Advertising as a Form Of Psychological Violence

As I sit through another advertisement on my paid streaming service, I realise that it doesn’t take a documentary on Andy Warhol to bring your attention to advertising. It’s literally and actually everywhere.

Given the breadth and diversity of reach, some may argue, it is the dominant cultural communication mechanism in modernity. It shapes discourse and culture, and does the job of both propaganda and meaning making machines simultaneously.

Despite what disgruntled artists might want, I would certainly suggest that it has found its way to being the most prolific artform of our time and the greatest contributor to content generation in most genres and mediums.

But, with all its pervasiveness. We barely even think about it.

Well, I do. Probably more than I should.

I used to work in advertising. But now I hate it. And, as I sit through another poorly thought through product placement, I loathe it with a passion I hold for few other things.

Advertising, in my opinion, has become little more than a form of psychological violence. 

In its purest and original form, it may have simply been a way of marketing, of raising awareness about the availability of a product or service. But now, it’s a form of abuse we have normalised so completely, that most people don’t even notice it anymore.

I say violence because, like any other action that exploits vulnerability and uses nefarious tactics to its advantage, it has invaded every part of our lives. It’s in our pockets, on our streets, and inside our entertainment. Further, because of its insidious nature, it has found a way into our conversations, and, through our love for technology and convenience advertisers are now watching us, adapting and targeting us in real time.

I hate it because it attempts to force us to feel and then to buy things. And when something constantly attempts to impose itself on our thinking, on our feelings, I begin wondering whether manipulation is too weak a description. It is.

Violence, at first, doesn't feel right, because it’s not physical. But when you see how devastating it is to our bodies, our communities and our planet, it is closer to the truth than we'd like to admit.

When I first considered advertising as violence, I thought I was just old and angry. I had become the stereotypical middle class white guy that doesn’t like culture in its current form. That the world has changed too much and too fast, and all of this product promotion is normal.

But then I learned about a gentleman named Edward Bernays. And realised that, to paraphrase Principal Skinner, it’s the children that are wrong.

Bernays has been referred to as the ‘father of public relations’. History outlines how he worked in propaganda for the United States of America government during and after World War I. One of his stints was in the U.S. Committee on Public Information, which was created to influence public opinion in favour of the war. In a time of far less commercialisation than our own, after seeing how effectively mass, manipulative, communication could shape populations, he adapted many of the techniques used successfully to move the U.S into the war, into peacetime advertising, public relations and corporate influence campaigns.

At first you might think, well, that’s a natural transition. It makes sense. And if you look around, you can still see it everywhere today.

The core idea was that people can be guided irrationally through emotion, symbolism, status and unconscious desire. Drawing partly on the psychoanalytic ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays argued that modern societies required an ‘invisible government’ of persuasion to manage public behaviour.

Invisible. Persuasion. These don’t sound like words that you would instinctively associate with something legitimate.

It sounds violent.

But legitimate. Hell, some would argue necessary, it has become.

These days. entire industries exist to study human attention, emotion, insecurity, aspiration, sexuality, loneliness and status, then use (weaponise?) those findings to influence how we think and behave. How we engage and interact. That might sound dramatic, but what else do you call a system deliberately designed to bypass reflection and rationality, and shape desire for someone else's purposes?

It’s a big question. But think about what integrity in advertising might look like.

Advertising rarely presents itself honestly. It’s all implied. There’s no disclaimer that says: look, all I want is your cash. Instead, it says, If you buy this product, or this service, you might become...

You might. Or you might not. It’s all very vague and manipulative.

Building on the idea of emotional manipulation, advertising attaches products to identity, morality, attractiveness, success, belonging and meaning. It pretends to be associated with the things that (supposedly) matter most in our lives. In doing so, it creates individual deficit and manufactures inadequacy, then sells temporary relief from the inadequacy it helped create.

Temporary, because the solution will soon become the problem, and once you’ve been manipulated again, you’ll realise that you need another product for that.

Rinse and repeat.

In that sense, advertising feels less like communication, or product marketing, and more like subtle but pervasive psychological warfare. Not warfare in the obvious or physical sense, but in the constant intrusion into our mental space. Our own private domains. A relentless pressure exerted against attention, self-worth and autonomy.

A battle to colonise and occupy your consciousness.

And even though it’s deeply personal. It’s our individual minds that are being invaded. It’s civilisation-wide.

We’re all going through the same, targeted, process.

But if it was just about selling and buying. If it just concerned consumption. I probably wouldn’t care that much. I would just huff, roll my eyes and move on. However, it’s bigger than you might think.

The deeper problem is that modern advertising doesn’t just sell products. It sells ideology and it markets culture.

It influences us about what to value, what to envy, what to fear, what success looks like, what our bodies should look like, what a ‘good life’ supposedly is. While Plato warned against an unexamined life, advertising bypasses analysis of ourselves and reduces us to data points, audiences, demographics and behavioural patterns to be ‘used’.

It’s this utility, this disturbing use of the individual, that’s so dystopian. Because underneath the language of personal choice, of desire, of dream and possibility, sits an enormous machine trying to shape those choices before we even realise we’re making them.

So, thank you Mr. Bernays.

And I guess, if it was just manipulative, I could probably just move on, but my diatribe goes further. Because, at a fundamental level, advertising just plain sucks.

Aesthetically, it is awful. Loud. Crass. Disrespectful. Designed to hijack attention and manipulate action, rather than enrich public space or human experience.

Why are banking and insurance company advertisements attempting to be funny? There is nothing funny about either of those industries. Why does every husband in an ad have to be dumb, hopeless and depend on his wife for their basic life support? It seems like the only way you can get someone to buy a product is to be as far from the truth about that product as possible.

Furthermore, advertising clutters up our physicality. Walk down any street, even in regional towns, and you’ll see that our spaces are bombarded with advertising. The internet, especially ‘social’ platforms have become almost unusable because you’re constantly interrupted by algorithmically targeted manipulation.

Lastly, and worst. I feel like I’m in the minority when I’m yelling in disgust at my screens. That there is little resistance to all of this. 

And it’s bizarre.

If another institution, industry or movement inserted itself this deeply into human psychology for gain, we would probably call it coercive. We would hate it. We would put barriers in place to minimise its impact. But because advertising is a deep and essential part of our economic fabric, it becomes not only acceptable, but almost desirable. As if we crave the ongoing deception we are presented with.

Maybe that’s the real achievement of advertising: not that it convinces us to buy things, but that it convinces us this level of manipulation is ok.

And if it’s ok, then maybe we start wondering how much of what we want, value and aspire to is actually ours anyway. We start thinking about how far the manipulation goes.

But that’s another story.