Advertising and Culture

Advertising does define our culture. Advertisers don't care about culture; they only care about selling their client's products to as many people as possible. Advertising to the masses is more efficient because it is more economical and profitable to promote a unified brand image that appeals to different cultures than to create individual campaigns or to ignore certain groups of consumers. Today, it's true that we're likely to see far more cultural diversity reflected in advertising than in the past, but this development should not be confused with diversity shaping advertising. Rather, it should be viewed as an effort to create a mass market through mass communications.

Building a mass market depends on convincing consumers to buy products that are identical or similar. As advertisements are including more people from different cultures, more people are accepting of the same things.

This involves not only plying goods accepted by America's mainstream white culture to other cultures, but also taking goods common to minorities and promoting them to a broader audience. Evidence abounds. In the 1950s, white people would never have listened to rap because it would not have been included in the commercial mainstream. Today, rap is listened to a wide audience, even whites. As a result of mass advertising in the United States, people just want to look like each other regardless of what culture or race they are from. For example, black people originally started wearing baggy pants, but now everyone is wearing them. On a more global scale, there's a celebration of Western consumer goods throughout the world.

Advertising defines culture by creating large-scale, homogenous buying habits. To do so, advertising is embracing cultures other than the white mainstream. In the process, it defines a culture of consumerism that shapes the very identifies of the cultures themselves.