Ad Nauseam

I’ve been a student and a critic of advertising throughout my adult life, and bring to this book the dual perspectives of having a Bachelor’s Degree in English and a Masters in Psychology. I have over thirty-five years of clinical practice as a psychologist. I’ve lived in foreign countries for over nine years (four in Austria, three in Germany, and two in Jamaica), and have some perspective on cultural norms in regard to advertising practices. As you can infer from my college degrees, two of my major areas of interest are language and communication specifically, and human behavior in general. 

I’m not against all advertising. I’m against its pervasiveness in our society and culture, the way it pollutes the mental environment and shapes mass behavior in negative ways. I leave it to someone else to extol the benefits that advertising has wrought in our culture. From my point of view, the most successful mass exploitation of the science of psychology has been in the fields of advertising and public relations. It hasn’t been pretty. Adbusters magazine put it this way: “Corporate advertising is the single largest psychological experiment ever carried out on the human race, yet its impact on us remains unstudied and largely unknown.”                      

Advertising is inescapable and we live in a thoroughly-propagandized society. It’s normal for the average citizen/consumer to get pitched hundreds of times a day. Why? Because it works. Commercial advertisers want to persuade you that you need their product or service, whether or not it’s necessary, or good for you. Lies that advertisers sometimes tell are a protected form of free speech.

Ads often promote the consumption of useless or unhealthy things, and sometimes encourage people to live beyond their means. They normalize superficiality, conformity and a mania for endless acquisition, suggesting that we need to own the biggest, the latest, the fastest, the coolest commodities. They promulgate greed, envy and fear as motivating emotions. Many ads employ the imperative voice (“you should/must/need to ______”) to tell us what we need or what to do. Manufacturers of nearly-identical products spend millions of dollars to convince us that their product is somehow superior.

Not all advertising is propaganda. At its best advertising provides consumers with useful and accurate information about goods and services and issues. Such publications as the Yellow Pages have long served as useful guides for consumers. At its worst, advertising uses rhetorical devices, carefully-crafted verbal and visual metaphors, and the psychological techniques of propaganda and behavior modification to shape opinions without regard to facts, and to influence behavior -- often in unhealthy ways.

The intent to persuade doesn’t make something propaganda, if the means of persuasion are logic and facts. It’s the use of deceptive and manipulative tactics, which will be specified later, that distinguishes propaganda from information. My “formal” definition of propaganda is, “The systematic and deliberate use of deceptive and/or manipulative communication techniques in the mass media to influence public attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.” A simpler formulation is, “Media presentations and campaigns that employ the techniques of propaganda and subconscious influence.”