COMPLAINTS THE CRITICS ARE MAKING AGAINST ADVERTISING

 Since, advertising is part and parcel of our lives, it has of course, bright side as well as dark side. The Five (Wrongheaded) complaints against advertising coercive, offensive, and monopolistic. That’s what critics say about advertising. You’ve probably heard most of the complaints: advertising sends subliminal messages to make us buy products we don’t need or want, it creates the very needs and wants it aims to satisfy, it is offensive to good taste and needs to be better regulated, it erects barriers to market entry, and it increases prices. The first two are the coercive arguments and together with the offensiveness complaint constitute the so-called social criticisms of advertising; the last two are the monopolistic arguments and constitute the economic criticisms. Let’s take these one at a time.

v    Advertising moves the people to buy thing they cannot afford

v    Biased

v    Irrelevant

v    Unduly Repetitious

v    Use of objectionable appeal

v    Confuses the people

v    Misleads the people

v    People have to pay for the advertising

v    Waste of money and time

v    Posters monopoly

v    Too much intrusive

v    Use of objectionable technique

v    It inclines a person towards materialism

Subliminal advertising:        Advertisers exert great effort to make their messages—whether filled with sexual innuendo or not—blatantly explicit. Whatever is beneath our threshold of perception is not perceived and, therefore, cannot influence our purchasing behavior. A 1957 movie theater “experiment” that allegedly increased sales of popcorn and Coca-Cola by flashing messages on the screen at a speed that no one could perceive has been argued to be a hoax; subsequent, well-controlled experiments produced no effect. Subliminal embeds in the 1970s—the word s-e-x, for example, spelled out in the ice cubes of a Gilbey’s gin ad or a sexual orgy “embedded” in the clam-plate special of Howard Johnson’s restaurant menu—were products of the overly active imagination of a journalism professor who admitted that his students could not see the embeds until he pointed them out. Explicit, above-threshold messages in advertisements are what sell; hidden, muffled, or unperceivable messages do not.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s supposed dependence effect holds that needs, wants, tastes, and demand are all dependent on, and therefore are created by, the process of production, especially advertising:  But needs, wants, tastes, and demand all originate within the consumer. A sign that says “Lemonade—5¢” cannot create a desire for the product if the consumer is not thirsty or does not like lemonade. Advertising can make us aware of needs and can stimulate our wants, tastes, and demand, but the final value judgment to say “no, I don’t want that product” resides with the consumer. Advertising is only a necessary, not sufficient, condition for the existence our desires.

Advertising, this third complaint states, offends good taste and needs to be banned from the airwaves or, at least, more tightly regulated: But what is taste? Tastes are values that are morally optional, that is, values that not everyone must adopt in order to remain ethical. I like Fords, you like Toyotas, he likes to walk. I like sexy models in my television commercials, you like PBS pledge breaks. Tastes are not disputable, so says the Latin phrase (de gustibus non est disputandum). Good taste is discriminative ability based on a specified standard, such as good taste in wine, clothing, or commercial execution. What is the standard that is being used when something is said to be in bad taste? That is not often specified or is assumed by the speaker to be his or her own optional taste.

Advertisers, to be sure, should not offend the tastes of their target audiences, but advertising is a mass communication that sends messages to many people beyond the target audience; it is these mistargeted consumers who often complain about particular ads being in poor taste—because the ad does not meet their taste. To regulate or ban allegedly distasteful advertising would be a violation of free speech. Advertisers and journalists both seek to earn profits with the messages they send to their audiences; both practice commercial speech that is protected by the US Constitution.

Advertising, through its large budgets, allegedly erects barriers to market entry by differentiating the product and thereby creating brand loyalty:                    The loyalty is the supposed barrier because competitors would have to spend an equal or greater amount to dislodge the consumer attachment. In fact, advertising is a means of entry and it is the product that creates the loyalty. A new product that is truly better than established brands attracts customers simply by advertising that it is better. Consumers try out the new product. If they like it, they buy more and spread the good word (favorable word-of-mouth) to others. Microsoft and Apple, two companies that did not exist 35 years ago, have done quite well for themselves dislodging customer loyalty to IBM products. And both started off with small advertising budgets. A true monopolistic barrier is the U.S. Postal Service’s control over the delivery of first-class mail. In the absence of such controls, the Davids of business can readily slay, and historically many times have slain, the Goliaths.

Advertising is a continuation of the previous one and states that advertising increases prices. As noted above, advertising differentiates the product and creates brand loyalty; this brand loyalty, in turn, further brings about an inelastic demand that enables the advertiser to raise prices. The result, allegedly, is a reduction in overall output and waste of society’s resources. But in the end it is advertising that contributes to lowering real prices over time. Advertising creates a larger market than would otherwise be possible, leading to economies of scale in production, distribution, and even in advertising. The unit cost of the product declines and so does the price—in real terms. The effects of inflation must be removed when making price comparisons over time. A 100-tablet bottle of Bayer aspirin in 1938, for example, cost 59¢; in today’s 2007 dollars, that would be $8.47. Today, on drugstore.com, a 200- tablet bottle of coated Bayer aspirin is priced regularly at $9.99, discounted to

$6.99—and “coated” here means that the product is a better product than it was in 1938. Advertising is not the only cause of real price declines, but it is a contributor. The complaints against advertising are seemingly endless, limited only by the creativity of its critics, but advertising is fundamentally benevolent. It is a communication technique that attempts to influence the behavior of others—no more nor less so than the techniques used by parents, journalists, teachers, and politicians. Indeed, in a contest of ethics and taste, advertising and its practitioners can hold their own against these four groups. Advertising is everyone’s favorite whipping boy.

