The Marketing and Advertising Industrial Complex

In his exit speech on January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation of the growing influence of the military-industrial complex. While he was not the first to use this term, his powerful words resonate today... In a different context--as you'll discover below--but certainly no less alarming.

Let's go back to 1961 and review President Eisenhower's words:

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Today, my friends, I believe we face a similar challenge: One I refer to as the Marketing and Advertising Industrial Complex.

We all know that technology, media segmentation, and expanding distribution channels have transformed the marketing and advertising landscape. It's nearly impossible for individuals to keep up with the exponential speed at which the online marketing industry alone is progressing.

Writing in SearchInsider, Gord Hotchkiss says: "It's not easy being a consumer. Current estimates indicate that the average urban dweller is exposed to between 3,000 and 5,000 advertising messages every day. That means, settling on the middle number, that every waking hour you're presented with an ad every 14.4 seconds. That's every 14.4 seconds, every minute of every day you're alive. The frequency of this advertising barrage has doubled in the past 30 years."

It's not just advertising that has proliferated, it's invasive marketing as well.

Every time you complete a warranty card, get divorced, buy a home, get listed in a school directory, enter a sweepstakes, purchase an item from a catalog, file an insurance claim, or perform a myriad of other everyday activities, some company somewhere makes a record of this fact and sells it--and your private information--to marketers for profit.

I could go on with data that supports my contention that the proliferation of advertising and marketing has reached alarmingly intrusive and influential proportions. The most frightening fact about how pervasive advertising has become in our consumerist society: Our children are exposed to about 50,000 ads a year.

A major problem with advertising today is that there is simply too much of it. Being exposed to more than 3,000 ads a day means that these ads increasingly encroach upon our public space--our schools, our public transportation, our buildings, our elevators, and even our beaches (a new technique enables the advertisers to stamp their ads onto the sand at beaches) and sidewalks (same method).

Another problem--at least for advertisers and companies trying to build a brand--is that globally, corporations spend more than $620 billion each year to make their products seem desirable and to get us to buy them.

According to Jean Kilbourne (quoted in an interview by Nan Knutsen), who has been studying ads' cultural impact for almost 20 years: “We believe we're not affected by advertising because it is so often silly, trivial, and something we don't pay conscious attention to. We flip through ads in magazines, speed by billboards, zone out during TV commercials. However, advertising's influence is cumulative and primarily unconscious. The less consciously we watch ads, the more deeply we are affected."

In response to encroaching advertising and intrusive marketing, When Corporations Rule the World has become a modern classic whose message seems increasingly prophetic. The book suggests that the global economy has become like a malignant cancer, advancing the colonization of the planet's living spaces for the benefit of powerful corporations and financial institutions.
The global economy has turned these once useful institutions into instruments of a market tyranny that is destroying livelihoods, displacing people, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money. It forces us all to act in ways destructive of ourselves, our families, our communities, and nature.

This destructive process is driven by a combination of institutional forces and an extremist ideology of corporate libertarianism that invokes the theories of Adam Smith and market economics to advance policies that systematically undermine both the market and democracy.

When Corporations Rule the World is a powerful and (to my tastes) radical indictment of the role played in our lives by the world's most powerful corporations.

The book says these corporations are active in shaping public policy in ways that virtually force us into a pattern of overconsumption that yields large profits to the corporations at the expense of our quality of living. Evidence is mounting that to make our societies sustainable we will have to restructure our systems of production and consumption to largely eliminate:

* Dependence on personal automobiles;
* Long distance movement of goods and people;
* The use of chemicals in agriculture; and
* The generation of garbage that we cannot immediately recycle.

Hearken back to President Eisenhower's words and, in light of the aforementioned data and insights (whether you agree with them or not), we may very well be able to rephrase his forceful remarks thusly:

"This conjunction of an immense advertising and marketing establishment and a large consumer-based industry is unparalleled in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every home, every city, every State house, and every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

"In our households and in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the supremely powerful and influential corporations that produce such advertising and marketing materials. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."