Advertising; The Uninvited Guest

If you are looking for my article, "Advertising; the Uninvited Guest", which appeared in "Think", you will find a link to the complete article at my other blog, "A Neurotic in an Exotic Land".

I have another blog dedicated to my novella, "A Neurotic in an Exotic Land", and I did post an essay there; but, it seems to me that given the contents of the novella and the contents of this blog, this particular essay fits better here.....(at least for the time being).

This is a selection (roughly the first section) from a pre-publication version of an essay to appear in the summer issue of "Think".

Pre-publication draft;

To appear in “Think; Philosophy for Everyone”

Advertising; the Uninvited Guest

Mark J. Lovas

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of bad films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running, and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: “We’re happy! We’re glad to be in the world, we’re in agreement with being!” It’s a silly scene, a cliché, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter “beyond joking”.

--Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,

(Trans. A. Asher)

In a recent article in this journal (“Some Contrarian Reflections On Advertising”, Think, Spring 2010, pp. 47-50.) Professor Tibor Machan defends advertising from those who find that it is “anything but honorable”. According to Machan advertising is not merely honorable, but also natural, a virtual paradigm of cooperative behavior, and an essential component of human well-being. “If human life is a value, advertising is a value. It is a positive good.” Machan concedes that sometimes people exposed to advertising make foolish choices, but that is explained by their lack of prudence, not any fault of advertisers. He also appeals to our sense of fair play: advertisers are like us—people trying to earn a living, and even issues a veritable cri de coeur: Who among us hasn’t tried to promote a book we’ve written?

Let us begin with a summary of advertising as Machan imagines it to be: Two individuals meet. One has something he’d like to sell. The other does, from time to time, need to purchase goods, so is not a priori hostile toward learning about the existence of a new product or the availability of an old product. The first individual does something with the intention of making his product salient in the mind of the second. The second may choose to follow up on the suggestion implicit in the first person’s behavior, or he may choose not to. This is a transaction with potential benefit to both parties.

Machan’s portrait of advertising omits important details. Once we fill in the missing details, we will see that advertising is essentially unfriendly and uncooperative. Moreover, Machan’s most ambitious claims are the result of fallacious reasoning.

Some of the details Machan leaves out: (1) The corporate sponsors of marketing and advertising have resources unavailable to ordinary citizens, and are primarily concerned to increase profits for wealthy shareholders—and those profits are not, as Machan suggests, merely a means to allow them to make a living, but are a means whereby the already rich and powerful increase their wealth and power. (2) Machan omits details about the content of advertising. Today most advertising is “aspirational”; adverts do not chiefly aim to provide information about a product, they portray a world which citizens aspire towards, and attempt to connect specific products to that world. At the extreme, this means an advertisement aims to create a preference for Brand A rather than Brand B, even when there is no qualitative difference between the two. (3) Corporations target specific populations. They study a population, test ads on focus groups, and only after they have done so do they make an ad widely available. (4) Advertising exploits design flaws in human nature; just as we have a propensity toward health problems because our bodies were not designed for an environment rich in sugar and fat, so too we have the propensity to acquire beliefs and desires which do not necessarily further our considered or long-term interest. Our brains were not designed for an advertising rich environment. Below I focus primarily upon points (2) and (4), but the other points will be mentioned along the way.

An Ambitious Claim Based Upon Faulty Reasoning.

Machan claims that advertising is unqualifiedly good, that its goodness is part of the goodness of life. Nothing in what he says suffices to establish either claim. Machan draws attention to the fact that advertising is part of our current system of social organization. It is true that we manage to live within our existing system, and, some of us (but surely not all of us or even a majority of those on the planet) actually flourish. However, that is to say nothing about the role that advertising actually plays in such goodness as there is in the world. The fact appealed to doesn’t warrant the conclusion being drawn. An analogy: If one afternoon I find myself in the Arizona desert, and I rest for a moment in the shade of an enormous building which happens to house the machines of a polluting industry, my brief rest does not constitute a proof that the industry in question is a necessary component of human well-being.

Under our current economic and political setup we must endure advertising as part of the price of acquiring what we want or need. It is good to acquire apples and books, but no law of economics or psychology says that one must endure advertising in order to do so. There need only be some form of communication between producers and citizens. Machan’s most ambitious goal—to show that advertising is actually necessary for human flourishing--fails.