Are The Advertisements Selling Us Ourselves

Whenever we turn the television on, open a magazine, or flip on a car radio, we are directly faced with advertisements for every product that is imaginable. Advertisement has been taken to a whole new level.

Ads are selling more than products they sell us values, concepts of love and sexuality, romance and success, a sense of identity, above all, what is "normal". For instance, in order to sell a product, some advertisers will exploit the consumer's most personal feelings.

Leading media critics demonstrate how living in an advertisement infused environment creates a psychology of need, massaging our anxieties, doubts, and discontents, creating a boundless hunger for more things.

One message you'll probably never hear in an ad is: ”You're O.K.”

Advertisements are marketed to attract consumers to materialistic goods, they create an infatuation for perfection and for beauty. This infatuation may sound harmless, but it places young adults on a path for desperate desire for acceptance and normality. When young adults find themselves on this path, they cannot judge what normality is, and define it as perfection.

But isn’t that perfect image sold to us by the media in general? This isn’t a matter of advertising it’s a matter of the contemporary media culture.

If a beautiful woman in a magazine or television show is always thin, with perfect skin and a flawless complexion, then the typical female viewer who is most likely not all of these things, will find herself alienated by the very image with which she is supposed to identify. The need to be feminine is important for women in order to feel socially accepted. Along with women, men will witness this media and begin to feel that women need to be this way in order to be liked. That “perfect body” is manufactured, meaning that most often women and men in magazines have been photoshopped to the extreme.

Messages designed to influence peoples' attitudes, desires and decisions fall upon society urging those people to buy a certain product, vote for a certain political figure, or support a "worthy" cause.

Is the daily attack of media and advertising persuading the public to be one and the same, rather than allowing them to function as humans who follow their own beliefs?

The abovementioned process is influenced by the commoditization of products and blurring of consumer's own perceptions of the companies' offering. In order to differentiate and position their products and/or services today's businesses employ advertising which is sometimes considered not only of bad taste, but also as deliberately intrusive and manipulative.

The issue of bad advertising is topical to such extent that organizations like Adbusters have embraced the tactics of subvertising - revealing the real intend behind the modern advertising.

The Adbusters Media Foundation is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, Canada. The foundation publishes Adbusters, a reader-supported activist magazine, devoted to numerous political and social causes, many of which are anti-consumerism in nature.

Adbusters has also launched numerous international social marketing campaigns, including Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week.