The problem with advertising

Advertising is one of the primary forces of evil in our world, stimulating the more base aspects of our nature, and essential to maintaining the growth economy and consumerism that are such a threat to our biosphere. This argument is made eloquently in the following piece.

However, since it is such a huge industry, in any transition towards a a post-growth economy, the force of advertising could be used to help create different mentalities, by appealing on the less base aspects of our nature.

Comments welcome.

Excerpted from Justin Lewis:

“For all their diversity, advertisements share one basic value system. Advertisements may be individually innocent, collectively they are the propaganda wing of a consumerist ideology. The moral of the thousands of different stories they tell is that the only way to secure pleasure, popularity, security, happiness or fulfilment is through buying more; more consumption – regardless of how much we already have.

There are three problems with this set of values – and they are all profound. First, the promise of advertising is entirely empty. We now have a voluminous body of work showing that past a certain point, there is no connection between the volume of consumer goods a society accumulates and the well-being of its people.

The research shows that a walk in the park, social interaction or volunteering – which cost nothing – will do more for our well-being than any amount of ‘retail therapy’. Advertising, in that sense, pushes us towards maximising our income rather than our free time. It pushes us away from activities that give pleasure and meaning to our lives towards an arena that cannot – what Sut Jhally calls ‘the dead world of things’.

Reviewing the evidence on consumerism and quality of life, Richard Layard argues that legislation banning advertising is a far more plausible policy for increasing quality of life than extending consumer choice. This may be unimaginable in policy terms, but we might begin to ask why we always seem to move in the opposite direction, forever increasing – rather than limiting – the volume of advertising.

The second problem with advertising’s value system is environmental. In a finite world, where the scale of human activity now matches the scale of the planet, our current growth in consumption is unsustainable. The global economy has expanded five-fold in the last fifty years. By the end of the century, if we continue consuming at the current rate, it will be eighty times larger.

Climate scientists insist that if we are to meet the targets required to avoid catastrophic level of global warming, we cannot do it by new technology alone. We must begin to consume less. The nearly half a trillion dollars a year we spend on advertising tells us – with beguiling repetition – to do exactly the opposite. Climate science is not only up against a well-funded PR campaign from vested interests in the energy sector, it has to contend with a hostile cultural environment that continually urges us not to worry and to carry on consuming. Advertising and the culture it promotes thereby threatens the sustainability of life on earth.

The third problem follows from this. If we are to prosper and develop as a species, we must begin to imagine economic models that appreciate the finite, and that do not rely on endless economic growth. We must pursue a way of working that values longevity over built-in obsolescence, on repairing and reusing rather than dumping and replacing. If we want to avoid high unemployment, we need to pass on productivity gains by giving people more free time rather than more money.

Advertising runs counter to all these ideas and thereby stifles our imagination. It keeps us hooked on a cycle of borrow and spend, with fiscal policies dependent on mountains of debt. And it sustains the idea that human progress is measured purely by our ability to acquire as many consumer goods as possible.

Occasionally, advertising can provide us with useful –albeit very partial – information. But in the world of branding, imparting useful information has become increasingly old-fashioned. What we have instead is a vast global industry that elevates one activity above all others, and, in so doing, promotes a very particular set of economic and cultural values.

In an age where these values are coming under increasing challenge, this makes advertising, en mass, intensely political. It is time we recognised it as such.”

2 Comments The problem with advertising

  1. AvatarTom Griffin

    I guess this is happening already, but should the open source movement be thinking about the importance of creating open-source (un)brands, using creative commons or other suitable licenses to ensure they could not be privatised. There needs to be a range of different materials, logos etc, attached to various licenses reflecting the various kinds of ‘open’ production, so that producers could use those materials to identify their own products and cross-market the movement as a whole.

    Obviously, the creative commons logo itself is an example of this, and I’m sure there are many others, but a lot more could be done, maybe through design competitions, curating materials etc.

    The internet commons is a pretty awesome meme-generator. Can it compete with corporate advertising in a strategic way?

  2. AvatarLori

    While some advertising contains some useful information, it is almost never information available nowhere else. And the low signal-to-noise ratio of advertising (let alone the relentless repetition of the message) makes it informational garbage by any yardstick. Plus it degrades the SNR of any information stream it “sponsors.” When I first encountered cyberspace (particularly Usenet) back in 1991, what amazed me most about it (even more than the fast, cheap and easy access to people overseas) was the proof-of-concept for communication functioning independently of advertising. I knew it was too good to be true, and the development of the Internet since the mid-1990’s has proceeded almost exactly as I would have predicted. Basically, it’s become a sort of technological arms race. We obtain technology to tune them out, and they obtain technology to deliver their pseudo-content in more “in-your-face” ways than I, at least, could have even imagined. It looks to me to be an Iron Law of Economics, but I certainly wish you well with promoting your admirable minimalist values.

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