Ad Nausea in the Age of Materialism

Where isn’t there an ad nowadays? 

I watch television and there’s an ad in the corner.  I go to work and there are pop-ups all over my screen.  I take a piss and there’s an ad on the door.  Buy me!  They scream mercilessly as if I’m thinking of what products I may want to purchase while I take a dump.

I studied marketing in college and know how the machine works.  It’s one of the reasons I don’t want anything to do with marketing.  It’s a shallow industry built on bottom lines and profit margins.  The people are secondary, tertiary even, to money and consumerism.

When I was in high school I took a course in Media Literature, no one wanted to take it as I recall and the damn thing was almost cancelled due to lack of interest.  Thankfully, the class was a go and I was enlightened a bit by a teacher who gave me a copy of a glossy magazine called “Ad Busters”.

Now, “Ad Busters” and any sort of publication like it should be taken with a grain of salt.  Much like the marketing machine, magazines like these are very much one-sided.  Where marketers spend time grabbing at your dollars by doing things like manipulating Maslow’s Hierarchy, anti-consumerism groups spend time basically telling you how evil it is to be a consumer.

I am not going to preach about this because I am aware people are either for consumerism or against it…and I know that consumers don’t want to hear about how they are shopping us into oblivion.  We’re cooking the damn planet with our garbage and fossil fuel dependency and no one seems to care…as long as you have the latest trendy piece of shit item, sadly it doesn’t seem to matter.

If you don’t need that new pair of shoes, think twice.  If you are only buying something because Carrie on Sex and the City wore it - for God sakes, don’t do it!  And if you can’t control the urge to splurge on the latest gadget - just think about how they are going to screw you with an update or new product in a few months.

I just want people to stop and think for a minute when they are out and about shopping - do you really need it?