The Parasitic Process of Mass Advertising

What precisely characterizes the phenomenon to which these commentators refer? Generally, the mass advertising process takes from the culture, transforms what it takes, and then tenders back what it took and transformed. More specifically, the advertiser appropriates the culture's images and ideas and then associates them with particular products and services. By this association, a subtle but significant metamorphosis occurs: the meanings of images and ideas are infused into products and services, just as the meanings of products and services are infused into images and ideas. Once this metamorphosis is complete, advertising releases the altered meanings back into a commercialized world ready to deliver products and services.

There is something of a parasitic quality about such advertising. It feeds on the organisms of noncommercial culture­the culture's past and present, ideology and myths, politics and customs, art and architecture, literature and music, and even its religions. Moreover, "[c]ertain values such as love, friendship, neighbourliness, pleasure, happiness and sexual attraction are the staple diet of advertisements ...." ⁶⁶ In general, advertising indiscriminately and completely draws from these sources their essential symbols. But, in another sense, advertising ceases to be parasitic: having reworked the meaning of cultural symbols, it sends them back in commercial forms. Thus understood, advertising "does not reflect meaning but rather constitutes it." ⁶⁷ A moment's deliberation will reveal an irony here, one best articulated by an advertising executive: "[W]hat we're doing is wrapping up your emotions and selling them back to you." ⁶⁸

Mortals yearn for meaning, for ways to structure existence. Ready to exploit this yearning, the advertising system provides us with structures of meaning in the name of consumption. ⁶⁹ Gillian Dyer describes advertising's process for structuring meaning in the following way:

[A]dvertisements create structures of meaning which sell commodities not for themselves as useful objects but in terms of ourselves as social beings in our different social relationships. Products are given 'exchange­value': ads translate statements about objects into statements about types of consumer and human relationships.... And once this initial connection has been made we almost automatically accept the object for the feeling. People and objects can become interchangeable as in, for example, the slogans "The Pepsi generation", "The Martini set". ⁷⁰