CRITICAL POSITIONS ON ADVERTISING

• Illustrates the saturation of images, publicity and messages. Bombarded with advertising telling the audience "Do this - Buy this"
• Effects the way people feel, think and act about the world and each other
• 90's - 11000 new TV commercials in the UK a year
• 25 million new print adverts produced in Britain every year from billboards to magazines
• Confronted with a message trying to sell you something

SOCIAL MEDIA

• Advertising follows you everywhere, facebook side adds, browsing history
• Increasingly bespoke in design
• Pop ups
• Youtube adverts

Karl Max 1818-1883

• Theorist - Communist manifesto
• Exploitative, unfair and dehumanizing - K.M
• Anti capitalism, consumer
• Consistently perpetuate the buying and selling of goods

CRITIQUE OF CONSUMER / COMMODITY CULTURE

• In commodity culture we construct our identities through the consumer products that inhabit our lives
• This is what Stewart Ewen terms 'the commodity self'
• Judith Williamson author of Decoding Advertisements 'Instead of being identified by what they produce, people identify themselves through what they consume' (Williamson, 1991:13)

• Post war 50's
• People start to construct their identities on what they buy rather than what they do
• Materialism
• Associates you to a pre defined style
• Commodified : To turn into or treat as a commodity; make commercial: "Such music . . . commodifies the worst sorts of . . . stereotypes" (Michiko Kakutani).

BRANDS

• Ideology of brands : Coke, free range, organic
• Fairtrade: Con, 50% has to be brought, consumers make more
• Like things because they fit with a certain style or ideal
• Famous punk poster this a chord x3
• Illusion of identity or reality
• Bought not to make us but the people we want to be
• People are judged by appearance we would have to go off the person themself. Better society? Alienated>
• Access symbolic power
• In our society we can not be without consumerism

• CK - attractive, attracted to each other, edgy, androgynous, associates audience with the models, gang, glamorous lifestyle.
• Production vs. payment
• Be successful, loved, sexy, popular we have to buy things
• Perpetuates false needs, system of creation
• Illusion we can be all we want to be through buying
• Shallow form of human existence
• Free individual
• Symbolic potency: lifestyle, beauty, wealth, status, youth
• Aesthetic Innovation: Something that looks pleasing
• Fashion, 'capitalism's baby'
• Seasonal cycles: 'out of fashion' 'out of touch'
• Novelty: New, Iphone 5, redundance/obselanse of old products. Peak in consumption
• Planned Obsolesce: design to break, computer circuit boards
• Trapped in an endless cycle consumption
• 3rd mechanism between human relationships - hairstyle, music, taste, style.
• Invest in the sign - Nike - Athletes - Micheal Jordan
• Commodities start to possess human qualities e.g sexy, cool, sophisticated
• Attack at the life of the consumer.