Everyone likes to think that advertising doesn’t affect them. “I’m too smart,” they say. “I know their tricks. I’ve never seen an ad and then felt compelled to rush out and buy that product!”
This misses the true purpose of ads. Ads aren’t mainly intended to convince you to buy a specific product. They’re intended to normalize a particular worldview via extreme repetition: specifically, the view that you have a problem, and spending money can solve it. And ads are extremely good at this. Nobody is immune to their impact. My wife and I can still sing ad jingles we learned forty years ago as kids, from commercials we haven’t seen since the last millennium.
What our kids taught us
When we moved into our house, we declined to start up a cable TV subscription. We’d had one at our old apartment, but we’d realized we hadn’t been watching much TV lately, so we decided to simply forgo cable TV for a while. There was plenty to entertain us online, and streaming was starting to become a thing; plus we spent a lot of time playing video games.
Our children were growing up in this same timeframe. A couple of years later, when our older boy was 6, we asked him what he might like for birthday gifts.
He had no idea. There were no particular toys he wanted; he didn’t ask to go to Disneyland or have a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. Nothing came to mind. We eventually resorted to taking him to Toys ‘R’ Us and following him around the aisles to get an idea of what might be interesting to him. So ultimately we got him a few things, and his grandparents bought him a bunch of toys too.
He never even played with half of them, and most of the rest he played with a little bit, before being relegated to the corner of his room where they collected dust. Instead, he spent a lot of time waving a cardboard paper towel roll around, making explosion noises and pretending to fight aliens or dragons.
This repeated itself year after year, and our younger son later followed the same pattern. We eventually figured it out: neither of them had grown up being exposed to TV advertising on a regular basis. They might occasionally see ads on TV at the grandparents’ houses, or at a restaurant or doctor’s office, but they lacked the constant exposure to commercials that my wife and I took for granted as part of our childhoods. So they never badgered us to go to McDonald’s, or to buy the latest movie tie-in toy. They never got the message that buying stuff is what makes you happy.
This really hit home when my wife and I began to realize, after several years of also not seeing much in the way of ads, that when we did see ads, it made us viscerally angry. How dare they speak to us like this, with their blatantly manipulative language and imagery?
Every election season I see people complain about how they’ve seen a million ads for this ballot proposition, or against that candidate. I sit there thinking about how I’ve barely seen any such ads; most of the ones I do encounter are on billboards or bus shelters, because you really can’t avoid seeing those if you go out in public. (I do make an effort to look away as soon as I realize what I’m looking at.) And I feel bad for people who still subject themselves to advertising.
Ads aren’t free
There’s a saying: If you’re not paying for something, you’re the product. The canonical example of this is that people who watch TV aren’t the customers; the advertisers are the customers, and the viewers’ attention is the product. (In point of fact, even if you are paying for it, you might still be the product; companies love collecting data about their customers and selling it to people. but usually when you do pay out of pocket, you at least can avoid having to see ads.)
The early Internet trained us all to think that websites should all be free. But websites cost money to run, and they’ve got to get that money from somewhere. Academia has long knows how much ads can distort a person’s decision-making abilities, but the general public is convinced that they’re too smart to be affected by it.
They aren’t. You aren’t. Stop accepting that advertising is something you just have to deal with, and start taking steps to erase it from your life.