Ads, ads everywhere and not a drop to – drink? Well, probably not a drop to drink that’s good for you.
When was the last time you saw an ad for something you really needed?
Do you really need a new car (OK, maybe you do), anti-wrinkle cream that probably doesn’t even work, or an M&M’s candy bar?
No, you don’t need them, and advertisers know that you don’t need them. Chances are you wouldn’t even think about buying any of these things unless they were in your face every single minute of every single day.
But you do buy them, and it’s not because they’re necessary. It’s because the miracle of advertising is that companies can use it to construct a reality in which you desperately need to buy their product in order to have a truly fulfilling life.
This is where the problem starts. If advertisers can shape your reality so that you want something you really shouldn’t, how does that affect the rest of your life?
Wait a minute, you might be saying. Whether or not I buy Cocoa Puffs has nothing to do with how I live my life.
I argue that it does. Recent estimates say that we are exposed to as many as 3,000 ads per day. You don’t come close to doing anything else that many times in one day besides breathing.
Yet everyone claims that advertising has absolutely no effect on them. Surely people aren’t such mindless lemmings that they would follow every mandate on every billboard.
The sad truth is that we are more like lemmings than we would like to think.
No one’s reality is completely self-constructed. You have to have information from somewhere about how the rest of the world works.
Where do you look when you need to know what people find important or how men and women interact? Maybe you look to a religious text, or maybe you look to a biology textbook.
But you inevitably also look at advertising.
Advertising has created a fictional perfect world in which everyone has the best clothes, the perfect body, the best cars, and a nonstop sex life.
Why? Because it sells.
Advertisers want you to think that you can have this perfect life they have created for you if you only buy their product.
But advertising has seriously screwed up the way we view our lives. Our society is more materialistic now than it has ever been before, partially because of the widespread availability of new and exciting products and partially because of the increased opportunity to advertise the hell out of them.
In our blind materialism, we overlook the fact that many of the products advertised everyday are made by people, often in other countries, who are forced to work for very little pay.
That $80 pair of sneakers isn’t expensive because they cost a lot to manufacture. They are expensive because it cost a lot to advertise them and it cost a lot for the president of the shoe company to buy another yacht.
Advertising can be (partially) blamed for the weight problem this country is facing. Before fast food and processed snacks (and, consequently, large scale advertising), the waistlines in this country were a lot slimmer.
You are not gaining anything positive from buying a candy bar.
But the company who manufactured it and the company who sold it to you are reaping plenty of rewards.
Advertising is also keeping women from rising above ‘object’ status, and it is increasingly doing the same thing to men.
Women in advertising are almost always seen as young, thin, beautiful, passive, submissive and innocent. The obvious message is that women who are old, overweight, assertive and experienced are not valuable to society or attractive to other people.
This false culture of advertising is probably the main reason most women in this country are unsatisfied with themselves.
So what can we do about it? Seemingly nothing, since we will continue to be bombarded with 3,000 ads every day, and the number is only growing greater.
But we can resist buying unhealthy food just because it looks good on TV, we can stop buying products made in sweatshops, and we can value women who for who they are, not for what they look like.
We can try our best to think for ourselves.
Or you could just eat your Big Mac and wear your Reeboks.

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