Advertising in a Post Modern World

Advertising, as we know it today, is a smarter, stronger, and considerably subtler breed than what our grandparents knew. Advertising pre 1980s was a rather straightforward occupation; here is our product, and this is why it’s better than the other guys. Advertisers were in the business of selling products, concrete things that could make your life better in some measurable way. However, advertising today has left its materialistic bonds of metal and plastic for more intellectual ones. Now days when we buy a product, we are not only buying a material object, but also an idea.

            Consumers and advertisers have played a cat and mouse game as long as advertising has existed. Public Relations firms will create an ad campaign and consumers will grow resistant to it because they know someone is trying to sell them something, and so the ad agencies had to create new ways of marketing that consumers wouldn’t be resistant to. This cycle played out for a while until advertisers realized that the best way to sell a product is to not appear that they’re selling it at all. Thus Video News Reports, or VNRs, were born. VNRs were created when marketers combined selective exposer, selective perception, peripheral processing, and the hostile media phenomenon to lure consumers into trusting their local broadcasting networks. They do away with the premise of an ad entirely and so create a new reality of what the viewer sees. Not only do marketers create products such as VNRs, but they also use the same techniques to infiltrate both the government and social media. Social media is increasingly taking up more and more of the average American’s life. People trust their friends’ opinions, and advertisers realize that so they create blogs and false social media to mislead people. By giving the illusion that something is popular it instantly becomes more valuable, and social media has created a venue for companies to shout to the world that what they are hocking is indeed popular. By creating fake blog and social media profiles companies can create the false sense that what they are doing is “trending”. By creating fake grassroots campaigns, or astroturfing, large corporations can create the image in the public mind, and thus the social reality, that the policy decisions that they want are supported and fought for by the American people. This seriously impacts the way a democratic government is meant to function because it intentionally obscures the will of the people. Knowledge of the human mind is a dangerous thing when wielded improperly.

            American’s lives have become filled with advertising. We live in a world where fake news, fake friends, and fake movements tell us how to be safe, what’s cool, and what we should believe in. Its almost as if the world were becoming interconnected for a person to live their own lives anymore.