Criticism of advertising
is a form of selling a product to a certain audience in which communication is intended to persuade an audience to purchase products, ideals or services regardless of whether they want or need them. While advertising can be seen as a way to inform the audience about a certain product or idea it also comes with a cost because the sellers have to find a way to show the seller interest in their product. It is not without social costs. Unsolicited commercial email and other forms of spam have become so prevalent that they are a major nuisance to internet users, as well as being a financial burden on internet service providers. Advertising increasingly invades public spaces, such as schools, which some critics argue is a form of child exploitation. Advertising frequently uses psychological pressure on the intended consumer, which may be harmful. As a result of these criticisms, the advertising industry has seen low approval rates in surveys and negative cultural portrayals.
Criticism of advertising is closely linked with criticism of media and often interchangeable. Critics can refer to advertising's:
- audio-visual aspects
- environmental aspects
- political aspects
- financial aspects
- time-consuming and interruptive aspects
- social/moral/ethical aspects
Hyper-commercialism
Discussing ad creep, Commercial Alert says, "There are ads in schools, airport lounges, doctors offices, movie theaters, hospitals, gas stations, elevators, convenience stores, on the Internet, on fruit, on ATMs, on garbage cans and countless other places. There are ads on beach sand and restroom walls." "One of the ironies of advertising in our times is that as commercialism increases, it makes it that much more difficult for any particular advertiser to succeed, hence pushing the advertiser to even greater efforts." Within a decade, advertising on radio climbed to nearly 18 or 19 minutes per hour. On prime-time television, the standard until 1982 was no more than 9.5 minutes of advertising per hour, but today it is between 14 and 17 minutes. With the introduction of the shorter 15-second-spot the total amount of ads increased even more. Ads are not only placed in breaks but also into sports telecasts during the game itself. They flood the Internet, a growing market.
Other growing markets are product placements in entertainment programming and movies, where it has become standard practice and virtual advertising, where products get placed retroactively into rerun shows. Product billboards are virtually inserted into Major League Baseball broadcasts and in the same manner, virtual street banners or logos are projected on an entry canopy or sidewalks, for example during the arrival of celebrities at the 2001 Grammy Awards. Advertising precedes the showing of films at cinemas including lavish 'film shorts' produced by companies such as Microsoft or DaimlerChrysler. "The largest advertising agencies have begun working to co-produce programming in conjunction with the largest media firms", creating Infomercials resembling entertainment programming.
Opponents equate the growing amount of advertising with a "tidal wave" and restrictions with "damming" the flood. Kalle Lasn, one of the most outspoken critics of advertising, considers advertising "the most prevalent and toxic of the mental pollutants. From the moment your radio alarm sounds in the morning to the wee hours of late-night TV microjolts of commercial pollution flood into your brain at the rate of around 3,000 marketing messages per day. Every day an estimated 12 billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials and more than 200,000 television commercials are dumped into North America's collective unconscious". In the course of their life, the average American watches three years of advertising on television.
Video games incorporate products into their content. Special commercial patient channels in hospitals and public figures sporting temporary tattoos. A method unrecognisable as advertising is so-called guerrilla marketing which is spreading 'buzz' about a new product in target audiences. Cash-strapped U.S. cities offer police cars for advertising. Companies buy the names of sports stadiums for advertising. The Hamburg soccer Volkspark stadium first became the AOL Arena and then the HSH Nordbank Arena. The Stuttgart Neckarstadion became the Mercedes-Benz Arena, the Dortmund Westfalenstadion is the Signal Iduna Park. The former SkyDome in Toronto was renamed Rogers Centre.
Whole subway stations in Berlin are redesigned into product halls and exclusively leased to a company. Düsseldorf has "multi-sensorial" adventure transit stops equipped with loudspeakers and systems that spread the smell of a detergent. Swatch used beamers to project messages on the Berlin TV-tower and Victory column, which was fined because it was done without a permit. The illegality was part of the scheme and added promotion. Christopher Lasch states that advertising leads to an overall increase in consumption in society; "Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life."
