In “Hype” Kalle Lasn argues that contemporary advertising is pervasive and toxic by using many examples from Pepsi ads in school classrooms to the Oscar Meyer wiener song that constantly plays in the author’s head.
I have to agree with the author. In my own life I see the absurd pervasiveness of advertisement. My favorite example is the people that pay good money for T-shirts that advertise a particular company (Nike, The Gap, Old Navy, etc.), effectively making them into walking billboard. This is one of the best scams I have ever seen, and it reveals, to me, how brainwashed people have become by advertising culture that they would consider it cool to wear advertisements.
Moreover, I have a huge problem with the invasiveness of advertising. As the author points out, one cannot walk in an average American city without being exposed to advertisement. Ads are everywhere: in the stadium, the buses, the supermarket, your kid’s school. Worse, though, are the ads that threaten your private spaces: the TV and radio commercials that invade your home every 20 minutes, the ads that pop up when you check the weather on the web, the ads tailored to your tastes when you shop in Amazon.com. I especially dislike the tons of e-mails from companies advertising the latest sale, particularly because I get the e-mails only because the same companies require an e-mail address to buy from them online. As if that were not enough, now that we have smartphones, we carry advertisements with us!
How can this type of pervasive, invasive advertisement not be toxic? If one takes into account that the point of advertising is to make us unhappy with how we are and what we have so that we go out and buy the product that will make all better, the answer seems obvious: when I have 12 billion display ads, 200,000TV commercials and three thousand messages a day telling me I stink, that I am fat, that I am not a “choosy mom” if I don’t feed my kids a particular brand of peanut butter, that my house is dirty if I don’t clean with Swiffer, and etc. how can I have a truly healthy self-esteem? It seems to me that the point is to take over our psyches altogether and make us children of advertisement. It already has happened to some, as my T-shirt example above shows.
I just hope they never get to me.
