Manufacturing Desire at the Altar of Anxiety:
Materialism, Consumption, and Marketing the Spiritual Void
by Dianna Morton


In both public and private spaces, we are assaulted by a thirty second spell on an average of three thousand times per day. Under these spells, we are momentarily prompted to believe that objects have the power to transform us and to bring us everlasting happiness. As we have been raised under the barrage of these ubiquitous and incessant spells, the onslaught permeates the atmosphere and creates a progressive confusion about our reality. These spells, orchestrated by the most creative minds of the century, may be considered the most successful propaganda effort in changing public consciousness in the history of the world (Jhally, 2006, p. 100) .They are so powerful that even the most rational among us are at risk of being swallowed up in the belief in the magical potions of materialism and cast our faith to the promise- that our dream life will be made real. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels recognized the necessity of capitalism to expand the consumption of commodities at all costs: “All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” (Marx and Engels, 1978, p. 476). Advertising is the spell, and it progressively works its manipulative magic upon us, as consumers, to up hold the illusionary reality of capitalism to the tune of $260 billion in the United States annually. This figure does not include the Public Relations aspect of advertising, nor the advertising that is now merged into the general culture (S. Jhally, personal communication, March 22, 2008). We do not have the choice to turn advertising off because it is everywhere. Choice is taken out of the equation- choice is seen as an enemy, but at the same time, choice is a crucial illusion incorporated within the spell.
My primary texts of focus for this writing are The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Culture, Media, and Politics by Sut Jhally, with a particular emphasis on his two essays Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic, first published in 1989 in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America and Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse, published in Critical Studies in Media Commercialism published in 2000, as well as Born to Buy, by Juliet Schor (2004). Sut Jhally is a Professor of Communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and founder of the Media Education Foundation. In the first essay, Jhally examined, through a Marxist lens, the development of the consumer society and the theft and reappropriation of meaning in advertising. Jhally (1989) claimed the development of the consumer culture born out of the capitalist mode of production as a cultural revolution. The second essay claimed that the powerful propaganda system of advertising, spawned from this cultural revolution, is in the process of piloting the consumer culture of the West into the destruction of the world, under the guise of leading us to individual happiness and a globalization in which all of the developing worlds’ people will be materially indoctrinated into this belief system. Schor is a prolific researcher and writer on consumerism in America. She also teaches sociology at Boston College. Born to Buy is based on Schor’s knowledge of economics, sociology, psychology, and media. Through the eyes and practice of a social scientist, she examined our contemporary culture in which advertising has an immense effect on young people. The theoretical underpinnings of focus are defining human happiness and its sources, understanding the depths of the magical and supernatural world view that advertising proposes, while playing upon our anxieties, and discovering how these two meet in forming a consumer culture. Lastly, this paper will examine the effects of this commercialized culture on the future: our children. Advertising is a system of “magic” that exploits our human desires in convincing us that commodities are the way to happiness, yet our consumer culture reflects lives bereft of personal autonomy, deep human connections with other human beings, as well as inflicting future generations with severe emotional and physical health issues that may weigh upon our survival as a species, while providing us with a fantasy world that increases our anxieties by manufacturing desires that can never be met through the proposed remedy of consumption.
Preindustrial society, as seen through the works of Goldsmith (1770) in “The Deserted Village” was an agricultural society in which work and leisure were intermeshed and family relationships were at the core of the culture. Goods were produced locally and there was an intimate connection between the people and their craft and their labor. Works of fiction, such as Moll Flanders, showed the means in which industrial capitalist society shattered these intimate societal bonds. People transitioned to urban centers and a rampant disconnect between families, labor, and leisure became the social norm. As this revolution pressed on into twentieth century America, modernism brought to the forefront what Jhally termed “a major crisis in meaning.” He stated, “Feelings of unreality, depression, and loss accompanied the experience of anonymity associated with urbanization. Religious beliefs waned in strength as traditional Protestant theology underwent a process of secularization.” (Jhally, 2006, p. 88) The emotional and physical health of the people was in a state of upheaval, as if a literal and cultural state of schizophrenia. As a result, where a communal, ethical, and religious framework had previously been employed to heal and strengthen the people, the secular nature of this new culture fragmented and dismissed these former structures. In addition to the crisis in meaning, another crisis emerged- an economic crisis that confronted the immense amount of commodities being produced within the capitalist system: they needed to be sold and then disposed of.
In Social Communications in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace (2005), the authors explained that capitalists saw an open door into exploiting the emotional and pseudo-material needs of the people to their economic satisfaction. Advertising would solve these problems simultaneously:
The consumer society resolves the tensions and contradictions of industrial society as the marketplace and consumption takes over the functions of traditional culture. Into the void left by the transition from the traditional to industrial society comes advertising, the most prominent aspect of the “discourse through and about objects,” and the reconstitution of the population not into social classes as the primary mode of identification, but into consumption classes (as in Jhally, 2006, p. 89).
Jhally noted that in a capitalist society, commodities have been stripped of the meaning that was once based upon the integral connection with their creation. Therefore, the goal of the advertiser is to refill the goods with meaning. According to Karl Marx, the fetishism of commodities involves hiding the real social relation between the object and the labor of its production to create an imaginary symbolic meaning. Advertising steps in and does this, which is where its power lies.
