Media and Advertising

An article by Anup Shah


"Advertising is the art of arresting the human intelligence just long enough to get money from it."

- Chuck Blore, a partner in the advertising firm Chuck Blore & Don Ruchman, Inc., quoted by Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), p.185.
Ever since mass media became mass media, companies have naturally used this means of communications to let a large number of people know about their products. There is nothing wrong with that, as it allows innovative ideas and concepts to be shared with others. However, as the years have progressed, the sophistication of advertising methods and techniques has advanced, enticing and shaping and even creating consumerism and needs where there has been none before, or turning luxuries into necessities. This section introduces some of the issues and concerns this raises.

Free media channels have a cost

Various free media such as the numerous channels available in America and other nations are naturally subsidized with advertising to help pay the costs.
As corporate competition has increased, so too has the need for returns on massive expenditures on advertising. Industries spend millions, even billions of dollars to win our hearts and minds, and to influence our choices towards their products and ideas. This often means such media outlets attract greater funds than those outlets funded through public funding or TV licenses. It can mean that such outlets can also then afford better programming of key events and programs.
Given the dependency media companies can have on advertising, advertisers can often have exert undue influences (knowingly or tacitly); if something is reported that the advertiser doesn’t like or the media company has funded a documentary that exposes bad practice by an advertiser, the media company can risk losing much needed revenue to stay alive.

The Audience as the Product

Additionally, as Noam Chomsky points out in his article, What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, for a company such as the New York Times, it too has to sell products to its customers. For the New York Times and other such companies, Chomsky points out that the product is the audience, and the customers are the corporate advertisers.
This at first thought doesn’t seem to make sense. However, although readers buy the paper, he argues that readers fit a demographic and it is this that is valuable information that can be used by advertisers. Hence, to the advertisers, the product that the New York Times and such companies bring to them is the audience itself and it is the advertisers that bring the money to the media companies, not the audience.

"[T]he New York Times [is] a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. … You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations."

— Noam Chomsky, What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, Z Magazine, June 1997.

Manipulating images of people in commercials

It has long been known that advertisers will photoshop” (slang for editing photos to touch up or airbrush out imperfections) photos to make the subject more attractive. But many have pointed out that this subtle manipulation often goes too far.
For example, young people — girls in particular — are often bombarded with imagery of the perfect bodies. Younger minds are more malleable and impressionable, so even when it may be known that these images are manipulated, the constant message everywhere a young person turns says the same thing: this is how you should look and behave and something must be wrong if you are not achieving these (unrealistic) expectations of perfection.
As such it can contribute to anxieties and stress when growing up and even last into adulthood.
Globally, there is very little regulation about this kind of manipulation as there are many grey areas making it difficult to provide definitive guidelines. However, some very obvious cases are easier to target.
For example, in 2009, France introduced advertising legislation that retouched images had to be explicitly identified.
In the summer of 2011 in UK, two advertisers had their adverts banned for airbrushing an actress and a model excessively to the point it was too misleading. A campaigner against this kind of misleading and a Scottish member of parliament, Jo Swinson added that the concern here “is half of young women between 16 and 21 say they would consider cosmetic surgery and we’ve seen eating disorders more than double in the last 15 years.”

Megan Gibson, writing for Time, added that Swinson’s concern was that, “The ads are purporting the effects of make-up, when in reality they’re showcasing the effects of Photoshop.”
PetaPixel reported the above UK ban too, also noting that it came about a month after the American Medical Association called upon ad agencies to stop the “altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image”.

PetaPixel quotes an American Medical Association board member:

"The appearance of advertisements with extremely altered models can create unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image. In one image, a model’s waist was slimmed so severely, her head appeared to be wider than her waist. We must stop exposing impressionable children and teenagers to advertisements portraying models with body types only attainable with the help of photo editing software."

— Barbara L. McAneny, Quoted by Michael Zang: American Medical Association Speaks Out Against Photoshopped Ad Photos, PetaPixel, June 24, 2011