The World of Advertising

Advertising today is present everywhere we turn. It’s ushered in on the morning news and it keeps us company on the radio when we go to work. When we drive, we read it on the billboards we pass, and on the sides of trucks that pass us. It pops up when we fire up our internet browser, and greets us when we open our mailbox. In the words of Professor Sut Jhally of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, “[advertising messages] have become, quite literally, the air we breathe in contemporary culture.”

In his lecture “How TV Exploits its Audience,” Proferror Jhally incites those studying the fields of communications and advertising to begin in the right place, to ask the right question starting out. In this case, the question has less to do with what message is being communicated by Television and Media and more to do with finding the actual product being produced, the central commodity being peddled by the companies engaged in communicating to us through mass media. Professor Jhally further defines that this search is best conducted from an economic point of view – by following the money trail and finding how profits are generated, goals and key objectives can be derived.

This leads to an entirely new view of advertising, wherein it is plain that those who “consume” advertising are really the unknowing producers in an industry dedicated to selling what could be termed human-consciousness-minutes. Media is an industry which sells attention units to advertisers, the average Joe consuming the media in the first place being the producer of attention units being sold. Or, in the words of renown media guru and analyst Mr. Doug Rushkoff, “Television and internet programmers, responding to the unpredictable viewing habits of the newly liberated, began to call our mediaspace an “attention economy.”

This is no longer limited to TV and radio, and there is in fact a broader “attention economy” growing up all around us, fueled by our faster and more diverse means of communication.

To illustrate just how much deeply into the modern lifestyle this “attention economy” has reached, take the celebrated advertisements for the very popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft, featuring several well-known actors such as Mr. T, Verne Troyer (MiniMe) and William Shatner; with Willy Toledo, Jean Claude Van Damme and so on overseas. These are 30-second shorts built around the catch-phrase “what’s your game?” and promoting not a good or real-world service but a membership into an “alternate reality” computer fantasy world; the amount and quality of advertising serving to underscore just how large a business this has become. Highlighting this fact are the slew of forums dedicated to discussing the economy of World of Warcraft, the Silicon Valley companies who trade WOW’s in-game currency against the US Dollar, and the Chinese laborers who work day in and day out to “farm gold” inside the game for western consumers who pay them with real-world cash.

Social networking (Facebook, MySpace and so forth), online gaming, video and music sharing, blogging, all these are not isolated portals of interaction but in reality elements of a growing economy, a completely ethereal economy, based on the merits of attention. This economy is spurred by and ties into real-world finance through the Advertising industry, which itself is in the business of harnessing individual attention so as to sell, in Prof. Jhally’s words, a “potential consumer response.” Having many friends on Facebook, many subscribers on YouTube and high-level characters in World of Warcraft is no longer a geeky diversion from the real world, but a money-making situation.

My brother spent 35 hours this week-end playing World of Warcraft, forgot to feed his dog, and didn’t even notice it was missing until hours after I had already been called by a kind neighbor several blocks away. Prof Jhally refers to TV exploiting its audience, and in this case I argue that is only the tip of the iceberg. Not just TV, and not merely exploitation – as we walk into an increasingly connected future, that figurative little poltergeist once trapped in the TV box and reaching out with great effort is now breaking his chains and walking out. What’s his game?

Sirio Balmelli