What Money Can't (Shouldn't) Buy: What's Wrong with Commercialism?
In 2000, a Russian rocket emblazoned with a giant Pizza Hut logo carried advertising into outer space. In grocery stores, tickers promoting the latest Hollywood movie or network television series began appearing on apples and bananas. Eggs bearing ads for CBS's fall television lineup showed up in the dairy department. The ads were not on the cartons but on each individual egg, thanks to a new laser-etching technology that enabled the company's logo and message to be etched (delicately but indelibly) onto the shell.
Strategically placed video screens enabled advertisers to steal people's attention during the brief moments in the day when even the most harried and distractible have no choice but to stand and wait -- in elevators as you wait to reach your floor, at ATMs as you wait for your cash, at gas station pumps as you wait for your tank to fill, even at urinals in restaurants, bars, and other public places.
Restroom advertising used to consist of illicit stickers or graffiti on toilet stalls and restroom walls with phone numbers of prostitutes and escort services. In 1990s, marketers like Sony, Unilever and Nintendo along with major liquor companies and TV networks have been elbowing the hookers and cranks aside to get their own commercial messages in front of a demographic with its pants lowered and its zipper undone. By 2004, bathroom advertising, which targets a young, affluent, and necessarily captive audience, had become a $50 million business. Restroom advertising firms have their own trade association, which recently held its fourteenth annual convention in Las Vegas. As advertisers began buying space on restroom walls, ads were also finding their way into books. Paid product placement has long been a feature of movies and television programs. But in 2001, the British novelist Fay Weldon wrote a book commissioned by Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company. In exchange for an undisclosed payment, Weldon agreed to mention Bulgari jewelry in the novel at least a dozen times. The book titled The Bulgari Connection, was published by HarperCollins in Britain and Grove/Atlantic in the U.S.. Weldon more than exceeded the required number of product references, mentioning Bulgari thirty-four times.
Some authors expressed outrage at the idea of a corporate-sponsored novel and urged book editors not to assign Weldon's book for review. One critic said the product placement would likely erode reader confidence in the authenticity of the narrative. Another pointed to the clunkiness of the product-laden prose as in sentences such as this: "A Bulgari necklace in the hand is worth two in the bush," said Doris. Or this: "they snuggled together happily for a bit, all passion spent; and she met him at Bulgari that lunchtime."
The emergence of digital reading devices and electronic publishing will likely put the activity or reading books in closer proximity to advertising. In 2011, Amazon began selling two versions of its popular Kindle readers, one with and one without "special offers and sponsored screensavers."
Flying is another activity that is increasingly suffused with commercialism. We saw how airlines have turned airport queues into opportunities for profit by charging extra for access to shorter lines at security checkpoints, but that isn't all. Once you've boarded the plane and settled into your seat, you are now likely to find yourself surrounded by advertisements. US Airways began selling ads on tray tables, napkins, and on airsickness bags. Spirit Airlines and Ryanair have slapped ads on the overhead luggage bins. Delta Airlines tried showing a commercial for Lincoln cars before the preflight safety video. After complaints that the commercial clutter led passengers to ignore the safety announcement, the airline moved the ad to the end of the video.
You can also turn your house into a billboard. In 2011, Ad-zookie, made an offer of special interest to homeowners facing foreclosure or struggling to make their mortgage payments. If you let the company paint the entire exterior or your house with brightly colored ads, they would pay your mortgage every month for as long as the house displayed the ads. The company was deluged with interested homeowners. Although it had expected to paint ten homes, the company received 22,000 applications.
Critics and activists decried "tawdry commercial values" and "the debasements of advertising and commercialism." They called commercialism " a pestilence" that was "coarsening hearts, minds, and communities across the country."
Some described advertising as a kind of pollution. A shopper, asked why she disliked finding stickers with movie ads on the fruit in the grocery store, said, " I don't want my apple defiled with advertisements. Even an advertising executive was quoted as saying, "I don't know if anything is sacred anymore."
It is hard to deny the moral force of these concerns. And yet, within the prevailing terms of public discourse, it is not easy to explain what is wrong with the proliferation of advertising we have witnessed in the last two decades. To be sure, aggressive, intrusive advertising has long been the subject of cultural complaint.
The commercialism of the last two decades has displayed a distinctive kind of boundlessness, emblematic of a world in which everything is for sale.
What exactly is objectionable about it?
