Ad Control
A typical mainstream newspaper frontpage
Welcome to mainstream news. Actually, welcome to your mainstream life.
Recognize anything familiar? It’s pretty easy to see since it’s so in-your-face, as well as being all around us. Ads, ads, everywhere there are ads. Now, no one is disparaging the advertising community because there is some amazing creativity to be found there. But we do have to make a serious reflection of our lives if this is how we portray what’s most important in our everyday experiences. And it’s not as if we don’t complain about being bombarded with ads anyway.
This is the top of yesterday’s NY Times online front page. The date’s on top if you’re curious, but it’s not all that important because it’s the same everyday, and it’s the same everywhere. The name of the company won’t make a difference either, as this is how the business world talks. And since business is now in our lives 24/7, it has become our language as well. Turn on the TV to watch a show, and expect at least 30% of each hour to be made up of advertisements. Really! According to Wikipedia, in 1960, we were only subjected to 9 minutes of commercials for a 1-hour show. Today, we can expect that 18 minutes of that same hour will be taken up with an avalanche of 30 to 60-second commercials. Do you even want to calculate how many hours per year we waste watching these brain-freezes, or using our TiVos to avoid them? Don’t try it unless you want to cry at the loss. And if you’re an advertiser, we should have a talk.
These ads are all around us. Watch a YouTube video and be ensured that a commercial is embedded at the beginning – usually one that has little to do with the theme of the video that you want to watch. Open a newspaper like the one above, and you can probably wallpaper a room with all of the ads contained within a couple of months’ worth of news. Same for the magazines that we read, and even our online content. Most websites today use ad revenue to desperately make at least a small portion of their living, though they can’t compare to the amount that Big Business pulls in. According to the 2011 IAB Advertising Revenue Report, a mind-boggling $14.9 billion was generated in the first half of this year in the United States. It’s hard to imagine the number of ads that represents. People even wear little blips of advertising on their clothes. And it’s happening everywhere. What have we become?
It wouldn’t be so bad if we were only being bombarded with ads, because many of the ads have artistic qualities that have to be admired. But companies are actually thinking up services that can be used for the same commercial value that we’re embracing without thought. And we are building a life that revolves around the most popular things discovered with the help of the marketing and advertising world. Our thoughts have become as shallow as reality tv. If someone mentions Einstein or Stephen Hawking in their conversation, it’s probably to impress the crowd that they’re talking to – unless you’re a scientist or enthusiast, in which case this is part of your everyday life. Usually we’re talking about someone or something that is being pushed by the larger groups in the masses, and these conversations are as temporary as a solar flare.
Corporations are now people, according to the US Supreme Court, so that means that they should be held to the same standards that people are held to in their daily activities. If you main or steal, then you should go to jail. If you pollute, then you should clean up your act. If you defame, then you should apologize. Changing the words in a law will not absolve you of your crime, but only temporarily hide you in the abstractions that words can provide. All of these responsibilities are part of being a real person. If you want to make that claim, then expect to take the blame, especially when you commit a wrong against society. There is no “get out of jail free” card in real life for a person. Because if there is, then why do we have to follow any of our laws? It’s not about a choice between society and anarchy. It’s about a choice for being responsible for the greater good. No one said that being an adult is a cake walk.
Corporations claim to have a primary fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. They also claim to have social responsibility ethics that align business operations with social values (source: Corporate Social Responsibility – Or Good Advertising?). But what is their boundary of ethics in which they operate when their shareholders’ finances are threatened? How effective can any marketing campaign be when it’s driven by a statistic, the CSR, within so much of the business community all around the world? Many use the excuse that they couldn’t possibly pursue good social responsibility because their customers won’t pay extra for it, through increased costs because of green packaging or clean operations. But doesn’t that indicate that their social values never incorporated the greater good to begin with? They all can’t make this claim, because there are companies out there, like Patagonia, that hold steadfast to amazing social values. Perhaps it’s because they use realism in their forecasts, unlike so many companies who believe that profits should continually increase in perpetuity.
In essence, the ad world mirrors the values that we hold in our society. Take a look at each ad and really look for the message being conveyed. Is it something superficial, or something life-altering for the entire world? I would hope for the latter, but there is still too much of the former in today’s world. We’re slowly realizing that we do have big responsibilities, and that they’ve been abdicated for way too long. We have much to answer for in those actions that destroy the delicate balance in which our world inhabits. We can’t walk away from that responsibility because we live in the consequences of our actions. The time is here to change our ways towards social responsibility that everyone can believe in and live with. No, it won’t be free. It won’t even be cheap. But it will be invaluable when we calculate the true value of a potentially profound future that’s in our grasps, if we choose to nurture it into existence. And costs do decrease as the process becomes part of everyone’s norm simply by volume usage.
Besides, shouldn’t we be a little sad that we made Stephen Colbert talk about the amorphous protest group OWS becoming much more mainstream by using advertising in their messages on his 12/13/11 “The Word”?
A clip from the Colbert Report explaining how OWS should use corporate sponsorship
And what about all of the false advertising being conducted by political members who are supposed to be the ones who make the laws of our lands? We are bombarded by these incessant political ads in an ever-lengthening campaign cycle that takes over mainstream media because they bought all of the viewing time. Is this what democracy has become? Why would we choose to let ads control the way we live? Wouldn’t it be better if real people everywhere created a world that we can all thrive in and be proud of? Do we really need all that stuff that ads tell us to buy? It’s pretty apparent that we still have a lot of deep thinking to do as a society, isn’t it?
For an interesting take on advertising, read Adbusters’ Pop Nihilism: Advertising Eats Itself .
[...] initial report by removing the offending code. Google did this in an attempt to tailor advertising to suit different visitors and other advertisers are expected to have used the same loophole. It [...]
[...] of today’s world. At least that’s what I thought until I discovered the horror of the Lorax’s endorsement of the Mazda CX-6 (which is being billed as “Truffula Tree [...]