In an opinion piece I posted yesterday, I ranted about one of my major reservations about advertising — namely, that advertising masquerades as advice, making a promise about what a product or service can do for you — and fails to uphold that promise.  That was a somewhat rash and unscholarly thing to say, so let me parse precisely what I meant.

To do this, I will first turn to the monumental work of Donald Gunn, who, after working for years as the creative director of an advertising agency, decided to critically analyse different types of ads.  I encourage everyone to view this wonderful slideshow of the categories Gunn indentified, with examples, which is hosted by Slate.com — but for those of you in a hurry, here are the 12 types:

Demo: Demonstrates (as the name implies) the features of a product.  Very straightforward.

Show the Need or Problem: A mini-narrative illustrates a common problem the viewer may have — followed by the product, which is offered (sometimes only implicitly) as a solution to the problem.

Symbol, Analogy, or Exaggerated Graphic of Problem: Similar to above, except it shows the problem in a representational way — using an anthropomorphic character, visual metaphor, etc.

Comparison: A comparison between a service or product and the competitor’s.

Exemplary Story: Similar to showing the need, this is a mini-narrative which shows a situation in which things go awry — but with an extension to the narrative where the product is seen correcting the problem (basically, it adds the second and third acts to the story).

Benefit Causes Story: Here, the narrative is inverted; we start with the wondrous effects of the product, and reveal the product in question as the source of the effects only at the end.

Tell-It / Testimonial / A-Tells-B: Sometimes presented, sometimes shown through a third-person dialogue, this is essentially someone walking you through the good features of a product.

Ongoing Characters and Celebrities: A celebrity spokesman or person somehow qualified to explain the product appears with an endorsement.  Sometimes, their hair catches on fire.

Symbol, Analogy, or Exaggerated Graphic Demonstrating a Benefit: This is the counterpoint to #3; the solution is shown using visual metaphor, analogy, etc.

Associated User Imagery: People portrayed as worthy of admiration are shown associated with the product, the unassailable implicit logic being “If I use the product, I too will be worthy of admiration.”

Unique Personality Property: A characteristic which positively distinguishes the product is highlighted — things like design and function, as well as optic-based qualities like perceived prestige, country of origin, etc.  Sometimes, products taste awful, but they work!

Parody or Borrowed Format: This format mimics the format of other media for comedic effect, usually somehow tying in the product using one of the methods already mentioned.

That’s it.  Every ad ever made fits into one of those 12 categories. Now that we have a basic understanding of the ways in which advertising conveys its messages, it’s easier to deconstruct how they work.

Many of these are innocuous — beneficial, even, to people who are provided an opportunity to learn about a product or service they need.  Connecting service providers with the people who require those services is, I think we can all agree, a noble effort.  But advertising isn’t about selling an appropriate number of products to people who need them — it’s about selling as much as possible, whether people need the product or not.

With that in mind, here are some of my criticisms with advertising:

Creating a Need: It’s all well and good to offer people solutions to their problems, but how do you sell the solution to a problem nobody has?  First, you convince the consumer there’s a problem where none exists.  Consider, for a moment, tooth whitening.  A Google search of “tooth whitening OR whitener” returns nearly 5½ million results.  It’s enough to convince anyone that yellow teeth are the scourge of the 21st century — and yet, this problem didn’t even exist a couple decades ago.  People had yellow teeth.  It was a fact of life.  But it’s easy to play on someone’s fears that their appearance isn’t all it could be — that they somehow compare unfavourably with others, and to make someone feel insecure.

This goes well beyond oral hygiene.  Remember detergent ads from the 80s?  They were fixated with ring-around-the-collar.  When ring-around-the-collar had been solved, the laundry terror became static cling.  Then it was grass stain.  Then it was dingey whites.  Then it was colours than run.  Then it was colours that fade.  It never ends!  There’s always some kind of problem with your detergent that detergent manufacturers just happen to have the solution to — for a price.  Now ask yourself if detergent today is fundamentally different from detergent three decades ago.

Fashion might just be the biggest manufactured need of all.  Ms. Leonard of The Story of Stuff does a great job of illustrating how we engineer obsolescence into our … everything, simply by making it go “out of style,” thereby necessitating constant consumption.  Only a fraction of the total short is devoted to fashion, but I urge you to watch the whole thing anyway.

Materialism: Of course, all advertising is predicated on one fundamental idea: that spending money solves problems.  There are a million permutations of and nuances to this idea, but essentially, that’s the whole point of advertising — convincing people that spending money will make their lives better.  This is never stated, of course; it is assumed.  It’s just a given.  Consumption is life, and life is consumption.

