Criticism of advertising > Hyper-commercialism and the commercial tidal wave

Criticism of advertising is closely linked with criticism of media and often interchangeable. They can refer to its audio-visual aspects (e. g. cluttering of public spaces and airwaves), environmental aspects (e. g. pollution, oversize packaging, increasing consumption), political aspects (e. g. media dependency, free speech, censorship), financial aspects (costs), ethical/moral/social aspects (e. g. sub-conscious influencing, invasion of privacy, increasing consumption and waste, target groups, certain products, honesty) and, of course, a mix thereof. Some aspects can be subdivided further and some can cover more than one category.

As advertising has become increasingly prevalent in modern Western societies, it is also increasingly being criticized. A person can hardly move in the public sphere or use a medium without being subject to advertising. Advertising occupies public space and more and more invades the private sphere of people, many of which consider it a nuisance. “It is becoming harder to escape from advertising and the media. … Public space is increasingly turning into a gigantic billboard for products of all kind. The aesthetical and political consequences cannot yet be foreseen.”^[21] Hanno Rauterberg in the German newspaper ‘Die Zeit’ calls advertising a new kind of dictatorship that cannot be escaped.^[22]

Ad creep: "There are ads in schools, airport lounges, doctors offices, movie theaters, hospitals, gas stations, elevators, convenience stores, on the Internet, on fruit, on ATMs, on garbage cans and countless other places. There are ads on beach sand and restroom walls.”^[23] “One of the ironies of advertising in our times is that as commercialism increases, it makes it that much more difficult for any particular advertiser to succeed, hence pushing the advertiser to even greater efforts.”^[24] Within a decade advertising in radios climbed to nearly 18 or 19 minutes per hour; on prime-time television the standard until 1982 was no more than 9.5 minutes of advertising per hour, today it’s between 14 and 17 minutes. With the introduction of the shorter 15-second-spot the total amount of ads increased even more dramatically. Ads are not only placed in breaks but e. g. also into baseball telecasts during the game itself. They flood the internet, a market growing in leaps and bounds.

Other growing markets are ‘’product placements’’ in entertainment programming and in movies where it has become standard practice and ‘’virtual advertising’’ where products get placed retroactively into rerun shows. Product billboards are virtually inserted into Major League Baseball broadcasts and in the same manner, virtual street banners or logos are projected on an entry canopy or sidewalks, for example during the arrival of celebrities at the 2001 Grammy Awards. Advertising precedes the showing of films at cinemas including lavish ‘film shorts’ produced by companies such as Microsoft or DaimlerChrysler. “The largest advertising agencies have begun working aggressively to co-produce programming in conjunction with the largest media firms”^[25] creating Infomercials resembling entertainment programming.

Opponents equate the growing amount of advertising with a “tidal wave” and restrictions with “damming” the flood. Kalle Lasn, one of the most outspoken critics of advertising on the international stage, considers advertising “the most prevalent and toxic of the mental pollutants. From the moment your radio alarm sounds in the morning to the wee hours of late-night TV microjolts of commercial pollution flood into your brain at the rate of around 3,000 marketing messages per day. Every day an estimated twelve billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials and more than 200,000 television commercials are dumped into North America’s collective unconscious”.^[26] In the course of his life the average American watches three years of advertising on television.^[27]

More recent developments are video games incorporating products into their content, special commercial patient channels in hospitals and public figures sporting temporary tattoos. A method unrecognisable as advertising is so-called ‘’guerrilla marketing’’ which is spreading ‘buzz’ about a new product in target audiences. Cash-strapped U.S. cities do not shrink back from offering police cars for advertising.^[28] A trend, especially in Germany, is companies buying the names of sports stadiums. The Hamburg soccer Volkspark stadium first became the AOL Arena and then the HSH Nordbank Arena. The Stuttgart Neckarstadion became the Mercedes-Benz Arena, the Dortmund Westfalenstadion now is the Signal Iduna Park. The former SkyDome in Toronto was renamed Rogers Centre. Other recent developments are, for example, that whole subway stations in Berlin are redesigned into product halls and exclusively leased to a company. Düsseldorf even has ‘multi-sensorial’ adventure transit stops equipped with loudspeakers and systems that spread the smell of a detergent. Swatch used beamers to project messages on the Berlin TV-tower and Victory column, which was fined because it was done without a permit. The illegality was part of the scheme and added promotion.^[22]

It’s standard business management knowledge that advertising is a pillar, if not “the” pillar of the growth-orientated free capitalist economy. “Advertising is part of the bone marrow of corporate capitalism.”^[29] “Contemporary capitalism could not function and global production networks could not exist as they do without advertising.”^[1]

For communication scientist and media economist Manfred Knoche at the University of Salzburg, Austria, advertising isn’t just simply a ‘necessary evil’ but a ‘necessary elixir of life’ for the media business, the economy and capitalism as a whole. Advertising and mass media economic interests create ideology. Knoche describes advertising for products and brands as ‘the producer’s weapons in the competition for customers’ and trade advertising, e. g. by the automotive industry, as a means to collectively represent their interests against other groups, such as the train companies. In his view editorial articles and programmes in the media, promoting consumption in general, provide a ‘cost free’ service to producers and sponsoring for a ‘much used means of payment’ in advertising.^[30] Christopher Lasch argues that advertising leads to an overall increase in consumption in society; "Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life."^[31]