The Weird and The Wacky Meet

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Media Diary 9:  Materialism in the United States

Do you think U.S. culture is overly materialistic?  If you do, what role do you think advertising has had in creating this state of affairs?  Do you find it surprising that much of the criticism of our consumer culture comes from people (Jelly Helm and Kalle Lasn, founder of the Media Foundation [see p. 394] are two examples) who are or were in the advertising industry?  Why or why not?

 

US culture is overly materialistic, and advertising has played a huge role in encouraging consumers to buy, buy, buy.  They’ve linked societal status to objects. It’s basic psychology and sociology, the more objects you have, the higher place you occupy in the social strata.  Every ad is specifically engineered to play on people’s social greed.  Buy the product, be a better person, be respected by your society.  It’s really quite simple and has worked wonderfully in the US, causing us to consume 25% of the world’s resources for our SUV’s, computers and big screen television, all while only being 5% of the world’s population.  Advertisements are the things that tell us we need to consume all this energy to maintain our stuff.

It doesn’t come as a great shock to me that most critics of advertising and the United States obsessions with material objects come from former members of the advertising business itself.  It cannot be easy to have a job where your entire purpose is to tell other people what they need to be better, higher up, and happier.  After all, advertisers never get to know people personally.  They have to box them into categories and use very generalized market research to find out what to tell us about what we want or should want.  I think it must be very frustrating, like giving someone dating advice when you’ve never met or spoke to them about anything, you just know they like men and watch Friends reruns.  I think eventually they realize they can’t box people into categories because they themselves can’t be boxed into categories.   They also probably see some of the harm in what they do.  They have to sell the unsellable.  If they personally don’t want their product, what makes them think we do?  The advertising agencies create their own critics and cynics pretty fast, and it’s shown by who founds organizations like the Media Foundation.

Copyright 2005

by Amanda Evans

Date: 05/03/05