Advertising Process

“Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse” by Sut Jhally (excerpted from article)

DIRECTIONS: for your assigned passage, answer these three questions:

1. Describe how your passage supports Jhally’s argument against advertising. Specifically, makes advertising “bad” in the passage?
2. How does advertising harm the audience in your passage?
3. Explain the significance of ONE of the bolded terms in the passage.

room passage from the essay “Advertising on the Edge of the Apocalypse”
Everyone “In this article, I wish to make a simple claim: 20th-century advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it. As it achieves this it will be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of non-western peoples and will prevent the peoples of the world from achieving true happiness. Simply stated, our survival as a species is dependent upon minimizing the threat from advertising and the commercial culture that has spawned it” (Jhally 1). 1.

1 “The right question would ask about the cultural role of advertising, not its marketing role. Culture is the place and space where society tells stories about itself, where values are articulated and expressed, where notions of good and evil, of morality and immorality, are defined. In our culture, it is the stories of advertising that dominate the spaces that mediate this function. If human beings are essentially a storytelling species, then to study advertising is to examine the central storytelling mechanism of our society. The correct question to ask from this perspective is not whether particular ads sell the products they are hawking, but what are the consistent stories that advertising spins as a whole about what is important in the world, about how to behave, about what is good, and bad. Indeed, it is to ask what values does advertising consistently push” (Jhally 4). 1.
2.
3.
2.
3.
2 “No wonder then that advertising is so attractive to us, so powerful, so seductive. What it offers us are images of the real sources of human happiness – family life, romance and love, sexuality and pleasure, friendship and sociability, leisure and relaxation, independence and control of life. That is why advertising is so powerful, that is what is real about it. The cruel illusion of advertising however is in the way that it links those qualities to a place that by definition cannot provide it – the market and the immense collection of commodities. The falsity of advertising is not in the appeals it makes (which are very real) but in the answers it provides. We want love and friendship and sexuality – and advertising points the way to it through objects. To reject or criticize advertising as false and manipulative misses the point” (Jhally 4). 1.

2. 
   3.
   3 “Ad executive Jerry Goodis puts it this way: “Advertising doesn’t mirror how people are acting but how they are dreaming.” (in Nelson 1983) It taps into our real emotions and repackages them back to us connected to the world of things. What advertising really reflects in that sense is the dreamlife of the culture. Even saying this however simplifies a deeper process because advertisers do more than mirror our dreamlife – they help to create it. They translate our desires (for love, for family, for friendship, for adventure, for sex) into our dreams. Advertising is like a fantasy factory, taking our desire for human social contact and reconceiving it, reconceptualizing it, connecting it with the world of commodities and then translating into a form that can be communicated” (as quoted by Sut Jhally 7) 1.
   2.
   3.
   4 “Television commercials offer solutions to hundreds of problems we didn’t even know we had — from ‘morning mouth’ to shampoo build-up — but nowhere in the consumer culture do we find anyone offering us such mundane necessities as affordable health insurance, childcare, housing, or higher education. The flip side of the consumer spectacle… is the starved and impoverished public sector. We have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but no way to feed and educate the one-fifth of American children who are growing up in poverty. We have dozens of varieties of breakfast cereal, and no help for the hungry” (Ehrenreich 1990 p.47 as quoted by Sut Jhally 8). 1.
   2.
   3.
   5 “The consumer vision that is pushed by advertising and which is conquering the world is based fundamentally, as I argued before, on a notion of economic growth. Growth requires resources (both raw materials and energy) and there is a broad consensus among environmental scholars that the earth cannot sustain past levels of expansion based upon resource-intensive modes of economic activity, especially as more and more nations struggle to join the feeding trough” (Jhally 9). 1.
   2.
   3.