What Mad Men Says About Advertising
The moral case for exploring why you want the things you want.
Why do you want the things you want?
Is it an inbuilt desire from millions of years of evolution? Or is it because you saw an advertisement about it somewhere that caught your eye? Some combination of the two? Maybe people in advertising simply find ways to activate basic needs brought on by evolution. It's a question that people argue about endlessly since the beginning of the whole practice of marketing and advertising. Part of the reason is because the lines are so blurry between the two. Advertisers spend billions of dollars trying to appeal to people's inherent needs like food, comfort and safety.
But despite this amount of effort, there are people who resist these appeals. They don't buy things that are advertised to them, going out of their way to avoid not only those products but also the advertisements themselves. Somewhat ironically because there's a whole industry around the idea of trying to avoid advertisements... which they advertise to people. It's virtually impossible to avoid advertising to people in some way shape or form.
Even the people who resist advertising still have those inherent needs within them. So on some level, they can't avoid the fundamental needs and being advertised to. Some people however contend that many of the things they want are entirely constructed by advertising. After all, people survived for thousands of years without creature comforts like computers, the internet, personally designed beds and many, many other things that have come out over the years. People are still alive today who remember when these things weren't available to them. While others have lived within a world where these things always existed and are central to their lives. This desire had to have come from somewhere and it's far from clear that we need them to function.
So where exactly does one draw the line between an inherent need and a creature comfort?
Mad Men is fundamentally about the conflict between these two ways of viewing what people need. Don Draper in particular exemplifies this problem. He follows whatever impulse he has, whether it's good for him or not. Whether he could actually exist without it or not. He seems to have no clue what he actually wants in any meaningful sense. This includes his loving and attentive family, or the many women he tries and mostly succeeds in getting into bed. All while spending his days trying to find ways to create the desire for something his clients are selling in people.
It's a remarkable contradiction to watch play out, and not just with Don Draper, played brilliantly by Jon Hamm. Peggy, Roger, Pete and Joan all struggle to figure out why they want the things they want. You might even say that it could be because they work in advertising constructing the desires of other people that they're so confused about themselves and their own desires.
Do yourself a favour and check out the show and explore your own desires and why you have them.
Watch it on Amazon or Direct TV depending on where you are.
this was a great article! advertising is based on manipulating most people's desire to have / own / possess objects, which is an innate process for most - materialism. on the other hand there are many people who reject wanting to own anything: they do not want to buy a house, or have a gazzillion kitchen appliances and other machines running their household. finally there are those for whom immaterial things are most valuable, such as ideas, knowledge and the exchange of experiences. what unites us is our desire to have a choice. as long as it isn't forced on us at gunpoint and we can survive without wanting to have it all, even advertising can be OK (subbd).