The Culture of the Commercial

Twenty­three billion dollars of annual commercial television advertising has a monumental pressure and product effect: money influences programming while commercial advertising strives to create a market for products. Commercials exploit the very entertainment format that constitutes today's television programming. Indeed, media ads are the paragon of the commercial television aesthetic, the ultimate in transmission of fantasy via the pleasure medium. Professor Postman captures the essence of commercial advertising when he states:

[C]ommercials stress the values of youth, . . . consumption, the immediate gratification of desires, the love of the new, a contempt for what is old. Television screens saturated with commercials promote the Utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. . . . They are about values and myths and fantasies. ⁷⁰

The typical television viewer partakes of the culture of the commercial ⁷¹ in astonishing proportions: "[T]he average American will have seen approximately 1 million television commercials, at the rate of a thousand per week, by the age of twenty. By the age of sixty­five, the average American will have seen more than 2 million television commercials."' ⁷² It is an incredible comment on the seductive power of television advertising over consumers that the more successful commercials have remained on the air for over a quarter­century. ⁷³

The aesthetics of commercial television have influence far beyond the realm of advertising. As politicians master the strategies of advertising, the line between important political discourse and pure entertainment becomes increasingly blurred. Advertising agency professionals serve as "media consultants"' to the candidates and orchestrate campaigns as if they were prime­time commercials. Forklifts, flag factories, tanks, harbor rides, and convict turnstiles were only a few of the backdrops for the staged 1988 presidential media events. ⁷⁴ The commercial media exploited the deceptive practices of the past­­the 1988 presidential backdrops were primed to "communicate"' more than "babes in arms"' ever could. ⁷⁵