"Advertising and the end of the world" -- a summary





A summary of the video asserting that our consuming society fueled in part by advertising must be changed to avert global catastrophe

featuring Professor Sut Jhally, of the Media Educaton Foundation, and author of four books (including "Codes of Advertising") and producer and narrator in "Dreamworlds 3"

Note: The studies Jhally uses (in the summary below and video) calculating when depletion of resources might occur have seen some criticism -- and, some critics say, disproven because of restrictive estimates on energy and population, etc. Students are urged to consider that even though the earth's resources might last longer than 70 years, this discrepancy should not be enough reason enough to dismiss Jhally's message and stance.

These are the points and arguments made by Jhally:

ADVERTISING AS CULTURE

  • The video asserts that in the world of advertising, normality is taken from us.

  • If anthropologists from Mars looked at us, they'd conclude this society was dominated by a belief in magic.

  • Scholar Raymond Williams has called advertising a "magic system" where material things have immense power of transformation.

  • Advertising has goods promse a myth. They can bring instant gratification. They can promise a world of desire.

  • The alien anthropoligists would point to the similarities between the consumer culture we live in and older cultures.

  • Economists would see the differences between our consumer culture and what came before our industrial-capitalistic society. Industrial-capitalism is different from previous societies in th number of goods produced. Economists would note the immense accumulation of commodoties.

  • No other society in history can match the output of our capitalistic society -- it is a revolutionary society in that sense. Once prodced, this vast number of goods must be Distributed and then Consumed.

  • The problem of capitalism is not one of production -- but instead is one of consumption.

  • It invented the institution of advertising in the last part of the 1900s to solve this problem.

    There has never been a PROPAGANDA EFFORT to match the effort of advertising in the 20th Century. Much thought, effort, creativity, time and detail has gone into the selling of the immense accumulatin of commodoties than into any other campaign in history to CHANGE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS.

    Now over $175 billion [$250 billion by 2004] is spend every year on advertising in the U.S. so it must be an important part of social life.

    Advertising has literally colonized the culture because it takes up more and more space. In the 1980s, studies showed the average person was exposed to 1,500 commercial impressions each day. By the late 1990s the average was 3,600 per day.

    American media systems are dominated by advertising. Broadcast revenues come 100% from ads; magazine revenues come about 50% from ads; newspaper revenues come about 80% from ads. Movies are more and more dependent upon ad revenues coming from ads placed in them (product placement), with examples like James Bond's car in Golden Eye and Tomorrow Never Dies. The media are vehicles mainly for selling products and services. Professional sports are integrated into the marketing effort. Ads colonize the space on scoreboards and places like behind home plate in baseball. Schools are selling ads on buses and in hallways.

    The internet is now fully integrated into this effort. In the modern world,, everything is sponsored by someone (the Mariner stadium is named for Safeco Insurance Company; the Sonics facility, Key Arena).

    There was even an idea to commercialize the sky with an orbiting billboard.

    Culture has now become an adjuct to the cycle of production, distribution and consumption. Its job is to sell us things (for example, diamond ads being pushed by the monopoly supplier DeBeers, which wants to make diamonds a CULTURAL IMPERATIVE for many periods in people's lives).

    In a sense, commercial culture is now INSIDE OUR INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS -- inside our homes and heads and identities.

    Now the problem for advertising is to cut through the AD CLUTTER -- how to make an ad stand out from the other 3,599 we will see in a day. The job of the individual ad gets more difficult so more thought goes into the ad than into the programming. Now an ad costs into the millions of dollars.

    Ads are made like big Hollywood blockbusters. IF ADS WERE STRUNG TOGETHER FOR 1.5 HOURS (THE LENGTH OF A MOVIE), THEY WOULD COST MORE THAN THE BIGGEST HOLLYWOOD FILM. Production cost per 30 seconds for Jurrasic Park was $236,000. For a TV commercial the same length, the cost runs $264,000.

    Two results:
    1) Advertising is everwhere (ubiquity)
    2) Huge amonts of money and creativity are expended on these ads

    Jhally asserts that we must come to terms with the role and power of commercial images.

    Too long have we asked the wrong questions concerning whether ads have an impact on our culture.

    The Wrong Question:
    "Does an individual ad campaign for a product increase sales?"

    The Right Question:
    "What impact does advertising have on our culture?"

    Culture is the place and space where a society tells stories about itself, where values are articulated and experienced, where notions of good and evil, of morality and value are defined.

    In American culutre, the story of advertising dominates the field.

    So, we should ask this:
    "What are the consistent stories told by the whole range of advertising -- and which values does advertising stress?"

    Jhally says we need to treat advertising as a cultural system -- that imparts how we make sense of the worNot to be influenced by advertising is to live outside our culutre and NO ONE CAN LIVE OUTSIDE HIS/HER CULTURE -- we are all influenced to some degree.

    How can we make sense of the vast field of advertising messages?

    A way to get answers is to pose another series of questions:

    1) How do ads tell us to achieve happiness?
    2) How does advertising define what society is?
    3) How does advertising perceive the future?

    1. How do we become happy.

    Ad systems tell us the way to happiness is through the consumption of commodities (they are sold through a story of goods bringing happiness to people). This story is the major motivating force for social change on a global scale as we head to the 21st Century.

    In advertising, political freedom is offered by an immense accumulation of commodities.

    These are powerful stories that equate happiness and freedom with consumption. ADVERTISING IS THE PRIMARY PROPAGANDA OF THIS VIEW TO CREATE CONSUMPTION.

