Shooting the messenger...

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The first recourse of those arguing about the dread impact of one or other great sin – the demon drink, artery clogging burgers, short skirts for girls, death-dealing tobacco - is to shoot the messenger. And in recent times this has become more and more insistent, more and more shrill and ever less bedded in understanding.

Let me explain in simple English –

Advertising does not make you buy stuff.

Now is that clear. No?

• Do you become some brainless zombie at the first sight of a McDonalds advert?
• Does the very presence of advertising around us suddenly turn us from intelligent, educated folk into the cannon fodder of the consumer society?

No you don’t and advertising doesn’t – you buy stuff because you choose to do so – it’s called a free society.

However Jackie Ashley – in glorious pig-ignorance – thinks otherwise (or rather rehashes some of the “no logo” piffle via a report from the lefties at Compass):

“We are more brand-driven, more advertised-to, than ever. We are also unhappy, indebted and extremely wasteful; and the two things may be connected. The Compass authors say that during an average day we will see more than 3,500 brand images. The purpose, they argue, isn't fulfilment and happiness – they don't sell products – but "the creation of a mood of restless dissatisfaction with what we have got and who we are so that we go out and buy more". We have become people not, as the religious once said, born to die, but born to buy.”

Uus evil marketing folk have you in our thrall.

Our bombarding of you with brand images isn’t an act of desperation but a cleverly constructed campaign from the demon hordes of mammon. We will make you buy stuff! And Jackie thinks we’re stuck on a “consumption treadmill” and that politicians should confront the advertising industry:

“The more you think about it, the more rolling back consumerism needs to start by confronting the advertising industry. That is, after all, where our wants are manufactured and sold to us. That's the frontline. And it is one area where politicians have fought and won a series of important skirmishes already. The ban on ­cigarette advertising is the best known. But restrictions on alcohol advertising and on advertising on children's TV programmes were also significant victories. They barely touch on the project of constructing an alternative vision of the good life, but they're a start.”

What we want is “manufactured”? No it is not.

Advertising does not create – never has created – the culture of our lives. It reflects that culture – holds a mirror to what we are like. Music, literature, art – and the media of their communication – set our culture. Advertising just piggy-backs, selecting ideas and images that chime with what we’re thinking, saying and doing.

As I said:

Advertising does not make you buy stuff.

But the battle lines are drawn. The Guardianistas – smug in their assumption of ordinary peoples’ gullibility – intend to attack and destroy advertising. Or rather just the advertising they don’t approve.

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