hanging around with someone who's wearing a shirt from
K-Mart or Wal-Mart? The student wearing the Nike clothes feels
somewhat superior to the kid wearing the no-name shoes from a
department store.
This
seems to be a rather natural symptom of a society that is
increasingly fragmented, among people who more and more have to
SEARCH for an identity, for their parents aren't sharing theirs
any more. Unfortunately, the ad campaigns teach them to search
outside themselves, to try to find identity (and thus
fulfillment) in things that have nothing to do with their real
lives.
Bill Watterson, in one of his typically perceptive "Calvin and
Hobbes" comic strips, says, "A good shirt turns the
wearer into a walking corporate billboard. It says to the world,
'My identity is so wrapped up in what I buy that I paid the
company to advertise its products!'" He ends the strip with
the line, "Endorsing products is the American way to
express individuality."
It's a
rather scary thought--our young people are learning that their
identities are somehow connected to what they buy and what they
own, despite thousands of years of wise women and men pointing
out that this attitude is harmful to us as human beings, for it
keeps our focus on external aspects of our lives. And as we
focus more on the external, we're less and less able to see
clearly what we need to see internally.
There's
no way to control the wants and needs of others, but there
certainly are ways to educate people. When my stepdaughters want
clothes with a certain label, we'll buy them if they're
reasonably priced, but we'll always let them know that their
choice of clothing simply because of the brand name is exactly
what the corporation wants of them--free advertising of their
products. And we'll never pay a high price for any clothing when
more reasonably priced clothing is available in the next rack.
I don't
know if Ramon loved his Nike clothing, or if he thought that the
clothes contributed to his identity. I do know that Ramon didn't
need the clothing--he was a great person, and his personality
spoke volumes on its own. I also know, though, that the clothing
acted as a barrier to some people who might otherwise have found
him to be much more approachable. Ramon was not Nike, and Nike
was not Ramon, but Nike sure had shoved itself into his life and
his consciousness. |
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Thinkers - the people behind the words
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The newspaper ad
showed photographs of two boats: One was an extravagant cruiser
splashing boldly through a small wave. The other was a simple
rowboat with two oars.
The cruiser,
indicated the ad, was what you'd have if you did business with that
financial service provider. The rowboat was what you'd have if you
did not.
Though
deceptively simple, the ad illustrates the materialistic equation that
tugs at our hearts, minds--and souls--each day: the idea that
bigger is better. The idea that something garish is better than
something simple. The idea that something fast is better than
something slow. And--no pun intended--the idea that if we do not
choose big, garish, and fast, then we're somehow missing the boat.
At its root, the
ad wants you to feel unhappy, discontent, lacking, inferior,
temporary. Because materialism--in essence, the doctrine
suggesting that things, not relationships, make the world go
around--is a replacement for something else. And when we're
content with that something else--the something else you can't buy with
a credit card--we won't need to adorn our lives with the unnecessary
goods and services being flashed before us at every turn.
Bob Welch
The
Things That Matter Most
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Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what
they are not.
E. R. Beadle
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As the wall
between advertising and content erodes, the aptitude required to
understand the functions and design of media content becomes more
complex.
Matthew P. McAllister
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What editors are
obliged to appear to say that men want from
women is actually what their advertisers want from women.
Naomi Wolf
The Beauty Myth
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What
is the difference between unethical and ethical
advertising?
Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to
deceive the public;
ethical advertising uses truth
to deceive the public.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
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Let
advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product
that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it.
Will Rogers
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Advertisers
in general bear a large part of the responsibility
for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women
to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle.
Marya Mannes (1964)
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Our
society's values are being corrupted by advertising's insistence
on the equation: Youth equals popularity, popularity equals success,
success equals happiness.
John Fisher
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Advertising design, in persuading
people to buy things they don't need,
with money they don't have, in order to impress others who don't care,
is probably the phoniest field in existence today.
Victor Papanek
Design for the Real World
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If
I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within
capitalism--the
single greatest source of its waning morality--I should without
hesitation name
advertising. How else should one identify a force that debases
language, drains
thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising,
unchanged in its tone
and texture, were devoted to some other purpose--say the exaltation of
the
public sector--it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive
element
that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this
startled notice. I
mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for
capitalism
arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions.
Robert L. Hellbroner
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History
will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time.
It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want
that.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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The
trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life
has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
Louis Kronenberger
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You
can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
Norman Douglas
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The advertising industry is a huge industry, and
anyone with their eyes open can see what it's for. First of all,
the existence of the advertising industry is a sign of the
unwillingness to let markets function. If you had markets, you
wouldn't have advertising. Like, if somebody has something to
sell, they say what it is and you buy it if you want. But when
you have oligopolies, they want to stop price wars. They have to
have product differentiation, and you've got to turn to diluting
people into thinking you should buy this rather than that. Or
just getting them to consume--if you can get them to consume,
they're trapped, you know.
