Commodify Yourself

How Dominant Ideology Proliferates Through Advertising

I’ve been getting a specific joy from listening to and watching TV and radio ads. This joy is not from the ads themselves, but from attempting to decide what it is they tell us about society. This way of critically consuming ads moves beyond the already well-explored areas that address ads as predatory; exploiting our weaknesses and insecurities to sell us something or reinforce social roles. The criticism I have been exploring is how ads reduce us into the commodity itself and help shape a narrative that aligns with our current dominant ideology.

Ideology, we’re in it

Far from simply encouraging the idea that individualism is best manifested through our consumption choices — by far the greatest and most successful sleight of hand achieved by capitalism — advertising also helps reinforce the things necessary for the functioning of capitalism. Alienation, self-commodification, and atomization.

All of these are necessary if we are to believe that it is us and us alone that hold the keys to our successes and failures, and that this success or failure is independent of larger political dynamics unfolding around us.

Send Help

Two ads that I have been coming across provide an interesting peek into this phenomena.

The first is an ad for debt consolidators. The ad is quite brilliantly made. A man wakes up in his family home bed. As he gets up from bed to introduce himself, his wife calls his name from downstairs, interrupting him by yelling out his name at the exact same time he was going to speak it — a nod to how in tune this make belief family is which has the desired effect of instantly humanizing them. As the protagonist walks down to the kitchen to be met by his wife, he walks us through the costs they face. A mortgage — as he walks down the stairs, tuition for their two daughters — as he points to one of them, after-school activities — camera pans to some hockey equipment, etc. At this point, the protagonist sits down, breakfast ready, blankly looks into the camera lens and says “You’re probably wondering how we can afford all this, we can’t, no seriously, send help”. Here, a narrator describes how many households in Canada are in debt and the services their company can provide to help manage household debt.

What I find absolutely amazing in this ad is how perfectly it normalizes the idea of debt. For the creators of the ad, the fact that Canadian household debt is at 170% is not the issue, it is, rather, what you do with this debt. The indicator that what your family is experience is natural, and you need not panic, simply call them and inquire about their services so they can help. This normalization also brushes over the idea that you need to understand anything about economics, or why Canadian household debt is relevant at all. Just be reassured that what you are experiencing is ‘normal’ — look, everyone is doing it ok? So don’t worry about it, just let us help you, for a fee.

Another interesting aspect of this ad is that it doesn’t shy away from stating the overarching daunting fact — that yes, most Canadian households are in a shocking state of debt. This makes it quite radical as unlike other ads that try to hide reality or present it through rose coloured glasses, or even morph reality to create insecurity, this one places the facts smack at the centre and offers a market solution to a market problem.

You are Your Own Boss

The second ad is for an online job site. The ad, in audio format, suggests that we, as the listeners, do not work for our boss, or to even become a boss — since our bosses have bosses, as a matter of fact, we don’t even work for our company. We work for self-development and growth, for a better life and our family. This chimes well with our individualist ideals of the “pursuit of happiness”, that what we do in life is not because we are forced to in a work or starve situation, but that we are self-directed individuals seeking what is best for us or those who are important for us. The presentation of job progression in a pursuit of hapiness lens also turns a blind eye to the intensive competition that occurs in a workplace, further presenting this as an atomized process.

Finally, the ad brilliantly displays the totalitarian aspect of what we have come to see as ‘self-development’. A process that is not guided by the humanism that the ad would like us to believe (we improve ourselves to better care for those we love like our family) but that the entire concept of self-improvement has become a subservience to market needs, that we need to improve ourselves (in a business sense to make us more appealing commodities) if we are to have the things we want such as a loving family.

The inversion of the relationship in the ad is as brilliant as one of the most asked interview questions — Why do you want to work here? Here the question “why should we hire you?” has been inverted to hide the true power dynamics of the workplace. Instead, the candidate now needs to not only show their skills and how they can benefit the company but also relay the fantasy created by a company, that they are somehow unique in their operation, culture, etc.

The candidate must live the lie that he is not just applying to a job because that is the only way for an individual to subsist “I want to work here so that I don’t starve” he must also feed the competitive ego of the company “I want to work here because you have the best technology, teams…” this to validate their differentiation form other organizations, as if the objective of all organizations is not uniform — the maximization of profit. If we lived in a truthful world the best reply to such a perverse question would be “to reduce your costs while increasing your profits at a level higher than someone else.”

And Beyond

Ads such as these do a great job at summarizing the ideology that quietly churns in the background of our lives. In their non-imposing way, they present us with a simplified, clean, and reassuring image of what life ‘really’ is and allow us to live it. The trade-off to our participation in the mythical world these ads create is that we lose the ability to see ourselves outside of the commodity cycle, we continue to seek solutions to problems that we could otherwise solve entirely but choose not to as they would conflict with the dominant ideology that we have learned to accept.

Instead, we march to the beat of a drum, lying about why we want to work where we do, and pretending that as long as we focus on our individual aspirations everything around us will normalize and get better.