Fully unsolicited advertisements, where the recipients have not consented and are provided nothing in return, have been singled out for particular criticism as instances of attention theft.
Constitutional rights
In the US, advertising is equated with constitutionally guaranteed freedom of opinion and speech.An example for this debate is advertising for tobacco or alcohol but also advertising by mail or fliers, advertising on the phone, on the Internet and advertising for children. Various legal restrictions concerning spamming, advertising on mobile phones, when addressing children, tobacco and alcohol have been introduced by the US, the EU and other countries.
McChesney argues that the government deserves constant vigilance when it comes to such regulations, but that it is certainly not "the only antidemocratic force in our society. Corporations and the wealthy enjoy a power every bit as immense as that enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times" and "markets are not value-free or neutral; they not only tend to work to the advantage of those with the most money, but they also by their very nature emphasize profit over all else. Hence, today the debate is over whether advertising or food labelling, or campaign contributions are speech ... if the rights to be protected by the First Amendment can only be effectively employed by a fraction of the citizenry, and their exercise of these rights gives them undue political power and undermines the ability of the balance of the citizenry to exercise the same rights and/or constitutional rights, then it is not necessarily legitimately protected by the First Amendment". "Those with the capacity to engage in free press are in a position to determine who can speak to the great mass of citizens and who cannot".
Georg Franck at Vienna University of Technology, says that advertising is part of what he calls "mental capitalism", taking up a term which has been used by groups concerned with the mental environment, such as Adbusters. Franck blends the "Economy of Attention" with Christopher Lasch's culture of narcissism into the mental capitalism: In his essay "Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse", Sut Jhally writes: "20th century advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it."
Costs
Advertising has developed into a multibillion-dollar business. In 2014, 537 billion US dollars were spent worldwide for advertising. In 2013, TV accounted for 40.1% of ad spending, compared to a combined 18.1% for internet, 16.9% for newspapers, 7.9% for magazines, 7% for outdoor, 6.9% for radio, 2.7% for mobile and 0.5% for cinema as a share of ad spending by medium. Advertising is considered to raise consumption.Attention and attentiveness have become a new commodity for which a market developed. "The amount of attention that is absorbed by the media and redistributed in the competition for quotas and reach is not identical with the amount of attention, that is available in society. The total amount circulating in society is made up of the attention exchanged among the people themselves and the attention given to media information. Only the latter is homogenised by quantitative measuring and only the latter takes on the character of an anonymous currency." According to Franck, any surface of presentation that can guarantee a certain degree of attentiveness works as a magnet for attention, for example, media which are actually meant for information and entertainment, culture and the arts, public space etc. It is this attraction which is sold to the advertising business. In Germany, the advertising industry contributes 1.5% of the gross national income. The German Advertising Association stated that in 2007, 30.78 billion Euros were spent on advertising in Germany, 26% in newspapers, 21% on television, 15% by mail and 15% in magazines. In 2002 there were 360,000 people employed in the advertising business. The Internet revenues for advertising doubled to almost 1 billion Euros from 2006 to 2007, giving it the highest growth rates.
Few consumers are aware of the fact that they are the ones paying for every cent spent for public relations, advertisements, rebates, packaging etc., since they ordinarily get included in the price calculation. Furthermore, given that countries such as the UK offer tax relief on advertisement, it may be perceived that taxpayers are effectively offering subsidies to those companies who are able to afford not to rely on the tax relief.
In 2021-22, advertisers and agencies raised concerns about the excessive volume of work and associated pressures entailed in making sales pitches for advertising opportunities. Criticisms raised argued that pitches were being requested unnecessarily often and their production being made too complex and too costly. The Pitch Positive Pledge was adopted as a result, according to which industry players would ensure a pitch was actually required before proceeding, "run a positive pledge" and "provide a positive resolution". Feedback to unsuccessful bidders is a key element of this process.