THE NEGATIVE CRITIQUE OF "AMERICAN-STYLE" ADVERTISING

The Mirror Theory:        According to the "mirror theory" put forth by some defenders of advertising, the industry simply takes its contents from the culture, transforms them and throws them back. But a metamorphosis occurs when culture's symbols are associated with goods. The meanings of images and ideas are infused into products and services, just as the meanings of products and services are infused into images and ideas. Advertising then releases the altered meanings back into a commercialized world ready to deliver products and services. This process is somewhat parasitic, feeding on the products of noncommercial culture -- ideology, myth, art, sexual attraction, even religion -- for commercial ends.  Others describe it similarly. The selling function of the advertising message limits what is mirrored. Promotion is always positive; commodities are presented as the road to happiness. In short, advertising uses existing values and symbols rather than reflecting them. It typifies what is diverse, filters out what is antagonistic and depressing, and naturalizes the role of consumption. The picture presented is flat, one-dimensional and habituates the audience to its interpretation of what is "normal".

It can go even further. Commodity imaging constructs the precise ideological focus most appropriate for a certain market situation. It builds dense semiological systems out of a selection of cultural items. In this way commodity imaging can, to a degree, be ideologically creative, and it may bring about a real change in the culture's symbols.

Advertising does contribute something by reconstituting meaning, rather than merely reflecting it. The devoured cultural contents retain their affectivity, but are stripped of their context and are "sold back" to the consumer as a new cultural system -- with new, commercial values replacing the original noncommercial values. For example, women are commodified to sell almost everything: cars, perfumes, etc. Their bodies, sexuality and mystique are traded. Today's mass advertising has less to do with products than with lifestyle and image, not reason but romance. Therefore, it is a cultural system instead of an informational system. But it is an incomplete cultural system, since the real values of its noncommercial contents have been drained out, leaving only their affects attached to commodities. Furthermore, only the pleasant side of life is shown, not the unpleasant and painful experiences with which a complete sociocultural system must cope.

The distorted image reflected by advertising is conservative, an effect of appealing to the lowest common cultural denominators, with which all will agree and which can offend as few as possible. In the constructed world, the safe compromise but false unity of perspectives which advertising shows is represented as our deepest and natural desire. The middle-of-the-road approach, the fear to offend any group, has been politically institutionalized. Therefore, as an ideological vehicle, advertising is not just constrained by the logic of hugging the middle of the road, but also becomes subject to the pushes and pulls of cultural politics, and is punished when it blunders too far off the track.
Ramifications of Commercialized Communication:               According to certain authors, there are seven cultural ramifications of the commodification of discourse-consequences which follow when the values of communication are fused to the market:

v    The logic of discourse changes and becomes distorted.

v    The recontextualization of images and ideas debases their former normative values. Logical relationships are destroyed when there is no longer any real connection between the product and the images and emotions used to sell it. The use of images from religion, art, patriotism and similar noncommercial dimensions of culture trivializes and debases not only the images, but also the noncommercial institutions themselves.

v    The identity of the consumer is reshaped as a relationship to goods and services, which themselves are turned into "fetishes" with unrealistic symbolisms of power. People become regarded as "economic animals" when the real relationships of life are distorted, as human nature is devalued and defined only in relation to the goods and services humans consume. Values far beyond what they really possess are attributed to the commodities being sold.

v    The reliance of mass media on advertising revenues gives advertisers direct influence on media contents, so that they can reshape almost the entire spectrum of the media to meet their needs. Consciously or unconsciously, those who pay for advertising come to control the media. The financial "bottom line" becomes the only criterion of "worthwhile" programming or publishing, and both the artistic and moral values of the media are inevitably degraded. The waste of resources becomes a virtue under this influence, as product "turnover" to inflate the "bottom line" overshadows even the most urgent demands of environmental conservation.

v    The constant urging to change products and services contributes to waste.

v    When messages are disseminated largely because of their market value, the ideals of citizen-democracy succumb to those of consumer-democracy.

v    Finally, politicians' imitation of mass marketing strategies makes political discourse undistinguishable from advertising. If people are only "economic animals", it follows that they have no rights except as contributors to the economy, and the central principles of democracy become gravely threatened. This threat would be made greater by the assumption, gained from the advertising-dominated culture, that the selection of political leaders should be guided by the same mindless process by which advertisers now sell their commodities.

v    This is a disturbing vision of an advertising-dominated world.