Some say "nothing." Provided the space being sold for ads or corporate sponsorships -- the house or barn, the stadium or toilet stall, the biceps or forehead -- belongs to the person who sells it, and provided the selling is voluntary, no one has a right to object. If it's may apple or airplane or baseball team, I should be free to sell naming rights and advertising space as I please. This is the case for an unfettered market in advertisements.
As we've seen in other contexts, this laissez-faire argument invites two kinds of objection. One is about coercion and unfairness; the other is about corruption and degradation.
The first objection accepts the principle of freedom of choice but questions whether every instance of market choice is truly voluntary. If a homeowner facing imminent foreclosure agrees to have a garish ad painted on her house, her choice may not really be free but effectively coerced. If a parent, in desperate need of money to buy medicine for his child, agrees to be tattooed to advertise a product, his choice may not be all that voluntary. The coercion objection maintains that market relations can be considered free only when the background conditions under which we buy and sell are fair, only when no one is coerced by dire economic necessity.
Most of our political debates today are conducted in these terms -- between those who favor unfettered markets and those who maintain that market choices are free only when they're made on a level playing field, only when the basic terms of social cooperation are fair.
But neither of there positions helps us explain what's troubling about a world in which market thinking and market relationships invade every human activity. To describe what's disquieting about this condition, we need the moral vocabulary of corruption and degradation. And to speak of corruption and degradation is to appeal, implicitly at least, to conceptions of the good life.
Consider the language employed by the critics of commercialism: "debasement", "defilement", "coarsening", "pollution", the loss of the "sacred". This is a spiritually charged language that gestures toward higher ways of living and being. It is not about coercion and unfairness but about the degradation of certain attitudes, practices and goods. The moral critique of commercialism is an instance of what I've called the corruption objection.
With naming rights and advertising, the corruption can play out on two levels. In some cases, the commercializing of practice is degrading in itself. so, for example, walking around with a corporate sponsored tattoo ad on one's forehead is demeaning, even if the choice to sell was freely made.
In 2001, a couple expecting baby boy put their son's name up for bid on eBay and Yahoo! They were hoping a corporation would buy the naming rights and, in return, provide the loving parents with enough money to buy a comfortable house and other amenities for their growing family. In the end, however, no company met their asking price of $500,000 so they gave up and named their child in the usual way.
Now you might argue that selling a corporation naming rights to your child is wrong because the child hasn't given his or her consent (the coercion objection). But this isn't primary reason it's objectionable. After all, children don't usually name themselves. Most of us carry the name our parents gave us, and we don't consider this coercive. The only reason the issue of coercion arises with a corporate branded child is that going through life with such a name (say, Walmart Wilson or Pepsi Peterson or Jamba Juice Jones) is demeaning -- even, arguably, if the child consented to it.
Not all instances of commercialism are corrupting. Some are fitting, like the signage that has long adorned stadium scoreboards. But it's different when corporate-sponsored banter invades the broadcast booth and asserts itself with every pitching change or slide into second base. This is more like product placement in a novel. If you've listened lately to a baseball broadcast on radio or television, the unrelenting corporate-sponsored slogans uttered by the announcers intrude upon the game and spoil the inventive, authentic narrative that a play-by-play account of a game can be.
So in order to decide where advertising belongs, and where it doesn't, it is not enough to argue about property rights on the one hand and fairness on the other. We also have to argue about the meaning of social practices and the goods they embody. And we have to ask, in each case, whether commercializing the practice would degrade it.
There is further consideration: some instances of advertising that are not corrupting in themselves may contribute nonetheless to the commercialization of social life as a whole. There the analogy to pollution is apt. Emitting carbon dioxide is not wrong in itself; we do it every time we breathe. And yet an excess of carbon emissions can be environmentally destructive. In a similar way, otherwise unobjectionable extensions of advertising into novel setting may, if widespread, bring about a society dominated by corporate sponsorships and consumerism, a society in which everything is "brought to you by" MasterCard or McDonald's. This too is a kind of degradation.
Recall the shopper who didn't want her apples "defiled" by advertising stickers. Strictly speaking, this is hyperbole. The taste of the apple is unaffected. Isn't it strange, then to complain about a sticker promoting a movie or a TV show? Not necessarily. The shopper's objection, presumably, is not this ad on this apple but the the invasion of everyday life by commercial advertising. The "defilement' is not of the apple but of the common world that we inhabit, increasingly dominated by market values and commercial sensibilities.
