Advertising

Years ago Marshall McLuhan said, “Ours is the first age in which many thousands of our best trained minds made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind . . . to manipulate, exploit, and control” (p. v). Given its pervasive and persuasive character, advertising is without doubt one of the most formative influences in popular culture, shaping values and behavior and telling people how and why to live. It is estimated that the average North American is subjected to over one thousand advertisements daily in one or other of the media (television, radio, magazines, newspapers, billboards, direct mail) covering everything from perfume to automobiles, from fast food to insurance.

Advertising is simply any paid form of nonpersonal presentation to promote products, services or ideas, sometimes, but not always, in a way attractive to the person the advertiser wishes to influence. In a market economy, advertising can supply information needed for the people to make an informed choice. But on the other hand, advertising is frequently used to persuade people or even seduce them to believe that what they want is what they need and that consuming a particular product will in some way change them. In other words, advertising tinkers with identity and values.

Not a Recent Invention

While many people think advertising was invented on Madison Avenue in New York City during the post-World War II boom, advertising is as old as civilization. Ironically one of the oldest pieces of advertising from antiquity that can be viewed today is an inscription of a woman in the pavements of ancient Ephesus (modern Turkey) advertising the nearby brothel. But even before this, in ancient Egypt (3200 b.c.) the names of kings were stenciled on temples, and runaway slaves were “advertised” on papyrus. Advertising took a giant step forward with the invention of movable type and the printing of the Gutenburg Bible (a.d. 1450). It could then be endlessly repeated and mass-produced. Not long after this, an English newspaper advertised prayer books for sale, a forerunner of the newspaper ad. While it can be argued that people have always been trying to persuade others to do, buy or experience something—from town criers to preachers—it is unquestionable that rapid industrialization, urbanization, the proliferation of media and now the information superhighway have escalated advertising to a central role in culture formation, perhaps even in spiritual formation, since it is a major player in establishing values and defining meaning-giving experiences.

As a form of communication, advertising has some good intended effects, some recognized by commentators on the Third World scene, where advertising has found almost virgin territory. Besides sometimes giving people information to make choices when there is more than one product or service offered, advertising is often used to promote desirable social aims, such as savings and investment, family planning, health-promoting products (such as antimalarial drugs), lifestyles that will reduce AIDS and fertilizers that will enhance crop production (MacBride, p. 154). Advertising helps the media to be autonomous from politics—not a small matter in some countries. But when we consider the overall impact, it is less clear to most observers that the effects of a highly commercialized culture are beneficial. Nowhere is this more evident than in the West.

The Not-So-Subtle Message

The intended effect of advertising is not merely to make a sale but to awaken or produce predispositions to buy an advertised product or service (Britt, p. 195). To advertise “Coke Is It” is not simply to sell a brand, but to have us think of branded, packaged goods when thirsty, not just plain water. It also alters our perceptions so that when we experience that branded beverage, we will see it a certain way, associating fizziness with youthfulness and joy. The total effect of advertising is to preoccupy society with material goods and services as the path to happiness and the solution to virtually all problems and needs. Commercial persuasion appears to program not only our shopping patterns but also the larger domain of our social roles, language, goals, values and the sources of meaning in our culture.

Advertising does this very effectively for several reasons. It is (1) pervasive, appearing in many modes and media; (2) repetitive, reinforcing the same and similar ideas relentlessly; (3) professionally developed, with all of the attendant research sophistications to improve the probabilities of attention, comprehension, retention and/or behavioral impact; and (4) delivered to an audience that is increasingly detached from traditional sources of cultural influence like families, churches or schools. A stunning example of the deceptiveness of advertising is the story of American cigarette ads in the 1960s. Backed by massive television budgets, they implied that filtered brands were good for our health. Smoking rates among teenagers continued to grow even after the famous report of the surgeon general in 1964.

Unintended Consequences

Not surprisingly, such an intrusive and all-pervasive system of communication has been negatively critiqued by academics and social scientists who are concerned with the effects of advertising on role-modeling, child development, social behavior and even religious belief. A Yale psychologist confessed, “Advertising makes me miserable” by an intensified pursuit of goals that would not have been imagined save for advertising (Dollard, p. 307). People are induced to keep productive in order to keep consuming, to work in order to buy because we are always in need of more. This has the serious (unintended) side effect of displacing feelings from people to objects and an alienating effect in which the self is perceived not as a child of God or as a person in community, but as an exchange commodity. Life is trivialized, not dignified, when someone becomes evangelistic about mundane material objects like mayonnaise.

