Advertising is becoming a nuisance
When business is good, it pays to advertise; if business is bad, you have to advertise — so runs a well-known advertising slogan. Thus, whether there is a boom or slump in any enterprise, its owners are sure to advertise. With rising standards of living all over the world, competition for customers is becoming more intense. Advertisements of all sorts, today, clamor insistently, and even hysterically, for the attention of consumers, actual or potential.
One cannot leave a radio set tuned to a local station nowadays, without an announcer cutting in and enthusiastically proclaiming the excellent qualities of a particular product. The same announcer will, a few minutes later, insist that yet another product is a ‘must’ in a decent, civilized household. And this goes on all the day, and also part of the night.
Some hardy souls may become immune to all this noise. This results merely in a hardening of sensitivity. A person soon becomes gross where his finer feelings are concerned. On the other hand, more sensitive people find all this extravagant advertising propaganda a strain on their tortured nerves. If they are listening to a serious program, they have to bear up with the continuous assaults of the advertisers. Those who can afford it, may smash their radios up and buy tape-recorders or record-players.
These latter, however, do not escape scot-free. They may like to relax occasionally in a theater. After all, there are some films worth seeing sometimes. In a theater, patrons have to sit through bouts of advertising twice during each show– once before supporting features, and once again before the main show, that is, during the interval. If a film is too long for there to be an interval, one gets a double dose of advertising before the entertainment begins.
Of course, one can enter a theater late — but there are few spirits brave enough to risk groping about, stumbling over steps and shins, in the dark, and generally making nuisances of themselves. Moreover, there is the question of timing. If you come too late, you will probably miss a film’s dramatic beginning. If you come a little before the film starts — there will still be some advertisements to fidget through.
Advertisements are a nuisance any way one looks at them. Since they are aimed at the general mass of people, advertisements have to have a common standard of appeal. This standard certainly cannot be high, if it has to require a response from everybody, educated or illiterate, people who are highbrow or people who have very ordinary tastes, men, women, and even children. The message in an advertisement is purely commercial. There is no other aim .. scarcely one that can be called aesthetic. Hence one finds vulgarity in advertisements. Such infrequent exceptions as there are merely prove the rule.
Why are women the most popular subject of advertisement ? Because they have an instant appeal both to men and to women. In the case of men, the appeal is blatantly pornographic. A woman featured on an advertising placed or slide is often scantily dressed — but this is subtly conveyed as being fashionable so that the fashion instincts of women are also pandered to. Sometimes, the leer on the face of a woman looming in tremendous proportions on a Cinemascope screen is supposed to be seductive, or at least attractive. And what woman among the audience dies not wish to be an object of some admiration ! The men are, of course, expected to respond instinctively to the appeal in such advertisements as have been described. What sort of insult do the advertisers think they are offering sensible people ?
Sometimes, the presentation of an advertisement in the way of a cosy, family subject. For example, one may be urged to buy a car through being shown father, mother and a couple of children surveying a particular make of car admiringly. The appeal here is to cupidity. The implication in the advertisement is that most ordinary families have cars — why not you, YOU ? Thus, one is apparently required to keep up with the Joneses.
There is no doubt that advertisement try to arouse the instinct to possess. A harassed family man may well be pestered by other members of the family to buy something which has been admired in an advertisement. The result is frequent argument, irritability, and final capitulation on the part of the person subject to persuasion that really comes from advertisements. It is such a result that makes advertisements a nuisance. One has to contend with an added source of irritation in a world that is already producing neurotics by the million. An advertisement may be immoral. But this does not imply that people will succumb to immorality easily. What makes the advertisement a nuisance is the distraction it offers — distraction from sane, balanced values. The sooner people decide on the worthlessness of most advertising propaganda, the sooner will advertisements be less of a nuisance.