The corrosive effect of advertising matters less in the grocery aisle than in the public square, where naming rights and corporate sponsorships are becoming widespread. They call it "municipal marketing" and it threatens to bring commercialism into the heart of civic life. Over the last two decades, financially pressed cities and states have tried to make ends meet by selling advertisers access to public beaches, parks, subways, schools and cultural landmarks.
Commercialism does not destroy everything it touches. A fire hydrant with a KFC logo still delivers water to douse the flames. A subway car shrink-wrapped in ads for a Hollywood movie can still get you home in time for dinner. Children can learn arithmetic by counting Tootsie Rools. Sports fans wtill root for the home team in Bank of America Stadium.
Nevertheless, imprinting things with corporate logos changes their meaning. Markets leave their mark. Product placement spoils the integrity of books and corrupts the relationship of author and reader. Tattooed body ads objectify and demean the people paid to wear them. Commercials in classrooms undermine the educational purpose of schools.
These are contestable judgments.
People disagree about the meaning of books, bodies, and schools, and how they should be valued. In fact, we disagree about the norms appropriate to many of the domains that markets have invaded -- family life, friendship, sex, procreation, health, education, nature, art, citizenship, sports, and they way we contend with the prospect of death. But that's my point: once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the goods they touch, we have to ask where markets belong -- and where they don't. And we can't answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the values that should govern them.
Such deliberations touch, unavoidably, on competing conceptions of the good life. This is terrain on which we sometimes fear to tread. For fear of disagreement, we hesitate to bring our moral and spiritual convictions into the public square. But shrinking from these questions does not leave then undecided. it simply means that markets will decide them for us. This is the lesson of the last three decades. The era of market triumphalism has coincided with a time when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance. our only hope of keeping markets in their place is to deliberate openly and publicly about the meaning of the goods and social practices we prize.
In addition to debating the meaning of this or that good, we also need to ask a bigger question, about the kind of society in which we wish to live. As naming rights and municipal marketing appropriate the common world, they diminish its public character. Beyond the damage it does to particular goods, commercialism erodes commonality. The more things money can buy, the fewer the occasions when people from different walks of life encounter one another. We see this when we go to a baseball game and gaze up at the skyboxes, or down from them, as the case may be. The disappearance of the class-mixing experience once found at the ballpark represents a loss not only for those looking up but also for those looking down.
Something similar has been happening throughout our society. At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. You might call it the skyboxification of American life. It's not good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live.
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another and bump up against one another, in the course of everyday life.
For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.
And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together.
Do we want a society where everything is up for sale?
Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
Strategically placed video screens enabled advertisers to steal people's attention during the brief moments in the day when even the most harried and distractible have no choice but to stand and wait -- in elevators as you wait to reach your floor, at ATMs as you wait for your cash, at gas station pumps as you wait for your tank to fill, even at urinals in restaurants, bars, and other public places.
Restroom advertising used to consist of illicit stickers or graffiti on toilet stalls and restroom walls with phone numbers of prostitutes and escort services. In 1990s, marketers like Sony, Unilever and Nintendo along with major liquor companies and TV networks have been elbowing the hookers and cranks aside to get their own commercial messages in front of a demographic with its pants lowered and its zipper undone. By 2004, bathroom advertising, which targets a young, affluent, and necessarily captive audience, had become a $50 million business. Restroom advertising firms have their own trade association, which recently held its fourteenth annual convention in Las Vegas. As advertisers began buying space on restroom walls, ads were also finding their way into books. Paid product placement has long been a feature of movies and television programs. But in 2001, the British novelist Fay Weldon wrote a book commissioned by Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company. In exchange for an undisclosed payment, Weldon agreed to mention Bulgari jewelry in the novel at least a dozen times. The book titled The Bulgari Connection, was published by HarperCollins in Britain and Grove/Atlantic in the U.S.. Weldon more than exceeded the required number of product references, mentioning Bulgari thirty-four times.
Some authors expressed outrage at the idea of a corporate-sponsored novel and urged book editors not to assign Weldon's book for review. One critic said the product placement would likely erode reader confidence in the authenticity of the narrative. Another pointed to the clunkiness of the product-laden prose as in sentences such as this: "A Bulgari necklace in the hand is worth two in the bush," said Doris. Or this: "they snuggled together happily for a bit, all passion spent; and she met him at Bulgari that lunchtime."
The emergence of digital reading devices and electronic publishing will likely put the activity or reading books in closer proximity to advertising. In 2011, Amazon began selling two versions of its popular Kindle readers, one with and one without "special offers and sponsored screensavers."
