Advertising's Value Exchanges

The "exchange­value" enables us to think of products in terms of power, beauty, success, and the like. In a more socially objectionable way, this exchange­ value enables us to think of and relate to people in terms of products. For example, women are commodified to sell everything from cars to colognes. Their bodies, their sexuality, and their mystique are traded in countless economic transactions. ⁷¹ Advertising thus pimps its products.

Only select values are traded in advertising's exchanges, however. Life is pictured as a Land of Oz­but without the Wicked Witch. It is a land of perpetual bliss, abundance, and novelty. Whatever darkness there is can be lightened by advertising's magic. Reality as fantasy requires that certain kinds of information about products and services be suppressed: for example, "the conditions of work in factories[,] the level of wages and benefits of workers[,] ... [and] the effect on the environment of producing goods through particular industrial processes ...." ⁷² These and other real­world facts are anathema to advertising's mission. Bleak truths and cynical attitudes must be kept at bay.

In sum, today's mass advertising often has less to do with products than lifestyles, less to do with facts than image, and less to do with reason than romance. Above all, it is more a total cultural system than an exclusively informational one; it is "a social discourse whose unifying theme is the meaning of consumption." ⁷³ This system refactors the marketplace­of­ideas equation: the ideas component is de­emphasized in favor of the marketplace component. "Commercial culture assigns no value or meaning to communications apart from their market value ...." ⁷⁴ Hence, in the commercial culture, truth is that which sells. ⁷⁵