Final Speech-Megan Woodrum

                            The Advertisement Poison

Megan Woodrum

Our generation has become the technology generation; as such we have access to nearly all information at the touch of our hand. This knowledge comes with a price; with everything we can know about the world, the world can know about us. People and corporations out there take advantage of this and can target whole demographics and even individuals to sell their products and ideas. Companies will go to extremes to stand out among the clutter that the current advertising society is faced with: anything to be noticed by the consumer. As companies try to appeal more and more to the individual the culture of society starts to dwindle because it no longer has the friction of differing opinions and groups to cause growth.

While commercials and other forms of advertisement do keep the economy stimulated and people interested in politics, their hyper attention to the individual eliminates controversy that stimulates cultural growth, and causes people to buy products that they had no want or need for before they were bombarded with the ocean that is advertising. As marketing agents research consumers, they look into their history, what websites they visit, their credit card history, and their basic lifestyles, the marketing agents learn exactly what the consumer wants to hear. This targeting of audiences targets what they currently believe, and so the consumer has no need to change because everything fits their beliefs just right and doesn’t push them into evolving their beliefs. This people pleasing done by advertisers are where we can really see this lack of cultural development caused by a lack of stimulation.

 Society doesn’t comprehend the magnitude of thought and research that goes into making a campaign for a product, idea, or person.  Corporations have serious research and funding just to get their product out there into the consumers mind.  This involves hiring people to discover the most effective way to reach their intended audiences, like what word choices illicit the best response, and what peoples’ instinctive responses are to certain ideas, such as what their first feeling and thought toward calling a car a luxury car is. These things are normally discovered through the use of focus groups and some interesting tests.

 Song Airline, a branch off of Delta Airlines, when being launched spent about a third of its funding on advertisement. Song attempted to advertise, not as a way to travel, but as a lifestyle, and a lifestyle that was targeted toward an untapped source of consumers for airline travel, the business woman. Song even created a profile for their intended demographic; she was a married woman in the middle to upper class, with three kids and often shopped at target….yes it got that specific. To reach this type of woman, Song hired Andy Spade, co-founder of Kate Spade (a product that sells to their targeted demographic). Together they designed an airline that marketed organic food, leather seats, personalized entertainment, and free drinks. Song, even with all of its glamor and billions of dollars spent on advertising, didn’t make it past three years, showing exactly why companies market their products as intensely as they do. With all companies doing exactly what Song did, and making their products specifically for certain types of people, it creates a society that tells the consumer what they want to hear and eliminates thought outside of people’s already set beliefs.

The advertising world is not limited to selling products; similar marketing tactics are used in political campaigns as well. Except, with politicians, they aren’t selling an idea to a specific demographic, they are tweaking an idea over and over again so it will reach as many demographics as possible. Politicians use what is called narrowcasting (spreading specific information to small target audiences) to gain favor from a broad spectrum of individuals in an election. Once again we can see marketing agents conform their clients into people pleasers, so that they can get the consumer’s attention in a positive way, simply to gain as many supporters as possible. This really doesn’t seem like such a bad thing until you see once again the lack of controversy that causes a lack of growth in our culture.

Advertisement has taken over our society, it is everywhere: You see it on the corner of the street on a billboard or on the sign someone is spinning, you see it on the side of the website you are browsing, and in every nook and cranny around. Everyone is trying to get your attention and it simply makes it harder to focus. When something does bleed through the noise of it all, it is because it seems to be made specifically for you. An analyst from the documentary The Persuaders observed that “when culture becomes completely advertising friendly; it ceases to become culture at all:” Americans are on the track to an era with a lack of individuality, an era of simply accepting what is presented to you, and individuals ignoring their own thoughts, taking simply what sounds good to them. We as individuals must seek out information about the world and differing opinions from the one sided arguments that are thrown at us by advertisers. Because, if America continues down its current path then we will lose what sets us apart from one another and what sets us apart from the rest of the world, our cultures.