Of course, this is not true.  There is no connection between living life — even a fulfilling life — and participating in consumerism.  A certain amount of participation in local economies is unavoidable to all but the most hermitty of us, but not to the degree that the average “normal” person in North America engages in.  We don’t need a new pair of jeans every season in order to go through life with our heads held high — we just think we do.

How did we get tricked into thinking we have to spend every dime we earn?  Through advertising, of course; the real question is why did we get tricked into thinking we have to spend every dime we earn?  The sad answer is that spending and consumption is crucial to economic growth in a capitalist economy.  Without economic growth, there are dire consequences which, even if I understood them, I still wouldn’t be able to explain.  But rest assured — if we were to stop spending, we’d sink into an atavistic nightmare overnight.  This, obviously, is why protecting uninterrupted spending was the primary concern of leadership following 9/11.  That sounds flippant, I’m sure, but I mean it literally: the worst possible result of the attacks, after the immediate results of the attacks themselves, would be the economic side effects of the reduced spending of a panicking populace — which, as it turned out, were very real and quite severe.  This is just one illustration of capitalism’s dependency on continuous consumption.

So we’ve painted ourselves into a corner.  Or made a deal with the devil.  Choose your platitude.  We’ve created a robust economy that grants us all pretty much the best standard of living on Earth, but at a great cost, both to ourselves and to our environment: it is founded on continuous consumption.  And to ensure continuous consumption, advertising must convince us to spend like fiends, forever, and at any cost — because spending is the source of emotional and spiritual fulfillment.

False Claims: When I accuse advertising of making false claims, I’m not talking about quantifiable promises, like “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand” — I’m talking about the implicit promises made using the “associated user imagery” technique.  More frequently, this is called “lifestyle advertising,” because it doesn’t so much sell a product as it sells the lifestyle attributable to the idealised consumer of said product.  As in the example above, the viewer comes to associate the product with an image of the person he or she wants to become, and, by extension, associates the attainability of this ideal life with consumption.

To give a common example: beer ads rarely resort to describing the qualities of the beer anymore, with a few notable exceptions.  Instead, they show the kind of people we wish we were drinking the beer.  Or not drinking, but holding, as the case may be.  This leads to all sorts of tangential associations branching off from the consumption of beer — from the joy of being fawned over by beautiful ladies at a sleepover camp for grown men, to becoming a more interesting person with a cultivated taste for adventure and fine cigars, to romanticist myths of masculinity (OK, that last ad is for whiskey, but that could apply to virtually every beer ad ever made).  We see boring beer drinkers become the life of the party, we see slightly-above-average-looking beer drinkers attract gorgeous women, we see down-to-earth beer drinkers enjoying the spoils of a millionaire’s lifestyle — how can it not be the beer that makes it happen?

Lifestyle advertising is not only the most effective, because it promises not just a solution to a single problem, but a solution to all life’s problems — it’s the most pernicious; it can be used to sell almost anything.  Consciously, we are able to reject the connections between seeing people we admire and the products they consume, but subconsciously?  It’s tough to defy these connections when they appear so frequently; surely a little bit of the message is incorporated into every one of us.  The human brain is designed to look for the relationships between things, and identify causality, and the more we’re exposed to these examples, the greater the identification.  Which brings me to point three:

Ubiquity: There is no escape.  If you want to participate in modern civilization, you’re going to be exposed to advertising. I don’t have the most reliable statistics here, but nearly one half of all advertising dollars spent worldwide are spent in the US (in 2001, at least).  Canada’s advertising saturation level is comparable.  It is simply everywhere you look.  There is (virtually) no media that you can consume that doesn’t contain ads.  Which means, if you find advertising objectionable on principle, you have two choices: suck it up, or run away — the latter of which doesn’t, strictly speaking, meet the condition of participating in modern civilization.

Which begs the question: do we, reasonably, have a right to freedom from advertising?  There’s a longstanding tradition of free speech on this continent — we cherish the right to say what we want to say.  But do we also have a right to not hear what what don’t want to hear?  Could one reasonably argue that advertising saturation, with all its false promises, its attempts to make us feel as shitty as possible about ourselves — to say nothing of its devastatingly eternal jingles — results in a diminishment of quality of life?  Do we not, as a population, have the right to the best possible quality of life?  If, after all, some free speech can be contained in free speech zones, why not contain the free speech that’s impersonal, unwanted, and exists only to move goods?

Of course, David Ogilvy might beg to differ.

[Jump to Part II.]