Adrift in a Sea of Advertising

“PAPA, what is the moon supposed to advertise?” This strange question, posed by a child, appeared in a poem written by Carl Sandburg some 50 years ago. In the future, such a question may not seem so strange. According to New Scientist magazine, two advertising executives in London are working on a plan to use reflected sunlight to project advertisements onto the surface of the moon.

Imagine using the moon as a billboard! Think of advertising a commercial message to a worldwide audience, a message that viewers cannot turn off, hang up on, toss in the garbage, or zap with a remote control. The idea may not enthrall you, but to others it would be a dream come true.

While advertising has not yet touched the moon, it has engulfed the earth. Most American magazines and newspapers reserve 60 percent of their pages for ads. The New York Times Sunday edition alone may contain 350 pages of advertisements. Some radio stations devote 40 minutes of every hour to commercials.

Then there is television. According to one estimate, American youngsters sit through three hours of television commercials each week. By the time they graduate from high school, they will have been exposed to 360,000 TV ads. Televisions advertise in airports, hospital waiting rooms, and schools.

Major sporting events are now major advertising events. Racing cars serve as high-speed billboards. Some athletes receive most of their money from advertisers. One top-ranking basketball player earned $3.9 million by playing ball. Advertisers paid him nine times that much to promote their products.

There is no escape. Commercial ads are displayed on walls, buses, and trucks. They adorn the inside of taxis and subways—even the doors of public toilets. Audio messages call to us in supermarkets, stores, elevators—and while we are on hold on the telephone. In some countries so much advertising comes through the mail that many recipients proceed directly from the mailbox to the nearest wastebasket to toss out the junk mail.

According to Insider’s Report, published by McCann-Erickson, a global advertising agency, the estimated amount of money spent on advertising worldwide in 1990 was $275.5 billion. Since then, the figures have soared to $411.6 billion for 1997 and a projected $434.4 billion for 1998. Big money!

The effect of all of this? One analyst put it this way: “Advertising is one of the most powerful socializing forces in the culture. . . . Ads sell more than products. They sell images, values, goals, concepts of who we are and who we should be . . . They shape our attitudes and our attitudes shape our behavior.”

Since you cannot escape advertising, why not find out how it works and how it might influence you?