In his book Deep Economy which creatively navigates a model for a post-consumer future, Bill McKibben (2007) wrote:
Traditionally, ideas like happiness and satisfaction are the sorts of notions that economists wave aside as poetic irrelevancies, questions that occupy the people with no head for numbers who have to major in something else at college. An orthodox economist can tell what makes someone happy by what they do. If they buy a Ford Expedition, then ipso facto a Ford Expedition is what makes them happy.” (McKibben, 2007, p. 30)
Advertising tries to get us to belief just this- objects bring us happiness. In a broad analysis, contemporary advertising acts as a system of magic. In order to understand the theoretical foundation of this analysis, it is essential to investigate the idea of human happiness and how advertising works in convincing us that objects will fulfill our desires and bring us happiness- or the cultural role advertising plays in the society, and how through this role society’s values are constructed. This is not to examine advertising in its effectiveness in selling product, but to examine advertising in terms of what stories are being told. These stories influence our behavior, our morality, and our ideas about what is important (Jhally, 2000, p.31). And these stories are presently inundating our society. Advertising, or the discourse through and about objects, has taken over our public and private landscapes (Jhally, 2000, p.29). As the greatest technologically based propaganda mechanism in the history of mankind, advertising pushes the myth that happiness is attained through consumption.
If we interpret the word “need” to mean something that we, as humans, cannot survive without, we would include items such as food, shelter, and clothing. We would also include those things that we need to fulfill us as participants in the human experience: love, safety, friendship, and sense of purpose. All of these needs can be met without advertising. In Jhally’s (2000) essay Advertising and the Edge of the Apocalypse, he refers to "quality of life surveys" in which people define what brings about happiness in their lives. Social values, including love, family, friends, far outweighed material values:
What people say they really want out of life is: autonomy and control of life; good self-esteem; warm family relationships; tension-free leisure time; close and intimate friends; as well as romance and love. This is not to say that material values are not important. They form a necessary component of a good quality of life. But above a certain level of poverty and comfort, material things stop giving us the kind of satisfaction that the magical world of advertising insists they can deliver. (Jhally, 2000, p. 32)
This is why the advertising industry, after the 1920’s, ceased selling us products. The pitch moved the relationship of objects to the social sphere of people.
One of the most prominent ways in which advertising works can be discovered through the analysis of its historical stages, which responded to the human psyche. Our relationship to products is twofold: (a) its use value and (b) its symbolic dimension. In anthropology, when humans bring meaning to a product, it is called the symbolic constitution of utility. This is inherent in human beings interaction with products. A historical and anthropological example of this would be the observations of Marcel Maus and the Maori’s ritualistic gift giving. For this African tribe, the ceremonial gift giving combined the appreciation of the natural raw materials (part of nature) and the life force of the person that produced it. The exchange of gifts is literally an exchange of persons- that is why reciprocity is so important in non-market, indigenous, societies. (Leiss, Klein, Jhally, Botterill , 2005, p. 243). Yet, our rational, technological communications systems offer us only the “facts” about the products we consume. Advertising is talked about as information- the central rational of advertising is that it is a complex industrial market society in which people need information to determine what goods are right for them. Business and marketing says advertising is a form of information that consumers need and require. If advertising is information, the objective features of goods are the information that advertising gives. This information includes what “it” does, how well “it” does it, and what “it” is made of- its technical performance features. The central motion of this starts off with the idea of rational consumers who know what their needs are; the job of producers is to relay this information to marketers who then forward it to consumers. The focus of the objective features of goods is a very narrow way in seeing what is important about goods.
In Advertising the American Dream, Roland Marchland wrote that in advertising’s emergence at the beginning of the 20th century, the initial focus was on the celebration of the grand quantitative production of the new industrial society:
Huge refrigerators tower above tiny towns of consumers; silhouetted against the starry sky, they stood guard over communities like giant sentinels. Immense cars straddled the rivers and towns of miniaturized countrysides below, symbolizing the command over the landscape obtainable through the automobile.
(as in Jhally, 2006, p. 90)
Jhally analyzed this view of advertising as a form of idolatry, and witnessed its progression as parallel with the evolution of religious belief. Jhally wrote, “What advertisers recognized was the nostalgia for the world that was passing, for a stable world of religious, family, and community life.” (Jhally, 2006, p. 90). Roland Marchland pointed out that the visual clichés at the dawn of the advertising age directly showed the object as sacred through the use of radiant beams glowing from the product as a “halo” effect. Following the idolatry stage of advertising up through the 1920’s, the stage of iconology emerged. These icons, or symbols presented through advertisements moved the consumer from the worship of commodities to bringing the meaning of objects within a social context (Jhally, 2006, p. 91). This transference of the consumption of goods into the social arena, involving social values or status, translated into social relationships. As the relationship of trust with local farmers diminished with the absence of local farms, original brands were comforting logos that were often images of people such as Aunt Jemima or Quaker Oats, symbols that invited a fake personal relationship with the product. This transferred the “feeling” of dealing with the real people that had represented the endorsement of the local products to imaginary people that stamped their mass produced product with the seal of value and reliability.