Nowhere may interpersonal relations be more affected than in the home as the roles of both women and children as consumers get expanded and redefined. Advertising has become an insolent usurper of parental function, “degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market” (Henry, p. 76). Relations with neighbors, the proverbial Joneses we strive to keep up with, are increasingly based on envy, emulation and competition. Advertising works on the tension-arousal and tension-reduction (with the use of the product) process. In the case of the poor and marginalized, the inaccessibility of the products being offered “may create in some viewers feelings of frustration sufficient to make them engage in antisocial acts” (Myers, p. 176).

Advertising, for almost as long as it has existed, has used some sort of sexual sell, sometimes promising seductive capacities, sometimes more simply attracting our attention with sexual stimuli, even if irrelevant to the product or the selling point. While less graphic than pornography, advertising is more of a tease than a whore, for sexual stimulation is moderated and channeled. Nevertheless, the overall effect represents a challenge to standards of decency, a devaluing of women and a revaluing of the body. Erik Barnouw notes that we now see women caressing their bodies in showers with a frequency and reverence of attention that makes “self-love a consecrated ritual” (p. 98).

Advertising also affects the credibility of language. S. I. Hayakawa notes that “it has become almost impossible to say anything with enthusiasm or joy or conviction without running into the danger of sounding as if you were selling something” (p. 268). Advertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation. For example, “Christmas and Easter have been so strenuously exploited commercially that they almost lose their religious significance” (Hayakawa, p. 269). Because virtually all citizens seem to recognize this tendency of ad language to distort, advertising seems to turn us into a community of cynics, and we doubt the advertisers, the media and authority in all its forms. Thus we may also distrust other received wisdoms from political authorities, community elders, religious leaders and teachers of all kinds. But without trustworthy communication, there is no communion, no community, only an aggregation of increasingly isolated individuals, alone in the mass.

Religious Significance

Some anthropologists view advertising in terms of rituals and symbols—incantations to give meaning to material objects and artifacts. Advertising defines the meaning of life and offers transcendence in the context of everyday life. Our commercial-religious education begins early with jingles, slogans and catch phrases, the total commercial catechism, so that children learn the “rite words in the rote order.” So direct exhortations are employed, literally a series of commandments, a secular litany that Jacques Barzun identified as “the revealed religion of the twentieth century” (p. 53). “You get only one chance at this life; therefore get all the gusto you can!” is a theological claim and a moral injunction. Toward this end advertising appeals to the traditional seven deadly sins: greed, lust, sloth, pride, envy and gluttony, with anger only infrequently exploited or encouraged. Since these words are frowned upon in the advertising community, they must be given a different spin. Lust becomes the desire to be sexually attractive. Sloth becomes the desire for leisure. Greed becomes the desire to enjoy the good things of this life. Pride becomes the desire for social status (Mayer, p. 128). In this way advertising cultivates what Paul called “the works of the flesh” (Galatians 5:17-23; Galatians 6:8 NRSV). Morality is subverted; values are revised; ultimate meaning is redefined.

The Ethics of Persuasion

All this happens largely without the viewer knowing it. Those who defend the present state of the advertising art claim that the most far-reaching advertising campaign cannot force someone to buy something he or she does not want. The citizen is supposedly immune to persuasion. But advertising is by definition intrusive, so intrusive that the real message communicated on television or in magazines is often the commercials. This successful commanding of attention makes the attempt to concentrate on the remaining content of media “like trying to do your algebra homework in Times Square on New Year’s Eve” (Hayakawa, p. 165).

Such intrusion, first into our consciousness and then into our inner voices, distracts us from the serenity of solitude and thereby inhibits self-awareness. The repetitive, fantastic, one-sided and often exhortative rhetorical styles of advertising combine to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy, producing a state of uncritical consciousness, passivity and relative powerlessness. Nonwants becomes wants; wants become needs. Advertising would never have taken hold the way it has without the American (and ultimately the Western) psyche having undergone a change in the direction of viewing itself therapeutically. We need help; advertising offers it. Not only this, but morals and values get adapted to the message: indulge, buy, now and here. As Barnouw observes, “The viewer’s self-respect requires a rejection of most commercials on the conscious level, along with some ridicule. Beneath the ridicule the commercial does its work” (p. 83).

It does this work in ways that are ethically questionable. Advertising is advocative through giving incomplete information, half-truths or careful deceptions, by being insistent, exhortative and emphatic. It appeals essentially to emotions, seducing people to indulge themselves now rather than defer gratification, reducing life to the here and now, if not the moment. It reinforces social stereotypes, aggravates sexism, racism and ageism. In idealizing the “good life” advertising makes us perpetually dissatisfied. Can it be resisted?

Battling Seduction

The myth of immunity to advertising’s inducements is clearly a delusion for some or perhaps many or even most of the public, including Christians. So the first thing we need to do is admit that we live in an advertising environment. Then what?

