I Believe In Advertising

At the tail end of a long day, I find myself surrounded with good friends from across the world, tipsy from good ksarak and wine, thinking about the circles I run in. It's been over a decade that I've been in this job, and it's gone from feeling like an accidental quirk of circumstance, where I was in the right place at the right time, to feeling like this job is a part of my fate, something karmic that my destiny is wrapped up in. I brought a lot of liberal guilt and self-hatred to my job in advertising, and for many years considered myself to be a grunt who struggled with the contradictions of being a cog in the larger capitalist machine. I mean, is there anyone who hasn't despised bad advertising at some point in their lives? At its worst its pure manipulative drivel that caters to the lowest drives of human beings, and makes you want to punch whoever put this idiotic commercial or billboard in front of you. I came into this business thinking my job in advertising was just a temporary fix, a day gig to occupy my hours and tide me over till my career in the arts took off. 12 years later I see things completely differently, and the youthful idealism with which I regarded the world has morphed into something akin to maturity. I've changed. More importantly, the world around me has changed, the market has shifted, and advertising as an industry has been forced to evolve. Never before have people had as much power and information available to them at their fingertips. They can buy brands or destroy them. If you think advertising is a scourge of our culture, has no merits, and compels people to consume and buy things they don't need, you're entitled to your opinion. But you're also not seeing the larger picture.

I believe in advertising. Why? Because advertising will exist whether I believe in it or not. Human beings will always be selling each other things, or trying to. Commerce needs catalysts. Every day, you greet the world and are confronted with a million choices of how to navigate it, with purchases that shape your lifestyle and become a part of who you are. Good marketing enhances and enriches your life, and helps fill in the details of what those choices mean. Bad marketing does the same. Your capacity to filter the communication coming at you is the difference between being an educated and conscious consumer or being a shmuck who simply accepts the programming that is fed to you. In today's world, there are programmers, and there are people who are programmed, and it's up to you to determine where you fit on that spectrum. Everyone has choices available to them. You can hate on advertising all you like, the same way atheists hate on religion, but neither one of these things is going to go away just because you hate it. I'm a realist. As with all human institutions, I believe the best we can do is to make them evolve, force them to be more honest, more transparent, and more efficient. This is part of my job, as a professional, and as a human being. If we're not demanding accountability from governments, corporations, and every system we engage with, we're not doing our job as human beings.