Media Literacy and the Advertising Industry

Of course, advertising is here to stay—even as other forms of marketing communica­tion come alongside it. As we have seen, companies spend more than $200 million a year on advertising. Advertising executives care about the money they allocate to the creation of ads and the purchase of ad space because this activity consumes lots of cash that could be used for other purposes. Media executives care about the money they receive from ads because it helps keep them alive. It’s natural for them to be concerned, and it’s natural for millions of other people to be concerned along with them because they work for companies that either spend or collect advertising money.

But what about people who are members of the larger society? What should citizens who want to live in a democratic, peaceful, thriving world think about the relationship between advertising and media? This is an important question, if only because advertising is all around us. Moreover, our everyday approach to ads is typically quite conflicted. We condemn the stupidity of some of them even while we hum commercial tunes and repeat commercial phrases (remember Budweiser’s Whassup? ad campaign?). We hate it when ads intrude on our viewing, but we are sometimes glad when commercials appear on TV so that we can go to the kitchen or bathroom. We sometimes buy what we see in ads even while insisting that they don’t affect us. In general, we accept ads as a given in our society and don’t think deeply about them.

Many scholars suggest that we really ought to think deeply about them. A few writers even suggest that the future of world civilization depends on redefining society's relationship to advertising. That may sound like an extravagant claim about an industry that sells cars and candy bars. But is it really that far-fetched? See what you think as we review three issues that center on advertising, the mass media, and society. One issue—the power of advertising conglomerates in the face of blurring media boundaries—carries forward two themes that we’ve seen throughout this text. The others—advertising and democracy and advertising and commercialism—focus on the ad industry but also relate to the media system as a whole. As we will see, all three issues are quite interrelated.

Advertising and Commercialism

commercialism a situation in which the buying and selling of goods and services is a highly promoted value

hidden curriculum a program of study that people don’t realize they are taking

We start with commercialism because it is the term most associated with advertising and its impact on American life. Commercialism refers to a situation in which the buying and selling of goods and services is a highly promoted value. Many people say that the United States is a nation in which commercialism runs rampant. Everywhere we turn, we see a sales pitch.

Defenders of commercialism insist that Americans would never have the high standard of living that they now have, nor the products that they take for granted, were it not for the industrial competition that commercialism has encouraged. Detractors of commercialism question this notion of progress. They insist that many difficulties come along with making commercialism a central tenet of American society. The most common problem, they say, is leading people to purchase things that they don’t really need.

From the time Americans are very young, the critics say, they are presented with a daily barrage of ads. These ads are important not primarily because they aim to sell individual products or services; sometimes they succeed at that, and sometimes they don’t. Rather, the importance of the advertising barrage is that it is part of what some observers call a hidden curriculum— a program of study that people don't realize they are taking. Advertising critics argue that what advertising teaches, and what Americans accept as a basic lesson from the ad “course” they receive, is that society is merely a huge marketplace, and that buying products and defining oneself through them is an essential aspect of life.

Supporters of advertising say that, even if this hidden curriculum exists in as powerful a manner as its critics suggest, it is not harmful. People need to feel good about themselves, and advertising provides a vehicle—products—for doing that. Critics respond, however, that commercialism has dire side effects. Two that they especially highlight are the exploitation of children and the destruction of the global environment.

THE EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN Media critics contend that advertising to children is ethically unacceptable. They point out that children aged 2 through 12 years are often treated just like any other consumers. Ad people know that children influence their parents' spending and, as they get older, also have their own purchasing power from gifts and allowances. The critics cite scholarly research showing that the youngest children (those under age 4 or 5 years) often don’t have the skills to be critical of advertisers' claims. As for the older kids, the critics contend that, by getting children hyped for toys, foods, and other products that their parents must approve, the advertisers may be encouraging family arguments. In fact, marketers and media firms that

Currently, the big video game makers like Electronic Arts are leading the way with creating places to insert ads, especially with sports games in which ads can be placed on stadiums and on billboards. Supporters of the activity say it heightens the realism of the game.

Iga Worldwide—a company that inserts ads in games—argues from its research that 82 percent of respondents say that the ads don’t distract from the enjoyment of the game. Of course, the problem with this study is that it was conducted by a company with a vested interest in seeing in-game ads succeed. In the end, advertisers and their agencies will have to judge invite children into a separate channel to advertise to them are quietly setting themselves up in opposition to the children’s parents—a situation that, the critics argue, is morally highly questionable.

DESTRUCTION OF THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT Some critics argue that, when so many people are taught that the continual purchase of new products is the key to the good life, their resulting activities place an enormous burden on the earth’s resources. The energy used to create the products they buy, the energy (and pollution) created by the use of the products, the garbage problems that are created when people throw away things that they could still use but that aren’t fashionable—all these activities make the earth a more and more difficult place to inhabit. Supporters of advertisers counter that these problems are not really so bad, that people are living better now than ever before in history. The critics reply that the ecological disasters caused by commercialism are just beginning. As the billions of people in developing countries such as China buy into the commercialist philosophy of countries such as the United States, the pressure on the earth's environment will mount to unacceptable levels. Advertising critics such as Sut Jhally have argued that this predicament will literally lead to the end of the earth's ability to sustain human beings.