Flying is another activity that is increasingly suffused with commercialism. We saw how airlines have turned airport queues into opportunities for profit by charging extra for access to shorter lines at security checkpoints, but that isn't all. Once you've boarded the plane and settled into your seat, you are now likely to find yourself surrounded by advertisements. US Airways began selling ads on tray tables, napkins, and on airsickness bags. Spirit Airlines and Ryanair have slapped ads on the overhead luggage bins. Delta Airlines tried showing a commercial for Lincoln cars before the preflight safety video. After complaints that the commercial clutter led passengers to ignore the safety announcement, the airline moved the ad to the end of the video.
You can also turn your house into a billboard. In 2011, Ad-zookie, made an offer of special interest to homeowners facing foreclosure or struggling to make their mortgage payments. If you let the company paint the entire exterior or your house with brightly colored ads, they would pay your mortgage every month for as long as the house displayed the ads. The company was deluged with interested homeowners. Although it had expected to paint ten homes, the company received 22,000 applications.
Critics and activists decried "tawdry commercial values" and "the debasements of advertising and commercialism." They called commercialism " a pestilence" that was "coarsening hearts, minds, and communities across the country."
Some described advertising as a kind of pollution. A shopper, asked why she disliked finding stickers with movie ads on the fruit in the grocery store, said, " I don't want my apple defiled with advertisements. Even an advertising executive was quoted as saying, "I don't know if anything is sacred anymore."
It is hard to deny the moral force of these concerns. And yet, within the prevailing terms of public discourse, it is not easy to explain what is wrong with the proliferation of advertising we have witnessed in the last two decades. To be sure, aggressive, intrusive advertising has long been the subject of cultural complaint.
The commercialism of the last two decades has displayed a distinctive kind of boundlessness, emblematic of a world in which everything is for sale.
What exactly is objectionable about it?
Some say "nothing." Provided the space being sold for ads or corporate sponsorships -- the house or barn, the stadium or toilet stall, the biceps or forehead -- belongs to the person who sells it, and provided the selling is voluntary, no one has a right to object. If it's may apple or airplane or baseball team, I should be free to sell naming rights and advertising space as I please. This is the case for an unfettered market in advertisements.
As we've seen in other contexts, this laissez-faire argument invites two kinds of objection. One is about coercion and unfairness; the other is about corruption and degradation.
The first objection accepts the principle of freedom of choice but questions whether every instance of market choice is truly voluntary. If a homeowner facing imminent foreclosure agrees to have a garish ad painted on her house, her choice may not really be free but effectively coerced. If a parent, in desperate need of money to buy medicine for his child, agrees to be tattooed to advertise a product, his choice may not be all that voluntary. The coercion objection maintains that market relations can be considered free only when the background conditions under which we buy and sell are fair, only when no one is coerced by dire economic necessity.
Most of our political debates today are conducted in these terms -- between those who favor unfettered markets and those who maintain that market choices are free only when they're made on a level playing field, only when the basic terms of social cooperation are fair.
But neither of there positions helps us explain what's troubling about a world in which market thinking and market relationships invade every human activity. To describe what's disquieting about this condition, we need the moral vocabulary of corruption and degradation. And to speak of corruption and degradation is to appeal, implicitly at least, to conceptions of the good life.
Consider the language employed by the critics of commercialism: "debasement", "defilement", "coarsening", "pollution", the loss of the "sacred". This is a spiritually charged language that gestures toward higher ways of living and being. It is not about coercion and unfairness but about the degradation of certain attitudes, practices and goods. The moral critique of commercialism is an instance of what I've called the corruption objection.
With naming rights and advertising, the corruption can play out on two levels. In some cases, the commercializing of practice is degrading in itself. so, for example, walking around with a corporate sponsored tattoo ad on one's forehead is demeaning, even if the choice to sell was freely made.
In 2001, a couple expecting baby boy put their son's name up for bid on eBay and Yahoo! They were hoping a corporation would buy the naming rights and, in return, provide the loving parents with enough money to buy a comfortable house and other amenities for their growing family. In the end, however, no company met their asking price of $500,000 so they gave up and named their child in the usual way.
Now you might argue that selling a corporation naming rights to your child is wrong because the child hasn't given his or her consent (the coercion objection). But this isn't primary reason it's objectionable. After all, children don't usually name themselves. Most of us carry the name our parents gave us, and we don't consider this coercive. The only reason the issue of coercion arises with a corporate branded child is that going through life with such a name (say, Walmart Wilson or Pepsi Peterson or Jamba Juice Jones) is demeaning -- even, arguably, if the child consented to it.
