The Price of Advertising

Advertising, which is as American as French fries, English muffins and Chinese takeout, saturates society with an incessant barrage. Most people develop mental filters to soften the sensory blitzkrieg, lest they go bonkers, and they respond to the barrage with boredom, which is a kind of criticism.

However, bored or not by advertising that assails eye, ear and even nose (some magazines contain scent strips¹advertising colognes), people are collaborating with the perpetrators of it (those who do it). So argues James Twitchell in an essay published in WQ, the invaluable quarterly of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Mr. Twitchell, who teaches English at the University of Florida, should not expect thanks for pointing out that people are paying for advertisements twice. They pay in the price of the product advertised, and they pay in the form of the attention they pay to the advertisements.

Advertising agencies exist to rent (зд. sell) our attention to people with goods or services to sell. Try to think when your attention is not rented. Many college sports teams have Nike's swooshes on their jerseys. Soft drink and other companies pay for "product placement" in movies. When you are put on hold (зд. ожидание, пауза) on the telephone you often areplied with commercial communications, which also appear in urinals, on grocery store shopping carts, on video screens attached to Stair Masters in gyms, in the first five minutes of rented movie videos.

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