According to Jhally, advertising made a complete shift to the consumer from the 1940’s through the 1960’s. He cited this phase as the “stage of narcissism” in which the product’s power is at the disposal of individuals:
The product reflects the desire of the individual. Advertisements show the fantasized completion of self, of how the product can transform individual existence. The power of the product can be manifested in many ways but, predominantly, it is through the strategy of black magic, in which persons undergo sudden physical transformations or in which the commodity can be used to entrance or enrapture other people. (Jhally, 2006, p. 91)
In Sut Jhally’s debate with James Twitchell “On Advertising” (2006), Jhally exemplified this with the huge success of The DeBeers advertising campaign in which the power of advertising has structured our culture into responding to the belief that the diamond is directly correlated with meeting the needs of love and courtship. The bloody and violent history of the diamond trade never entered into the arena of this story. Jhally stated that The DeBeers example points out how advertising works, “by reaching deep seated human needs” (Jhally, 2006, p. 119). “A diamond is forever” is central to the ideas we think about when we contemplate the rituals of courtship and marriage in this culture, and to understand this value we must look at the history of diamonds. Until the 1870’s, diamonds were a rare stone and their value came from their scarcity. In about 1870, huge diamond mines were discovered in South Africa. The most important thing to know about diamonds is that they are not scarce. They are found everywhere in the world. But the owners of these mines were fearful that the market would be flooded and as supplies increased the prices would come down, so they formed a monopoly, or a cartel. The family that had control over diamonds was the Oppenheimers, and their goal was to gain control over the diamond trade. They have employed the most successful advertising campaign in the world. In 1938, there was a decline in sales in the diamond business. Vast quantities of diamonds were being unearthed in Africa, Russia, and Australia. Along with their discovery, the knowledge of their common existence was seeping out. Every time there were new discoveries of diamond, they needed to be either destroyed or controlled. What DeBeers had to do was to make sure wherever diamonds were found, they needed to gain control. (From an economic point of view, it is exactly what producers should do.) They needed to change public attitude towards diamonds and needed to make diamonds something beyond their economic value. In order to do so, diamonds had to be connected to the emotional life of people. The Madison Avenue N.W. Ayers Advertising Company was hired to capture the attention of both males and females in varying propagandist stories about the value of diamonds. Men were to be persuaded that diamonds were the gift of love and the greater the diamond the greater the love. For women, diamonds were a necessity to romantic courtship. The goal was to change public attitudes. The reason DeBeers could do this was because they had monopoly control of it. They never had to even mention the company or brand because they had control over the product; the sole need was to change the meaning of these “things” that can be dug out of the ground in vast quantities. They proceeded to do this through both the movies and British royalty. After WWII, the major medium was the movies. An internal menu from N.W.Ayers stated the following: “Motion pictures seldom include scenes showing the selection of or purchase of an engagement ring to a girl. It would be our plan to contact scenario writers and directors and arrange for such scenes in suitable productions” ( The Diamond Empire, 1994).They gave out diamonds to producers to put diamonds into the movies in a very favorable situation, which were staged renditions of the man surprising the woman with a piece of diamond jewelry and while simultaneously proposing marriage. Hollywood, in its Golden Age, was indoctrinated in this advertising campaign; their compensation was in diamonds. Entire movies were created around diamonds such as “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “Diamonds are Dangerous”. To Americans, The British Royal Family represented the ultimate in aristocratic behavior. As diamonds came from British colonies, the royalty was more than willing to become the sales agents for DeBeers- almost as a coup. (Both of these situations illustrate the merging of advertising into the general culture.) In 1948, a Madison Avenue slogan “A diamond is forever” was created; the idea that a diamond is forever was to get people to store and hold them- so they would never flood the market and their value would not diminish. Within as little as twenty years, this agency was able to change cultural attitudes towards love and marriage. The diamond, at the cost of an average worker’s two month salary, entered the market of necessity in the cultural rituals of courtship.

Jhally’s analysis of the development of advertising moves into the stage where it presently exists today- totemism. In ancient societies, totemism “refers to the correlation between the natural world and the social world, where natural differences stand for social differences. In modern advertising, goods take the place of natural species” (Jhally, 2006, p. 91). In this final stage, all of the previous stages mix and merge. It is a cumulative progression in which utility, symbolization, and personalization meet under the sign of “group”. A consumption community emerges and products give the magic access to these communities (Jhally, 2006, p. 92). This appeals to the primeval needs that reside within the deepest human condition.
In totemism, contemporary advertising highlights personal ascetic values over social values, severing our relationships with one another. An ad for Blue Fly depicts a young woman shopping on line during a party. The copy reads, “It’s her party and she’ll shop if she wants to.” There is often a recycling or piggy backing of previous pop culture that has proven successful in creating an instant recognition and fulfills the need for symbolic meaning. One recent phenomenon in advertising is the human model as limp and lifeless, sending the message that humans, themselves, are commodities. In advertising, women are often objectified, a first step in justifying violence towards a human. Women’s bodies are often dismembered- another lead towards violence against women. They are photographed in sexually provocative and submissive poses. Last year, “America’s Top Model”, a network show in which women compete for modeling opportunities, required participants to send in photos of the model as “murdered and beautiful.” One image, in particular, showed a women in a doorway with her midsection carved open as illustrative of organ theft. Bondage is used to sell cars in a Lexus ad and watches on city buses. Pornography has entered the mainstream through advertising. Women are “silenced” in many ads, such as a Bonnebell ad that features a women with a turtleneck sweater covering her mouth with copy that reads, “I let my eyes do the talking.” It is also a “to be looked at world” and feelings of worthlessness and dissatisfaction are imposed upon us. As we are being sold a solution to our desire of freedom and transformation, we are, in reality, put into mental prisons. This is emphasized in advertising directed at women as the body is depicted as being a form of capital in and of itself that depreciates with age and weight gain. The magical remedy is a Lands’ End bathing suit. The copy in the catalogue reads, “You never have to feel self conscious on the beach again.” Women can “defy” their age by using Revlon products. Men are asked, “Would you rather tell her your secrets or be her secret?” The archetypical male is featured in advertising in an “Attitude is Everything” stance. A truck ad boasts, “When you drive a truck this frigging big, you don’t run from trouble, you run over it.” The message promotes dangerous driving habits, but also the concept that "might is right" and that conflict is solved through physical strength and violence, rather than negotiation (Tallim, 2002). The Media Awareness Foundation has identified these male archetypes found in advertising as masculine icons from popular history:
The cowboy, the pirate and the ancient warrior are all examples of violent, rugged manhood that support the premise that man is, historically, an aggressive creature. The Marlboro Man, the icon of the rugged, solitary male, is meant to suggest that men who smoke Marlboro cigarettes are equally rugged and masculine. With the cowboy icon comes many other (often stereotypical) associations of strength, bravery and 'noble violence' — the lone cowboy using violent behavior to protect the weak and defenseless (who are usually female). (Tallim, 2002)
These messages isolate males. They, too, are delivered, through advertising, to a mental prison in which masculinity is defined in a very narrow and limited way. Advertisers further remind readers of their power to continually transform. Ads urge the reader to, “live in the moment”; “create your own spotlight”; and “you can make it happen.” Risks are presented as an essential element in a life of novelty. Many of these ads push addiction to food, alcohol, and tobacco. The messages of advertising’s spell takes us further than ever from the warm family relationship, intimate friends, and romantic love that we all seek to satisfy our human needs. It indoctrinates us into a world of isolation, violence, and self-abuse.
