There is no more doubt that advertisement has changed our daily landscape. Everywhere we look and read, we get saturated with ads competing for attention, sometimes on different mediums. That much is obvious. Where there is disagreement is on how good it is.

Ads have a singular advantage, in that they make advertisers pay instead of consumers. In essence, the advertiser becomes the consumer in an indirect way. This relieves the consumer of part of all the burden of paying for the product. An extreme example of this would be most television channels. While television advertisements are annoying as a general principle, not everyone wants to pay instead.

The opponents of the "ad culture", "anti-ad activists" we might say, would rather fight against this tendency. But we have to actually be convinced that it's worth being a bit poorer for their cause. There are usually three arguments used to accomplish such a task :

1. Anti-corporatism. Some ads may be considered to be fraudulent, and it can also be argued that advertising gives too much power to corporations in terms of how to manage a given product. This argument has some merits. However, it is usually assumed that claims of fraud of power must be taken as gospel. Anti-ad activists must demonstrate such problems on a case-by-case basis before we can grant them credibility.

2. Culture jamming and anti-consumerism. One may propose that ads are distorting the culture towards material needs. It is uncertain why this is a bad thing. While consumerism does damage some people's situations in the long run, surely fulfilling material needs is not bad as a general rule. Once again, it must be demonstrated that specific problems are inherent to the consumption of certain goods.

3. Control of the public. The nature of advertising is to change minds. This always carries with it certain risks of memetic conditioning. As such, it may seem like a danger to free will and social cohesion in general.



This last point is more complex than it seems. Indeed, it brings into light the whole science of memetics - what makes some memes convincing and others unsuccessful. Superficially, it may seem that there is no place for free will in the equation. But this is not true : the mind is always active in processing information from the senses and past information, and we cannot arrive at a proper understanding without this fact.

The proper question, I propose, should not be "should we let ads continue to control us ?", but rather "what makes people suggestible, and some not ?". I would say that this is in no small part due to one's epistemic beliefs. Someone who accepts readily the beliefs of the people and the media surrounding him, will be more likely to "buy" into marketing rhetoric. Someone who is more rational would be more likely to see advertising information thru a more objective light.

Ads exist because they profit, and they profit because people buy their premises. Yet they do not provide much information, but rather concentrate on the superficial. Why this situation exists is a psychological and memetic question, not a social question.