Bamboozled By Ads
Politics, Propaganda And Advertising
Sharon Basco is executive producer of TomPaine.com.
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Many U.S. citizens today are more isolated from and out of sync with the opinions and attitudes of the rest of the world than they’ve been in generations. Especially since 9/11, Americans increasingly have seen the Bush administration paint domestic and global issues in stark hues of black and white. Why have many Americans "bought" a more simplistic worldview? TomPaine.com’s Sharon Basco spoke about advertising and propaganda with Jean Kilbourne, author of Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel.
TomPaine.com: Are Americans more vulnerable to advertisements, and perhaps less skeptical about them, than, say, Europeans?
Jean Kilbourne: The only reason that Americans might be more vulnerable than people from other countries is that we believe we’re not vulnerable. There’s such a widespread belief in America that we’re not influenced by anything really, that you know, we’re not culturally conditioned. And in a sense, that makes it more difficult for us to really see the kind of conditioning that does go on all around us. So it’s a way in which -- and I think the advertisers really count on this -- that we believe we’re not influenced, and therefore we’re less alert, in a way.
TP.c: Do Americans expect to be "sold" something by politicians, rather than addressed as thinking people who can consider complex issues?
Kilbourne: I’m sure that most Americans would say they want to be talked to as thinking people, but the evidence is clear that in fact we tend to be very susceptible to being sold stuff. And one of the things that’s alarmed me the most as I’ve studied advertising over all these years, is the extent to which our political system has really been hijacked by the advertisers. That it’s all about advertising, commercials, spin, hype, and not at all, really, about the issues anymore. But it’s very difficult to get people to really see that and understand it.
TP.c: Does our vulnerability to advertising prepare us for propaganda, to be willing consumers of ever more important untruths -- say, when politicians are not telling the truth?
Kilbourne: I think it does, and I think it goes back to what I said earlier, that we believe we’re not influenced by anything, that we believe we’re able to see through it all, and we’re therefore not capable of being manipulated. And so, in a sense that makes us a little less alert, and a lot of the stuff that goes on in advertising is unconscious. So we’re affected by the unconscious messages of these ads -- be they political or otherwise.
TP.c: Has the tone of advertising mutated over the years, or is it as bad as it once was?
Kilbourne: I actually think advertising and the whole problem of advertising is much worse now than it was when I started looking at ads in the ‘60s. And it’s worse in several ways, but very quickly, one is that there’s so much more of it, that it encroaches much more into our private space than it ever did before.
The ads that have come into the schools, for example, the contracts that schools are making with Coke and Pepsi and all of that. Just the ads that show up in spaces where they wouldn’t. There’s a new technique now that enables advertisers to stamp corporate logos onto sands of beaches. So you can go to the beach and there might be a Skippy peanut butter logo up and down the beach. Ways in which it’s just everywhere. And there’s just more of it than ever before. That’s one thing.
Another is the technology, the research is so much more sophisticated than it was before, so they’re able to target us much more specifically and with much more psychological awareness, which is frightening.
And then the third huge difference is the extent to which it has taken over our political process. So that the elections now are all about advertising and who has the best ads, and the best spin, and all of that, and just not at all about issues. So 30, 40 years ago there was still some room for real discussion of issues, and it was the beginning of using ads and commercials to take over the process, but it’s certainly happened now just about completely.
And to me this represents real danger to democracy because you simply can’t have democracy if you don’t have informed citizens, and certainly one can make the case that we do not have a very informed citizenry these days.
TP.c: Jean Kilbourne, you’ve said that advertising, and the fantasies it engenders, seem to have contributed to Americans’ acceptance of Bush administration policies favoring the rich.
Kilbourne: I believe it’s because an extraordinary number of Americans identify with the rich, and believe that they’re going to end up wealthy even though they aren’t wealthy now and there’s no reason to believe they ever will be. They believe that they will be. And in fact I think there have been surveys that indicated that about 40 percent of Americans actually believe that they’re going to be wealthy. So therefore when Bush does something like get rid of the estate tax, which of course just favors those people who are phenomenally wealthy, other people think, "Oh well, that’ll help me when I make my millions of dollars and that will be good for my heirs," although that will never happen.
There’s lots of reasons for this. There’s the whole mythology of the culture, you know, that we can be anything we want to be, and that anyone who isn’t phenomenally successful just hasn’t tried hard enough. There’s a way in which the media focus on overnight success stories, and people who do go from rags to riches and all of that. There’s the emphasis on the lottery and the people who win, you know, $200 million and all sorts of publicity is given to that.
And then beyond that, there’s the whole cultural fantasy in advertising and throughout the media that I think really does encourage us to identify, to really long for luxury, to long for all kinds of very expensive goods, and to believe somehow that we are going to be able to get there and to achieve them.
TP.c: Is the American dream a real or advertising-induced image?
Kilbourne: Well, you know, there are different kinds of American dreams. I mean, the American dream that I think you’re referring to of being able to be successful no matter how humble our origins, and all of that, has been around probably from the beginning. The Horatio Alger story and all of that. However, originally it was based on hard work, that if you worked hard enough, then you could transcend your origins and you could become very successful.
These days it doesn’t have anything to do with, or very little to do with hard work. It has to do with either some sort of talent, so that we get a lot of celebrities or athletes who make that leap, or with just sheer luck, with being a winner on a TV show, or winning the lottery or something like that. It’s a very different kind of American dream than it was originally, where it was all about how thrift and hard work would get you there. And that was a problem even then, because it simply wasn’t true, and it made people feel that those who weren’t rich and successful were somehow lazy and weren’t working hard enough. But it’s an even bigger problem now, where people sort of assume that sort of effortlessly one can suddenly live the lifestyle of the rich and famous.
TP.c: Jean Kilbourne is the author of Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel.
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Published: Apr 07 2003
