Jesus is a brand of jeans
A ad for Thule car-rack systems features a child in the backseat of a car, seatbelt on. Next to the child, assorted sporting gear is carefully strapped into a child’s carseat. The headline says: ‘We Know What Matters to You.’ In case one misses the point, further copy adds: ‘Your gear is a priority.’
This ad features an attractive young couple in bed. The man is on top of the woman, presumably making love to her. However, her face is completely covered by a magazine, open to a double-page photo of a car. The man is gazing passionately at the car. The copy reads, ‘The ultimate attraction.’
These ads are meant to be funny. Taken individually, I suppose they might seem amusing or, at worst, tasteless. As someone who has studied ads for a long time, however, I see them as part of a pattern: just two of many ads that state or imply that products are more important than people. Ads have long promised us a better relationship via a product: buy this and you will be loved. But more recently they have gone beyond that proposition to promise us a relationship with the product itself: buy this and it will love you. The product is not so much the means to an end, as the end itself.
After all, it is easier to love a product than a person. Relationships with human beings are messy, unpredictable, sometimes dangerous. ‘When was the last time you felt this comfortable in a relationship?’ asks an ad for shoes. Our shoes never ask us to wash the dishes or tell us we’re getting fat. Even more important, products don’t betray us. ‘You can love it without getting your heart broken,’ proclaims a car ad. One certainly can’t say that about loving a human being, as love without vulnerability is impossible.
We are surrounded by hundreds, thousands of messages every day that link our deepest emotions to products, that objectify people and trivialise our most heartfelt moments and relationships. Every emotion is used to sell us something. Our wish to protect our children is leveraged to make us buy an expensive car. A long marriage simply provides the occasion for a diamond necklace. A painful reunion between a father and his estranged daughter is dramatised to sell us a phone system. Everything in the world – nature, animals, people – is just so much stuff to be consumed or to be used to sell us something.
The problem with advertising isn’t that it creates artificial needs, but that it exploits our very real and human desires. Advertising promotes a bankrupt concept of relationship. Most of us yearn for committed relationships that will last. We are not stupid: we know that buying a certain brand of cereal won’t bring us one inch closer to that goal. But we are surrounded by advertising that yokes our needs with products and promises us that things will deliver what in fact they never can. In the world of advertising, lovers are things and things are lovers.
It may be that there is no other way to depict relationships when the ultimate goal is to sell products. But this apparently bottomless consumerism not only depletes the world’s resources, it also depletes our inner resources. It leads inevitably to narcissism and solipsism. It becomes difficult to imagine a way of relating that isn’t objectifying and exploitative.
