Life in the Rear-view Mirror

The Advertising Push

In the previous chapter I discussed how easy credit helped people spend money before it was even earned. But how could the financial industry change conservative attitudes to spending? How could they change frugal people into spendthrift ones? The answer is that they had a lot of help from the advertising industry. In this chapter I discuss how they changed people’s attitudes to spending and consumption.

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There was a time when we could sit down comfortably in front of the television, to enjoy our favourite programs or movies, with only the slightest inconvenience of a commercial break here and there. We have now reached the point where watching television is no longer enjoyable, at least for me, because one has to sit for a whole hour of programming, continuously interrupted by propaganda, to watch a half hour show. The title of my favourite television comedy show sums it up really well, “This Hour Has 22 Minutes.” These days, people watching TV are held hostage to advertisers. Fortunately, technology allows us to record our favourite shows, to view them at our convenience and fast-forward through the commercials.

The advertisements of the sixties and seventies were not nearly as bad. I remember the toothpaste commercial that went, ‘You wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent’. They were differentiating themselves from Crest and Colgate, but at the same time they were promoting teeth brushing, which was a healthy activity. The main advertisers of the era were: car companies, who showed off and promoted their new lines of gas-guzzling cars; and consumer product companies, who promoted laundry detergent, toothpaste, hand soap, and things of that nature. And, who can forget the Man from Glad who introduced plastic bags as a novel way to take one’s garbage to the curb? As it turned out, it wasn’t such a good thing for the environment. They replaced the old reusable tin garbage cans, which were environmentally better. We have gone back to reusable bins, except that now they are made from plastic instead of metal. That was the power of advertising, replacing a good habit with a bad one. The tobacco industry was the real bad apple, coercing young people to consume a product that was both addictive and carcinogenic. Fortunately, those advertisements are gone due to appropriate government action, but it took a long time, during which much harm was done.

Over the decades, not only has the quantity of television commercials increased, but their very nature has also changed. On average, today’s commercials are more insidious. They are more about selling a lifestyle than a product; and if one doesn’t buy into the new lifestyle, then one cannot be part of the ‘in crowd’. Nowadays, advertising companies are all about shaping human behaviour. Advertising agencies have become big multinational corporations with huge resources at their disposal. They make the clever use of psychological and behavioural research from publicly funded universities, to exploit our weaknesses for the benefit of the corporate world. Their objective is to control our desires; and they achieve it using the most subtle and effective means from their arsenal. The corporate world is now telling us, and making us believe, that they know what is best for us. They tell us what we must have to fit in.

Advertising has become a pernicious business because it intrudes our deepest levels of consciousness, where we are most vulnerable and susceptible to suggestions. They exploit our weaknesses using results of psychological testing, known to be very effective at shaping human behaviour. Such tactics are just as immoral as those of the cigarette companies, who put addictive substances in cigarettes to develop a long-term captive market. Although cigarette advertising has been banned, other types of advertising, which are equally insidious, continue unabated. The advertising agencies are akin to churches. Both want to change our behaviours and beliefs by playing on our fears.

The food industry, and its advertising agencies, capitalized on middleclass women’s entry into the workforce big time. For many years, after married women traded the home for the office or factory, they continued to cook wholesome meals for the family. But the food industry was determined to relieve women of that responsibility, and it has largely succeeded. As with everything else, the change was first resisted, then slowly embraced, and ultimately fully accepted.