The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [117]
Two-thirds of our newspaper space and 40 percent of our mail is unsolicited advertising.61 In 2002, global spending on advertising reached $446 billion, an almost ninefold increase since 1950.62 In 2005, in the United States alone, $276 billion was spent on ads.63 China, meanwhile, spent $12 billion in 2006 and is projected to reach $18 billion by 2011, which will make it the third-largest advertising market in the world.64 In 2007—the year before they requested massive government bailouts to keep them from going bankrupt—the big three automakers in the United States spent over $7.2 billion on ads: General Motors spent more than $3 billion, Ford spend more than $2.5 billion, and Chrysler spent $1.7 billion.65 In 2008, Apple spent $486 million on advertising.66 These staggering sums provide no service to humanity at all.
The ads I remember from my youth focused on why a particular product was better than its competitors: for example, one dish soap had special ingredients that made your glasses sparkle or removed the soap scum from your plates. Or this laundry detergent would prevent you from having embarrassing ring-around-the-collar. In that era, we bought Stuff because we were told it would perform some function we needed or wanted.
But these days, with literally hundreds of brands of soap and shoes and just about everything, there’s no way that brands can even hope to distinguish themselves with actual information on their product alone. So today’s ads often don’t even bother with describing the product, but instead associate it with an image, a lifestyle, a social status. Rather than describe qualities or ingredients, we see advertisements showing the kind of people who use this product. The implication is that if we want to be like those people (thin, happy, loved, surrounded by other beautiful people, etc.), we need that product. A current ad for a television actually states, “Change your TV, change your life.”67
In addition to getting more sophisticated, ads are also more intrusive. They seem to be everywhere these days, even places that, one would hope, would be off-limits to commercial messages. When I was leaving the hospital with my newborn daughter, a nurse handed me a package of “educational” materials, which turned out to include credit card applications and advertisements for baby products. When I walked across the border from Pakistan to India, the archway under which I entered the country had painted across the top “Welcome to India—Drink Pepsi.”
An innovative company called the Hanger Network developed clothes hangers covered with cardboard on which advertisements are printed. It distributes these free to dry cleaners around the country. Hanger Network says their hangers are even better than direct mail: for starters, dry-cleaning customers tend to be in higher income brackets, so are great advertising targets. Second, most people put dry-cleaned clothes directly into their closets on those hangers rather than throw them away, as they increasingly do immediately with junk mail before even opening it. So they wind up looking at those ads every time they open their closet, for weeks or even months, making them “an ongoing billboard in (their) bedroom.”68 Yuck. Who wants a billboard in their bedroom?
There seems to be no limit to how far advertisers will go. Some corporations have even paid people hundreds or thousands of dollars to have brand logos tattooed onto their bodies. In 2005, Kari Smith, a mother in Utah, sold the space on her forehead on eBay to raise funds to pay for private school tuition for her son, who was struggling in the local public school. A Canadian online gambling company paid Smith $10,000 so it could tattoo its website address onto her forehead.69
Then there are the sneaky ads that many people don’t even think of as ads. Rampant product placement is all over TV and movies (an Apple laptop on the desk or a can of Pepsi on the counter).