I wrote the following short article about advertising as an assignment for my anthropology class. I receieved a pretty good grade on it, so I thought I might as well share it with you. Enjoy.

There is a Jerry Seinfeld quote from an episode of his show that has stuck with me through the years: “who are the ad wizards that came up with that one?” He was being sarcastic when he said it, and my memory fails me when I try to remember the context. But in America “ad wizards” are what we’ve got and in my opinion we need to bring them down.

I’m all for legitimate advertising; but advertising and marketing products has gone far beyond getting the word out about your product and making it look good. Take for instance MTV. I wish my generation could take a step back from life and look at the things that station and their parent company have done to us. They have consistently fed off of underground movements and style, commercialized them, and fed them back to the masses. Fashion trends that start with the wierd kids at school soon spread to everyone else thanks to the money making machine that is the media. Of course Hot Topic, The Gap and their ilk are right there to cash in on it too.

The capitalist destruction of our individualism isn’t the only thing that fuels my fire when it comes to advertising. Another point is that you simply cannot escape it. Unless you watch PBS all day you will constantly be bombarded with ads, and I’m sure on some level they effect us all. You take a drive and see billboards lining the highways. Commercial bus lines can now be called commercial bus lines for a totally different reason: the exterior of the machines are line with ads for magazines, TV shows and products. You open up that magazine that you bought because the bus told you to and what do you get? More full-page advertisements than you do pages of articles. Men’s magazines like Maxim and FHM are the worst: They sell a magazine on the pretense of giving guys something they have a hard time resisting: scantily clad women. Then come the advertisements for all those things we think will keep us from leaving the bar alone: cologne, expensive liquor, trendy name brand clothing, and—something no woman can resist—chewing tobacco!

Hoping there is some sort of rock one could climb under to avoid being bombarded with commercialism, one might turn to the Internet; wrong solution! The average computer user will probably see more advertisements while surfing the Internet than he or she will while watching television for the same amount of time. Some are unobtrusive and legitamate in that they complement your web surfing. Many unscrupulous advertising technologies will hinder your surfing, like “ad-ware” and “spyware.” Website authors looking to make some quick cash can embed into their web pages a program that in my opinion is no better than a virus. What does this program do? It monitors your internet activity, then serves ads onto your screen based on your browsing patterns. Not only is it annoying, but it can also be pretty offensive when your grandmother starts receiving ads for sex toys and penis enlargement pills.

In hindsight, it seems I forgot to write a conclusion. Whoops.