In this realm of totemism, with the understanding that people’s relationships with objects is what defines us as human beings, advertising works through the illusion of catering to deep human needs. Schudson (1984) wrote in Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society:
IN THE FACTORY we make cosmetics," Charles Revlon of Revlon, Inc. said, "in the store we sell hope."An advertising executive told me, "We've convinced the mothers of America that they're not good mothers if they don't serve Minute Maid." Another executive, referring to AT&T's "Reach Out and Touch Someone" campaign said, "Advertising turned that instrument, a physical inanimate object, into an instrument of the heart." These are the sorts of statements, no matter how hyperbolic or self serving, that critics of advertising seize on as the inner worm of truth in the apple of the ad industry. ( Schudson, 1984, p. 129)
Advertising depended upon identifying the niche market and segmented audience, so that the stimuli that were created could evoke stored information: it had to resonate with the information that the listener processed. It needed to identify our anxieties, and then to wrap up our emotions and sell them back to us. As advertising drew its materials from the experience of the audience, it reformulated them in a unique way that did not reflect meaning but constituted it. The feeling of the message became the essential element of advertising. (Botterill et al., 2005) This is the symbolic meaning that advertising supplied as products entered the market in the industrialized capitalist economy.
Jhally noted that this system has been established as an essential part of Capitalism. He quoted retail analyst of the 1940’s Victor Liebow in his essay “Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse” (2000):
Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and the selling of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in commodities...We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate. (in Jhally, 2000, p. 31)
It is this connection between goods and human happiness that the story of advertising tells us, and in the telling of this story, a culture is created. Based on this premise, humans become the product sold to advertisers, of value only as a potential customer.
Jhally called this “The cruel illusion of advertising” and quoted ad executive Jerry Goodis in stating, "Advertising doesn't mirror how people are acting but how they are dreaming." (in Jhally, 2000). The power of advertising exceeds the reflection of the dreamlife of the culture- advertisers create what Jhally termed “the fantasy factory”, yet as advertising does this, it brings us further away from human relationships, a true source of our human happiness. This irony creates great confusion and anxiety. People receiving the message that happiness can be got through consuming objects become negligent of collective values and interests. It speaks to our most base human instincts: selfishness and greed (Jhally, 2000, p.35).
The ironies are steep. Advertisers will argue against the fact that their purpose is to homogenize people and culture at the same time that commodities are often presented as a means to achieve individuality. Gap claims wearing their jeans will channel your life into one of distinction. Yet, the drive of advertisers is to merge the niche market and segmented audiences in order to build a constituency of the audience so the audience becomes a willing, consolidated mass market. This age of mass industrialization has become an “Age of Choicelessness” under this guise of individuality. Although commodity choices seem to exist, Klein noted that as we are “dazzled by the array of consumer choices, we may at first fail to notice the tremendous consolidation taking place in boardrooms.” (Klein, 2002, p. 129) In the same vein, we are confused into thinking we have an abundance of lifestyle options to choose from, while brand tribes define our lifestyles. Through branding, advertisers realized that they could sell back to the consumer the consumption of the product. An example of this is the contemporary television car advertisement. For young people, what they love most about cars is about hanging out with friends and listening to music. Advertisers have recreated this lifestyle image and used it as the sales pitch for the car. Advertisers understood that they could sell lifestyles by finding where our brand idea lives independently and then merging with it. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Disney understood this. In the 1960’s, Coca-Cola was selling peace and happiness through manipulated song lyrics. Disney was selling the nostalgic American Dream, complete with messages of racism and sexism, Phil Knight, CEO of Nike, did not want to compete in a commodity market place. He wanted to run a sports company based on the idea of sports- not a fashion company (Klein, 2004).This lifestyle branding- or selling of an idea as commodity is damaging to a democracy. If one of the major sources of happiness includes personal autonomy- branding, by its nature, obliterates this. Virgin sells the idea of individualism and mass produces rebellious individuality. Apple invokes revolutionary icons such as Einstein, John Lennon, Gandhi, and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ikea boasts their products as a form of democracy because you can choose and put together your furniture. In branding, these valued ideas are not connected to belief or action but are just commodity- which is key in devaluing them. Our most important ideas, democracy and revolution, have now become “brands”. In No Logo, Naomi Klein summarized that every facet of our lives is vulnerable to use (and abuse) in the theatre of the brand (Klein, 2002). As the values reflected in these ideas have been diminished, and as this chaotic cultural and economic landscape, “with its border defying flows of money, high speed information and imagery” (Earp and Devereaux, 2002) has left every aspect of our lives open to this branding, our autonomy has been robbed, a sham has been made of our sense of our own individuality, and our political ideals have been commoditized. If the equation of happiness consists of these attributes, it would be reasonable to assess that advertising has not interrupted our channels to feelings of contentment, but progressively works at brainwashing us into believing that we still have to buy more things to get “there” at the cost of annihilating our true sources of happiness.