First, Christian organizations and churches need to repent of their own seductive advertising. The end never justifies the means. Keeping the televangelist on the air does not justify half-truths and appeals to the flesh. Many relief organizations use rhetorical devices and selected “truths” to get money for their great cause. A good first step would be for Christian organizations to establish an ethical code for their own advertising to be published along with their financial statements.

Second, the church or groups of people can lobby or use legitimate channels of political expression to press for the closer regulation of advertising. Some obscene ads have been effectively banned by consumers boycotting certain suppliers, although an unintended side effect is sometimes more publicity for the product itself, as happened with some of the Calvin Klein ads (Faltermayer, p. 64).

Third, Christians working in the advertising industry need the prayerful support of their church as they are stewards of the culture and shapers of morals. There is no place in the world where it is easy to work as a Christian (even the church), but there is no place so demonized that a Christian might not be called to work there. The well-known novelist and apologist Dorothy Sayers worked for many years in advertising and turned the experience to good literary and theological effect.

Fourth, individually we can become more critical of advertising, reflecting on what we see and hear and discussing the intended and unintended consequences as families and groups of friends. One of the most important facets of Christian education in the family is to learn how to more than survive in the world. This will normally involve limiting time watching television, deliberately excluding commercials where possible and discussing the values implicit in advertising.

Fifth, in place of the seven deadly sins, which are often cultivated by the advertising industry, we should cultivate the seven cardinal virtues—wisdom, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and love (see Organizational Values; Values). Spiritual conflict is a fact of life in this world, but if we live in the Spirit and are firmly rooted in a genuine community of the Spirit we can battle the world, the flesh and the devil victoriously. Paul said, “Live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature” (Galatians 5:16 NRSV).

Sixth, the recovery of solitude, sabbath and spiritual disciplines are crucial to regaining and keeping our true identity. Most people in the Western world need to reduce the input they receive from the media, take periods of fasting from television, magazines and advertising, in order to regain perspective. If we get over a thousand messages each day to buy and consume, we need equally to hear God speak through Scripture and the stillness of our hearts. The advertising world cultivates discontentment; true spirituality leads to contentment whether we have much or little (Phil. 4:12). By recovering God at the center through worship, we are protected from both being manipulated and becoming manipulators.

Seventh, we need to recover shopping as a spiritual discipline: not shopping impulsively, not shopping thoughtlessly, not buying on the strength of advertisements but doing our own research on products and services with the help of others and objective surveys.

Advertising is clearly not an omnipotent master, nor is the consumer a helpless puppet. But the cumulative effect of an advertising environment cannot be avoided. The analogy of rain is appropriate. Individual raindrops are benign and have little noticeable impact, like individual advertisements inducing us to consume. But when heavy rains come, defensive gear is needed. In a deluge individuals become preoccupied, and in extreme conditions, overwhelmed. Advertising has such influence not only because of its saturation impact but because it normally addresses many of life’s common issues, while other institutions, especially the church, have all too often neglected everyday life—eating, sleeping, playing, working, relating, washing and so on. The issue posed by advertising today is simply who will become the social and spiritual guide.

» See also: Consumerism

» See also: Culture

» See also: Need

» See also: Shopping

» See also: Simpler Lifestyle

References and Resources

E. Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); J. Barzun, “Myths for Materialists,” Chimera 4, no. 3 (1945) 52-62; S. Britt, “Advertising,” in Encyclopedia Americana (Danbury, Conn.: Grolier, 1989) 1:195-206; J. Dollard, “Fear of Advertising,” in The Role of Advertising, ed. C. H. Sandage and V. Fryburger (Homewood, Ill.: Irwin, 1960) 307-17; C. Faltermayer, “Where Calvin Crossed the Line,” Time, 11 Sept. 1995, 64; S. Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of Twentieth Century American Advertising (New York: Morrow, 1984); E. Griffin, The Mind Changer: The Art of Christian Persuasion (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1976); S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action (New York: Harcourt, 1964); J. Henry, Culture Against Man (New York: Random, 1963); S. MacBride, Many Voices, One World: Communication and Society, Today and Tomorrow (New York: Unipub-UNESCO, 1980); M. Mayer, “The American Myth and the Myths of Advertising,” in The Promise of Advertising, ed. C. H. Sandage (Homewood, Ill.: Irwin) 125-33; M. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951); J. G. Myers, “Advertising and Socialization,” in Research in Marketing, ed. J. Sheth (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1978) 1:169-99; R. W. Pollay, “The Distorted Mirror: Reflections on the Unintended Consequences of Advertising,” Journal of Marketing 50 (April 1986) 18-36, portions quoted with permission; R. W. Pollay, “On the Value of Reflections on the Values in ‘The Distorted Mirror,’” Journal of Marketing 51 (July 1987) 104-9.

—Richard Pollay and R. Paul Stevens