It starts with the infant, but now there's a huge part of the
advertising industry which is designed to capture children. And
it's destroying childhood. Anyone who has any experience with
children can see this. It's literally destroying childhood. Kids
don't know how to play. They can't go out and, you know, like
when you were a kid or when I was a kid, you have a Saturday
afternoon free. You go out to a field and you're finding a bunch
of other kids and play ball or something. You can't do anything
like that. It's got to be organized by adults, or else you're at
home with your gadgets, your video games.
But the idea of going out just to play with all the creative
challenge, those insights: that's gone. And it's done
consciously to trap children from infancy and then to turn them
into consumer addicts.
Noam Chomsky |
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Many
media commercials encourage us to believe that if we buy
a certain product, we can be physically appealing, or popular, or
successful. According to the commercial message, it may be easy
to make friends and influence people if we simply do what we're
told to do. It would be wonderful if that were true, but
unfortunately
life does not seem to work that way. What is inside of us can be
much more important and influential than what is outside.
John Marks
Templeton
Worldwide Laws of Life
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In a culture that is
becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative
of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he
donates
a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of
Congress,
that "Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by
helping to tell
these stories," it is perhaps not surprising that people have
trouble teaching and
receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even
more
urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if
only to
protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated
among us.
George Saunders
The Braindead Megaphone
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Advertising
is the modern substitute for argument; its
function is to make the worse appear the better.
George Santayana
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One the one hand, our
economists treat human beings as rational actors
making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other
hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for
advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to
encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a
matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious
matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business
as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.
John Michael Greer
The Long Descent
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Once
a culture becomes entirely advertising friendly, it ceases to be a
culture at all.
Mark Crispin Miller
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All of us somehow felt that the
next battleground was going to be culture. We
all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us--by
commercial forces,
by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no
longer singing
our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the
bottom up, but
now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.
Kalle Lasn
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To build a sustainable future will require
dramatic changes in the overall levels and patterns of
consumption in developed nations. To change consumption
levels and patterns will require a new consciousness and new
consensus among millions of persons--and this will require
dramatic changes in the consumerist messages we give ourselves
through the mass media, particularly television. In the
United States 98 percent of all homes have a TV set, and the
average person watches more than four hours of television per
day. In addition, a majority of people get a majority of
their news from this source. What is more, the average
person will see more than 35,000 commercials each year.
Television is more powerful than either the schools or the
workplace in creating our shared view of reality and social
identity. Not surprisingly, then, television is the most
powerful instrument in developed nations for promoting either
consumption or conservation.
Currently, the television industry is aggressively promoting
high-consumption lifestyles and ignoring the re-definition of
the "good life" that is needed if we are to build a
more sustainable future. The television industry is
understandably unsympathetic to simple ways of living.
Television stations make their profits by delivering the largest
possible audience of potential customers to corporate
advertisers. Mass entertainment is used to capture the
attention of a mass audience that is then appealed to by mass
advertising in order to promote mass consumption. The
television industry deliberately ignores the views and values of
those who have little to spend (the poor) and those who choose
to spend little (the frugal person or family that is more
concerned with the quality of being than the quantity of
having).
The profound consumerist bias of contemporary television creates
an impossible double bind: People use the consumption
levels and patterns portrayed in TV advertising to evaluate
their levels of personal well-being while those same consumption
patterns are simultaneously devastating the environment and
resource base on which our future depends. If the old
adage that "one picture is worth a thousand words" is
correct, then the 35,000 or so commercials that people see each
year represent the equivalent of 35 million words (!) about the
seeming importance of material consumption to our happiness and
satisfaction with life.
These commercials are far more than a pitch for a particular
product--they are also advertisements for the attitudes, values,
and lifestyles that surround consumption of that product.
The clothing, cars, settings, and other elements that create the
context for an advertisement send strong, implicit messages as
to the standards of living and patterns of behavior that are the
norm for society.
Not surprisingly, more frugal patterns of living and consuming
seldom appear on television. These themes would threaten
the legitimacy and potency of the television-induced cultural
hypnosis generated by a self-perpetuating cycle of mass
entertainment, mass advertising, and mass consumption. By
default, industrial societies are left with programming and
advertising that selectively portray and powerfully reinforce a
materialistic orientation toward life.
Duane Elgin
Voluntary
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We begin to suspect that our life is not working quite the way the
TV commercials say it will. Television advertisements suggest that
if you have the newest hair spray and makeup and garage door
opener, you life is going to be great. Right? Well, most of us find
that isn’t true. And as we see that, we begin to see that the way we
live isn’t working. The selfish greed which runs our lives is not working.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Everyday Zen: Love and Work
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