Advertising agencies, as satirized on the television series "Mad Men," are rooted in, and drive, consumerism. "Mad Men" won a few Golden Globe awards this past week. I suppose it's only a matter of time before CorpWatch gives one of these agencies its tongue-in-cheek Geenwashing Academy Award.
Although ad agencies don't contribute to pollution directly (except perhaps in the reams of paper they consume), they are culpable on a larger scale. Their messages drive consumers to buy more "stuff" to gratify appetites already gorged on a steady diet of Third-World manufactured items like Salad Shooters and microwave omelet cookers, most of them unused.
The top three agencies worldwide are Omnicom Group (OMC – $42.18) WPP Group (WPPGY – $55.94), and Interpublic Group (IPG – $7.60). Together, they deliver roughly $26 billion dollars worth of advertising to such companies as Bayer AG, DaimlerChrysler, FedEx, GE, Motorola, PepsiCo, Procter and Gamble, Adidas, Apple, Michelin, Nissan, Mediacom, McCann and Lowe, to name but a few.
Yet all of this stuff, pushed and promulgated as it is on every type of media from print to cell phones, is not making us any happier. Between 1990 and 2000, obesity-related deaths rose 22 percent, gunshot wounds became the second leading cause of death among young adults, and alcoholism accounted for a full 8 percent of mortality. The obesity index rose 4 percent between 2000-2004 alone. These are not the sign of a content society.
So why do we continue to consume? Because it feels good. At least temporarily. An Emory University study showed that dopamines (those "feel good" brain chemicals) are released in anticipation of a purchase. Owning the product, however, may trigger "feel bad" chemicals that translate to our conscious mind as remorse, which in turn drives us back to the store to get another fix. A similar study, conducted at a university in Bonn, Germany reports that we don't really even want the stuff. We just need to know we have more of it than someone else; a paradigm of overachievement we share with all primates, who hoard food and other commodities even in the presence of plenty.
Acquisition is key and the more costly the better, as confirmed by a California Institute of Technology study on 20 volunteers who sampled wine with various price tags, which were unrelated to the wine's actual value or quality. Participants almost uniformly described the "expensive" wines as tasting better.
Advertisers like Omnicom, WPP and Interpublic know how to tap into this primitive wiring. They use psychologically proven tools like celebrity status to trigger our buying impulse. Neurologists at Erasmus University in Rotterdam demonstrated conclusively that our ability to weigh an object's usefulness is overridden by our instinct to trust a well-known face. This curious phenomenon is a result of our having evolved in tribal societies, where a familiar face was a symbol of safety and security. We emulate celebrity's buying habits because that same primitive brain evolved to seek out solidarity and avoid ostracism, which meant death in ancient societies. This urge to acquire, prompted by the desire to fit in, and subsequent feelings of disappointment leading to more acquisition, are known as the "hedonic treadmill."
On this psychological treadmill, the consumer is given his (or her) choice of 99 different cereals (or shoes, or cars), and driven to purchase as many as possible in search of that ultimate fix. The question is, why do we need 99 varieties of anything when 98 are clearly derivative and one or two would suffice?
We, the consumers, can get off that treadmill by simply refusing to buy more than we need.
Disclosure: I don't own stock in any of the above-mentioned companies.
Photo:iirraa, Creative Commons, Flickr