The imperial powers of lifestyle branding now push against their own boundaries. The goal is now to stretch the brand in terms of selling more and different products. Warring megabrands want to be everywhere and everything. In actuality, Disney has reached brand nirvana in the creation of the first privatized town: Celebration, Florida. Ironically, there are no brands in the first branded town which was built as a monument to public space. Yet, as advertising does so well, what has been created is the antithesis of all that brings us happiness. The town of Celebration is a Disney monopoly. As companies try to feed off of meaning and space, everything is a potential prop. Even in capitalist culture, the commons should be the place where the rules of the market do not apply. In today’s consumer society, we have given up the commons for look-alike imposters (Klein, 2002). Because of our lack of communal values, schools have begun to look like malls, relying on corporate advertising money to fund basic educational programs. In public schools, computers lined up in educational spaces have Apple or Microsoft logos on their screens. Mathematic texts pose problems with photo illustrations of M&M candies. Vending machines advertise Coca Cola and Dasani. Just as public places take on the visual illusion of the private sphere, private spaces appear as public. Malls take on the physical attributes of the commons, designed to mimic the town square, but bereft of any constitutional rights. In this privatized illusion of the commons, all rights must be surrendered - and we are confronted with the question- what is real? “Branding works its magic only up to the point of sale, and then the actual human need returns, unfulfilled; the advertiser is always pleased to offer a new round of promise and failure.” (McKibben, 2007, p. 113) Advertising does not meet our needs, rather it creates an illusion of doing so, actually bringing us further away from chance of fulfillment.

James Twitchell (2004), who stated his belief that “The Industrial Revolution was a result of our materialism, not the cause of it.” (Twitchell, 2004, p. 35), celebrated the success of the advertising industry’s corporate transcendence in naming the phenomenon “Branded Nation”. Twitchell viewed this branding as a new form of community. In his essay Branding 101: Marketing Stories in a Culture of Consumption, Twitchell wrote, “Much of our shared knowledge about ourselves and our culture comes to us through a commercial process of storytelling called branding…ten percent of two year old’s nouns are brand names.” According to Twitchell, this “gives the consumer something to hold onto.” (Twitchell, 2004, p. 2) The very notion that one tenth of the primary and limited vocabulary of a toddler is brand names should be cause for alarm. As a child’s vocabulary reflects the child’s interpretation of the world, what we have done is to allow the cultural space to be taken over by very narrow capital interests. If we, as educated and life experienced adults are as vulnerable as we appear to be in our believe in the magical properties of materialism, a child is a blank slate.
Economist and social scientist Juliet Schor (2004) in her book Born to Buy, examined our contemporary culture in which advertising has an immense effect on young people, in particular children ages eighteen months through thirteen years old. Having posed the question, “What is happening to kids today?” in terms of well-being trends, Schor did not dismiss the discourse that crosses political spectrums including family structure, permissive parenting, the decline of morality, and ill performing schools, yet included what she named the “ 800 pound gorilla” in the room, an alternative explanation: Media and Consumer Culture. The basis for this claim is that children are spending more time with media than generations of the past. (In this context, it is essential to comprehend and clearly recognize the blurry merging of advertising and the general media culture.) Her quantitative research strategy was two-fold. First, she obtained a managerial position with a Madison Avenue children’s marketing group. There, Schor was tutored in all facets of children’s advertising; she met with those contacts for an additional forty meetings and interviewed people in the industry to find out what was going on and what the cutting edge of marketing to kids was. Schor’s second mode of research involved surveying three hundred children age ten through thirteen in five schools, both urban and suburban, and residing in varying socio-economic and racial/ethnic households, in the Boston area, to measure consumer involvement, media use, and a series of psychological variables including depression, self-esteem, headaches, etc. This research included twenty-six parent interviews. The purpose was to ask the question what is the impact of media and commercialization on children’s well being? Schor examined how the market targets children immersed in the consumer media culture to their detriment, in which they are offered false promises, yet are put into a metaphorical prison in which they are controlled, bereft of connection with caring adults, suffer severe stress and anxiety, become prone to obesity and diabetes, and are encouraged to develop addictive behaviors, all in order to meet the ever increasing demands of the market. The concept of the defense of advertising needs clarification when examining the detrimental effects of advertising on children. This defense is based on the belief that adults are rational and can detect truth and falsity in advertising. Yet, this argument cannot be applied to children because rationality is not something that exists, but develops. Based on the defense of advertising theory, it would be unethical to direct advertising to children, especially children under the age of twelve, as the younger the child, the more vulnerable to the message. Prior to the 1960’s, children were only exposed to ads that were made for adults. The reason is that a medium for the market did not exist until television entered as a commodity in the mainstream culture. This commercial media technology connected children directly to the market. Juliet Schor (2004) explained that up through the 1980’s, the messages of advertising were less directly sent to children, as the parent served as a gatekeeper to some extent. She noted how this historic shift in the triangle of children, parents, and marketers began to break down in the eighties, and that advertising firms pushed and disseminated this old regime in the 1990’s, where a direct market to kids, via advertising, created an alliance between the marketer and children. She stated that the corporate position made a claim to children in which the marketer is “going to take you to a free hedonistic place where everything is going to be fun.” (Schor, 2004, p. 202) The taste of a generation is being formed through a process of marketing and advertising. The lives, the development of meaning, and experiences are being constructed by a set of corporations who are turning children into commercialized children. The market’s claim is that it is empowering these children. Yet, Schor, based on a structural equation model of media exposure and physical and psychological health, argued that the negative trends in childhood well being are directly correlated to commercial media exposure.
