A Negative View of Advertising and Education

Modern consumerism, a result of the protestant work ethic’s overproduction, is constantly promoted by a barrage of advertisements through every source of media, including text books.  Every aspect of a commercially dominated culture is affected by advertisements.  Even religion is not safe from the influence of commercial interests, as can be seen by the replacement of spiritual gift giving with those of material gifts during the Christmas holiday.  In order to rid themselves of a surplus of goods, manufacturers must convince the public to purchase them.  This is done through advertisements that are essentially supposed to educate the public on the product of interest.  However, advertisements are best received by those who are ignorant, according to Scitovsky (1971).  Advertisements mostly appeal to emotions and visual or audio signals that encourage consumption.  Many times these emotional appeals contain false information, further retarding the knowledge of the public.   For instance, several companies that make diet pills were fined more than $25 million by the Federal Trade Commission for making exaggerated and bogus weight-loss claims (Kesner, 2007).  However, the ignorance of the public is not only advanced by advertisements, it is initiated by educational materials.

Advertising is of course presented in everyday life as a necessity to educate the public about a manufacturer’s products.  One would think that a more detailed investigation into the history and foundations of advertising might exist in class rooms where the topic of study is advertising.  But according to Norris (1989), a study of several popular advertising textbooks reveals that an extremely miniscule amount of their pages are devoted to the history of advertising (p. 283).  The history that is addressed is poorly researched in that it considers advertising to be a construct of human nature as opposed to a force of market activity.  This of course is not very surprising seeing as how according to Bagdikian (2004):

Free classroom materials are produced by 64 percent of the five hundred largest American industrial corporations, 90 percent of industrial trade organizations, and 90 percent of utility companies… ‘Free marketplace’ and non-regulation of business is the predominant classroom economics lesson, presented largely through materials from a business group, the Advertising Council (p.159).

Educational institutions should be strongholds of diverse points of view, especially in a democratic society.  But with the educational discussion being so foundationally biased, this ideal is unfortunately difficult to uphold.  Democratic ideals are lost in the hyper-commercialism of contemporary society and are replaced with “cynicism and materialism, both cancerous for public life (McChesney, 2004, p.166).”  This is due to the isolating effect of aesthetic expression.  According to Jardine, “The consumer economy tends to isolate people from others by creating an obsession with individual choice and privacy.”  Replacing other forms of human creativity, consumerism requires that people focus all of their attention on expressing themselves through their consumption in order to keep the economy moving.  They are persuaded to accept this lifestyle through advertising that is seemingly unavoidable.  This environment is extremely shallow and has led to the development of numerous complications such as accumulation of personal debt.  According to the Federal Reserve 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances, more than three-fourths (76.4%) of Americans hold debt.  This is an unsustainable and unfortunate reality that has been caused in part by a propagandist advertisement industry that operates at the behest of profit driven corporate interests.