Ad And Ego Essays - Jean Kilbourne, Freudian Psychology, Sut Jhally

Ad And Ego The Ad and the Ego Students will never look at an ad the same way again after screening The Ad and the Ego, the first comprehensive examination of advertising and our culture of consumption. The film artfully intercuts clips from hundreds of familiar television ads with insights from Stuart Ewen, Jean Kilbourne, Richard Pollay, Sut Jhally, Bernard McGrane and other noted critics, performing a cultural psychoanalysis of late 20th century America and its principal inhabitants, Consumer Man and Woman. The Ad and the Ego depicts how the market economy has metastasized until today commercialism invades the most intimate aspects of our lives. The average American is exposed to 1500 ads a day. But, like the air we breathe, we pay advertising little attention preferring to believe we're impervious to it. Scholars point out that advertising's constant stream of messages forms the neural network of a consumer society integrating individual psychology, mass culture and commodity production. As the film progresses, we begin to perceive how ads for Nike, Calvin Klein, Oil of Olay, and Suzuki are selling more than products. As Jean Kilbourne argues, they sell us values, concepts of love and sexuality, romance and success, a sense of identity, above all, what is normal. Leading media critics demonstrate how living in an advertisement infused environment creates a psychology of need, massaging our anxieties, doubts, and discontents, creating a boundless hunger for more things. One message you'll never hear in an ad, sociologist Bernard McGrane observes, is You're OK. The Ad and the Ego traces advertising's development from its largely descriptive 19th century origins through today's ads which eschew rational arguments for symbols and imagery playing directly to our emotions. Sut Jhally describes ads as the dream life of our culture and explains the persuasive techniques they use to invest commodities with powerful properties magically able to transform the mundane lives of their purchasers. The Ad and the Ego goes on to demonstrate the link between our debased public discourse and a culture which defines freedom as consumer choice rather than civic deliberation. It analyzes the selling of political beliefs to demonstrate how citizenship has increasingly been replaced by spectatorship, civil society by consumer culture. The Ad and the Ego makes the critical connections between the rise of consumerism, environmental degradation and our blind commitment to economic growth at any cost. This pathbreaking new film will help students of communications, sociology, psychology, marketing and business ethics better understand the central role of advertising in our society and our psyches. Sociology Essays