How Advertising is Changing Our Culture

If you live here in the United States of America, it’s incredibly difficult to avoid the aggressive taictics of advertisers. When I purchase my local newspaper on Sunday (which is the day that most stores advertise their weekly sales), approximately half of the inch wide stack of paper that I pay $1.50 for is advertising inserts. Compare the amount of time the actual content of your favorite network television sitcom is on screen to the amount of time the advertising is on screen, it becomes clear that half of that hour long block of time that you dedicate to watching your show is sucked up by advertising.  (Incidentally, this is why services such as Hulu that allow you to watch television shows on the Internet are becoming so incredibly popular.)

Advertising is everywhere in an urban setting and becoming more prevelant in the rural setting with each new billboard put up along the roadside. While advertising serves an important role for informing the consumer about products and services available in the community it also has an effect upon the culture. Some of these effects can be argued to be desireable, as can be seen by the functionally complete elimination of the public acceptance of overt racist behavior. Other effects are more questionable, like the sexualization of young girls.

It may be argued that these effects are incidental and societal change is not part of the intended goal of advertising. This argument, however, is outdated and the changes to how perscription medicine is advertised demonstrates this. Even after the Sexual Revolution, some matters have remained topics of conversation that are viewed as too private to discuss publically. Sexual dysfunction, especially in men, is perhaps the finest example of the taboo topic.

With the direct advertising of prescription medication to consumers boom of 1996, mentioning the uniquely male sexual dysfunction known colloquially now as E.D., a breech was made in this social bulwark. As a result, it has become increasingly socially acceptable to make ‘off color’ jokes about sexual dysfunction and advertisements for products to assist in resolving this dysfunction are now on television during prime time programming. Before this advertising boom, the mention of these products during the prime time programming was frowned upon because of the possible exposure of ‘adult’ material to children.

As the New England Journal of Medicine reports, Julie Donohue, Ph.D., Marisa Cevasco, B.A., and  Merideth Rosenthal, Ph.D., found in their August 2007 published study that the increase in direct advertising of prescription medicine has continued despite intense protests both on a cultural and medical basis. In the face of such opposition, one would believe that this would be a point where the advertising industry would move away from such practices. This, however, is clearly not the case and it leads one to question just what the objective of the aggressive advertising that has developed over the last decade.