The State of Advertising Address

 Let’s flush out the concept of advertising as it exists today.

In its purest form, advertising is a way to bring visibility to a product or a service. Its ultimate goal is some sort of conversion in which a person decides to buy a product or use a service or watch a particular movie. On a fundamental level, advertising attempts to steer our choices. It presents us with one specific choice which is accompanied by a message, no matter how subliminal, “choose me!”

But the state of advertising today is not merely a means to an end. In fact, I would argue that advertising is an end unto itself—not necessarily purposed as such by its producers and creators, but by its audiences who treat advertisements as products and more specifically, as entertainment. I’ll use myself as an example: as someone who has little to no interest in watching or understanding the game of football, the Superbowl has one main draw for me: the half-time commercials. Millions of dollars are spent every year on these commercials, and the airing of these commercials has become an event unto itself. If an ad is shocking or successful enough, it can even overshadow the “main” event—the football game itself.

Nowadays, we enjoy advertisements like we enjoy TV shows or movies. We pass YouTube links around telling our friends, “Watch this ad. It was hilarious!” When I go to the movies, I am as excited for the movie previews as I am for the movie itself, which is a testament to our affinity for the micro-narratives embedded into advertisements. I’ve been thinking about the psychology behind this advertisement-as-entertainment scheme, and I think advertisements function as short comedy sketches or vignettes that can fulfill our desires for new and interesting narratives without occupying too much of our time and attention. We are a distracted society, after all. But I think advertisements can also function as commentaries on our society in the way that they point out something we know about ourselves but would hesitate to talk about. Advertisements can be self-mocking; they can be absolutely ridiculous; they can be parodic; and they can be poignant. Advertisements as form do not need to conform to a specific genre to be functional or even successful—a fact which gives the producers of these ads room to be creative (I know there are corporations who place limits and constraints around this production, but I’m highlighting the fact that ads have the potential to be creative—not necessarily that all ads are creative). More and more, with the way that we spend so much time online or on YouTube, I think advertisements can begin to occupy an educational and innovative space—a space that would become interdisciplinary and multi-faceted, that would not solely be about a product or service or object but also include other kinds of commentaries and ideas. I see the advertising space right now changing with technology, and I think we will see the transformation of the medium of advertisements into a hybridized vessel that combines selling with other motives. The growth of technology is unpredictable and ever-expansive, and I’m excited to see how advertising will be changed because of it.