Thou shalt want, more

Imagine for a minute you woke one morning to find all advertising replaced with religious scripture. If you are Christian, imagine the messages were Muslim, and vice versa if you’re Muslim. Every logo, billboard, television advert and radio spot, now a quote from the Bible. How would you respond?

I’m pretty positive that people would be annoyed, even outraged. On every page of their newspapers, more scripture than news. Jesus gazing at you from the back of toilet cubicle doors, and a quick sermon before tonight’s movie, and every 12 minutes during sitcoms.

We’d object to the indiscriminate pushing of religion without our consent. How dare they bombard me with religion in my own home? Who gave them the right to put this stuff on the radio/ on the TV/ in my magazine? This is public space, how can they fill it with such messages, do they own the public all of a sudden?

Hopefully some would take it upon themselves to graffiti the billboards. We’d say that freedom of expression had gone too far, feeling that we’d woken up to an intolerant and repressive state, an Orwellian nightmare.

The point, though, is this is already taking place, only most of us haven’t noticed. It’s only when we use the mechanisms of one ideology to push another, that we realise the absurd degree to which consumerism bombards our lives.

Ultimately all advertising tells the same story: how we’d be happier / sexier / more successful / more of an individual if we buy whatever is being advertised. It’s the ideology of constant consumption, and it is being pushed in magazines, on TVs, on the internet, and through your email. We are thoroughly saturated with media messages telling us to buy, buy, buy, and that we’ll be better off for it.

In 2006 the total amount spent on advertising worldwide was $427 billion — that’s more than $61 spent on every human being in the world. By the age of ten, American children can recognise on average 400 brands (118)¹. If we were exposed to religious messages as frequently and invasively as we are exposed to logos, brands, and commercial messaging, we’d call it indoctrination. However when it comes to advertising, most people don’t even notice how invasive and pervasive it is.

What’s interesting is that if South Africans are anything like consumers in the US, 90% would say that despite continual exposure to commercial messaging, advertising has no effect on what they buy. They’d claim to be rational, free-thinking individuals, uninfluenced by glitzy images. We like to think that advertising is harmless; that it has little effect on what, or if we buy. Yet though 90% say advertising is ineffective, 76% “always consider the brand of a product before making a product selection”². And that “consideration” of the brand comes down to brand essence, brand identity, and how a brand has been positioned: advertising and marketing in short.

We have become so accustomed to the ubiquity of commercial messaging, that we assume we are immune to its messages. But consider that companies who spend the most on advertising are consistently the ones controlling their particular market (35)³. Clearly advertising works, which means we aren’t all that immune after all.

Although we may not rush out to buy Nike every time one of its billboards yells at us, what we purchase, and more importantly, the amount we spend on purchases, is heavily influenced by advertising. We respond to promises of a more luxurious life, a softer skin, a happier family, a whiter smile, and we spend our money on manufactured desires. We believe that paying extra for a shirt with a swoosh will make us feel more sporty, more valuable.

Our willingness to buy a more expensive computer simply because it has a half-eaten apple on the front is a function of advertising. And the emotions we associate with that logo — creativity, open mindedness, spontaneity — those associations are also all created through advertising: those billboards, TV ads, and magazine inserts we think have little effect on us.

I am not saying that we are all media dupes, completely incapable of resisting the urge to whip out our credit cards. What I am saying is that advertising does work. It gets us to buy what we don’t really need, and leaves us willing to pay extra for branded goods because we’ve been convinced that they are better quality, they are superior, or will make our lives better than before.

It’s a system that profits from driving insecurities and creating anxieties, leaving us with “needs” we never had before, and which remain unsatisfied every time we get back from the sales and the endorphins run out. Women, and men for that matter, how often do you finish looking through a Cosmo or a Men’s Health and feel empowered, happy with the way you look and what’s in your wardrobe? Do beauty adverts make you feel beautiful, or make you want to feel beautiful?

This is power of advertising. And believing that it has no effect on how you live your life is advertising at its most powerful.