    The question seldom asked: Does happiness come from material things? The answer is no. Happiness surveys beginning in 1945 tracked the general level of happiness in the U.S. They found that in spite of greater commodities, the number of people who say they were happy stayed level. Quality of life surveys showed happy people valued social elements of life such as atuonomy and self-control, good self-esteem, warm family relationships, relaxation and leisure time, romancy and love, and close and meaningful friendships.

    Social values such as love, family and friendship were valued over material values.

    So, a real sense of happinesss comes outside the marketplace.

    Since the 1920s, advertising has stopped talking about advantages of goods and services and began connecting relationship of objects to social lives of people.

    It connected commodities to the deeply desired social life -- ads began to offer images of the real sources of happiness (romance & love, frienship, self-control, etc.).

    The cruel illusion of advertising is how it links the things we want to a place that by definition cannot provide it -- the market and goods.

    The falsity of advertising is not in the appeal it makes -- which is very real -- but in the answers it provides.

    Advertising does not mirror how people are acting but how they are dreaming. It taps into their emotion and repackages them connected to the world of things, in effect creating a dream life and translating real desires for love, family, adventure, sex, etc. into dreams.

    Ads become a fantasy factory -- in that they take desires and reconceive them and connect them with the world of commodities. The irony is that it drives us away from meaningful human relationships with others and reduces our capacity to become happy.

    A true world that reflected our desires would stress social relationships, not material possessions.

    2. How does advertising define what society is?

    From the view of the market, there is no such thing as society. People are just individuals and their families (Jhally cites Margaret Thatcher, a former British Conservative prime minister -- thus denying the idea of community).

    Looking at people as individuals acting on their own cannot address collective issues such poverty and the environment.

    The appeal is to the worst in us and includes a focus on GREED and SELFISHNESS while discouraging COMPASSION, CARING and GENEROSITY.

    Key societal issues are relegated to the margins of the culture while instead ads talk of INDIVIDUAL power, comforts, desires and pleasures.

    3) How far into the future can we think?

    Consumerism is build on economic growth, more consumption and more production and environmental scholars say we cannot keep going in this manner. Resources are being depleted --with research indicating that we will run out of most resources sometime after the middle of the century.

    "If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years." (Limits to Growth Study)

    Since 1950 we've used resources equal to all those resources used in human history.

    "Now the way of life of one part of the world in one half century is altering every inch and every hour of the globe." (Bill McKibben)

    The situation is so bad that 1,700 scientists, including Nobel prize winners, say we are on a collision course.

    "If not checked, many of our current practices may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner we know." (Union of Concerned Scientists)

    FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES ARE URGENT.

    THE OIL TANKER ANALOGY: We must change fundamentally IMMEDIATELY to avoid catastrophe. It is similar to an oil tanker headed toward a crash with the shore. It must begin turning well before the actual collision in order to avoid its momentum carrying it into the shore.

    It is up to this generation to save the world from barbarism and savagry it will face after resources begin to run out (probably in 70 or 80 years). Recycling alone won't do it. We must act collectively and make future generations our primary interest.

    Unfortunately, the marketplace deals with he present, not long-range issues. Advertisers do not think of collective interests 70 years away but focus on the present.

    Advertising speaks to us through our bodies and "smacks us in the mouth" so we don't think. It makes ads something we feel, not think about. So, we will continue to see more and more sexual imagry, more and more images -- and it will be a male-dominated vision.

    In such a move from cognitive to emotion, not just sexuality will be used. Other emotional appeals will be used, including our nightmares.

    Most certainly, we will not see any stress on a collective long-range future.

    We used to think we'd come together worldwide to battle environmental battles. Not so. We will compete to get the resources. The third world will be portrayed as making unreasonable claims on OUR resources.

    Advertising has been called a CULTURAL THREAT, and it is to the extent that it pushes us toward material things and away from social relationship -- and pushes us down the road to increased economic production that is driving us toward economic catastrophe, to the extent it focuses on individuals and puts aside the collective interests (and usually from a male viewpoint because of the male dominance of advertising).

    It is a MAJOR OBSTACLE TO OUR SURVIVAL AS A SPECIES.

    New ways to look at the world look hopeless -- but it is not The system of advertising is a house of cards in that it must be held in place by the advertising industry and the public relations industry.

    Answer may lie in Antonio Gramsci's TWO CONCEPTS that describe our present situation -- and action we must take:

    1) PESSIMISM OF THE INTELLECT
    2) OPTIMISM OF THE WILL
    [Note that we will also talk about another Gramsci concept: hegemony -- know all three for J190]

    PESSIMISM OF THE INTELLECT means recognizing our present circumstances and properly analyzing and understanding the nature of our present reality.

    OPTIMISM OF THE WIll means insisting on the possibility and moral desirability of social change.

    It is through use of these two concepts together that we can develop an intellectual strategy of recognizing the falsity of advertising and being willing to work to turn a seemingly hopeless situation around.

    This is especially important because ads are thought of as trivial and easy to dismiss -- but they occupy the main part of our culture.

    The question we must ask ourselves is if we believe in the future is this: What stand are we (as individuals and community members) willing to take to avoid global crisis?
    [Please note that the "crisis" may not come as soon as the studies Jhally uses predict -- see top of this summary.]

    Jhally says the stakes are too high not to do something. We must insist on alternative values and a world fit for human habitation.

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    Updated 2008