While there are positive aspects, we will come back to those, I would like to emphasize the negative effects advertising has on society. Now that you know about the negative effects of advertising on society, let us look at whether there is any positive that can come from it.
Advertisements contribute to unhappiness and dissatisfaction. They do so by creating artificial wants and reminding the viewer that they lack what the advertisement is persuading them to covet. So the viewer feels disappointed and desirous of the thing being advertised.
Once the advertisements have succeeded in making you think you are unimportant, they will then sell you high-priced clothes to get you noticed by others.
Once they succeed in making you feel ugly, they sell you beauty products so you can improve on being ugly. Once advertising has achieved to destroy our self-esteem, advertising attempts to trick us into thinking only products and services will make us feel better. What advertisements are usually trying to do is to make you feel worse about yourself, by degrading your self-esteem, to convince you to buy this particular product, claiming it will make you happier and better.
Everyone has seen these ads, in which advertisers attempt to convince consumers that the product will make their life five times better and that their lives will not be any better until they purchase the product.
Most Advertised Products Are Garbage
Many companies make you believe you need their worthless product, when in fact, it would make no meaningful difference to your life. People think that buying all of these things will make them happier, but at the end of the day, they are simply doing the opposite.
We have an economic system where people need to earn to survive, and as manipulative as they are in achieving this, the people are doing it–and you see that very clearly with the advertising industry. I think it is also important to point out that our central nervous system is colluding with advertisers in a way to keep us perpetually dissatisfied. Our human tendencies to pick things that make us feel good are hijacked by advertisers and used to get us to buy products, often without us even realizing that this is happening.
Multiply that same psychological phenomenon over the entire spectrum of consumer products — clothing to cars, stereos to shoes — and you begin to understand why having more does not make us happier.
Families Are More Susceptible to Gross Advertisements
Families, in particular, are feeling ever-greater pressure to make the perfect Christmas, promoted by advertisers and other popular media, and that puts us under greater economic strain, as we borrow, put off paying bills, and make other sacrifices to chase that impossible dream.
More often than not, companies create products that seem incredible in advertisements, but they do not work almost as well in real life. False promises from advertisements lead to feelings of disappointment when we actually purchase their products, putting us into a cycle of buying and being disappointed. Impossible beauty ideals are used routinely in advertisements, causing us anxiety over our body image and diminishing self-esteem.
Advertisers are not trying to educate us about the product anymore, but rather are trying to mould our feelings of what it means to be successful, fashionable, accepted, beautiful, happy, and the way we are supposed to be enjoying ourselves. In this booklet, we look at how corporate advertising works, how it encourages and thrives off of our uncertainty, bodily dissatisfaction, debt, and misery; and why we would be happier and healthier if our urban streets were free of ads.
Wellbeing Declines as Advertising Rises
We found evidence for a negative association between national advertising and national well-being (Mishel et al. Although evidence exists for a longitudinal negative association between national advertising and national resentment, causal mechanisms remain to be discovered.
Using longitudinal information about countries, derived from cross-sectional aggregate surveys, we found that increases and decreases in advertising were followed, several years later, by decreases and increases in national life satisfaction, suggesting inverse associations between levels of advertising and later levels of country well-being. The greater a nation’s increase in advertising, the smaller its subsequent increase in life satisfaction.
The effect implies that hypothetically doubling the amount of advertising spending will lead to a 3 percent decline in life satisfaction. Using standard regression analysis, we were able to show that the negative impact of advertising on life satisfaction is not driven by a correlation between the two variables and GDP.
Life Is Better without Advertisements
Advertising does not have an erroneous relationship to life satisfaction, which is only due to the business cycle. Advertising is what drives consumerism, and it is what makes people upgrade their phones each year, even when they should not. Another major detrimental effect of advertising is that it gives us the false impression that anything we want can be bought, and therefore money must be our measure of success and primary purpose in life. Advertising feeds your drive to slave away at your job, only so that you can waste your hard-earned cash on things that ultimately make you frustrated and unsatisfied.
Companies are trying to make kids addicted to soda and alcohol, and also to buy into the ideology that buying more stuff will make you happier sooner rather than later so that they can make more money. Advertisers convince white women they need tanning products, promoting skin-whitening creams to Asia and Africa.
Giles Frazer says the ads are designed to make people essentially unhappy with their circumstances so that they can be encouraged to buy more and more things. Giles Fraser insists advertising is fundamentally incapable of telling the difference between what people need and what they want.
Whether TV ads really did influence the materialism of some kids, experts are already suggesting parents restrict kids’ TV viewing, and help them to be more aware of advertising as a whole. Parents can help, notes the study lead, Suzanna J. Opree, by teaching kids to look at ads with a critical eye, to be suspicious o