How Do You Feel About Selling By Huge Advertising Campaigns?
Advertising is a mammoth selling machine to influence us to buy products and services. Huge amounts of money are spent annually to convince us that we need to be improved: to smell better, to look younger, to be considered sexy based on the cars we drive and the clothes we wear.
Selling by companies using mass media – and now the web – is virtually a science driven by psychology and often manipulation of our self images and identities. Without realizing it, we can be influenced by advertising which sells us on particular world views.
What is your relationship to advertising? Do you tune it out or edit it out? What kind of credibility does that kind of selling provide for you in making day-to-day buying decisions? Is this kind of selling honorable and useful? How conscious can we keep our buying decisions based on the selling that takes place in national advertising campaigns?