The average American is exposed to over 600 advertisements per day whether it is through television, radio, magazines, books, and various other media outlets. Corporations speak to consumers daily; even though consumers sometimes have no idea that they are being directly spoken to. This constant barrage of advertisements has had an unforeseen negative impact on society; it has given advertisers a control over consumers they never possessed before. The advertising culture influences how consumers think and perceive through the various messages it sends out which inspire how consumers feel and communicate.
One example of how advertising culture affects and has affected how consumers feel would be the spike in eating disorders among young men and women over the past couple decades. A percentage of these disorders is theorized to stem from consumers looking to the body types portrayed as the ideal in media and attempting to emulate them. The images can create dissatisfaction when it comes to how a male or female feels about their body. This causes some men and women to attempt to achieve what is considered by the media to be the ideal body through dieting, purging, and skipping meals. For girls, the ideal body type that the media projects is only possessed by roughly 5% of American females. This makes the efforts of consumers to emulate media even more futile because on average most people will never look like the portrayals.
Another example of how the ad culture has affected consumer thinking is recognized in the selling of high priced diamonds and jewelry from such companies such as Jared’s and Kay’s. Advertisers of these companies send a message that the bigger or more expensive the diamond that a husband buys, the more he loves or appreciates his fiancé. They use effective slogans such as “Every kiss begins with Kay” and “He went to Jared’s” to get this point across. Ad culture theorists such as Sut Jhally and James Twitchell are both “consider advertising to be the central meaning-maker in our culture, the key storyteller." Advertising tells consumers a story that becomes a part of our daily interaction in personal relationships. Now more than ever before, more men feel that they must strive to buy the expensive diamond ring in order to express their love for a woman. Advertising taught them that. The fact that advertisers can do this is alarming because now if our intimate relationships are able to be shaped by a company’s agenda then nothing in our culture is beyond influence.
A third example of how the ad culture dominates the consumer is by keeping the consumer perpetually unhappy and constantly wanting more. Companies drum up business by doing two things: instilling a false sense of need into the mind of the consumer and marketing products in a way that says a specific product will fulfill a specific need. The products themselves are marketed as things which can replace human needs such as love, affection, and the need to belong or fit in. Despite how they are marketed, whether through television or “stealth marketing” the products do not and are fundamentally unable to replace human needs. There are parallels between this system and the system described by Arthur Young when he explains how “the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." From the point of view of certain businesses, it is more profitable if consumers are unhappy because then they will buy more products in an attempt to correct that unhappiness.
All of the aforementioned are select examples of how the ad culture operates to openly manipulate the public’s way of thinking drive up sales. Advertisers have no intention of stopping and they continue to get smarter about how best to reach consumers in new, subtle ways.