Statistics that Schor was exposed to during her “work” on Madison Avenue was that the present generation of children is the most “brand” oriented. Her Madison Avenue “constituents” bragged that by eighteen months old, children were identifying logos, and by age two, they were asking for products by brand name. By age three, children were using brands to communicate aspects of their personalities. The growth of research on how to market to kids included marketers moving into homes to “study” kids and their activities. The scientific side of the research included “neuro-marketing”- actual MRI scanning on “consumers”, including children. In her direct research with children, Schor recognized that children were shopping 50 % more than the preceding generation, both with their parents and on their own. The supermarket was the predominant consumer arena. Schor also noted that commodities have become increasingly influential especially in the social dynamics within schools. Among youngsters who previously answered questions about future aspirations with career goals, the number one answer (75%) is now “rich.” (Hymowitz, 2007, ¶ 5) As I thumbed through a local high school newspaper this week, two out of three senior students interviewed stated “rich” as the future goal they wished to attain. A term used by Madison Avenue when discussing their target child audience is “Tweens”. The markets’ hype is the benefits of appealing to the children’s “aspiration age”. (Hymowitz, 2007, ¶ 5) Tweens are between six and twelve years old, and the term refers to a person who is between childhood and adolescence. According to the marketers, a six year old is no longer a child. If we are to return to the ethics of advertising, this concept takes the heat off the advertisers in a moral debate.
Through advertising and corporate media, there are several stories that are being told to children about the culture of childhood. The first is that children now have clout in the market place. Prior to this shift in the eighties, kids’ consumer culture was “cheap”. There was penny candy to be sold along with cheap plastic toys. When the paradigm began shifting, and children were spending more time with media, an advertising culture was set into place to reel the children into the consumer culture. In her article Childhood for Sale, Kay Hymowitz stated that, “marketers use the expertise of anthropologists, sociologists, brain-imaging specialists, child psychologists, and pollsters to plumb children's desires, analyze family dynamics, and develop techniques that seem consciously designed to make parents' lives miserable.” (Hymowitz, 2007, ¶ 5) Part of this alliance between marketers and children is the “nag-factor” or “pester power”, which results, according to Schor (2004), in seven hundred billion dollars of adult purchasing power being driven by children annually. As the Nickelodeon motto has it, "Kids Rule!"
In this defunct paradigm, food is a major product that is being pushed. A recent study done by the Kaiser Foundations Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States concluded the following:
The study combined content analysis of TV ads with detailed data about children’s viewing habits, to provide an estimate of the number and type of TV ads seen by children of various ages. The study found that tweens ages 8-12 see the most food ads on TV, an average of 21 ads a day, or more than 7,600 a year. Teenagers see slightly fewer ads, at 17 a day, for a total of more than 6,000 a year. For a variety of reasons -- because they watch less TV overall, and more of their viewing is on networks that have limited or no advertising, such as PBS and Disney -- children ages 2-7 see the least number of food ads, at 12 food ads a day, or 4,400 a year.
For each age group studied, food was the top product seen advertised. Thirty-two percent of all ads seen by 2-7 year olds were for food, while 25% of ads seen by 8-12 year olds and 22% of ads seen by 13-17 year olds were for food. Of all genres on TV, shows specifically designed for children under 12 have the highest proportion of food advertising (50% of all ad time).
