Is Advertising Evil?
Revisiting some old questions before Super Bowl Sunday.
Once upon a time our greatest minds abhorred the advertising industry with a tireless and often revolutionary vigor. Novelists, painters, thinkers, philosophers used to take up arms not just in an uproar toward a specific ad i.e. one that continues the sickening distortions of women’s bodies, for example, but toward the industry as a whole. The question of the relationship between advertising and art, and advertisements insidious ability to distort our notion of art, occupied a foundational place in our aesthetic notions. (Lewis Hyde in his seminal book, The Gift, gave that question one of the more extensive and influential treatments of the topic.) Our greatest post-modern writers all made the nefarious effects of advertising a central part of their books, and cultural critics wrote dense tracts decrying the propaganda of advertising, how it fosters a slavish devotion to unthinking consumerism and support of oppressive regimes. Though David Foster Wallace dropped many of the privileged insular obsessions of the Post-Modern writers, he picked up this strain of thinking making it part of his central outlook on the world in his essay, E Unum Pluribas.
Long-time radical thinker, Noam Chomsky, made advertising one of the central aspects of his political and cultural criticism. He sees advertisement as the explicit propaganda tool of American government and capitalist industry, a propaganda that not only fosters support for American mythology of opportunity and prestige, but also creates slavish devotion to diversions from politics like shopping, sports and entertainment. (Chomsky would want us to think through the implications of 9 huge international conglomerate corporations owning and controlling most of the media we are exposed to day in and out, which seems like a pretty relevant question.) Accumulating the almost endless and complex lists of the ills of advertisement and the dangers it presents for modern society proposed by these writers would take too long and Wikipedia serves as a much better introduction into that topic. What I find so damn interesting is that shockingly this main concern of yore has become a sort of non-starter in conversations, even less than the question of nuclear proliferation. This in of itself, the disappearance of this question has also gone largely unnoticed.
I don’t yet know when this radically changed, but our era, on the whole, reacts to advertising on a proscribed and delimited spectrum of reactions. Most try to avoid advertisements, but if forced to watch most don’t feel offended by the notion of advertisement. On the whole, we no longer see advertising as inhibiting our freedom in anyway. Rather we see it as a necessary though often-flawed tool of free trade and capitalism. Some circles go so far as laud its power, its brilliance, its ingenuity in the face of a shifting society. When we do criticize advertisements we do so on a case by case basis, rarely attacking it as a system. Criticism of advertising, understandably so, still flourishes outside of America, but here, something changed and either we don’t care anymore because we shouldn’t care, or we’ve forgotten to care.
Recently, one of our more brilliant American writers, Joshua Cohen brought up this question i.e. what happened to criticizing advertising, but laments that it seems to be an old and stale pursuit. Yet, seeing as we are about to enter into the Mecca of advertising seasons with the Super Bowl, it seems prudent to revisit some of these questions. That could take forever, but I think a focus on one specific commercial can highlight some of the persistent issues. Here’s, by all accounts, a pretty innocuous, kind of cute, maybe even inspiring/moving ad.
This is the long version of the commercial. Like many commercials of the same ilk, the conceit is straightforward = Take some universal sentiment (i.e. love of a family member, puppies, or the desire to be happy) portray so it looks endlessly enticing (attractive people, bright colors, sleek design etc.) then try to create an association between that non-controversial feeling and your product. The last requires some bit of magic and finagling because what the hell does the world being pretty great have to do with a Honda Civic, but the gamble is that people won’t notice this gap or won’t care.
So what’s potentially wrong with this ad? How could something so ostensibly innocuous be evil? First off, I like to think of commercials as concentrated acts of emotional mugging. Ads force out emotions or thoughts — i.e. here, “the world is actually a great place, let’s celebrate!” they move us emotionally, but without any real emotional fodder or experience to back it up. In that sense, advertisements are wholly manipulative. Manipulation generally ought to make us wary, but manipulation solely to get something from us should force us to raise all the red flags.
On the most basic level feeling emotionally mugged like this all for the explicit purpose of buying a car ought to make us feel like we are being pandered to, like dumb children. Advertising will never hide the fact that its basic function is manipulation, most often very crude manipulation that treats the viewer like asshole idiots. On the whole, we all know this and accept it as necessary. We know that advertisements work this way, but we see ourselves as past and above manipulation so who cares if the commercial is offensive and manipulative if it can’t manipulate me?
For now, let’s leave this response alone to go into a considerably more problematic side of advertising: commercials as propaganda. Now, this commercial is a great example because it posits an important question about the world i.e. isn’t the world such an awful place, which is another way of asking, “What the fuck happened to the American Dream?” Of course coming to terms with the insanely wide gap between what America promises and what it provides is perhaps the central question of our generation, so it’s not an unimportant issue.
The commercial asks this question then provides evidence for the question mostly through images of economic and ecological decline. It presents itself as one of us: sincere, genuine, multi-racial, into cool music, technologically savvy, searching for answers to the ills of society. Then comes the turn. The commercial raises the question then answers, “But it’s not.” The rest of the commercial contains images, and actors explaining why the world isn’t so bad, in fact why the world is pretty great. Let’s therefore posit that perhaps we cant answer this question in a 30 second commercial, and that it deserves some real thought to think about what it would mean for the world to be a good place i.e. for whom, and who gets to measure?
But the biggest problem is that this sentiment, this supposed answer is coming from a corporation, and by most accounts huge globalized corporations like car companies are the problem with the world. So, in a sort of twisted manner, the evil of the world is asking with us, “hey, the world isn’t so great, right?” then answering for us, or as us that, “hey, you know what the world is pretty great!” If this was a video made by some grassroots collective then it would be different. But that its made with millions of dollars, with the tools of globalization, for the explicit purpose of making people think they need something they don’t need, it hard not to accept this as twisted and evil. The people who reap the benefits off this sick society are basically telling us that society isn’t so sick just so they can make more money off of us.
This criticism doesn’t even take into account the very specific points the commercial makes about what makes the world not so awful. But here they are: “Science, selfies, puppies, being accepted for who you are, art, driving on mars, engineering fast cars, more to see, more to do…” Now, let’s put aside that the list sounds like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, because the cynicism and dishonesty ought to strike us as grotesque. For a car company to tell us that the world is pretty great because of science and art is absurd because the car has nothing to do with that. To then tell us that the world is great, and it’s no worse than it has been not only flies in the face of what we know and experience, our sense of morality, but it overly simplifies a dense issue just to separate us from our money. The message seems to go like this. Though the world seems like it’s gone to shit, it hasn’t that was just a misperception on your part. Rather, the world is great, here’s why, and therefore you should spend more money on things like cars.
I don’t know about you, but after this commercial I feel manipulated, pandered down to, and complicit in spreading some obviously nefarious myths about America, the world, technology and capitalism . Why we stopped caring about things like this, why we stopped feeling overwhelmingly offended by ads like this is therefore, beyond me. There’s considerably more to say and to analyze, but I just wanted to re-start a long lost conversation.
