The amount of marketing messages we see a day range from 3,000 to 20,000. Those higher numbers include every time you pass by a label in a grocery store, all the ads in your mailbox whether you see them or not, the label on everything you wear, etc. We see 247 images per day and probably don’t notice half of them even though we’ve been exposed. We can’t notice, absorb, or even judge the personal merit of 3,000 visual attacks a day. In every city there is a central hub focussed on advertising. Is Times Square. If you look at all the screens, doorway, cab, bus, billboard, light pole, building, sandwich board, hawker, and flyer you’d come up with no less than 500 messages. We skim to see what speaks to or connects with our core wants, desires, and values. That’s why engagement is such a hot topic in marketing today A good campaign doesn’t just offer the right product to the right consumer. It gets them emotionally stimulated to buy or at least investigate the advertised product or service

 

Advertising has a huge connection with materialism. How are they connected? Well because that's where the money is. You can't make money by (say) promoting simple living and mindfulness, except for some small amounts to be made writing books about it and maybe teaching meditation. Therefore, anyone who wants to make money has to sell commodities. This in turn becomes a self-reinforcing mechanism. The more people sell commodities, the more money they make, and the more money they make, the more they are able to sell commodities. It’s a constant loop. At a lower level of consumption, when we are talking about getting enough to eat and improving access to basic needs, this isn't a bad thing; you want to encourage people to produce commodities because these meet basic needs. But at our level of consumption, it has gone beyond what we need or even what makes us happy; it's a vicious cycle. Studies on happiness, by the way, uniformly show that after basic needs are met, increasing financial success does not result in increasing happiness. This cycle tends to create a "bubble" of materialistic consumption, at some point this reaches the point of diminishing financial returns (as well as the point of diminishing satisfaction, which has already been met). It reaches this point because (a) people have taken on all the debt they can (see: mortgage crisis and banking crisis) and (b) we have exploited all the natural resources we are able to (see: peak oil, global warming). At this point, the whole consumption bubble pops and if people have a lot of debt (which they do, in spades!), then there will be massive defaults by individuals who can't pay their debt, and defaults by banks who made them the loans in the first place. Everyone assumed that consumption would just continue indefinitely, and surprise! It doesn't and can't.

 

We are told that what we have is not good enough. That what we have is “dated” and that we need the “latest and greatest”. They do this by persuading the viewer by making them believe that their lives will be better with this new commodity. That we must replace ours with this new and or better one because it’s newer and supposedly much better. On the other hand if we don’t by this commodity then we are outsiders. It’s the whole theory of "Keeping up with the Joneses". This is an idiom in many parts of the referring to the comparison to one's neighbor as a benchmark for social class or the accumulation of material goods. For example my best friends just bought the new iPhone. Now I must buy one in order to be “accepted” and to “keep up”. We are brainwashed by these companies into believing that purchasing their products will make us happy. However, as we all know “money can’t buy happiness” and this is scientifically proven. We as humans do not gain happiness because of products but, instead are manipulated by them to thinking we are. It’s a constant loop of purchasing a product, throwing it out and getting a newer/better version because we are told to by advertisements.