“Children of all ages see thousands of food ads a year, but tweens see more than any other age group,” said Vicky Rideout, vice president and director of the Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Since tweens are at an age where they’re just becoming independent consumers, understanding what type of advertising they are exposed to is especially important.” (The Kaiser Foundation, 2007, ¶ 2)
The study revealed that out of the types of food advertised, 34% are for candy and snacks, 28% are for cereal, and 10% are for fast foods. Of the 8,854 ads reviewed in the study, there were none for fruits or vegetables targeting children or teens. The appeals used in advertising food to kids include a push to view websites and a premium toy gift. One in ten of these toys are connected to a TV or movie character. Only fifteen percent of this advertising included depicting healthy habits such as physical activity. (The Kaiser Foundation, 2007, ¶5)
Out of all the battles between parent and child: food, drugs, sex, and violence, food is the one that has been lost, and may do the most harm to children over time. The extreme changes in the levels and rates in obesity in American children show that one quarter of all children are obese today. One third of these children will develop diabetes as a direct result. (Schor, 2004, p.128) There is a never ending increase of branding of junk food through toys. Junk food is even being produced to look like toys. Hymowitz (2007) highlighted the point that, “ They (the marketers) appeal to children's impulsiveness by introducing ever more exciting and more noxious products like "Blue Funky Fries" or "Mystery Color Ketchup." (Hymowitz, 2007, ¶5) While this advertising is going on, continuously pervasive is drug, alcohol, and tobacco advertising to kids. (Schor, 2004, p. 35-36)
Another story that is being told about the culture of childhood is that adults are the enemy. Schor claims that Nickelodeon is the prime pusher of this concept. Shows on Nickelodeon are disrespecting of adults, and sell children on the “cool” factor. To be connected to “cool”, you need to be disconnected from adults. Anti-adultism is rampant in this consumer kids’ culture. Schor’s research indicated that the more children watch Nickelodeon, the more they dislike their parents. (Schor, 2004, p. 51) A few months ago, an eleven year old child was a guest in my home for a week. She watched television (which is severely monitored in her own home), and often chose the Nickelodeon station as a novelty. I sat with her to view a show on a Saturday morning and was abhorred by the behavior of the animated characters. Teachers were portrayed as sadistic and evil; children were physically torturing their teachers in retaliation. My viewing experience leads me to accept Schor’s observation.
A third story being told is the need to be “cool” in order to be respected in the society. A shift in how products are marketed to children has changed. In the past, the nature of the product was advertised as in “It tastes good.” or “It is fun to play with.” Yet in this new world of marketing to kids, the adult approach of the symbolic and social significance of the product is what is being sold as in “You need this cereal to be cool.”
The move has been from the intrinsic qualities of the product to the branding of the product, and cool has become the central theme of all youth marketing. Although this idea has been present in adolescent culture for many years, making sense in terms of childhood development in which the adolescent needs to seek an identity separate from a family identity, (Merchants of Cool, a PBS documentary, examines the marketing to teens industry in depth) the idea that a six year old should care about being “cool” is radical. Another shift in marketing to children is that marketers are now taking products and themes (“cool”) usually marketed to adults and teens and are marketing these products to children. (Schor, 2004, p. 202) These include items such as make-up and iPods. Children are now weighing in on what type of automobile the family will purchase. As major automobile marketers attend the marketing for children conferences, companies like Toyota sponsors family safety pamphlets to schools. There has been an age compression in media marketing.
According to cultural critic Steven Kline (2004), marketers have always paid more attention to children’s imaginations than educationists. They recognized these attributes as the deeply planted roots of children’s culture, and that they could use them to communicate effectively with children. (Schor, 2004, p.203). In one sense, this marketing move does empower children. Consumer theory views the consumer as agent rather than consumer as manipulated, and children are now viewed as economic agents and consumer agents according to marketers- their defense is that they are empowering children. Yet this empowerment is taking place in a toxic media consumer environment.
As boundaries between adult and child break down- what will be the role of children in the future? The problem of what is happening today is that the world that children have been let loose into is the corporate construction of the market place, which includes tobacco, junk food, and alcohol. A very small number of powerful corporations, and through a discourse of empowerment, are making kids sick. Schor (2004) noted that the notion of sacred childhood, in which the field of childhood development sprouted from, fails to recognize its own social construction-the field of childhood development grew up simultaneously with marketing to kids. (Schor, 2004, p. 200-201) Kline lamented that, “Television kills children's imaginations with limited colonizing narratives; violates their innocence in relation to sex, violence, and commerce; and like a narcotic, numbs their innate curiosity about the world.” (Kinder, 1999, p. 121)
Schor’s research supports Kline’s observations between the amount of commercial media consumed by children and the direct correlation on children’s physical and emotional health. According to Schor (2004), 21 % of the population ages 9 through 17 suffer from emotional behavior /psychological disorders including depression and anxiety. (Schor, 2004, p. 152-172) Schor (2004) concluded that kids spend more time in consumer culture than anywhere else. Their average daily media use is six hours and twenty one minutes, and that reading magazines and books has also become a commercial medium to sell products, especially media characters. Schor (2004) also noted that the amount of exposure time with media could be considered a plus of two hours due to double exposure – daily TV use is 3hours and 4 minutes plus movies and videos 3:51, video games 49 minutes, recreational computer use one hour. Although it was anticipated that computer use would push out the television, this is not the case. Computer use is rising, but television use is not declining. (Schor, 2004, p. 154-162). The media has become an advertising delivery system for children. And based on Schor’s research, children are ingesting advertising and marketing for most of the child’s day.

