Advertising

I was just listening to a radio program about advertising - arguing about how advertising is good for us.

Some of the points were:


It gives free services like facebook which is funded by advertising dollars

All people regardless of social class have access to the same product. i.e; A bottle of coke for a bum is the same bottle of coke a rich person drinks.

It creates perceived value in commodities and so helps the economy.


My rebuttal is as follows:

Let me begin with the 'free services' it allows like television.  I would argue that it is precisely not a free service, because the consumer incurs a cost in the media they are consuming, and do so in a way they are not aware of a lot of the time. For example, consumers will have to suffer constant interruptions in television shows - a lot of which use proven scientific and psychological techniques to get people to consume their products. Facebook, sells a lot of information to clients about peoples personal lives - which a lot of Facebook users are unaware of when they sign on to use the service. The point is, services funded by advertising always has hidden costs - and this is worse than paying for a service upfront because consumers are made directly aware of what they're paying with when the incur the cost.

Next, they made the argument that rich and poor alike are influenced by advertising as it's only motivation is the numbers - reaching as many people as possible. I would argue that this statement is untrue. Firstly, as any advertiser knows, targeting publics is an extremely important part of a successful advertising campaign, so the notion that everyone is influenced 'equally' is a farce. Secondly, the premise that all people have the same access to the products in our economy is completely misplaced. By definition, that fact that a person is poor necessitates their inability to have access to a product. In other words, a bottle of coke will be valued very differently when a rich person can have as much coke as he wants with little to no effort, and a Bum needs to beg all day just to be able to afford the same product.
 
 Finally, the program made a distinction between the actual value (utility) of products, and the 'perceived value' and how this helps our economy. There are two points to this. Firstly, there are very serious (environment, social, etc) issues that result from the way our economy functions - and the creation of artificial demand is a primary driver of those issues. So the argument that it 'helps' our economy, while true, and be nullified by a wider critical analysis of the system in which advertising operates. Secondly, the fact that advertising creates perceived value around commodities can be deemed as an enormous inefficiency - in that the resources of advertising can be used to build 'perceived value' around more abstract concepts, like kindness, like health or taking part in fulfilling activities. In other words, building the very values our society aspires to. Focusing all these efforts into mundane item like.. say toothpaste for instances, seems to me to be an enormous waste.