Not all instances of commercialism are corrupting. Some are fitting, like the signage that has long adorned stadium scoreboards. But it's different when corporate-sponsored banter invades the broadcast booth and asserts itself with every pitching change or slide into second base. This is more like product placement in a novel. If you've listened lately to a baseball broadcast on radio or television, the unrelenting corporate-sponsored slogans uttered by the announcers intrude upon the game and spoil the inventive, authentic narrative that a play-by-play account of a game can be.
So in order to decide where advertising belongs, and where it doesn't, it is not enough to argue about property rights on the one hand and fairness on the other. We also have to argue about the meaning of social practices and the goods they embody. And we have to ask, in each case, whether commercializing the practice would degrade it.
There is further consideration: some instances of advertising that are not corrupting in themselves may contribute nonetheless to the commercialization of social life as a whole. There the analogy to pollution is apt. Emitting carbon dioxide is not wrong in itself; we do it every time we breathe. And yet an excess of carbon emissions can be environmentally destructive. In a similar way, otherwise unobjectionable extensions of advertising into novel setting may, if widespread, bring about a society dominated by corporate sponsorships and consumerism, a society in which everything is "brought to you by" MasterCard or McDonald's. This too is a kind of degradation.
Recall the shopper who didn't want her apples "defiled" by advertising stickers. Strictly speaking, this is hyperbole. The taste of the apple is unaffected. Isn't it strange, then to complain about a sticker promoting a movie or a TV show? Not necessarily. The shopper's objection, presumably, is not this ad on this apple but the the invasion of everyday life by commercial advertising. The "defilement' is not of the apple but of the common world that we inhabit, increasingly dominated by market values and commercial sensibilities.
The corrosive effect of advertising matters less in the grocery aisle than in the public square, where naming rights and corporate sponsorships are becoming widespread. They call it "municipal marketing" and it threatens to bring commercialism into the heart of civic life. Over the last two decades, financially pressed cities and states have tried to make ends meet by selling advertisers access to public beaches, parks, subways, schools and cultural landmarks.
Commercialism does not destroy everything it touches. A fire hydrant with a KFC logo still delivers water to douse the flames. A subway car shrink-wrapped in ads for a Hollywood movie can still get you home in time for dinner. Children can learn arithmetic by counting Tootsie Rools. Sports fans wtill root for the home team in Bank of America Stadium.
Nevertheless, imprinting things with corporate logos changes their meaning. Markets leave their mark. Product placement spoils the integrity of books and corrupts the relationship of author and reader. Tattooed body ads objectify and demean the people paid to wear them. Commercials in classrooms undermine the educational purpose of schools.
These are contestable judgments.
People disagree about the meaning of books, bodies, and schools, and how they should be valued. In fact, we disagree about the norms appropriate to many of the domains that markets have invaded -- family life, friendship, sex, procreation, health, education, nature, art, citizenship, sports, and they way we contend with the prospect of death. But that's my point: once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the goods they touch, we have to ask where markets belong -- and where they don't. And we can't answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the values that should govern them.
Such deliberations touch, unavoidably, on competing conceptions of the good life. This is terrain on which we sometimes fear to tread. For fear of disagreement, we hesitate to bring our moral and spiritual convictions into the public square. But shrinking from these questions does not leave then undecided. it simply means that markets will decide them for us. This is the lesson of the last three decades. The era of market triumphalism has coincided with a time when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance. our only hope of keeping markets in their place is to deliberate openly and publicly about the meaning of the goods and social practices we prize.
In addition to debating the meaning of this or that good, we also need to ask a bigger question, about the kind of society in which we wish to live. As naming rights and municipal marketing appropriate the common world, they diminish its public character. Beyond the damage it does to particular goods, commercialism erodes commonality. The more things money can buy, the fewer the occasions when people from different walks of life encounter one another. We see this when we go to a baseball game and gaze up at the skyboxes, or down from them, as the case may be. The disappearance of the class-mixing experience once found at the ballpark represents a loss not only for those looking up but also for those looking down.
Something similar has been happening throughout our society. At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. You might call it the skyboxification of American life. It's not good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live.
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another and bump up against one another, in the course of everyday life.
For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.
And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together.
Do we want a society where everything is up for sale?
Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
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