The average American young person has the anxiety level equivalent to what was measured in 1957 within in-patient psychological hospitals. (Schor, 2004, p. 35) A study published in the Pediatrics Journal found that “the rates of emotional and behavioral problems among children aged four through fifteen soared between 1979 and 1996.” (Schor, 2004, p. 35) Among the high rates of anxiety and depression among today’s youth, suicide is now the fourth leading cause of death among ten to fourteen year olds. (Schor, 2004, p. 35) The worsening of these well being trends has occurred in a period of time when rates of child poverty were declining; a period of time in which should have been presumed a more healthy and hopeful childhood. Juliet Schor’s research concluded that the whole picture that is playing out in terms of kids well being in this immersion in media consumer culture is the underlying cause of emotional and psychosomatic illnesses in children and adolescents. The higher the level of consumer involvement the higher the level of depression, anxiety, etc-The higher media use leads to higher consumer involvement that then leads to psychological outcomes. The model does not go both ways. In order to resolve this situation, a developmental approach is only a starting point, as it fails to address and understand the cultural context, and the public health approach is too narrow. The social and cultural context in which kids are being raised needs to be considered. (Schor, 2004, p. 200)
In the twelve years from 1992 through 2004, the annual budget of direct child marketing moved from one billion to fifteen billion dollars in the United States. The consumer media market now saturates the landscape of childhood, from television to video games, to schools and museums. Congress “Tied the hands of the Federal Trade Commission in 1981” (Schor, 2004, p. 194) in regulating children’s media. The Children’s Television Act passed in 1990, yet it is a far cry from an alternative, basically requiring stations to include three hours per week of educational programming, yet with little oversight. In Advertising, Culture, Criticism, and Pedagogy: An Interview with Sut Jhally conducted by William O’Barr, Jhally (2006) went so far as to metaphorically compare advertising to children as child molestation. He also claimed the same of the media based on how commercial television is organized. Jhally (2006) stated, “What networks are trying to do is gather you together in the way a factory owner would gather laborers together. They are drawing value out of your watching, out of your labor.” (Jhally, 2006, p. 14) Jhally further explained that when this is done to children as early young as two years old, it becomes a type of child labor. (Jhally, 2006, p. 14) The networks need their captive audience to sell their product.
A de-commercialization of cultural would seem the way to correct these problems in children’s health. According to Schor (2004), this would include the de-commercialization of food, media space, and the outdoors. Schor advocates for a national comprehensive curriculum in gardening, menu planning, eco-literacy, and science and nutrition. She suggests a model of a government funded “National Kids Public Media Corporation”, (Schor, 2004, p. 203), and a national incentive to make outdoor spaces much safer for children, so that children will not be confined to indoors, only to become a captive audience for commercial media and sedentary media involved activities. Recently, after a year of co-teaching media literacy to high school students, a colleague of mine removed her television from her home. She noted that at first, her children, ages seven and ten, moaned and groaned about the house, nagging for its return. Within a week, she observed a shift in their behavior. Instead of coming home from school and fighting over program viewing, they ran outside to play, and soon made no mention over the missing television; yet these children are fortunate to reside in a relatively safe rural environment. Such a movement to de-commercialize the culture would take tremendous effort not just from legislators, but from parents and educators. There are currently numerous organizations, including The Action Coalition for Media Literacy, The Media Education Foundation, Stop the Commercial Exploitation of Children, The Center for Media Education, Commercial Free Childhood, and The Center for the New American Dream, that are working towards this very goal. Although their funding is small and limited, individuals and communities are moving towards involvement and support in these cultural movements as imperative in the future of our children, and ultimately humanity, rather than contribute to a media driven consumer machine that pillages the earth, the cultures of its peoples, the brains and mindsets of individuals: a culture that can only result in war over limited resources and the destruction of life on earth.



References
Botterill, J., Leiss, W., Klein, S., and Jhally, S. (Eds). (2005). Social communications in advertising: consumption in the mediated market place. 3rd Ed. New York, New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
Earp, J., & Devereaux, D. (2002). Challenging media: brands, globalization, resistance. Media Education Foundation, Retrieved March 22, 2008, from http://www.mediaed.org/videos/CommercialismPoliticsAndMedia/NoLogo/studyguide/ noLogo.pdf.
The Diamond Empire.(1994).Prod. Laurie Flynn. Dir. Gavin MacFadyen. VHS. BBC/WGBH Frontline, 1994.
Hymowitz, K. (2005, Wntr). Childhood for sale?. Public Interest 125+.
Retrieved November 17, 2007, from Questia database: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5008256372
Jhally, S. (2000).Advertising and the edge of the acocalypse. Critical
Studies in Media Commercialism. 27-39.
Jhally, S. (1990).The codes of advertising: fetishism and the political economy of meaning. 1st Ed. New York, New York: Routledge.
Jhally, S. (Ed.). (2006). The spectacle of accumulation: essays in culture,
media, and politics. New York, New York: Peter Lang.
Kilbourne, Jean. (1999). Can't buy my love: how advertising changes the way we think and feel. New York, New York: Touch Stone.
Kinder, M. (Ed.). (1999). Kids' media culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Retrieved November 24, 2007, from Questia database: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=17841074
Klein, Naomi. (2000). No logo: taking aim at the brand bullies. 1st ed. New York, New York: Picador.
Leiss, W., Klein, S., and Jhally, S. (Eds). (1986). Social communications in advertising.
London: Methuen.
Mander, Jerry.(1978). Four arguments for the elimination of television. New York: Morrow.
(March, 2007). Food for thought: television food advertising to
children in the united states. Retrieved November 17, 2007, from Kaiser Family Foundation Web site: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/7618ES.pdf
Marchland, Roland (1985). Advertising the american dream. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McKibben, Bill (2007). Deep economy. New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Schor, J. (2004). Born to buy. New York, New York: Scribner.
Schudson, M. (1984). Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Basic Books. Retrieved March 12, 2008, from Questia database: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=88989315
Tallim, J. (2002). Advertising and male violence. Media Awareness Network, Retrieved March 21, 2008, from http://www.media awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/secondary/gender_portrayal/advertis ng_male_violence.cfm
Twitchell, J. (2004). Branded nation: the marketing of megachurch, college inc., and museumworld. New York, New York, Simon and Schuster.
Tucker, R. C. (Ed.). (1978). The marx-engel reader. New York, New York:
W.W. Norton and Company.