The Wonderful, Terrible World of Advertising

There are some questions which we are culturally conditioned to know the answers to. For example, who is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound? The obvious answer that springs to your tongue without even thinking about it is Superman. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Superman comic book. I’m not sure I’ve read any comic books at all for that matter. I don’t really like superhero movies, and I wasn’t really into watching the Justice League cartoon as a kid. Yet, I know exactly who you are talking about when you say someone is faster than a speeding bullet. That’s good branding. Speaking of good branding, here are a few other ones. Who keeps the light on for you? What fast food restaurant “has the meat?” Where do you go to “have it your way?” Where do you find “a helpful smile in every aisle?” “If you’re hungry, grab a” what? “What would you do for a”...? The list could go on forever. The power of good advertisement causes lifelong embedding of these jingles and slogans. Sometimes, they tell us about great cost saving deals that will protect our wallets from the high prices of their competitors. Sometimes, they promise us some future deal or product, declaring what will come in the future. Sometimes, they are a simple comfort in our lives, reminding us of the familiar, reliable, enjoyable goods and services their companies provide. 

In Isaiah 44:6-8, God issues a challenge. After declaring that there is no other god, God goes on to give any pretender the chance to prove their worth. “Who is like me? Let them proclaim it; let them declare and set it forth before me. Who has announced from of old the things to come?” There is a bit of mockery present in this passage. The implication is that obviously no one could do what God has done. No one would be foolish enough to claim God’s place. Upon hearing this challenge, everyone should silently cower and give up whatever great claim to power they had. After all, who else could possibly think they have the right to pretend to be God, to promise you everything you could possibly want or need, to comfort and care for you, to tell you of things that will come in the future? 

Martin Luther’s understanding of a “god” is whatever you look to as the source of good. Whatever you place your trust in. With this understanding, one could be committing idolatry, worshiping another god, without taking the name of any other deity on one’s lips. You don’t need to pray to Zeus to be worshiping a different god. Instead, wealth can be your god. Fame can be your god. A strong capacity for violence can be your god. You can be your own god. Whatever you look to to resolve problems and bring good things into your life is your god. 

I don’t want to suggest that advertising is a false god in and of itself, but it is the prophet of the market, which can become an idol itself. The dominant economic theory of our country believes in the “invisible hand of the market,” an understanding which personifies the market and trusts it to direct progress in just, fair, and genuinely good ways. We expect the hand of the market to bring prosperity and distribute resources well so that the lives of all people can be improved. We look to the market to provide us with quality goods and services when we need them, even if we don’t exactly “need” them.

One amazing fact about our economy is that we can buy almost anything we could imagine. If you have thought of it, whether it is actually useful or not, someone has probably made it and found a way to sell it. If not, you can be that someone! You can buy pet costumes. You can buy blankets that have entire books printed on them. You can buy jelly beans that taste like dog poop. There are children starving overseas, and we buy candy that tastes bad on purpose for the novelty of it. I don’t want to shame anyone for these things. They’re fun, a good diversion from the stresses of life. My point isn’t that you shouldn’t buy them or feel bad for buying them. The point is that our market blesses us with so many things, that now it has moved on to useless things to fill the holes that have been carved out of our lives

It isn’t only comically useless things that the market provides. There are useful things that we used to rely on friends, family, and neighbors to help with that are now for sale. There is an app you can download to get a dog walk sharing service. It’s like Uber for dog walkers. If you don’t want to walk your dog or you can’t for whatever reason, you can pay someone to do it for you rather than just sharing that task for free with a neighbor. Throughout most of human history, travelers relied on the hospitality of friends or complete strangers as they moved about the world. This is part of why hospitality is so highly valued in many cultures. However, now, people can rely on hotels to provide hospitality. There is an entire industry built around the idea of caring for travelers. It isn’t a matter of cultural values. It’s a matter of money. Almost everything can be paid for now. Need someone to talk to for your mental health? Pay a therapist. Want to be entertained with a good ghost story? There’s an app for that called Chilling. Want help getting in shape? Buy a Fitbit and pay for premium for a downloadable workout program based on your goals. Whatever you want in life, all the good you need, all the bad you want to avoid, you can pay for it. The ever increasing influence of the market on our daily lives combines with the ancient love of money to produce an idolatrous dyad, the thing we are most likely to imagine replacing God in our lives. 

I think we all instinctively know that nothing is as good as the advertisements suggest. The food never looks as good as it does in the commercials. There is always some catch in the deals they offer. The snake oil won’t cure all your diseases. We know how untruthful marketing is. The promises made are almost always misleading or false. They create problems and sell us the solutions. We know it is wrong, and yet we don’t stop buying. We continue to rely on money to carry the day for us, enabled by the many creative applications for our wealth the market provides. Despite the fact that we know all the advertisements are a little misleading, we never really have a big problem with them. Perhaps if we saw advertising as the market’s response to God’s challenge in Isaiah 44, we would hear them as a little more nefarious. Of course, idolatry would present itself as good, necessary, right, but we know that God’s path for us isn’t found in an app or subscription service. We won’t find our way to God through a TV commercial or an internet popup ad. God has already made God’s way to us, meeting us at the cross. No matter what the world offers, it can’t compare with the true love and grace extended to us from the one and only God.